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 psychologist and feminist William Moulton Marston and the longest-serving superheroine in the DC Universe, has undergone many transformations in her 80-year history, embodying different gender concepts. 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 feminism in the 1970s to her reorientation as a queer heroine since the 2010s. The lecture will also focus on the tensions arising from the appointment of Wonder Woman as a 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 considering from a gender theory perspective.
