Gender Stereotyping In Comic Books !!INSTALL!!

I made my first foray into teaching gender through comics last semester at Ball State University, and it was met with tremendous success. The entire class was engaged, and I saw social cliques break down as students from various walks of life resonated to lessons learned from superheroes.

"We've kept everything we loved about comic books too. The city in which it is set is full of larger-than-life characters and dual personalities," Dr Brooker explained. "There's conspiracy, alternative realities, last-minute life-and-death decisions, sidekicks and secrets too."

Hundreds of fans are already following some of the characters on Twitter. "The comic books of today don't have to be for an exclusive fan club following. We can bring the characters to life through social media and expand on their fictitious world with extra online features," Dr Brooker added.

Comic books, a form of American popular culture, offer a window into the past, allowing researchers to track societal changes over several decades. The purpose of this study was to determine if, how, and how much female gender roles have changed in Marvel Comics from the Silver Age (1960) to the present (2014) to help understand how popular culture portrays and treats female characters. It was hypothesized that female gender roles in Marvel Comics in the last decade have become less stereotypical and more equitable as compared to the 1960s, as determined by the sevenpoint quantifiable rubric. The seven-point rubric underwent inter-rater reliability tests twice, with ten experienced raters. The researcher reviewed 68 Marvel titles for a total of 788 Marvel comic books broken down by decade from 1960 to 2014.

Quantitative content analysis determined that the average overall female gender role scores for Marvel comics consistently went up by decade from 12.20 for 1960 to 1969 to 22.50 for 2010 to 2014, which supported the hypothesis and was significant at p = .001. Results were also tracked for the seven rubric categories between 1960 to 1969 and 2010 to 2014, respectively (score range 0 5): average cover art (0.39 to 2.61), Bechdel Test (1.21 to 2.72), storyline (2.55 to 4.00), occupation (1.50 to 3.16), balance of power (1.45 to 3.14), female sexualization (1.88 to 3.53), and violence against women (3.22 to 3.32) with significance noted in these subsets.

According to Bradford Wright (2001), "Few enduring expressions of American popular culture are so instantly recognizable and still so poorly understood as comic books . . . Just as each generation writes its own history, each reads its own comic books" (p. 1). Comic books are a litmus test for pop culture itself. Comics do not exist in a vacuum. They are steeped in the thoughts, feelings, and values of their writers and readers. Female gender roles in comic books often reflect these values and attitudes, and they both illustrate and chronicle the year in which they were published.

Popular culture and comic books offer the reader an inside look at how society functioned when they were written. According to Dr. Christina Blanch (2013), "One benefit of analyzing gender through comics is the ability to track attitudes over time" (para. 5). Comic books often parallel American culture, values, and politics.

During the 1940s, comic book art inspired life and often imitated it. The comic books of the 1940s inspired women to be more than homemakers. The authors tried to inspire women to become part of the war effort, to leave their homes, enter the workforce, and fill the jobs previously held by men. This was the Golden Age of Comics, and the decade when female superheroes were christened symbols of American strength, freedom, patriotism, and independence (Larew, 1997, p. 592).

With the end of World War II and the return of the male work force, women were relegated back into the home. There was a backlash and return to conservative family values in which men were the breadwinners and women the homemakers. Comic books reflected the swinging of society's conservative pendulum with regard to female gender roles. During the late 1950s, female superheroes were slowly vanishing. First, they were treated as powerless sidekicks to their male counterparts. Then, they began disappearing altogether. As women were forced out of the public sphere, they also vanished from comics (Larew, 1997, p. 596).

Women are often marginalized in the superhero universe as in American culture. Comic books frequently perpetuate social or cultural gender stereotypes or both. For many young boys, comic books act as an agent of socialization, modeling social values, and gender roles (Ito, 1994, p. 90).

Traditionally, comic books have targeted male readership. According to a 1995 survey, about 13.41% of comic book readership was female. The average age of women was 25 to 35, considerably older than the 16 to 24-year-old average for men (Emad, 2006, pp. 969-970). Today, young women make up 46.67% of comic book readership (Schenker, 2014, para. 5).

The most comprehensive comic book study analyzing female gender roles was Karl Larew's (1997) "Planet Women: The Image of Women in Planet Comics, 1940 1953." It analyzed the number of female superheroes in Golden Age Planet Comics and the number of times they graced the comic books' covers (p. 592). In addition to Larew's, only two other quantitative comic book studies of female gender roles have been completed: Kinko Ito's (1994) "Images of Women in Weekly Male Comic Magazines in Japan" and Erik Palmer's (2008) dissertation "Superheroes and Gender Roles, 1961 2004." Ito dealt only with contemporary Japanese publications while Palmer analyzed only Marvel Comics' cover art.

From these very limited quantitative studies and other research, seven indicators of female gender roles or status were developed. The indicators or categories include: comic book cover art, the Bechdel Test, storyline, occupation, balance of power, female sexualization, and violence against women.

Writers often overlook the female perspective, because male storylines are considered dominant or universal (Scheiner-Fisher, 2012, p. 222). This is true in comic books and other literature. In the Golden Age of Comics, female characters were used almost entirely as companions or sidekicks to their male counterparts.

In addition to occupations being a strong indicator of female status, roles are important in comic books because superheroes have secret identities. In the Golden Age and early Silver Age of Comics, female characters often had no occupation, role, or even name (Jones, 2014). They were just window dressing. Those that had occupations were often limited to caregiving roles (Ito, 1994, p. 88). "The superheroine was placed on a pedestal of achievement, playing with the boys, and developing strength and identity in areas not traditionally available to women. But as females in a majority male universe, symbolically they had nowhere to go except into the roles of women that were recognizable and familiar" (D'Amore, 2012, p. 1229). For example, Susan Storm, aka the Invisible Woman, was a very powerful superhero in her own right, but she was relegated to the role of girlfriend, wife, and mother (Dunne, 2006, p. 6).

The fifth indicator regarding female gender roles is the balance of power between male and female characters. "Surely you've noticed. Female superheroes aren't nearly as revered as male superheroes," from "Equal Fights" (O'Reilly, 2005, p. 273). Up until 1960, most superhero-sidekick partnerships were all-male. After that, many female superheroes would not exist without their male counterparts, for example: Hulk and She-Hulk, Spider-Man and Spider-Woman, and Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel. Female comic book characters relied on their male counterparts to rescue them, care for them, make decisions for them, and give them a purpose in life (Emad, 2006). Women were almost invisible and certainly not in any position to make decisions (Ito, 1994, p. 87).

From 1954-2005, the comic book industry was regulated and censored by the Comic Book Code Authority. From its earliest beginnings, the Anti-Comics Crusade was concerned about gender roles, sexuality, and violence, especially in relation to women (D'Amore 1227). And yet, female sexualization is a very prominent comic book feature, especially focusing on large breasts, long legs, and tiny waists. "More precisely, the portrayal of women characters throughout comic books builds upon and continues to perpetuate the idea that women are mere objects of desire, basically submissive and ineffectual creatures whose virtue is found in the lewd display of their body" (Jones, 2014, para. 2).

Comics have traditionally exploited women for male readership, making violence against women the 7th indicator. Women often serve the role of perpetual victim in comic books. They are threatened, kidnapped, assaulted, humiliated, violated, and often killed (Larew, 1997, p. 602).

At least 100 Marvel comic books were collected from each era: 1960 to 1969, 1970 to 1979, 1980 to 1989, 1990 to 1999, 2000 to 2009, and 2010 to 2014. A seven-point rating rubric for all comics was designed on rcampus.com with each category being rated from zero to five such that the highest possible score a comic could cumulatively receive was 35. Each comic was rated on seven categories: the Bechdel Test, Cover Art, Storyline, Occupation, Balance of Power, Female Sexualization, and Violence Against Women.

After creating the seven-point rating rubric on rcampus.com, 10 experienced raters and the researcher scored the same comic book using the rubric to test for inter-rater reliability. Based on the raters' feedback and comparison of their scores, the rubric was revised and the inter-rater reliability test was repeated so that the average scores would differ by fewer than 0.5 points. Upon observing this degree of variability, 788 selected comic books for a minimum of 100 comics per decade (1960 to 2014) were reviewed by the researcher.

The purpose of this study was to determine if, how, and how much female gender roles have changed in Marvel Comics from the Silver Age (1960) to the present to help understand how popular culture portrays and treats women and female characters. It was hypothesized that female gender roles in Marvel Comics in the last decade have become less stereotypical and more equitable as determined by the seven-point quantifiable rubric as compared to the 1960s. Through the quantitative content analysis, the average female gender role scores for Marvel comics consistently went up by decade from 12.20 in the 1960s to 22.50 from 2010 to 2014. An ANOVA statistical analysis was run using XL-Stat Software. Significance was found, and the null hypothesis was rejected. T-tests were then run to determine the location of the significance. Comparing 2010 to 2014 data to each decade found very high significance at .001 for all of the time periods between 1960 and 2009. 2b1af7f3a8