Monday, April 29, 2013

Wonder Woman and the Ubermensch

I was chatting recently with my Residence Director, a black woman who identifies as bi-sexual, about why Hollywood will never make a movie about Storm, the X-Man of African descent.  Basically, it boiled down to the fact that she's black, and she's a she.  Hollywood wouldn't dare make a movie with a female protagonist who isn't also white.  But it got me thinking as I consider all the hype around proposed Wonder Woman movies.

First of all, the original storyline for Wonder Woman would just have to be scrapped.  The whole Amazonian thing is kind of weird.  As Ubermensch Jeff Clayton has observed: "Wonder Woman was originally conceived as some 1940's male bondage-fetishist's fantasy of what a feminist hero should be like."  The updated storyline has some interesting twists, essentially tying Wonder Woman to Greek mythology in a way that is both satisfying and more-or-less consistent with our idea of Wonder Woman.


Intriguingly, though, Wonder Woman, though originating in a place that is definitely not white America, or any other Anglo-Saxony sort of place, is depicted as full on white.  I just have a hard time imagining that the people who read comic books are also the people who would freak out if someone with a skin color other than white was the main character.  

So maybe there is hope for a Storm movie; we just have to pave the way.

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