Szaleństwo a władza. Konstruowanie kobiecości na przykładzie superbohaterek mainstreamowych...

Power and in/sanity. Constructing femininity - the case of American mainstream comicbook superheroines The paper is a critical, feminist analysis of the identity narrative of superheroines in American comic-books. The mainstream discourse of femininity in the Western culture spins around the roles of a daughter, wife, and mother, and the processes of socialization make sure that biological females, from their early years, follow the line of obedience to the masculine order. The behavioral patterns and purpose of the “female identity” are discursively, as Foucault would have it, always already there, established and forced upon, which makes the life of a “female” an already determined, teleological project. Such a discourse has spawned a range of disciplinary mechanisms, the aim of which is to keep (biological) females within the roles deemed “natural”; the mechanisms make sure that the desired patterns of femininity are carried out successfully. The identity narratives of superheroines, “females”, in American comic-books constitute such a disciplinary mechanism; interestingly enough (or maybe not), they play out the same saddening scenario, irrespectively of the historical and political settings or the socio-cultural climate, where a given story unfolds (and it does not really matter whether the story is set in the period of an antifeminist backlash or in more liberal times). And the story goes as follows: [1] a superheroine wields great power (but, “of course”, it is too much of a burden for a “female” like her, and, all of a sudden, it turns out that ); [2] she is too weak to contain the great power (on account of her being a “female”); so [3] she slips into madness, and, as a result, [4] she dies. Two American comic-book series, The Uncanny X-men and The Avengers, have seen the emergence of three most powerful female figures: Jean Grey alias Phoenix, from the X-men mutant group, and Sersi and Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlet Witch, from the Avengers group. Each of the heroines was, at some point, referred to as the most powerful entity in the whole universe. However, their identity narratives are constructed in such a way that when they have reached a certain level of power, they all crumble under the weight of the power and then plummet into the depths of madness, from which there is no way out but their (real, physical, or symbolic) death. In the paper, with the analysis set on the character of Jean Grey from The Uncanny X-men, I will try to discuss the following questions: what can be the discursive or socio-cultural motivation of such an identity pattern of comic-book superheroines? What is/can be the purpose of such an identity narrative? Why are the “most powerful” “female” figures always doomed to irreversible madness and death right from the start, and why is such an identity narrative not applied to “male” superheroes? And what are the “most powerful” superheroines-“females” really punished for?