Feminism

Several waves of feminism have intersected with comics, sometimes represented and debated within titles, sometimes co-opted by feminism. Regarding the latter, second-wave feminism adopted Wonder Woman as an icon when Gloria Steinem put her on the cover of the first issue of feminist flagship Ms. in 1972 (Ormrod 2018: 545). In comics, the second wave appeared in mainstream titles such as Gerry Conway and John Buscema’s Ms Marvel (1977–1979), where the very title showed an engagement with feminism, albeit in a rather constrained way (Gibson 2015). Later comics, especially by women creators engaged with AUTOBIOGRAPHY, tend to explore issues in a way that is in line with the notion of plural feminisms, rather than a singular variant dominated by Western middle-CLASS white women. INTERSECTIONALITY (Collins and Bilge 2016) can be seen across a number of comic GENRES, both fiction and non-fiction. Sana Amanat, Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, and Adrian Alphona’s Ms Marvel (2014–) is also significant in relation to REPRESENTATIONS of intersectional feminism via the adoption of the title by Kamala Khan, a young Pakistani-American Muslim. Her admiration for the previous Ms Marvel, Carol Danvers, now Captain Marvel, is explored in the comic (Wilson et al. 2016), but is also interrogated, and the characters can be seen as representing differing generational approaches to feminisms (Gibson 2018).