Monstrous Women in Comics ed. by Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody (review)

Why are comics full of monsters? What can these monsters who lurk in the dark and on the margins tell us about a specific moment in history or the particular fears of a culture? Why are so many of the monsters in comics coded as female? In this collection, Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody assemble an impressive group of comics scholars working on representations of monstrous women across a range of sources, from US superhero comics to Bolivian Chola comics to snake women in Chinese comics and animation. The fifteen essays are highly readable and richly varied in approach, accompanied by thirty-five illustrations for readers who may not know the comics first-hand. This is a landmark volume in transnational feminist comics studies that needs to be on the shelf of every comics scholar. It will be a touchstone for future comics research thanks to its rigorous discussions of how femininity, sexuality, disability, maternity, ethnicity, race, nationality, and even childhood are potential sites for both monstrous othering and monstrous empowerment in comics.

Langsdale and Coody's introduction situates the volume within popular culture studies and feminist theory, explaining that "the authors of this volume are specifically interested in patriarchal cultural contexts, wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject such that women frequently become monsters" (3). Moreover, as the subsequent chapters illustrate, coding the female as monstrous is "overwhelmingly exacerbated by the intersection of gender with other markers of identity like sexuality, race, nationality, and disability" (4). Over the course of the volume, it becomes clear that monstrosity is often an embodied transgression of sociocultural norms and hierarchies, through which comics artists register specific anxieties about the unregulated, non-normative female body. At the same time, as the editors explain, "it is crucial not to collapse a study of monstrous women into nothing more than a survey of degradation and marginalization" (4). Accordingly, many of the chapters consider characters who reclaim monstrosity as a source of empowerment and thereby challenge the gendered systems that relegate difference to the realm of the monstrous other.

While the introduction establishes a broad thematic context for the volume, each chapter delineates specific social, cultural, economic, political, and aesthetic formations of monstrosity in particular comics texts. These detailed discussions, framed by broader critical analyses, work individually to variously reframe familiar texts and introduce less familiar ones, and the shared methodology provides the collection with a welcome unity and coherence. A number of thinkers appear frequently throughout, providing the volume with a conceptual unity: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Barbara Creed, and Margrit Shildrick are referenced by multiple authors to ground the comics analysis in theories of monstrosity, alterity, and femininity. References to Sara Ahmed, Donna Haraway, and Julia Kristeva will also make this volume of interest to feminist scholars working in other fields. Likewise, the chapters draw on comics theory to offer formal as well as thematic readings, such that fans and scholars of the specific works will find a satisfying attention to breakdowns, layouts, caricature, color, characterization and visual rhetoric. The book is divided into five thematic sections of three chapters each, beginning with the origins and types of monstrous representations of women in comics and ending with female characters who take on the role of monster as a form of resistance and retaliation.

Part 1, "The Origins, Agency, and Paradoxes of Monstrous Women," sets up the collection's central insight that monstrous women produce fear because they are paradoxical creatures: they "are neither wholly empowered nor entirely disenfranchised, but often they are both" (6). In chapter 1, Elizabeth Rae Coody explores how the multiple origin stories of Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, and Mary Magdalene refect the various storytellers' anxieties about these characters' subversive powers. As a religious studies scholar, Coody first analyzes the comics characters and then brings her findings about their boundary-crossing monstrosity to the cultural discomfort around Mary Magdalene's origin story, skillfully highlighting how transdisciplinary...