The (Fe)male Representation of Virtue in Superhero Comics

Abstract

The present study is motivated by the asymmetric gender paradigm observed in several cognitivist analyses of metaphor (see López Maestre 2020; Hirsch, Andrews 1983; Koller 2004). Specifically, it seeks to examine the potential feminine/masculine dichotomy in the representation of virtue in superhero comics. The focus is thus on the domain of good. The key objective is to explore the extent to which multimodal representations of virtue and morality could be said to be closer to metaphoric femininity or metaphoric masculinity, and whether such a generalization can be made at all. In line with this goal, the first issues of Wonder Woman (WW) and Superman (S) comics albums are analyzed within the cognitivist framework, i.e. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), and the manifestations of metaphors are classified according to the typology of different classes of verbo-pictorial multimodal metaphors (Tasić, Stamenković 2015). Greater diversity of domains was documented for the WW comic, while the S comics album was based almost entirely on aspects such as strength and speed. The link between masculinity and virtue was more obvious in the case of the S comic strip, while the situation was less clear in the case of the WW album. The results thus seem to suggest that the asymmetric gender paradigm could be a matter of degree, rather than an actual split. The higher portion of text-dominant and complementary metaphors supports the claim that the metaphorical content in superhero comics is usually delivered through the verbal channel.