lhs (print) issn 1742–2906 lhs (online) issn 1743–1662 Article

Comicbooks as cultural archeology: Gender representation in during WWII

Francisco O. D. Veloso

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss how comicbooks, as complex multimodal artifacts, discursively interpret and evaluate events during World War II. More specifically, I examine how women are represented in an archive of 69 Captain America stories published by between March 1941 and March 1943, drawing on theoretical developments within the area of social semiotics (Halliday, 1978; Hodge and Kress, 1988). An important argument within social semiotics and multimodal studies is that texts are a combination of semiotic resources that are used for produc- tion and consumption of meanings, in specific contexts (Hodge and Kress, 1988). As a consequence, by examining these semiotic resources one can develop a better understanding of social meanings that circulate in society and how these meanings are structurally organized. By examining forms of discourse for social analysis we may identify ways of addressing particular issues at the level of representation.

Keywords: comicbooks; gender representation; social semiotics; women

1. Comicbooks as historical documents The use of the term comicbook in this article is motivated by the transforma- tions of the medium across time. Historically, the medium, in its materiality as it circulates today, originated from the newspapers’ ‘funnies’ (Inge, 1990), what is referred to as comic strips, nowadays. A first collection of reprints of previously published funnies was bound together as a giveaway for a Proc- tor and Gamble product, and the successful campaign suggested the medium

Affiliation

Department of Modern Languages, LIteratures, and Cultures (LILEC), University of Bologna, Italy. email: [email protected] lhs vol 11.2-3 2015 284–299 https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.34737 ©2018, equinox publishing Francisco O. D. Veloso 285 had potential to be commercialized on its own. Commercial success paved the way to the creation of original characters and publications. A key point is that the funnies were first developed for publication in newspapers, where they had spatial constraints considering the newspaper page layout. As the funnies moved to their own medium, space constraints were not removed but certainly extended insofar as artists then could work with an entire blank page. The changes in terms of mode are not the focus on discussion but helps us understand how the page historically became the entry point, the initial space where artists work and operationalize different semiotic modes to create meanings connected to the context of production. The term funnies was perhaps accurate at first, as they were initially used to reflect the social purpose of the new, emerging medium: to produce amuse- ment and laughs through witty stories. However, as the medium expanded into a marketing product of its own, and more content was produced, it found the space and social context appropriate for narratives beyond humor. The 1930s, following the economic crash in 1929, precipitated an environment for stories of adventure and escapism (Reynolds, 1992) that would flourish and led to the publication of Action Comics #1 in June, 1938, with a story that intro- duced the character Superman to the world. The publication was successful enough to originate a specific comicbook genre: that of the super-hero, estab- lishing the medium as a legitimate form of entertainment, although confined to a teenage audience. There are various reasons for that but the prestige of writing over pictures in contemporary society (cf Olson, 1994) is certainly an important aspect to be considered when trying to understand why comic- books have been relegated to a marginal role in the pop culture landscape. The further development of the medium starting with the popularization of super-hero comics in the 1940s, during World War II, led to deep transfor- mations and expansion in thematic repertoire. Berninger et al. (2010: 2–3), for instance, state that comicbooks

(…) have, despite their name, been used to tell very serious stories about the frag- mented experience of revolution, war, and terrorism, but have also been employed to capture the very mundane fragmentation of autobiographical memory.

As such, comicbooks have been facing the challenges and perhaps limita- tions labeling brings upon them. If funnies has long been dropped, comic book seems not to suffice any longer, especially when the general public might still be keen to associate the term comics with humorous stories. At the third International Comics Conference (2012) in Bournemouth, UK, for instance, the artist David Lloyd delivered a keynote talk where he raised similar issues, suggesting that a new label that embraces a variety of cultural tra- ditions, styles and themes might be necessary. We either create a new label 286 Comicbooks as cultural archeology or take the challenge of modifying the very perception of the term. The cre- ation of the term graphic novel and its later adoption by publishers already indicated the difficulty with the terminology in terms of marketing, as more mature stories had to find a way to its target readership and its way to book- shops. Although this is not a central theme here, distribution in comicbooks is a powerful semiotic resource that ascribes meanings, and legitimacy, to the medium. I suggest that using the term comicbook, as a single noun, erases the funny component from its origins but still evokes the sequential art form that has become so ubiquitous in contemporary society. An important element in the creation of meanings in a text is that, other than being coherent in itself, it has also to be coherent with its context of situ- ation (Halliday and Hasan, 1985), which is related to its context of production and consumption. As such, comicbooks, as texts, become important docu- ments to understand not only formal aspects of language (cf. Bramlett, 2012), but also the role of comicbooks as discourse in a dialectical relationship with society, reflecting and reproducing social values but also reinforcing them. As such, it is expected that comicbooks produced during a period of strong tension such as World War II, when disputes took place in battlefields per- haps long after a discourse of conflict and identification of enemies was estab- lished (Culbert, 1990; Koppes and Black, 1990; Honey, 1985) may function as a form of cultural archaeological artefacts, telling us of social values and dis- course strategies enacted. These texts, as historical documents, may inform on semiotic properties deployed on the construction of characters and, more specifically, the representation of women in popular culture. For this reason, we will focus on examining a particular aspect in the data described in the next section, which is the role of women in Captain America stories. This objective is the result of larger process of annotation of the same data, where we initially focused on identifying who were the enemies in those narratives in terms of doing and being, covering both linguistic and pictorial aspects. There are scholars examining comicbooks as cultural archeological arti- facts. Dittmer (2007), for instance, explores the construction of identity in comicbooks in the context of World War II. As the author examines the first ten issues of Captain America, he suggests the character functions as a resca- ling icon that links together collective and individual identities. The author discusses comicbooks as a facet of geopolitics, as they process through dis- course what it means to be good, and evil, and establishing an identity to good and evil through the narrative. Results, however, are limited as the study is in smaller scale, including only ten issues, and does not focus specifi- cally on gender representation. Concerns over gender representation in popular culture have covered dif- ferent areas such as TV ads and film (Ganahl et al., 2003; Smith et al., 2010: Francisco O. D. Veloso 287

775) but comicbooks are still uncharted territory requiring further inves- tigation. Comicbooks play a role in the process of circulation of meanings in society, reproducing ideas that circulate in other media, that operate in tandem to promote political initiatives such as the participation of the USA in World War II and, more recently, shaping the war on terror and post 9/11 actions and policies (cf. Holland, 2013; Veloso and Bateman, 2013; Smith and Hung, 2010). Examining the development of comicbooks in the United States of Amer- ica, for instance, reveals how all the actors involved were men (Harvey, 1996), which corroborates to a widespread notion that men dominate comicbooks as creative industry and that they produce stories about strong and smart men, conveying a message that women have not much of a role to play in this diegetic universe. However, empirical analysis that actually shows that this is the case and how this functions is almost nonexistent.

2. Comicbooks as social-semiotic artifacts Comicbooks, as texts, create meanings through the articulation of an array of semiotic resources that, combined, produce information and knowledge that require specific multiliteracy skills, such as the decoding of language and pictorial elements. The entry point for the organization of modes and production of meanings is the page which, as a blank canvas, works as what Groensteen (2007) has termed the ‘hyperframe’. The organization of hyper- frames has recently received detailed attention and a systematic annotation scheme to support empirical analysis is motivated in Bateman et al. (2017). Panels are placed on a page as a blank canvas, shaping the macro structure and providing space for pictures and language. There are pictorial resources of different kinds, such as drawings that will construe embodiment of char- acters, organization of information at panel level that might contribute to the narrative. Panel framing properties and color might also play a specific function within a story. Linguistic elements are also located within panels, separated from pictures by caption or bubble-like boxes. Some language might be used boundlessly within panels to produce onomatopoeias, often making use of irregular font sizes and unconventional shapes to reinforce meanings. As such, fonts that increase in size might be used to construe the onomatopoeic representation of an explosion, for instance. These modes need to be coherent in relation to each other but also to the context in which they are produced and interpreted. Modes, at the expres- sion plane are therefore articulated to create meanings at the content plane (Matthiessen, 2009; Veloso, 2014). Therefore, in order to explore meanings at this level, it is necessary to develop and apply a systematic methodology, a system of annotation that will allow us to understand how elements at the 288 Comicbooks as cultural archeology expression plane are used to produce meanings. A starting point is perhaps to understand the patterns, some of them relying on already produced and well- established resources from other social practices that include narratives, such as film, literature, and magazines to construe meanings. If the term comicbook is used to refer to the medium, to sequential art narratives, superhero comicbook is a genre of its own. Each title usually car- ries the name of its main character, which can be an individual or a group. Published periodically, the stories evolve around the main characters, who do not develop much in their diegetic essence, that is, the hero will usually be a law-abiding citizen, even if their methods are slightly different, such as Superman and Batman, for instance – but also circumstantial, because these characters have been published for such a long time that some basic features of these characters are changed through time. Superman, for instance, was first published as an Action Comics title and only in the Summer of 1939 had a title bearing his name on the cover. Simi- larly, Batman, first published in Detective Comics #27 in May, 1939 was pub- lished in a title under his name in the Spring of 1940. The quick growth of the industry, in that period, led to publications that would bear the main characters name, such as Captain America. Interestingly, the period was pro- lific in the publication of characters with a strong national, belligerent appeal required in a period of a major war. Reynolds (1992) points out more than twenty characters that, similar to Captain America, were soldiers and had their uniform based on the USA flag, and who would fight against the perils of the war promoted by countries who would later be labeled as the axis of evil. These texts emerged motivated by the very context of production and they served different social purposes, reaching a large audience. In the United States, comicbook sales reports pointed out to 15 million copies a month and by December 1943 numbers had climbed to 25 million copies (Nevins, 2017: 236). There was, on top of the gross numbers, the additional reader- ship acquired through passing-along copies. Comicbooks were also shipped to battlefields, where they were distributed among soldiers during idle peri- ods in between battles (Reynolds, 1992). The themes explored in the narra- tives served to identify the enemy, embodied in the other, signified through nationalist, symbols (such as the rising sun, for the Japanese army, or the swastika, for the Nazi Germans), the accent, captured in the register con- figuration of speech bubbles assigned to particular characters, pictorial and linguistic elements aligned to present meanings as ‘[m]anichean binaries’ (Holland, 2013: 361). These narratives provided versions of reality neces- sary to foreign policy makers in order to push their own agenda forward and contributing to the shaping of the collective imaginary and, in the process, Francisco O. D. Veloso 289 offering representations of what it is to be a woman in the early 1940s in the United States during WWII. Studies in social cognition and gender schema theories have suggested that popular culture artifacts might work as medi- ating models of reality, influencing children’s knowledge regarding gender roles (Smith et al., 2010: 776).

3. Methodology The data compiled for this study was taken from the Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Captain America collection, published between 2008 and 2012 by Marvel Comics. The collection consists of the reprints of stories as orig- inally published, including the page number, color scheme and sequence of stories. Each volume provides the metadata for the corpus organization through a table of content with details regarding issue number, artist infor- mation such as pencil, ink and lettering for most of the stories and original date of publication. The data is composed of volumes 1 through 6 containing 24 issues and 69 stories published between March 1941 and March 1942. Volumes 1 and 2 were annotated first, in order to test the categories of analysis and for cross-checking their validity in face of objectives. The process of validation included the reviewing of annotated content for each story and making the necessary adjustments to data annotation. After the first validation, a total of 69 stories were annotated and a second validation was performed throughout the data, where two researchers cross-checked the annotation results with the related stories, refining the categories and making minor adjustments to descriptors. As an exploratory annotation scheme, decisions had to be made regarding borderline cases about graphic representations between being and doing. Embodyment of characters, for instance, was annotated as an identify- ing attribute (cf Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) while garment and weapons were annotated as possessive attributes as they are owned and used by charac- ters as part of the narrative action, but are not fixed elements. For each story, an annotation scheme was created to annotate the follow- ing categories. Each story was coded for corpus organization, indicating the issue and the story number, so one can identify quickly how many stories were published. In issue #1, for instance, there were four stories. This was followed by story title, year and month of publication. A summary of the main narrative event in the story was added to the crisis type. Super-hero comicbook stories evolve around a main character and a number of support- ing characters, and for each story they will handle a specific complication. A character’s nationality was annotated, followed by alignment – which coun- try characters would position themselves within the context of war. Since the objective of the annotation scheme was to examine the presence of women 290 Comicbooks as cultural archeology in the data set, female characters were identified using the name or a brief description that allows identification. Two important categories were necessary for the annotation of the realiza- tion of a character. Smith (1995: 21) points out seven categories that he sees as fundamental to the realization of a character, but two of them are more crucial to reach my objectives here: ‘the capacity for self-impelled actions’ and ‘the potential for traits, or persisting attributes’. These two categories are related to aspects of doing ­– the types of social practices female characters engaged in, such as investigating crime or killing someone, for instance – and states of being. We should note that another of Smith’s requirements is ‘a discrete human body’, which is captured in the annotation scheme as being – characters’ social condition, such as a princess, a housewife or a government agent and doing as identifying attributes, what they are, but also in terms of possessive attributes, in terms of what they possess: weapons, aids and other elements used by them to achieve some goal in the narrative. Inclusion criteria were set to those characters meeting at least one of the following conditions: character who is given a name, her action(s) lead(s) to narrative moves, with direct attributes and reference to a specific political/ cultural group. For example, female characters pictured in the background, without any particular role, simply as part of a crowd, were discarded because they do not fulfill the basic requirements for the realization of a character.

4. Analysis and discussion After the annotation and validation process, we have identified the presence of female characters in 32 out of 69 stories included in this study. Out of this total, 29 characters are represented as American, while only three of them are foreigners: Countess Mara, from Germany; Princess Yana, from China and Lotta, represented as coming from an unspecific place in South America. Betty Ross is the only recurrent character, appearing in 15 out of 69 stories, bringing down the total of characters with an US nationality to 14 and, more important, actually reducing gender diversity to 18 characters. The role played by these characters is, overall, a minor one. In terms of role, there are two characters who are US Government agents. The first of them is identified as Agent X-13 and appears shortly in issue #1, 1941. The second agent is Betty Ross, and because of her recurrence in the stories, I will further discuss her role in the next section. The remaining 16 charac- ters vary in their role, with few of them playing a professional role, such as Carol Young, an actress; Miss Ray, a nurse; Miss Hale, a secretary and Lotta, a dancer. These professions are among those which have been historically acceptable for women, because they borrow from their femininity: being an actress or a dancer requires a certain level of sensuality and beauty while Francisco O. D. Veloso 291 being a nurse or a secretary means that one should take care of other people. Women are not represented as outside an expectation of what a woman’s job is or should be, occupying for instance what tends to be regarded as ‘man’s’ job – for the position of US agent, I will further discuss it below.

4.1. The case of North-American female characters As pointed out above, there are 14 female characters that are construed as North-American citizens. Since Betty Ross is the only recurrent female char- acter in the entire annotated corpus I will further discuss her characteriza- tion. The other two characters to be focused on are Miss Druscilla and Queen , because of their different role in the stories. The other female char- acters are represented as an extension of men, such as a niece, daughter or wife – some of them are not named, or play a minor role such as Miss Ray, a nurse. Betty Ross is first introduced in issue #2, story #5 (Volume 1), The Ageless Orientals Who Would Not. The character is embodied as a white, blond woman, dressed up in a red outfit and high heels. The narrator, in caption boxes, informs the reader she is a ‘special investigator for the US Government’. Gunshots take her to a crime scene where she finds a dying victim, prompting her to inves- tigate the case. The follow-up sequence shows Ross entering what is identified as a ‘tougher’ area of the city, where she is attacked by one of the ‘ageless mon- sters’. Figure 1 shows the moment Ross encounters the monster, and the cap- tions inform us that she ‘freezes in her tracks. Then she breaks into a mad dash for safety’. The pictorial representation of the scene is incongruent with the description, as it portrays the character running away from the monster – not freezing in her tracks, or yet, her high-heels – while shooting it with a pistol, a piece of information that is only available in the picture. The following panel registers the moment Ross first meets Captain America, when he quickly turns the monster upside down with a blow. The sequence, placing them next to each other, is significant to contrast issues of representation. Ross, despite having a gun, runs away from the monster and does not fight against it. Captain Amer- ica, on the other hand, relies only on his body strength and to knock out the monster and save the Government agent in danger. As an agent, one should assume she has been trained for battle, but this is not the case here. In her embodiment, Ross is more adequately dressed up to be a secretary. The next sequence where Ross is present takes place the following day, when she goes to the Army camp for reporting to her superiors. There, she meets Steve Rogers, Captain America in his civilian identity, peeling pota- toes. In that particular context, the relation of power between Rogers, as a private, and Ross, as an agent due to report to General Meade, tips to her side, as they are different rank. Ross and Rogers engage in conversation, but are 292 Comicbooks as cultural archeology

Figure 1: Betty Ross is chased by a monster and saved by Captain America (CA #2, 1941) interrupted by an unnamed sergeant who reprimands Roger for his ‘flirting’ behavior towards Ross, who is depicted holding up makeup powder, perhaps checking or fixing her makeup while waiting for the meeting. There is, in the scene, a moment of sensuality where Ross’ becomes an object of desire – in the diegetic development of the characters, Ross and Rogers will become long love partners in the future. In the story Captain America And The Man Who Could Not Die (issue #9, story 30 December 1941), for example, the same embodiment description applies, with the difference that, besides holding a pistol, Betty Ross is physi- cally active and hits one of the gangsters on the head with her pistol, to help Captain America. In the sequence, the villain, Nick Pinto, seizes her in order to escape, leaving her behind to climb a wire fence in which Pinto ends up electrocuted. The next panel displays Betty Ross with her face buried in her hands while Captain America along with three other male characters watch Pinto die. The female character is graphically represented as the only one who cannot stand watching the man’s fate. Such a representation suggests a cer- tain fragility that is not shared by the male characters – her moment of weak- ness in the scene serves to highlight strength and resolution before the death of a character that is construed as an enemy. Throughout the 15 stories in which she appears, Betty Ross is presented as a sociable and young lady who wears elegant outfits, including hats and high- heels, which offers a model of what a woman should look like and behave. In six out of 15 appearances, she plays an active role investigating crimes and cooperating with Captain America and his young assistant, Buck. Ross fights against villains but relies on a pistol only three times. She plays an investigative role but tends to get into trouble but ultimately rescued by Francisco O. D. Veloso 293

Captain America in a ratio of 11 out of 15 stories. In the other three stories she appears as an investigator and in one of them she is the leading lady in a military camp show, that is, she is entertaining military personnel despite being a Government agent. The only US female character that is projected as an anti-hero is Miss Drus- cilla, who is represented as a village girl raised in a remote area. The charac- ter appears in Captain America #11 along with five male characters, a family of countrymen living in an unidentified place in the US. Characters are pic- torially construed as ‘hill Billies’: dressed in rags, worn-out straw hats, long beards, smoking pipes, holding rifles, with two of the characters graphically construed as missing several teeth. The family is not assigned with a villain- ous role that connects them to any of the countries belonging to the countries mostly represented as the enemy in the story, that is, Germany and Japan. The plot focuses on long-term conflict between two families. Druscilla’s role in the story, while not a ‘hero’ type, is to keep guard on Captain America with a rifle, following her grandfather’s orders. Captain America escapes from her not by making use of physical effort or weapons. A well-dressed man in a suit approaches them and, as he starts engaging in conversation that leads to flat- tering Druscilla’s beauty, Captain America quietly escapes. That is, it only takes a compliment to distract Druscilla from duty and lose her prisoner. This is the last panel where Druscilla appears for the remainder of the story, which is entirely dominated by male characters, that is, the female character plays a minor, almost incidental role. The third female character identified as North-American in the anno- tated corpus is Medusa, the good queen of the under-earth, who appears in Captain America #17. There are no elements in the story indicating national- ity but, assuming characters are inhabitants of an under-earth place located within the US, the decision to be made is to identify her as such. A bomb exploded underground by Nazi agents has disturbed the queen and her sub- earth men. Following advice of a cunning Nazi agent, the under-earth instead seek revenge by attacking US cities. and is stopped by the good queen, Cap- tain America and . She is also projected as a tall, slim-bodied, wealthy lady with a black long hair, stockings and high heels. She takes a passive role in the fights, and is once rescued by Captain America. Despite being the queen, she is undermined by her subjects, all men in long hair and a slight ape-like characterization, wearing shorts and exhibiting muscled bodies. In contrast, the Queen of the under-earth wears net-tights and high heels and very long hair. While the under-earth men are graphically represented as sav- ages, the Queen evokes a dancer – she wears tight, short clothes that leave her body and legs on display. Yet, despite being the queen, she cannot control her subjects in their desire to pursue revenge against people on the surface, who 294 Comicbooks as cultural archeology they think are the ones responsible for the bombs, not the Germans. Queen Medusa only reverses the situation with the help of Captain America and Buck.

4.2. Non-USA female characters The annotation scheme revealed that there are only three characters who are represented as non-American people. In order of appearance, they are Countess Mara, Lotta and Princess Yana. Countess Mara is the only out of 18 female characters who play an evil role, as a German agent, in Captain America #10, 1942. Her objective, simi- lar to other evil characters, is to undermine the US military and win the war. She is infiltrated in the US to articulate their defeat. Her embodiment is how- ever not different from other female characters: she exhibits a slim figure and nice outfit. She fights against US soldiers using grenades she takes out of her red pouch bag or, once, using a grenade-gun. Whenever the fight gets physi- cal, she relies on the help of a ‘lumbering seven-foot mountain of a man’, as see in Figure 2. Again, the tall, muscled man is shows shirtless, foreground his sturdiness, as the one up for a fight. This scene is, in this sense, similar to Figure 1, with the only different being that Ross is on the good side. But both women rely on men to protect them physically.

Figure 2: Countess Mara relies on Klaus to fight Captain America

The difference is that, as an evil character, Countess Mara has to be defeated as part of the war propaganda effort in which Captain America is inserted (cf. Dittmer, 2007). Ironically, her defeat comes from her own move, when she throws a grenade on Captain America who deflects it using his shield – again, the man proves to be smarter. The scene that follows the explo- sion cause by Countess Mara signals her defeat, which is graphically repre- sented by her embodiment: now she has her hair loose and messed up, her Francisco O. D. Veloso 295 dress is in rags and she looks dirty. Countess Mara loses the battle and her elegance – she is the only female character who is ever presented, through- out the annotated corpus, in an unfashionable manner. Perhaps this is the moment when we can see her ‘true self’, an evil character begging not to be tortured before Captain America kills her. In her violent war mindset, this is what awaits her. Her embodiment now reveals herself, perhaps evoking what Barthes (1972) as the embodiment of evil: the disgusting and the ugly are strategies of semiotically externalizing the internal evil.

Figure 3: Countess Mara is defeated and her graphic embodiment reveals her true self.

The other two foreign characters Lotta, a South American dancer, and Princess Yana, from China, play a minor role in their stories. Rozzo, the vil- lain, uses Lotta to unknowingly toss explosive flowers to the US President. She is almost killed by Rozzo, but Captain America rescues her in time to save her life. Princess Yana is inserted in a more complex story. The League of Uni- corns, a group of Asian terrorists in the story, intends to ruin USA and China relations during the war and plan to kill Prince Tsaihoon and his wife, Prin- cess Yana. The princess is kidnapped by the villains and rescued by Captain America. Her embodiment follows what seems to be a common stereotype for Chinese or perhaps Asian people: long fingers and nails. Again, physical attributes are in the forefront and out of all the female characters, she is the only one to wear a dress with cleavage that is quite uncommon in Chinese culture, especially with a royal family member.

5. Conclusion The data annotation shows the stories develop around men and women play a secondary role, perhaps doing what they would be expected to do: serve men, as a prop, preferably in high-heels. 296 Comicbooks as cultural archeology

Betty Ross, the only woman playing a brief active role in the stories, is an agent in high-heels who gets in trouble only to be consistently saved by Cap- tain America. She does not seem to handle her job well. That is, as an agent, she is incompetent. She needs a man’s help to fight her battles and she never loses her posture or embodiment composition. The only female character to do so is Countess Mara, who is the only female villain identified throughout the 69 stories examined here. The representation of women as displayed in the data places the female role in a category of tool or prop that ignites/prompts actions that only high- light features of male characters. Women, in these comicbook stories, barely qualify as characters simply because they lack certain features that constitute a character. Except for Betty Ross and Countess Mara, who display initiative, the other female characters follow orders or play a minor role, being used by men to reach their objectives. It is true that we have walked a long way regarding gender roles, and how women occupy much higher positions such as Prime-Minister or Presidents, but they are still a few. Even in those positions of power, they are still sub- jected to issues of representation, with media articles dedicated to their phys- ical appearance, including hair style, for instance. More concerning, however, is that more recently the media has reported a number of cases where politicians in high ranks express, without any con- cerns of a possible rebuttal, ideas that are aligned with the representation of women, as discussed in these comicbooks published in the early 1940s. Janusz Korwin-Mikke, European Union Parliament member from Poland, argued in March 2017 that women deserve to earn less because they are ‘weaker’, ‘smaller’ and ‘less intelligent’. Similarly, the current President of Brazil, Michel Temer, who only reached that position through a political coup against President Dilma Rousseff, exalted the importance of women on a speech on International Women’s Day, 8 March, highlighting the con- tribution in domestic affairs, from checking prices in the supermarket to raising children – according to him, this is not a man’s task. Examples of this kind abound and it ranges between surprising and shocking that these ideas are expressed not only in public, but are elaborated in official political events. There has been a lot of advance in the representation and social role of women in society, but it might be the case that we might be living through what Giddens (1979: 143) refers to as system degeneration, which is promoted by the contradictions generated by the political and economic system that, incapable of meeting people’s expectations and needs, and improving income distribution and social justice, might be fomenting ‘retrograde movements of historical change’. Francisco O. D. Veloso 297

I suggest here that we might have been living a bit of an illusion provoked by the means of representation, that is, media at large. While we hear of per- haps few stories of female success we lose sight of many others that are not so successful. Even among those successful ones, there are examples of misogyny in discourse. President Dilma Rousseff, for instance, was said to be ‘sweep- ing off’ corruption, while her counterpart, President Fernando Collor, in the early 1990s, was said to be ‘hunting’ corruptors. This is a much more power- ful and positive graphic representation of actions of the same type, where lex- ical choices are determined by gender – and of course, the preference of parts of the mainstream media for Collor, at a specific moment in time. More studies are required exploring different media to empirically under- stand issues of gender representation especially in popular culture, because these are subtle meanings that circulate and impose themselves as natural expectations of what a man or a woman should be and behave like.

Note 1. Some explicit external conjunction has also been added, but not discussed here.

About the author Francisco O. D. Veloso is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (LILEC) at the University of Bologna, Italy and Associate Professor (currently on leave) at the Federal University of Acre, Brazil. His research areas include popular culture, comic books, media and semi- otics, from a Systemic-Functional Linguistic perspective.

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