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List of contents
Introduction: Wonder Woman and the Body in Popular Culture
1. Beautiful White Bodies: Gender, Ethnicity and the Showgirl Body in the Second World War
2. ‘Here Be Monsters’: The Mutating, Splitting and Familial Body of the Cold War
3. The New Diana Prince! Makeovers, Movement and the Fab/ricated Body, 1968–72
4. The Goddess, the Iron Maiden and the Sacralization of Consumerism
5. Taming the Unruly Woman: Surveillance, Truth and theMass Media Post-9/11
6. Whose Story Is It Anyway? Revisiting the Family in the DC Extended Universe
7. The Once and Future Princess: Nostalgia, Diversity and the Intersectional Heroine
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Joan Ormrod is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, co-author of Superheroes and Identities (2014) and has an extensive journals publication record.
Summary
Wonder Woman was created in the early 1940s as a paragon of female empowerment and beauty and her near eighty-year history has included seismic socio-cultural changes. In this book, Joan Ormrod analyses key moments in the superheroine’s career and views them through the prism of the female body.
This book explores how Wonder Woman’s body has changed over the years as her mission has shifted from being an ambassador for peace and love to the greatest warrior in the DC transmedia universe, as she's reflected increasing technological sophistication, globalisation and women’s changing roles and ambitions. Wonder Woman’s physical form, Ormrod argues, is both an articulation of female potential and attempts to constrain it. Her body has always been an amalgamation of the feminine ideal in popular culture and wider socio-cultural debate, from Betty Grable to the 1960s ‘mod’ girl, to the Iron Maiden of the 1980s.
