still here, and some thoughts on refrigerators

I haven't died or anything. I just . . . wasn't planning to post here until I had my recommendations list prepared. Unfortunately, it's harder to write than I expected--considering I'm just writing a relatively praiseful paragraph or two for each title, rather than a full-blown review--and it just keeps getting longer. I've decided to start posting it in sets of ten or fifteen; that way, even if it takes me forever to finish, there will be something to see in the meantime.

I should get that first set up tonight or tomorrow; it's alphabetical, and I have to write up one or two new additions (I was done through the Fs, but now, not so much).

Meanwhile, I've spent a fair amount of time reading around the comics blogosphere; particularly following the various links on WFA. I don't have much to add to the latest controversies (Tigra, the New Gods, etc), because my superhero reading is pretty narrow these days, so I'm not terribly conversant with the background material. However, I've been thinking a bit recently about a topic that comes up a fair amount in my WFA-related reading. (Let's see how articulate I can be about it; I haven't done much analytical writing of any stripe in awhile, and it's time to start working the kinks out.)

The catchphrase "women in refrigerators" gets thrown around all over the place these days; I myself have started applying it not only to my comics, but to much of the pop culture I consume. It's useful shorthand, to be sure, but sometimes I can't help but wonder if the other people who use it are defining it . . . a bit differently than I am? Particularly when I see bloggers--notably, the kind who refer to feminist comic fans as a "hive mind" without irony--complaining that feminists don't want to see any female character harmed or killed, ever, in any context (which would certainly be inconsistent with the superhero genre).

These folks are (perhaps deliberately) missing the point, at least to my own understanding of the phrase. The way I use it--and, I think, the way I most frequently see it used--"women in refrigerators" does not refer to just any instance of harm befalling a female character (even shocking or drastic harm). Instead, it refers to an instance of harm (most often, death) befalling a female character as a plot point, or in order to motivate a male protagonist (to heroism, revenge, and so forth). It's the notion that a female character's life, death, or pain does not exist for the sake of her own story; she is simply a disposable element in someone else's, to be sacrificed or discarded. (If I'm on the money here, the rest of this bit of musing will probably be old hat for anyone familiar with the phrase, but let me work through it.)

I should give an example here, I think. The original example is, of course, Alex DeWitt, the Green Lantern (Kyle)'s girlfriend; she's the one who was literally stuffed inside a fridge, in order to motivate him in his fight against a villain. I don't follow any Green Lantern related titles, but that this applies to my definition above? Should probably be obvious.

For me, a recent example that springs to mind isn't actually from a comic book, but from a genre TV show (one which is closely connected to comics): the character of Simone Deveaux from NBC's "Heroes." Simone wasn't powered, and did not have her own storyline. She was a love interest for both Isaac Mendez and Peter Petrelli (both male, both powered); she functioned as a catalyst for both during their discovery of and struggles with their abilities, as a point of friction between the two men, and her death occured basically as motivation (with a side of angst) for each. Her whole purpose, in other words, was to further the development of these two male characters; they were active participants in the overall plot, but she wasn't. This was particularly notable because there were so few major female characters in the first season of Heroes, and because such a high proportion of the secondary female characters were killed off also.

Even so, you might say, of course some female characters do and should fit this description, as do some male characters . . . that kind of writing can be useful or necessary, as part of this or any genre. So--at least in my understanding--the definition goes a bit further. "Women in refrigerators" does not refer to just any instance in which a female character is sacrificed as a plot point, etc; it refers to the fact that this sort of storytelling happens frequently, to the point that it has become an easy, throwaway writing strategy; that it often happens in the service of a male character's story; and that it happens overwhelmingly more often to female characters, with particular brutality. "Women in refrigerators" isn't a series of isolated incidents: it's a trend.

It is this last point that is most important. The Women in Refrigerators website, which spawned the catchphrase in the first place, features a long and incomplete list of female comic characters who have suffered extreme harm, degradation, and/or untimely demise. Site creator Gail Simone muses that "in mainstream comics, being a girl superhero mean[s] inevitably being killed, maimed, or depowered, it seem[s]." She mentions that, over the course of creating her list, she "realized that it was actually harder to list major female heroes who HADN'T been sliced up somehow." While male characters are certainly "sliced up" as well--superhero comics are, after all, partly about violence as well as power--the fact that it seems to happen to such a statistically large proportion of female characters is disturbing.

What this trend suggests is that female characters often exist in mainstream comics as fodder for plots in which they are out-and-out victims. They aren't so much there to be powerful, good role-models, or the focus of interesting plots in their own right (as male superheroes are generally understood to be). Through this trend, the pain and deaths of female characters (specifically) become both frequent, and throwaway, story elements. This is clearly misogynistic.

It isn't so much that any individual story involving a woman's death or injury--even as a plot point--is inherently misogynistic. Particularly if the story is well-written, and the death/injury really is necessary to the plot (not just tossed in because it's easy to do); which is obviously a subjective judgment. What is misogynistic is that it happens so often and so casually, and to such a large proportion of female characters. The more you see it, the more it comes off like this: [insert male super] needs a motivation to go pound on [insert villain]? Let's stuff his girlfriend/mother/teammate into a household appliance, that should do the trick!

The original website doesn't articulate all of this (much of it seems obvious or implied), but that's my understanding of the catchphrase, and how it's used. That's certainly how I use it. There may be a great deal of contention as to what individual stories really qualify as examples of "women in refrigerators" --after all, we're really not a hive mind, feminists or comic fans in general--but there's a fair amount of consensus that such a trend exists. I'm not writing to argue about that, however, so much as to clarify the term itself; if you have a different understanding of "women in refrigerators" as it's being used around the blogosphere, I'd be interested to read it. At the moment I'm just trying to figure out if other people are missing the point, or if I am.