Reading Wonder Woman’s Body:
Mythologies of Gender and Nation
MI TRA C . E MAD
Few enduring expressions of American popular culture are so in-
stantly recognizable and still so poorly understood as comic books.
(Wright)
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition
of the nation: it is an imagined political community . . .. In fact, all
communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact
(and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be dis-
tinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in
which they are imagined.
(Anderson)
L
ONG-STANDING AMERICAN COMICS THAT APPEARED FOR THE FIRST TIME
during the ‘‘Golden Age’’ of comics (the 1940s) and continue to
the present day constitute a rich arena for exploring cultural
meanings about America as a nation and the mythologies of national
identity pervasive during specific historical moments. Traditionally a
popular cultural venue marketed primarily to children, how do comic
books reflect and create particular
imaginaries of nationhood?
Through all kinds of commodities besides the comic book itself (pos-
ters, T-shirts, action figures, dolls, lunch boxes, children’s games, cos-
tumes, refrigerator magnets, journals, coffee mugs, etc.) the comic
book superhero, Wonder Woman, remains ‘‘instantly recognizable’’ in
The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 39, No. 6, 2006
r 2006, Copyright the Authors
Journal compilation r 2006, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
954
American and sometimes even in transnational contexts.1 Understand-
ing Wonder Woman as an iconic figure in and of American popular
culture entails contending with particular, often oppositional, mean-
ings inscribed onto the ever-changing Amazon’s body. What is at stake
when for over sixty years this comic book female body has been cos-
tumed in American nationalist iconography: golden eagles, the stars
and stripes, red, white, and blue colors? What mythologies about
America as a nation are being imagined and told through this comic
book’s long and continuous