Women in Refrigerators
From Encyclopedia Superheroica -the Encyclopedia of Superheroes
"Women in Refrigerators" represents an alleged phenomenon whereby women are seen, generally, to meet worse ends in comicbooks than their male counterparts. The eponymous example comes from the case of a supervillain who not only killed a superhero's girlfriend, but stuffed her remains into a refrigerator.
Women in Refrigerators.
Contents |
Story
It occurred to writer Gail Simone (with contributions from Beau Yarbrough, Rob Harris, John Norris, Jason Yu, and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, among others) that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. Curious as to whether this was statistically anomalous or not, she began correspondance with various comicbook professionals to test her theory.
Mission
"This isn't about assessing blame about an individual story or the treatment of an individual character and it's certainly not about personal attacks on the creators who kindly shared their thoughts on this phenomenon. It's about the trend, its meaning and relevance, if any."
The List (partial)
Not every woman in comics has been killed, raped, depowered, crippled, turned evil, maimed, tortured, contracted a disease or had other life-derailing tragedies befall her, but...
- All of Savage Dragon's girlfriends (dead)
- Aquagirl (dead)
- Firestar (powers were sterilizing her)
- Marrina (insane, dead)
- Mockingbird (abducted and mind-manipulated into a relationship, dead)
- Zatanna (powers severely limited)
- etc.
References
As archived via the Wayback Machine.
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