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So the other night we went to hear Jill Lapore talk about her book The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Lapore is from outside comics fandom, and it's one of those cases where a fresh angle on the subject is very useful -- her specialty is political history, and her take on the bondage imagery in Marsden's original WW comics is that they were meant by Marsden (who came of age as a male ally to the women's suffrage movement and whose extended (poly) family included Margaret Sanger) and Peters (who had drawn pro-Suffrage cartoons for Judge using the women-in-chains/women-breaking-chains imagery popularized by Annie Lucasta Rogers) as reference to Suffragist imagery and to Pankhurst and others chaining themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace in protest.
I actually think it's intersectional, as Marsden also pretty explicitly discussed voluntary submission as a demonstration of self-confidence and trust in one's partner; but it's good to hear someone bring up a different take on it than "kinky, hur hur hur." Now I'm curious as to how big an influence Wonder Woman actually had on modern BDSM (of the "safe, sane and consensual" kind); guess I'm going to need to research that.
(I'd also have liked to know more about the relationships between Marsden, Holloway and Byrne, but as Lepore pointed out, they all lived together so there are no letters between them; if you want further historians to know what was up between you and your loved ones, you have to spend time apart from them.)
I actually think it's intersectional, as Marsden also pretty explicitly discussed voluntary submission as a demonstration of self-confidence and trust in one's partner; but it's good to hear someone bring up a different take on it than "kinky, hur hur hur." Now I'm curious as to how big an influence Wonder Woman actually had on modern BDSM (of the "safe, sane and consensual" kind); guess I'm going to need to research that.
(I'd also have liked to know more about the relationships between Marsden, Holloway and Byrne, but as Lepore pointed out, they all lived together so there are no letters between them; if you want further historians to know what was up between you and your loved ones, you have to spend time apart from them.)
