Wonder Woman
Superheroes are undoubtedly one of the most popular phenomena on our planet. It is hard to imagine
our world without them and we encounter them every day in comics, films and
video games, and they are also almost omnipresent online. All of this makes them characters whose values,
appearance and activities are always read politically. Wonder Woman, created in 1941 by the
psychologist and feminist William Moulton Marston and the longest-serving superhero
in the DC universe, has undergone many transformations in her 80-year history and
embodied different gender concepts in the process. This lecture tells the story of these
transformations from her first appearances as a warrior in a matriarchal society in the
1940s and her importance as a feminist role model for the feminism of the 1970s
to her reorientation as a queer heroine since the 2010s. The lecture
will also focus on the tensions arising from Wonder Woman's appointment as
United Nations (UN) Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls (2016)
and the latest debates about the political views of Israeli actress Gal Gadot,
who has played Wonder Woman since 2016 and has embroiled the character in controversies about
the war in Gaza since the early 2020s, which have made her popularity politically problematic and which are also
worth looking at from a gender theory perspective.
