ABSTRACT
The political history of Batwoman is an intriguing one. She was created as a love interest for Batman after the homophobic fallout from Fredric Wertham’s controversial Seduction of the Innocent (1954). She became, in effect, an accessory which Batman could then properly, and heterosexually, desire. As critic Chris York (2000) contends, Batwoman grew to be ‘a “new trophy”, of course reflect[ing] the highly dichotomized gender roles within the idealized nuclear family of the 1950s’ (p. 106). When writers Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, and Mark Waid reintroduced Batwoman into the Gotham universe with the limited series 52 (2006-2007), it came with the caveat to the public that they would be subversively drawing on this 1950s tradition of Batwoman. Rather than fashioning her as the heteronormative equalizer against gay undertones as originally conceptualized, 52’s Batwoman reinscribes that latent suggestiveness by being a lesbian, as Gareth Schott (2010) notes (p. 19). However, Schott only offers this notation and does not examine the ways in which Batwoman’s creators refashion her or the implications of that subversion. Even so, her artistic representations, first sketched by Keith Giffen and illustrated by a variety of artists, in 52 contain any queerness, portraying Kate Kane (Batwoman) as a typically heteronormative woman in superhero comics, conspicuously attired in tight short dresses and high heels (Johns et al. 2007, p. 236). Kate’s physical appearance, already buxom and augmented by her figure-fitting choices, reifies notions of gender conformity that, as a
SUPERHEROES AND IDENTITIES
68 P. Petrovic
lesbian, she ostensibly combats. It is not until artist J.H. Williams III reshapes Kate in the later Batwoman: Elegy (2010) that Kate, and by extension, Batwoman, change(s) again to embody a radically queer aesthetic.
