ABSTRACT

As a member of X-Factor and one time love interest of Mystique, Forge may not have had the power to fix Mystique, but this dangerous female shapeshifter has had a number of plans used to keep her ‘fixed’. Female; lesbian; mutant; villain, Mystique evokes ideas of flow, grotesqueness, abjection, and otherness – the classic marginalized female/feminine other. She is alluring, openly sexual, and enigmatic, inciting ambivalence. As a hostile, out-of-control woman she ‘must be leashed, or else will wreak havoc’ (Warner 1994, p. 4).