Sister, Lover, Monster: Gender, Sexuality, and Monstrousness in Batwoman

Introduced in 2006, Kate Kane is the modern iteration of Batwoman, who is an out lesbian woman, in contrast to her 1950s counterpart that was created to alleviate concerns that Batman was gay. She would go on to star in stories by Greg Rucka, J.H. Williams III, and W. Haden Blackman that were published from 2009 to 2013. This run established core aspects of Kate’s character, supporting cast, and origin story. Though Rucka and Williams’ work has received some scholarly focus, Williams and Blackman’s work has received very little. This project attends to how these Batwoman comics facilitate queer representation by drawing on contemporary LGBTQ politics and deploying familiar superhero tropes to display LGBTQ cultural anxieties to a wider audience. This project highlights how the modern Batwoman freely and fluidly crosses gender boundaries in sharp contrast to her 1950s counterpart’s adherence to heteronormativity. Through this contrast, the modern Batwoman is then cast as a gender transgressive liberator. The comic also presents a complicated reclamation of monstrous womanhood by revealing the misogynist patriarchal constructs that create them, and by portraying their means of liberation. By analyzing the comic’s portrayal of gender, sexuality, and monstrousness, Batwoman reveals how comics are a unique medium to explore these constructions, with its own set of strengths and limitations, and encourages similar studies with other characters and series.