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REPRESENTING THE FUTURE OF DISABILITY: THE PAST AND PRESENT OF AS

Item Type Electronic Thesis; text

Authors Escobar, Raquel

Citation Escobar, Raquel. (2020). REPRESENTING THE FUTURE OF DISABILITY: THE PAST AND PRESENT OF BARBARA GORDON AS BATGIRL (Bachelor's thesis, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA).

Publisher The University of Arizona.

Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

Download date 26/09/2021 16:08:08

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/651007

REPRESENTING THE FUTURE OF DISABILITY:

THE PAST AND PRESENT OF BARBARA GORDON AS BATGIRL

By

RAQUEL ANN ESCOBAR

______

A Thesis Submitted to The Honors College

In Partial Fulfillment of the Bachelors degree

With Honors in

Gender & Women’s Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

MAY 2020 Escobar 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... 3

Figure Descriptions ...... 4

Introduction ...... 7

Disability in ...... 9

Contextualizing Barbara Gordon’s Narrative History ...... 12

Theoretical Framework ...... 18

Constructing, Studying, and Imagining Disability ...... 19

Understanding Comics ...... 25

Understanding ...... 26

Disability as the Abject ...... 29

Era One: Barbara Gordon’s Debut (1967) – of Batgirl’s First Stint (1988) .. 35

Era Two: The Killing Joke (1988) – The End of Oracle (2011) ...... 39

Era Three: Batgirl’s Return (2012) – The Present ...... 50

Conclusion ...... 56

Recuperation From Disability ...... 59

Era One: Barbara Gordon’s Debut (1967) – The End of Batgirl’s First Stint (1988) .. 62

Era Two: The Killing Joke (1988) – The End of Oracle (2011) ...... 63

Era Three: Batgirl’s Return (2012) – The Present ...... 73

Conclusion ...... 77 Escobar 2

Conclusion: Towards A Different Future ...... 80

Works Cited ...... 87

Escobar 3

ABSTRACT

In this thesis, I situate the comics character, Barbara Gordon, as a point of contact between fiction and reality, examining the past and present of her narrative through feminist crip theory in order to imagine a different future for the representation of disability in

Science Fiction. I divide her narrative into three eras, the first of which spans from her 1967 debut to the traumatic events of The Killing Joke (1988), the second follows her career as Oracle up until her 2011 reinstatement as Batgirl in a company-wide DC Universe relaunch, and the third from The Darkest Reflection (2012) to the present. In these three eras, I explore feminist crip theoretical concepts, such as “narrative prosthesis” and the

“supercrip,” crafting an overarching analysis that focuses on disability as the abjected Other, and recuperation from disability as represented through Barbara. I work to reveal what has not yet been created for the representation of disability in Barbara’s narrative, and what has not yet been accounted for in Critical Disability Studies. In doing so, I demand more from Science Fiction and feminist theory, urging both fiction and reality to carve space for disability into their futures. Escobar 4

FIGURE DESCRIPTIONS

Fig. 1. Selected Panels from Moore, Alan (w). Bolland, Brian (p), (i). The Killing Joke. (March

1988). Batman, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2012, p. 30.

As reproduced on page 41 of this thesis, this figure contains three comic panels that

depict Gordon reacting to photos of Barbara as he moves through the carnival ride. Each

panel includes speech bubbles. In the first, the sings "When you're loo-oo-oony,

then you just don't give a fig..." while Gordon says, "Wait! Wait a minute. That's..." and

the dwarf orders Gordon, "Down." In the second: sings, "Man's so pu-uu-uny,

and the universe so big..!" while Gordon says, "...Barbara?" and the dwarf continues to

order him, "Down! Down!" In the third, the Joker sings "If you hurt inside, get certified,

and if life should treat you bad..." while Gordon screams "Barbaraaaaaa."

Fig. 2. Selected page from Dixon, Chuck and Jordan Gorfinkel (w). Gary, Frank, Matt Haley,

Stefano Raffaele, et al. (p). Dell, John, Bob McLeod, , et al. (i).

Birds of Prey (Nov. 2015), Comixology ed. Vol 1. DC Comics, 2015, p. 278.

As reproduced on page 46 of this thesis, figure 2 contains a comic page that depicts

flashbacks from Barbara's traumatic injury overlapping the present Batgirl's . Two

small speech bubbles beside her face read, "No... Not you..."

Fig. 3. Selected panel from Benson, Julie and Shawna Benson (w). Antonio, Roge and Claire

Roe (p), (i). Batgirl and the Vol. 1: Who is Oracle? (April 2017),

Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017, p. 14.

As reproduced on page 51 of this thesis, a comics panel depicts Barbara in her

wheelchair, seated before a window. is dark and raining outside, and a black bird sits

on the windowsill. Barbara's thought bubbles read: "I didn't feel sad," "(Lies)," "I didn't Escobar 5

feel sorry for myself," ((Lies)," "I had been helping others 24/7, but now others thought I

needed 24/7 help," "That's what was depressing."

Fig. 4. Selected panel from Benson, Julie and Shawna Benson (w). Antonio, Roge and Claire

Roe (p), (i). Batgirl and the Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Who is Oracle? (April 2017),

Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017, p. 16.

As reproduced on page 51 of this thesis, this figure contains a comic panel depicting an

empty wheelchair sitting in front of a window. Outside, a bird flies over a sunrise or

sunset. Barbara's thought bubbles read: "It took a couple of years to adjust to my 'new

normal' in a wheelchair," "Took even longer for me to adjust to the experimental surgery

that put me back on my feet," and "After that, Dinah felt like I didn't need her anymore

and the Birds of Prey disbanded."

Fig. 5. Selected panel from Ostrander, John, and Kim Yale (w). Stelfreeze, Brian (p). Story, Karl

(i). “ Chronicles.” (June 1996). No. 5, Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years,

Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [173-190], p. 181.

As reproduced on page 67 of this thesis, fig. 5 contains three comic panels depicting the

start of Barbara's hacking career, each of which include one of her thought bubbles. The

first reads, "With a grant from the Wayne Foundation, I set up shop in my bedroom. I put

together as powerful a computer set-up as I could." The second reads, "One thing I knew

how to do was research and, thanks to my modem, I could tap into databases worldwide.

I discovered I had an affinity for computer hacking, and I started to make some money."

The third reads, "I got into the INTERNET before the public really knew what it

was. And I discovered a world there." Escobar 6

Fig. 6. Selected panels from Ostrander, John, and Kim Yale (w). Stelfreeze, Brian (p). Story,

Karl (i). “The Batman Chronicles.” (June 1996). No. 5, Batgirl: A Celebration of 50

Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [173-190], p. 188.

As reproduced on page 70 of this thesis, two comic panels depict Barbara's

sequence. Dressed as Batgirl, she stands on a hill, surrounded by white birds, and

overlooking Grecian ruins. The first panel's thought bubble reads, "In my dream, I am

walking. I am dressed as Batgirl once more. I know, with a dreamer's certainty, that I am

in classical Greece." The second panel's thought bubble reads, "Just as instinctively, I

know I am at Delphi, and the woman before me is the priestess who speaks for the --

the oracle" and the Oracle says, "Speak, child-- ask me your questions."

Fig. 7. Selected panel from Ostrander, John, and Kim Yale (w). Stelfreeze, Brian (p). Story, Karl

(i). “The Batman Chronicles.” (June 1996). No. 5, Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years,

Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [173-190], p. 192.

As reproduced on page 72 of this thesis, fig. 7 contains a comic panel that I have

intentionally cropped to include slivers of previous, overlapping panels. Barbara moves

through the city in her wheelchair, surrounded by birds, people, and buildings. Two

thought bubbles read, "A little over a year has passed since my old life ended, since I died

and was reborn. The shadows remain, but only to give contrast to the light. I am no

longer a distaff impersonation of someone else. I'm me-- more me than I have ever been.

My life is my own. I embrace it, and the light, with a deep, continuing joy." Escobar 7

INTRODUCTION

Barbara Gordon: unassuming librarian with an eidetic memory, daughter of Police

Commissioner Jim Gordon; martial artist, intelligence expert, founder of the Birds of Prey;

Batgirl, Oracle, and Batgirl once again; nondisabled, disabled, cured. Since her 1967 debut as the female crime-fighting counterpart to Batman, Barbara has transformed into an ever-expanding comic book character whose influence extends far beyond her two-dimensional world. Her narrative begins with her eager to prove herself to ’s most prominent and to her own father —who also happens to be one of Batman’s closest allies— and continues on to see her become much more than simply a lesser, third element to Batman and ’s Dynamic Duo.

Her existence continuously challenges the DC Universe to not only make room for her in spaces meant only for the narrowest of superheroes, but also to make contact with the reality of disabled womanhood.

As a disabled comic book fan whose negotiation of reality has shaped, and been shaped by, my engagement with the Batman universe, I believe that critically analyzing Barbara’s narrative contributes to the argument that the representation of marginalized individuals in fiction matters, and that critical analysis like mine within this thesis is key to imagining the future of narratives available to marginalized individuals. While Barbara may exist in the distant, impossible realm of Science Fiction, I feel her interaction with my reality through disability, and

I see the differences in our disabled experiences through feminist theory and Critical Disability

Studies. In this thesis, my analysis will entangle the past(s) and present(s) of Barbara and real disability, illuminating what has not yet been represented in her narrative to imagine what must come next. Just as I align myself with feminist claims to futurity and demands for the Escobar 8 impossible,1 I center this thesis around demanding more from the future of disability representation in fiction, in imagining more for Barbara. By analyzing Barbara’s past and present, I hope to render futures of disability legible, challenging the boundaries between

Science Fiction and reality to radically (re)present difference.2

Encounters with difference are central to Science Fiction (SF), which, as a ,

“provides a means, in a popular and accessible fictional form, for exploring alterity.”3 Difference might be represented through the sentient spaceships of Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang, the disabled Earthling refugees of Allen M. Steele’s ’s Outcasts, or the hyperempathic navigating the dystopic world of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. SF offers a kaleidoscopic array of difference to its audiences, and how that difference is communicated matters. For example, the representation of disability within The Ship Who Sang, once thought to be positive, communicates the notion of disability as a tragic burden by characterizing its disabled protagonist as “a thing” prior to the transplantation of her consciousness into a government-owned spaceship. As such, the protagonist “makes a vital contribution to her society; far from being a burden, she is one of its most productive members,” and reaffirms the notion of the supercrip,4 which I will detail later on in this thesis. In the same vein, the

1 An in-depth analysis of what it means to envision impossible futures through and for Barbara Gordon is beyond the scope of my thesis, but one pivotal work for further inquiry is Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz. In this thesis, I engage more directly with the claims to futurity explored in Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer that use “crip time” to imagine futures for disabled people beyond the expected cure to their disability (Kafer, 28.) 2 I begin this thesis with an understanding that my work does not engage with many key elements of disability as represented in reality or fiction, including race and class. Barbara’s narrative is inevitably shaped by her privileged position as an upper-class white person with access to the billionaire ’s vast resources. A future, more in-depth analysis of her narrative must necessarily take the entire breadth of Barbara’s social identity into account. 3 Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction (The New Critical Idiom). Routledge, 2006, 17. 4 Cheyne, Ria. “‘She Was Born a Thing’: Disability, the Cyborg and the Posthuman in Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, pp. 138–156. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.36.3.138, 142. Escobar 9 representation of Barbara Gordon’s disabled womanhood has the power to reaffirm narratives of disability that restrict or expand, that validate or challenge what has been imagined for disability and disabled people thus far.

While analyzing every moment of Barbara Gordon’s narrative history is beyond the scope of this thesis, I understand the comic books and graphic novels that I have highlighted as central to the development of her character, as viewed through my feminist analytical lens. A broad understanding of disability in comics and a brief history of disability activism in the United States —both of which are located within this introduction— will serve as a foundation for my critical analysis of Barbara’s narrative. A framework for how I understand and engage with disability, comics, and Science Fiction will follow the introduction, leading up to my thesis’s analytical argument. My analysis is split into two sections; the first section focuses on the representation of disability as the abjected Other in Barbara’s narrative, while the second explores recuperation from disability as represented through Barbara. Each section is divided according to what I have identified as the three key eras of Barbara’s life; Era One extends from

“The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” (1967) to “The Last Batgirl Story” (1988), Era Two from

The Killing Joke (1988) to the end of her career as Oracle, and Era Three from Batgirl, Volume

1: The Darkest Reflection (2012) to the present. With the conclusion of my thesis, I hope to leave my work as an opening for the future of the representation of disability in comics and Science

Fiction.

Disability in Comics

Within comics and Science Fiction, disabled characters are often given the role of the

“supercrip,” and Barbara Gordon is no exception. Representation of the supercrip relies on the notion that disability is intrinsically inferior to nondisability. The problem of an individual’s Escobar 10 atypical body/mind can be overcome through extraordinary feats that grant the disabled person some measure of respect despite their disability.5 Disabled people can become exceptional and inspiring, rather than purely tragic, by achieving unlikely success6 through talents, hard work, or superpowers that compensate for the presumed unavoidably negative of disability. The achievement of unlikely success by measuring up against standards of normal bodily/mental function, and thereby representing oneself in opposition to disability as “productive, functional, and efficient,”7 maintains the false binary between disability and nondisability. Furthermore, identifying supercrips as sources of inspiration is often tangled with “an internalization of inadequacy and the desire to be socially accepted, leaving intact the normalized views dictated by an able, moral majority.”8 If supercrips are inspiring because they are able to imitate ideal normalcy, the supremacy of nondisability is maintained and the person cast as the supercrip loses full subjecthood, reduced to a caricature of pity-born inspiration in the place of complex personhood.

Embedded in the image of the supercrip is an expanded understanding of ability as property that speaks to the defining characteristics of a superhero. I understand superheroes as made “super” through the elimination of undesirable traits, adhering to and perpetuating the model of the ideal human as a “mytho-poetic body” linked to the gods, wholly set apart from the problem of disability.9 The superhero —accountable to no one and bounded only by their

5 Shapiro, Joseph P. No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. 1st ed. New York: Times, 1993. Print, 16. 6 Silva, Carla Filomena, and P. David Howe. “The (In)Validity of Supercrip Representation of Paralympian Representation.” Journal of Support and Social Issues, vol. 36, no. 2., May 2012, pp. 174-194. doi:10.1177/0193723511433865, 175. 7 Silva and Howe 180. 8 Silva and Howe 190. 9 Davis, Lennard J., editor. The Disability Studies Reader. Taylor & Francis, 2006, 2. Escobar 11 strength— is powerful because they are a “unified, self-contained corpus/text”10 in “favor of a quasi-fascist physical ideal.”11 Akin to the conditions placed upon citizenship, superheroism is contingent on the ideal normalcy of the individual and on the possession of ability, is preeminently located in the productive and profitable “nondisabled white heterosexual male body,”12 and exists “through an always-erased though always-implied disabled/dying/dead body.”13 Ability is constructed as one of the essential properties of the superhero.

Disability as narrative prosthesis occurs within comics to expand and support the narrative of the independent, godlike superhero. As unruly resistance to the enforcement of normalcy,14 disability presents a motivating obstacle for the self-contained, productive power of superheroes, either as the villain whose moral failing is communicated through disability15 or as a destabilizing force16 that seek to control inside or outside of themselves. The possession of ability is the key to the superhero’s over individual and social collapse;17 the superhero transcends all human fragility to defeat spectacularly disabled villains and the social unrest they incite, independently pushing their comic’s fictional world forward, into a better future, towards progress.

Social progress is believed to exclude disability such that the absence of disability itself signals utopic momentum, and in comics, this belief extends to the curing or expulsion of

10 Alaniz, José, Peter D. Halverson, and Ebooks Corporation. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. E-book, University Press of Mississippi, 2014, 17. 11 Alaniz 6. 12 Erevelles, Nirmala. “(Im)Material Citizens: Cognitive Disability, Race, and the Politics of Citizenship.” Foundations of Disability Studies, edited by Matthew Wappett & Katrina Arndt. E-book, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013, pp. 145-176, 166. 13 Alaniz 25. 14 Davis 205. 15 Bérubé, Michael. “Disability and Narrative.” PMLA, vol. 120, no. 2, 2005, pp. 568–576. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25486186, 569; Alaniz 57. 16 Alaniz 55. 17 Goodley, Dan. Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. SAGE Publications, 2017. Print, 15. Escobar 12 disability. Identifying individual or social progress by its lack of disability goes hand-in-hand with the images of the superhero and the supercrip, while adhering to the normative nondisabled/disabled —and, furthermore, desirable/undesirable— binary. Barbara’s “return” to disability and the role of Batgirl, which I will detail later in this thesis, is a manifestation of this notion that disability is incompatible with superheroes and the social progress that they ostensibly fight for.

Contextualizing Barbara Gordon’s Narrative History

Barbara Gordon first dons the Batgirl costume in 1967, entering a comics industry influenced by postwar youth culture’s demands that heroes represent and navigate both the aspirations and anxieties of their readers.18 “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” (1967) establishes Barbara’s character in the DC Universe as a female addition to the Dynamic Duo of

Batman and Robin, whose potential lies in her diverse skill set and her familial ties to one of

Batman’s major allies, . Reminiscent of the principles of the contemporarily rising women’s liberation movement, Barbara is determined to prove that she is more than the

“colorless female ‘’”19 she is taken for in her ordinary life as a librarian and police commissioner’s daughter,20 that she can fight crime alongside her father and Batman, despite her gender. Her career as one of Batman’s associates begins in the Silver Age of Comics; an era saturated with images of the ideal, invincible U.S. citizen,21 and increasingly responsive to the sociohistorical realities of its contemporary readers. Disability becomes essential to the

18 Alaniz 20. 19 , Gardner (w). Infantino, Carmine (p). Greene, Sid (i). “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” (Jan. 1967). Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [18-35], 19. 20 “DC Universe Encyclopedia.” DC Universe, www.dcuniverse.com/encyclopedia/batgirl/. Accessed 27 March 2020. 21 Alaniz 4. Escobar 13 construction of Silver Age superheroes whose defective alter egos are overcompensated for, and erased by, power.22 For example, the character is forced to assume an of human frailty to learn humility and, ultimately, to overcome the identity of disabled Dr.

Donald Blake through heroics.23 Inevitably written with the Silver Age’s “underlying rationale of a disabled, structuring Other,”24 Barbara is unable to achieve that status of her male peers and role models, doomed to remain the defective Other, the woman.

I identify the first era of Barbara’s narrative life as spanning from her 1967 debut, to the

1988 The Killing Joke.25 As I will explain in greater detail further into this thesis,

Barbara’s partial paralysis at the end of The Killing Joke marks the end of her initial term as

Batgirl. While she is not yet disabled throughout this first era, her first stint as Batgirl is set against the backdrop of the burgeoning U.S. disability rights movement. Following the reinvention and rehabilitation of the post-WWII body into one suited for white, masculine labor26 and the rise in popularity of the disabled poster child who has overcome their suffering thanks to charity,27 activism centered around the social dimensions of disability were taking wing.

Activists Judy Heumann and Ed Roberts were emerging as pivotal figures for the independent living movement, working to integrate disabled people as normal individuals in society.28 Major events for the disability rights movement, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act that would later influence the creation of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990,29 Blatt and

22 Alaniz 36. 23 Alaniz 38. 24 Alaniz 35. 25 Moore, Alan (w). Bolland, Brian (p), (i). The Killing Joke. (March 1988). Batman, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2012. 26 McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. E-book, New York University Press, 2006, 113. 27 Shapiro 16. 28 Shapiro 41, 55. 29 Shapiro 105. Escobar 14

Kaplan’s 1965 exposé on the conditions of institutions for disabled people, and the first

Paralympics in 196830 pushed disability further into the U.S. public sphere. In a fictional world that relied upon the abjection of disability and a real world marked by resistance to abjection,

Barbara Gordon, female counterpoint to the established Batman, emerged.

The second era of Barbara’s life takes place between 1988’s The Killing Joke and her reinstatement as Batgirl in 2011, where her career as the disabled superhero Oracle follows her partial paralysis at the hands of the Joker and ends once she repossesses ability. I locate the end of Oracle’s career in 2011 because Barbara recuperated from her disability —an event which I will detail later on in this thesis— as a part of DC’s universal continuity relaunch. The relaunch, referred to as , was an effort to make DC’s line of comics more accessible to consumers unfamiliar with the company’s decades of storylines by clarifying and simplifying their characters’ narratives.31

Prior to that relaunch, Oracle was the hacking, intelligence, and computer support for a vast network of DC superheroes within and beyond Gotham, becoming “more integral to the DC

Universe than ever before.”32 Her influence expanded once she and formed the

Birds of Prey, an all-woman team of superheroes that operated in multiple cities, and as she trained new iterations of Batgirl for Batman.33 Throughout her narrative lifespan, Oracle was simultaneously regarded as a “positive and empowering image of a person with a disability who lived life to the fullest”34 —the likes of which had never been represented in the genre before—

30 Shapiro 176. 31 Rogers, Vaneta. “Harras, Berganza: DCnU Will Keep Much of DC History Intact.” . www.newsarama.com/7812-harras-berganza-dcnu-will-keep-much-of-dc-history-intact.html. Accessed 19 April 2020. 32 “DC Universe Encyclopedia.” 33 “DC Universe Encyclopedia.” 34 Foss, Chriss, et al., editors. Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives. E-book, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016, 60. Escobar 15 and a “decades-long aberration brought about by the genre’s misogynistic treatment of women.”35

For the U.S. disability rights movement, this period was one of extensive action, largely through integration, accessibility, and rehabilitation efforts. The year 1988, alone, saw the

Gallaudet University Deaf student protests and the first draft of the ADA.36 The 1990s saw multiple major events for disability rights activists, including the 1995 initiation of the Texas

Medication Algorithm Project,37 the rise of ADAPT’s civil disobedience under Bob Kafka’s leadership, and “wrongful birth” suits and “Baby Doe” cases38 that furthered the idea of disability as invariably and singularly tragic in the cultural imaginary. Amidst this flurry of ableism and resistance, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act extended legal protections for disabled people in order to increase public accessibility, and to decrease individuals’ dependency on the state.39

Integral to understanding the fictional and real impact of Barbara as the Oracle is the notion of . Created by and her colleagues after a 1994

Green Lantern issue wherein the body of the hero’s girlfriend is discovered in his fridge, Women in Refrigerators referenced their compiled list of female comic book characters who had been killed, mutilated, and/or disempowered, in contrast to male characters who die heroically and are often resurrected.40 The original meaning of the term has been expanded into a “syndrome,” where women in comics routinely “serve as motivation for the hero’s journey, rather than as

35 Foss et al. 68. 36 Shapiro 74-85, 108. 37 Davis 115. 38 Davis 76. 39 Davis 74, 99; Shapiro 105, 114. 40 Brown, Jeffrey A. Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture. E- book, University Press of Mississippi, 2011, 145. Escobar 16 characters of substance in and of themselves,”41 and, thus, are routinely subjected to violence to further a male character’s .42 Barbara’s traumatic injury, and resultant paralysis, is an oft-cited example of this phenomenon, as the “whole point of [The Killing Joke] is how her father and Batman feel about it.”43 The second era of Barbara’s life is diegetically and - diegetically by her trauma and the revelation of her supposed expendability. Within her fictional world, she must grapple with the traumatic roots of her disability as she works as

Oracle, while audiences often nostalgically supported the idea of a recovery from her “fridging” via recuperation from her disability.44

I have identified the third era of Barbara’s life according to her second term as Batgirl, from 2012’s The Darkest Reflection45 to the present. I locate the beginning of this third era in

The Darkest Reflection because the graphic novel marks the official return of Barbara as Batgirl following DC’s continuity relaunch, and because its reflections on Barbara’s narrative up until that point offer critical insight into the construction of disability in her world, which I will analyze later on in this thesis. I am analyzing Barbara’s narrative up until now, so I have situated the end of this era in the present, but I understand that this era has not ended, that her future will extend from this present. Barbara’s return to her Batgirl identity is made possible by her

41 Duncan, Randy & Matthew J. Smith. Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods. Routledge, 2012. Print, 237. 42 The Women in Refrigerators Syndrome does similar work to understand the representation of women in fiction as the Bechdel-Wallace test (https://bechdeltest.com/), which has been used to identify films that depict at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. This test is particularly known for the routine failure of media to meet its apparently simple requirements. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s article on Women in SF (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/women_in_sf) also serves to identify women’s restricted representation in media, but specifically in terms of the genre’s tropes for female characters, such as the “Frustrated Spinster Scientist” and the “ Queen.” 43 Cocca, Carolyn. "Re-booting Barbara Gordon: Oracle, Batgirl, and Feminist Disability Theories." 7.4 (2014): n. pag. Dept of English, University of Florida. imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v7_4/cocca/?print. Accessed 27 March 2020, par. 10. 44 Cocca par. 39. 45 Simone, Gail (w). Cifuentes, Vicente and Ardian Syaf (p). Cifuentes, Vicente (i). Batgirl, Volume 1: The Darkest Reflection (July 2012), Comixology ed. Vol 1. DC Comics, 2013 Escobar 17 recuperation from disability. An experimental surgery in South Africa provides the miracle cure to her partial paralysis,46 and it isn’t long before Batgirl swings through Gotham’s streets once again. The transition from Oracle to Batgirl, from disabled to nondisabled, is not easy, however, as she confronts ableism from those who are unaware of her past,47 survivor’s guilt,48 and those who preferred her work as Oracle.49 Altogether, this latest iteration of Barbara presents a tangled notion of internal and external ableism as she (re)asserts herself as a hero in the fictional world, and poses questions for the construction and representation of disability.

This new continuity of Barbara’s story as Batgirl is often regarded as the return to her truest role because Oracle must inevitably be constructed as a pitiable, incomplete, and inferior iteration of Barbara as a superhero because of her disability.50 The Women in Refrigerators concept is recalled by fans, creators, and scholars alike to justify her healing, stressing that at least she might be cured —as harmed male characters so often are— to rectify the misogynistic violence that led to her partial paralysis;51 a line of reasoning that is, at least, partially dependent on the equation of disability with inferiority. In an ableist framework, extending Barbara’s life as a disabled woman is unjust because, no matter how her story takes shape, she will always be lacking.

46 Simone 75. 47 Simone 21. 48 Simone 73. 49 Benson, Julie and Shawna Benson (w). Antonio, Roge and Claire Roe (p), (i). Batgirl and the Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Who is Oracle? (April 2017), Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017, 119. 50 Foss 73. 51 Cocca par. 39. Escobar 18

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The entanglement of nostalgia with Science Fiction, disability, and Barbara Gordon’s narrative history is central to my analysis of Barbara Gordon’s narrative history. When historically contextualized with disability activism in the United States, and when situated as a point of contact between fiction and reality, Barbara’s past and present reveal possibilities for the future of disability in media. As seemingly impossible futures are communicated in SF through nostalgia, disability is often constructed, represented, and experienced through the real or imagined past to shape a future rife with suffering, or a future that does not exist at all. With this thesis, I aim to explore this process through Barbara, whose movement through disability and womanhood bends, and is bent by, the real world.

My examination of Barbara’s narrative history through the lenses of feminist theory and disability activism challenges disability theory and the representation of disability to account for a more complex, fluid experience of disability. Much of Barbara’s significance as a point of contact between fiction and reality lies in the particularities of her disability; her disability’s roots in traumatic, misogynistic violence necessarily imbue her eventual “miracle cure” with added meaning. The feminist argument that the representation of marginalized individuals in media matters1 recognizes the value in representations of Barbara’s movement through disability as a female superhero, and urges us —meaning: comic book fans, feminist theorists, disabled

1 While the analysis of media through the lens of diverse representation and feminist inclusion has been discussed at length in both popular and academic circles, an in-depth explanation exploration of why the representation of marginalized individuals in media matters is beyond the scope of this thesis. I will shape my argument around the representation of disability in Barbara Gordon’s narrative specifically, but topics for further inquiry include the representation of disability in SF more broadly and the impact that diverse representation has on SF fan culture. To engage more directly with the subject of why representation matters, see works such as: “The importance of representation” by Natachi Onwuamaegbu (https://www.stanforddaily.com/2018/05/25/the- importance-of-representation/) and “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samule A. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” by Mark Dery found within Dery’s 1994 anthology Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Escobar 19 people, and everyone in between— to ask what is missing from Barbara’s narrative, where we would like her narrative to go, and why she hasn’t gotten there yet. In doing so, we participate in meaning-making; stretching and shaping the comic book panels that have, or have not yet, been created to make space for the multicolored, action-packed stories of disabled women.

Constructing, Studying, and Imagining Disability

In this thesis, I argue that disability resists definition and will not work with one unambiguous or definition. Disability is what “occurs when the shape and function of bodies come into conflict with the shape and stuff of the world,” the “brute fact of impairment and the surrounding world”2 molded by society.3 To be disabled is to represent “aspects of the human condition that are unpredictable, unstable, and unexpected: in short, contingency itself,”4 and to be “inherently excessive to normative boundaries.”5 As a “fluid and labile fact of embodiment,”6 disability reaches a plethora of human experience, from chronic illness7 to severe disability;8 indeed, the category of disability is so expansive —swelling and shifting with social, temporal, and environmental context— that it might be “the essential characteristic of being human.”9 Thus, to account for the wealth of human experience that includes disability, as well as the relative rarity and context-dependency of nondisability, I intend to use the term broadly, highlighting the multiplicity of difference inherent to the human species.

2 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Case for Conserving Disability.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 3, 2012, pp. 339–355., doi:10.1007/s11673-012-9380-0, 342. 3 Silva and Howe 177. 4 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 340. 5 Shildrick, Margrit. “Critical Disability Studies: Rethinking the Conventions for the Age of Postmodernity.” Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Nick Watson and Simo Vehmas, 2nd ed. E- book, Routledge, 2020, pp. 32–44. 33. 6 Bérubé 570. 7 Davis 171. 8 McRuer 31. 9 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 342. Escobar 20

In the realm of fiction, understandings of disability are often symbolic, imbue disabled characters with weighted meaning, and move the overall narrative in a particular discursive direction. The dependency of narrative on disability, known as narrative prosthesis, opportunistically uses disability as “a crutch for popular culture on which to lean for representational power.”10 The idiosyncrasy of a disabled character differentiates them from the

“anonymous background of the ‘norm,’” where the disabled body/mind represents “the body’s unruly resistance to the cultural desire to ‘enforce normalcy.’”11 In fiction, disability is the deviant condition of an individual that demands explanation,12 the “abrupt consciousness-raising exercise”13 necessary to humanize the nondisabled, or the signal to “social or individual collapse and disruption;”14 very rarely is it grounded in the social realities of bodily difference.

Critical Disability Studies is a project to “augment the terms and confront the limits of the ways we understand human diversity, the materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences,”15 while critically analyzing “bodies and experiences that are normally taken for granted, and that some people have a vested interest in taking for granted.”16 Imagining disability beyond medical discourse necessarily entails situating the lived experience of disability as entangled with the concurrent experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The swelling, fluid, undefinable state that is disability must be understood as spilling over into every social identity; a concoction of identities that blend and separate, that swirl and settle, which cannot be fully understood by the examination of its individual

10 Goodley 15. 11 Davis 205. 12 Bérubé 570. 13 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 344. 14 Goodley 15. 15 Davis 362. 16 Scully, Jackie Leach. Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference. Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, 16. Escobar 21 components. For example, disability and race intertwine to disproportionately cast disabled people of color as problematic populations fit for incarceration.17 By engaging with Critical

Disability studies, I recognize that disability must be studied within its historical context, with sensitivity to the theoretical and material weight of social status and identity on disability, and in conversation with lived experiences of oppression of all kinds.18

Crip theory works with Critical Disability Studies to reclaim “the disabled body as a celebratory moment of body politics,”19 as “forms of resistance to cultural homogenization.”20

Akin to the reclamation of “queer,” the use of the term “crip” signifies this branch of disability theory’s investment in taking a sledgehammer to that which has been concretized, or in cutting a curb through critical theory.21 Cripping feminism, then, entails demanding more from feminist theory through increasingly critical work against cultural homogenization and through envisioning radically liberating futures. In refusing to take embodiment and experience for granted, feminist crip theory engages with Critical Disability Studies by rejecting the notion that compulsory nondisability and normalcy are as good as it gets, and by working to imagine bodies and desires otherwise.22

Nested inside Critical Disability Studies, I take on feminist crip theory in this thesis through the difference model of disability as (mis- or un-) represented by the Batman comics character, Barbara Gordon, who functions as the focal point of this thesis. The difference model

17 “The Institution Yet to Come”: Analyzing Incarceration Through a Disability Lens by Liat Ben-Moshe is a highly informative examination of how disability and race are medicalized and criminalized in the context of U.S. institutions. In this thesis, I leave race and incarceration relatively untouched, but Barbara Gordon’s work with the Police Department, and with Asylum in particular, contain potential for feminist analysis in this vein. 18 Davis 175. 19 Goodley 194. 20 McRuer 33. 21 McRuer 35. 22 McRuer 32. Escobar 22 of disability works in opposition to models of disability that frame “atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective, best understood and addressed in medical terms”23 and that ignore systemic ableist oppression to highlight and construct the “problem” of disability as located within defective individuals. With this model, disabled individuals are not imagined to suffer from a socially undesirable medical pathology, which must be medically cured or mitigated24 to (re)align the individual with ideal normalcy. Rather, the model argues for valuing disability as difference25 in a manner that acknowledges the multiplicity of human experience and the restrictions that the construction of ideal normalcy places upon the breadth of difference inherent to the human species.

The social construction of normalcy situates one vision of whiteness, wealth, cisheterosexuality, and nondisability as the imperative ideal of human experience, setting the disabled human as a “problem” of human experience in the process.26 When laced with neoliberal capitalism, the normal individual becomes a “healthy, rational, autonomous, educated, economically viable, self-governing and able”27 participant in “progress, human perfectibility, and the elimination of deviance.”28 A citizen —meaning: one who participates in knowledge- making and social practice, and helps determine what is socially valuable29— of progressive, normal society is best, and singularly, represented by “the nondisabled white heterosexual male body as the most productive and profitable citizen for the burgeoning capitalist society.”30

23 Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. E-book, Indiana University Press, 2013, 5. 24 Mauldin, Laura. Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children. E-book, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, 12. 25 Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. Routledge, 1996. Print, 84. 26 Davis 2. 27 Goodley 207. 28 Davis 6. 29 Erevelles 146. 30 Erevelles 166. Escobar 23

Citizenship, then, is contingent on possessing ability; ability as property necessarily bolsters the distinction of disabled people as inferior and abnormal with their citizenship determined by the

(re)possession of ability. “Unruly bodies” who resist normalizing treatment aimed at

(re)possessing sufficient ability to contribute to capitalist productivity are relegated to the protection of the welfare state; their dependency deemed parasitic and their right to citizenship challenged.31 Perfectly average society enforces norms of productive citizenship and self- containment, leaving no room for the abnormal transgressions of disability and disabled existence on the journey to social progress.

The nondisabled/disabled —and, furthermore, normal/abnormal and desirable/undesirable— binary establishes disability as obviously incompatible with all visions of individual and social progress. The disabled body/mind —which, as I will detail later, is weighed down by perceptions of tragedy and mortality— is an obstacle to the mandate of modernity to “control the future by intentional human action in the present.”32 Disabled people are represented as always already on some unpredictable, miserable track towards , wholly set apart from the neat, acceptable progression of society and its normal, compliant, productive, and ability-possessing citizens. The future promises “radical infinitude.”33 It is forward, it is ahead of the present; all that is backwards or that hinders forward momentum must be left behind on the journey from the present to somewhere better. According to modernity’s logic of social control,34 if disability is obviously inferior to normal nondisability, it must be left behind, and social progress can be identified by the absence of disability.35

31 Erevelles 168. 32 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 348. 33 Davis 314. 34 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 340. 35 Kafer 73. Escobar 24

The difference model of disability seeks to carve out room for disabled people in society through the recognition of difference as valuable in and of itself. Locating the “problem” of disability in ableism rather than in bodily and mental differences within the individual drains disability of the ableist value judgments placed upon it36 and challenges the supposedly innately and imperatively nondisabled human existence. In analyzing Barbara Gordon’s narrative history through the difference model as it emerges from feminist crip theory, I work to imagine possibilities for critical disability representation within comics and Science Fiction (SF) that afford disabled characters, such as Barbara, the full value of difference and the status of subject.

As explained by Judith Butler, the subject is defined in contrast to the status of the abject; lives that are unacceptable and unimaginable are excluded to the uninhabitable realm of social life— in other words, they are abjected— so that an acceptable, living subject can come to light.37 As the “threatening and vengeful figure of wounding, death, collapse, and explosion,”38 disabled people are fundamentally incompatible with the subject’s hopeful future as an average individual. Thus, disabled people are relegated to the realm of the abject, never to be afforded full personhood and doomed to some poor semblance of life that is defined by suffering. The discursive linkage of disability with death marks disability as “the outermost limits of human existence”39 and ignores the lived reality of cognitively or “severely” disabled people, in particular.

While I am working with the difference model of disability as the preferable alternative to models that perceive and construct disability as “an automatic or intrinsic cost to your well-

36 Barnes, Elizabeth. “Valuing Disability, Causing Disability.” Ethics, vol. 125, no. 1, 2014, pp. 88–113., doi:10.1086/677021, 93. 37 Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993. Print, 3. 38 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 340. 39 Erevelles 147. Escobar 25 being”40 and to society at large, I do recognize the insufficiencies of the difference model.

Experiences with disability that are rooted in , such as that of Barbara Gordon, are not entirely accounted for in the understanding of disability as pure difference, as simply another example of the diversity inherent to humanity. Valuing all disability —in fiction or reality— as difference must not be achieved at the cost of brushing harm-induced disability under the rug.

Discussions of Barbara surviving misogynistic violence as one instance of the Women in

Refrigerators Syndrome must occur in the same instance as discussions of the value of disability representation in comics through Oracle. In recognizing that the difference model neither explicitly leaves room for disabled people who want to be cured of their disability —as Alison

Kafer’s political/relational model of disability does41— nor directly speaks to how harm and trauma can shape disability individually or socially, I hope to put this thesis in conversation with a larger project to expand the theoretical and material possibilities of the difference model.

Understanding Comics

I understand comics to be a sequential art, stringing individual pictures together to produce meaning and evoke responses in the reader.42 The creation of sequence through space rather than time —as is the case in the sequential art of film— is made possible by sequential dynamism, or the formal visual energy that “propels the reader’s eye from panel to panel and from page to page, and that imparts a sense of sustained or varied visual rhythms.”43 The spatial representation of temporal relationships makes comics uniquely suited to experimentation with narrative time.44 Additionally, the visual orientation and non-linear possibilities of comics offers

40 Barnes 91. 41 Kafer 7. 42 McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1994. Print, 9. 43 Duncan 89. 44 Duncan 55. Escobar 26 new pathways for meaning making and association to those whose experiences can not be fully conveyed through conventional storytelling, such as some autistic people, as Foss describes.45

The formal structure of comics also offers, or requires, a high degree of reader participation. Individual panels are snapshots of one particular point in a comic’s narrative that fracture time and space within the comic narrative, presenting “a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments.”46 Between each panel lies the gutter, a sliver of blank space that pushes the reader into a state of where “human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea,”47 where the reader must participate in the comic’s project to create meaning. This mental process that produces motion between panels, known as closure,48 shifts the comic from moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, or aspect to aspect,49 or otherwise shapes a non-sequitur relationship between panels. The momentum and meaning of a comic sequence is dependent on the reader’s imagination; the past, present, and future of a comic’s story is visible all at once,50 and the visual information presented by comic creators can only encourage the reader to wade through and decipher that information in a particular order.

Understanding Science Fiction

While investigating the place of Barbara Gordon and, furthermore, disability itself within the Science Fiction genre is beyond the scope of this thesis, outlining Barbara against the backdrop of SF is essential to the creation of an accurate portrait of her character’s significance

45 Foss 95. 46 McCloud 67. 47 McCloud 66. 48 McCloud 107. 49 McCloud 70. 50 McCloud 104. Escobar 27 for the representation of disability. In this thesis, I understand that the SF genre “does not project us into the future, it relates to us stories about our present, and more importantly, about the past that has led to this present.”51 I will also engage Adam Roberts’ depiction of “nova” within SF as a tool to locate the dual, tangled significance of Barbara Gordon and her disability between the realms of fiction and reality. As a genre “predicated on some substantive difference or differences between the world described and the world in which the readers actually live,”52 SF uses nova to point to those differences. Grounded in “the discourse of possibility,”53 the nova symbolizes that which connects the SF world to the reader’s reality. Star Wars, for example, crafts visions of its ’s present, and about the past that has led to that present, by sending

WWII-inspired spacecraft54 careening across the expanse of space towards worlds of exotic, inferior Others reminiscent of Earthly freak shows.55 The audience’s memory of non-whiteness as primitive and exotic renders the contrast between Star Wars Ewoks and its white male heroes legible, cultivating confidence in its as both normal and superior, as better suited for the serious task of saving the universe over the bizarre, amusing array of aliens.56

Barbara Gordon serves as a novum for the communication of womanhood and disability from her fictional superhero world, to the reader’s reality, and vice versa. In what I have identified as the three eras of her narrative life, I understand that her character points towards both differences and similarities between the fictional and real worlds through a recollection of audience memory. Her movement through womanhood and disability attracts meaning from the

51 Roberts 29. 52 Roberts 4. 53 Roberts 7. 54 Roberts 29. 55 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, editor. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York University Press, 1996. Print, 333. 56 Garland-Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body 333. Escobar 28 interaction of her fictional experiences with the real world, particularly due to the demands that the comics medium places upon readers to participate in meaning-making. The “jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments”57 that is Barbara’s narrative on the comic’s page floats in the larger “discourse of possibility.”58 The possibilities that Barbara’s past, present, and future drift towards, or steer clear of, not only reveal the nature of her own world —what it means to be a disabled woman superhero among the likes of Batman— but also that of the reader.

By analyzing Barbara as a novum, I challenge the boundaries of SF and reality as a part of the larger feminist project to demand the impossible. All that is absent or present, is a challenge or success, or is indefinable within Barbara’s narrative history can be used to chart a radical, or even impossible, future for the representation of disability. This claim to futurity necessarily rejects Barbara’s abjection, as well as the notion that the past and present of the representation of her disability are as good as it gets.59 Another world —one that challenges both the boundaries between and within the current fictional and real worlds— is possible, and disability belongs in it. My examination of Barbara as a contact point between our world and hers attests to the belief that meaningful construction and representation of disability is possible.

57 McCloud 67. 58 Roberts 7. 59 McRuer 32. Escobar 29

DISABILITY AS THE ABJECT

Disability is often understood to be a tragic occurrence, a lifelong, static condition that signifies a loss of potential. Physical and mental ability signifies worth through time; social and economic success is contingent on nondisability.1 To be disabled, then, is to be doomed to a life of “tragedy inflicting upon the mind and body, requiring treatment, rehabilitation or (at its most logical extreme) cure”2 that forecloses all positive possibilities from one’s life.

Much hope available to disabled people is located in a medical cure for their disability, or in “overcoming” their disability through public acts that appear to be within, or beyond, the boundaries of “normal” ability, such as assuming the role of the “supercrip.”3 Laura Mauldin, investigating the ambivalent medicalization4 of the cochlear implantation process for Deaf children and their parents, observed that parents believed that all hope for their children’s future hinged on their “ability to hear: their ability to be educated, successful, independent, and happy.”5 Parent participation in the cochlear implantation process is viewed as a means to better their children’s futures by increasing their children’s ability, thereby distancing them from disability. Deafness is imagined to be the absence or foreclosure of their children’s hope, but cochlear implants offer to “restore” hope as they “restore” hearing. The continued existence of

“hopeless” —that is, still disabled— people becomes a tragedy, a call to action for charitable nondisabled people to restore hope for the future.

1 Goodley 6. 2 Goodley 6. 3 Silva and Howe 175. 4 Mauldin 4. 5 Mauldin 149. Escobar 30

Euthanization, institutionalization, and donations to organizations are common efforts to kindle hope for the future motivated by “an enlightened pity which prompts us [meaning: the charitable nondisabled] to spare the hideously disabled (as well as those who love them) a lifetime of anguish.”6 Charity telethons are among the most familiar purveyors of the idea that disability is a tragedy to be eliminated, communicated through poster children and Tiny Tims.

Telethons center around the weakest subjects imaginable, urging the assumedly nondisabled viewer to help put an end to the suffering of the innocent.7 Disabled people are reduced to

“dependent objects of beneficence,”8 empty receptacles that nondisabled people can fill with money and pity to prove that they are more sympathetic than Scrooge was to Tiny Tim. If disability is equated to tragedy, charitable acts to “restore” hope become acts to “restore” ability, particularly through medical care and research that enables the weak and destitute to survive, or, ideally, cures disability. To challenge or refuse the refashioning of disability into normative ability is to be unsympathetic and uncharitable; the tragedy of disability is taken as self-evident in normative disability narratives.

If fundraising for medical cures for disability proves fruitless, the tragically defective bodies and minds of disabled people are concealed and, sometimes, are destroyed. The institutionalization of disabled people in the United States stretches far beyond the deinstitutionalization of the 1960s,9 into the currently enmeshed systems of medicalization and criminalization that shape institutions “as a catch-all for ‘problematic populations’ that are

6 Fiedler, Leslie A. “Pity and Fear: Images of the Disabled In Literature and the Popular Arts.” Salmagundi, no. 57, 1982, pp. 57–69. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40547499, 66. 7 Davis 36, 38. 8 Davis 39. 9 Shapiro 59, 64, 257; Davis 122. Escobar 31 deemed socially undesirable or dangerous.”10 Enlightened pity spurs the that institutions might serve as a halfway point, a center for normalizing bodily and mental function, so that disabled people might be reintroduced to society as productive citizens.11 For those whom normalization and integration appears impossible, death is the next best hope for alleviating their tragic situation, either by eventual death inside the institution, or through euthanasia.

While detailing the entire history of eugenicist ideology and euthanasia is beyond the scope of this paper, the eugenicist project to control the future by sculpting a utopian citizenry shapes, and is shaped by, the notion of disability as tragedy. The belief that suffering is intrinsic to disability is used as “justification for eliminating disability and disabled people,”12 where euthanasia is imagined as a project to decrease tragedy and suffering within the individual and society. As leaders of the eugenics movement, post-WWI German Nazi physicians framed the

State as their primary patient, for whom the necessary treatment was euthanasia.13 The United

States was also at the forefront of the early-20th Century eugenics movement with national health and immigration policies founded on eugenics as the positive advocation “for particular forms of human regeneration, coupled with the negative restriction of the propagation of certain classes and ethnicities”14 and widespread involuntary sterilization,15 shaping a legacy of eugenics that has seeped into incarceration and institutionalization,16 selective abortion and so-called “designer

10 Davis 127. 11 Blackwell, Robert and Ernest Pancsofar. A User’s Guide to the Community Entry for the Severely Handicapped. State University of New York Press, 1986. Print, 6; Goodley 162, 172. 12 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 350. 13 Grodin, Michael A., M.D., Erin L. Miller B.A., and Johnathan I. Kelly M.A. "The Nazi Physicians as Leaders in Eugenics and "Euthanasia": Lessons for Today." American Journal of Public Health, vol. 108, no. 1, 2018, pp. 53-57. ProQuest, http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy3.library.arizona.edu/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304120, 53. 14 Davis 51. 15 Grodin 54. 16 Davis 123. Escobar 32 babies,”17 and physician assisted suicide.18 These varied articulations of eugenics sustain beliefs that the incurable disabled individual is an unacceptable and incontrovertible burden on society, in that, with its supposedly inherent connections to tragedy and death, disability is an obstacle to utopia.19 The death of disabled individuals, then, is understood as a solution to individual and social tragedy.

The tragedy of disability overshadows the tragedy of death, such that the death of a disabled person is imagined to relieve the individual from their pain, and society from the endlessly tragic presence of disability. Death is sought as a remedy for disability in eugenics and physician-assisted suicide, while life is foreclosed from disabled people in selective abortion because the suffering assumed to be intrinsic to disability is presented “as a justification for eliminating disability and disabled people.”20 The exclusion of disabled people from life is above the criticism and horrors of murder because it is motivated by the “enlightened pity” discussed by Fiedler; lives are not lost, tragedy is. Any charitable society or individual should work to expunge tragedy from life, and, when disability is synonymous with tragedy, it becomes necessary to rid society of valueless, miserable disability.21

17 Within The Disability Studies Reader, “Disability Rights and Selective Abortion” by Marsha Saxton and “Disability, Democracy, and the New Genetics” by Michael Bérubé both complicate the topic of abortion by highlighting the eugenicist logic often implicated in arguments for selective abortion, and by examining what that eugenicist logic looks like in film. 18 Grodin 55, 56. 19 Here, I draw from Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip in which she argues that the utopian future presented in Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy is accomplished through the eradication of difference (Kafer, 82.) Throughout this thesis, I expand upon Kafer’s analysis of the apparent conflict between utopian futures and difference with Nirmala Erevelles’s definition of citizenship and Lennard J. Davis’s concept of normalcy, each of which I discuss in the “Constructing, Studying, and Imagining Disability” section of this thesis. 20 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 350. 21 While necropolitics, as first discussed by Achille Mbembe, is not one of the primary angles from which I will examine Barbara’s narrative, it is an important notion for understanding the historical construction, and subsequent systemic destruction, of disability. Further feminist research into Barbara’s narrative history might include necropolitics in the analysis of the disabled and/or disfigured villains she faces, or in analysis of her recuperation from disability. Escobar 33

The relegation of disabled people to the realms of charity, institutionalization, and death is indicative of disability’s incompatibility with subjecthood, its abjection from society. As discussed in the introduction, Judith Butler’s term “abject,” constitutes the uninhabitable zones of social life that are, nonetheless, inhabited by those who are excluded from subjecthood, and serves as the background against which a social subject can be defined.22 Subjects are afforded hope for the future and protection from tragedy, subjects are living. The living disabled person, however, is unimaginable and intolerable in the domain of the subject because to be disabled is to be “disqualified from the privileged social position of the nondisabled and forced to assume the threatening and vengeful figure of wounding, death, collapse, and explosion.”23 In order to fashion a social subject who is unthreatened, happy, valuable, and alive, society must be purged of everyone and everything that the subject can not, must not be. If disability is a threat that guarantees destitution and death, it does not belong among the hopeful living. The disabled person is relegated to abjection; objectified as a vessel for charity, physically excluded from society in institutions, and dead or never living.

In the comics I analyzed, Barbara Gordon is cast as the abject body. Barbara’s inferiority and disability are rendered against the concurrent presence of nondisabled characters with agency and independence, preventing her from ever reaching the status of those nondisabled characters in the second era of her life. She is rejected from the normative conceptualizations of person and hero because her assumedly tragic existence constitutes a threat to the hopeful, successful lives of her nondisabled counterparts. In order to maintain some foothold within the realm of the nondisabled superhero —meaning: the realm of the subject— she must continuously

22 Butler 3. 23 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 340. Escobar 34 demonstrate that she is not inferior to those who underestimate, pity, or attack her. This narrative aligns with the image of the supercrip, who can only gain some measure of personhood by imitating ideal normalcy through seemingly extraordinary feats “despite” their disability. She resists and resents her social exclusion, but her self-worth in regards to her disability and her valuation of other disabled characters wavers and shifts, often contradicting itself from one instance to the next. As a character, Barbara operates between the abject and the subject; an ambivalent position, which is significant for the representation of the complexities of disability identification and experience, but which also demonstrates the difficult necessity of recognizing her as both disabled and a social subject in our reality.

Placing Barbara in the realm of the abject distinguishes her as fundamentally different from her nondisabled counterparts, as obviously and unchangeably separate from them. This precludes Barbara from existing within the habitable zones of normative social life, but demanding her non-normativity also opens up her narrative to explore how life continues even in states that have been deemed unlivable. Moments where the disabled Barbara feels “stronger than ever”24 as Oracle, navigates a rekindled romantic relationship after her traumatic injury,25 or resists other characters’ underestimation and devaluation of her as an individual26 subversively portray Barbara as disabled and alive, arguing that life is not intrinsically normative. In this manner, Barbara’s abjection within her own fictional society offers avenues for the representation of disability in all its complexities.

24 Benson 15. 25 Dixon, Chuck (w) , Scott McDaniel, , et al. (p). Collazo, Hector, Drew Geraci, Jackson Guice, et al. (i). Volume 5: The Hunt for Oracle (Nov. 2016), Comixology ed. Vol. 5. DC Comics, 2016, 90. 26 Ostrander, John, and Kim Yale (w). Stelfreeze, Brian (p). Story, Karl (i). “The Batman Chronicles.” (June 1996). No. 5, Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [173-190], 176. Escobar 35

My resistance to Barbara’s abjection coexists with this notion that her abjection might provide representational power —particularly if she is shown claiming subjecthood in spite of or within the realm of the abject— and does not entail denying that she navigates painful difficulties particular to her abjected status. Depicting Barbara’s process of identifying as disabled, and the real, bodily limitations she lives with as complex, non-static, and challenging is essential to the project of disabled representation. Seamlessly slotting Barbara into the role of disabled hero whose represented physical difference does not change how she moves through the world and interacts with others, or wordlessly ridding the Batman universe of all ableism —or, even further, of all recognition of bodily difference— would misconstrue the reality of disability.

In reality, the experience of disability is both positive and negative, and always subject to change; images of disability in ourselves and others as either endlessly hopeful or concretely tragic are fabricated by ableist logic. Realizing Barbara’s full potential as a disabled hero necessitates a multi-dimensional depiction of her disability as more than a loss or lack of what she was capable of pre- The Killing Joke, and in comparison to nondisabled characters; it is possible to explore disability-related pain without reducing disabled characters to hopeless inferiors. Barbara facing abjection within her universe offers the opportunity to represent her as challenging society’s creation of the abject and asserting her disabled self as a full social subject.

However, throughout her narrative history, Barbara’s potential has been bounded by her representation as fundamentally, tragically inferior as a result of her disability.

Era One: Barbara Gordon’s Debut (1967) – The End of Batgirl’s First Stint (1988)

Prior to The Killing Joke, Barbara’s inferiority is communicated, and functions, through her gender. While the comparison between Barbara’s womanhood and her disability is superficial, it is also instructive in the analysis of how her Othering is varies with context. The Escobar 36 concept of the Other, as discussed by Simone de Beauvoir,27 is similar to that of the abject, in that both set Barbara apart from idealized, normative social spheres based on her perceived master status28 in the given context. At the start of her narrative history, Barbara’s gender, above all other facets of her character and irrespective of her actions, marks her as inferior to Batman and Robin as a crimefighter.29

Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl is introduced against the backdrop of Batman and

Commissioner Gordon, setting the stage for the entire first era of her career, wherein she is distinguished as neither Batman nor Gordon, as not a man. Planning to attend the police departments’s masquerade ball as Batgirl, she is singularly focused on proving herself as more than a “colorless female ‘brain’” by shocking her father with her costume— so much so that she declares this masquerade is the highlight of her life, above her earning a PhD and a brown belt in

Judo.30 From her first mission rescuing Bruce Wayne from Killer to her first experience teaming up with Batman and Robin, Batgirl is underestimated by allies and foes alike because she is a woman. By the end of “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” Batman concedes that he will welcome Batgirl’s aid, but the final panel depicts Gordon bitterly scolding Barbara for not being more like the Batman-approved crimefighter, Batgirl.31 Regardless of how remarkable her accomplishments are, or how distant Batgirl is from the “colorless” librarian Barbara, she cannot escape the Othering of womanhood.

27 Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York, Vintage Books, 1989. 28 Hughes, Everett Cherrington. “Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 50, no. 5, 1945, pp. 353–359. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2771188. 29 A topic for further feminist analysis of Barbara’s narrative is her character’s connection to Gordon and Batman, where her value to the DC Universe and her own self-worth are dependent on how her work measures up against their careers, and where she is distinguished as Gordon’s daughter and as Batman’s female counterpoint, rather than as an individual superhero. 30 Fox, “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” 21. 31 Fox, “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!”35. Escobar 37

Subsequent issues continue to define Barbara in comparison to Batman and her father, representing her on a hopeless quest to prove her worth beside theirs that is doomed to fail because she is a woman. “Batgirl’s Costume Cut-Ups” is centrally concerned with Barbara overcoming “feminine instincts”32 to apply lipstick or complain about ripped tights amid a battle, so that she might fight crime as effectively as Batman and Robin. Even with substantial crime- fighting experience under her belt, Barbara’s womanhood paints her with naivete; lingering attraction to an ex-boyfriend that she defeated as Batgirl ten years prior somehow overpowers her extensive crime-fighting knowledge, convincing her that “the cutest con-man of them all”33 is trustworthy enough to be given access to a priceless manuscript. Prior to The Killing Joke,

Barbara’s decades of experience as Batgirl routinely amount to nothing in the face of her gender; she is fated to make rookie mistakes again and again because she cannot overcome her womanhood. As Batgirl, she is the non-male superhero, the woman, the Other; this Othering necessarily and invariably pinpoints Barbara as the inferior alternative to the crime-fighting identities of her father and Batman.

Throughout the first era of her life, Barbara’s master status as a woman colors all that she can do and be as a superhero, ultimately resulting in her abjection. In his initial portrait of the function of an individual’s master status in the U.S., Everett Hughes imagines a female electrical engineer who, as a result of her gender, is advised to take on a woman’s role within her profession.34 Regardless of this woman’s qualifications as an electrical engineer in comparison to her male colleagues, she is deemed best-suited for a career in household appliances because, as a

32 Fox, Gardner (w). Kane, Gil (p). Greene, Sid (i). “Batgirl's Costume Cut-Ups." (Jan. 1968). Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [57-73], 65. 33 O’Neil, Dennis (w). Heck, Don (p), (i). “The Unmasking of Batgirl!" (April 1972). Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [75-83], 78. 34 Hughes 358. Escobar 38 woman, she is inherently linked to the home. In the same manner, Barbara’s gender supersedes all other identities, traits, and skills that compound into her full character. When she is saving

Batman and Robin from Killer Moth’s anti-gravity chamber, she inches towards the full subjecthood of her male allies because the interaction is “formal and specific;” as soon as he is rescued, Batman reasserts his expertise by explaining how he would have escaped the chamber without her help,35 firmly closing the door on the professional setting that allowed for their interaction beyond gender status.36 Womanhood colors all that Barbara is imagined to be, or to be capable of, such that, in comparison to the men who surround her, she is the inferior, the

Other, and the abjected.

In “The Last Batgirl Story,” Barbara clings to what little subjecthood she is afforded as a woman among superhero men by using recovery from a traumatic past encounter with the assassin Cormorant as a means by which to distance herself from the realm of the abject. Four years prior to the events of this issue, Barbara was shot by Cormorant while on a mission, and she remains haunted by her first major injury, attesting that Cormorant “killed part of me, reduced my world to a haze of pain and self-protection” and stripped her of her status as an

“innocent hero.”37 She dreams about him murdering her and imagines him when she feels scared,38 so his reappearance in her life gives the jarring realization that she has “unresolved” trauma with him —that her near death experience still looms over her life. Barbara’s friend encourages her to retire as Batgirl to avoid injury or death, and Barbara agrees, but assumes personal responsibility to defeat Cormorant before following her friend’s advice because she

35 Fox, “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” 33. 36 Hughes 357. 37 Kesel, Barbara Randall (w). Kiston, Barry (p). Patterson, Bruce D (i). “The Last Batgirl Story." (May 1988). Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [135-172], 137. 38 Kesel 138. Escobar 39 believes that his defeat will end her fear, will allow her to function with the confident agency of a normal superhero.39 Trauma and the threat of death are the threat of abjection, and they necessitate the loss of Barbara’s superhero identity. If Barbara dies, is seriously injured in action, or does not purge herself of Cormorant-related trauma, her status as subject is threatened.40

Era Two: The Killing Joke (1988) – The End of Oracle (2011)

The Killing Joke is predicated on, and embedded in, the notion of disability as tragedy.41

Seeking to prove his theory that “all it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy,”42 the Joker shoots Barbara to craft the “one bad day” that will destroy her father and one of Batman’s greatest allies, Police Commissioner James Gordon. When Batman visits her in the hospital, the doctor declares that, “her are completely useless. Putting it bluntly, she may well be in a chair for the remainder of her life,”43 and Batman learns she was found with a camera containing images of her stripped, injured body, which are later used to torture her father.

Certainly, Barbara’s treatment at the hands of the Joker is tragic, so it follows that Gordon would suffer as a result of witnessing that treatment, but Barbara’s injury is also imagined to be the end of her future; the doctor’s prognosis that her legs will be “useless” for the “remainder of her life” is meant to stretch the tragedy of her injury forwards in time. One bad day, one momentary shock would not be enough to ruin Gordon, nor would it be enough to measure up to the

39 Kesel 149, 159. 40 Barbara’s clash with Cormorant and Slash is worthy of further feminist analysis, particularly regarding the comic’s historical context. Released in 1988, “The Last Batgirl Story” depicts Barbara caught between an abusive husband and misogynist, Cormorant, and a rapist-killer, Slash, at a historical moment of anxiety over women’s power and women’s liberation. The representation of Barbara as a liberal feminist who seeks to defeat Cormorant and Slash through Gotham’s Justice System warrants discussion that I am unable to include here. 41 While my examination of ableism within The Killing Joke is centered around Barbara Gordon’s narrative, but the graphic novel’s ableism extends far beyond what I discuss here. Topics of interest for further feminist analysis might include the representation of mental illness as threatening and necessarily evil, or the construction of the Joker character in opposition to the ideally normal Batman. 42 Moore 43. 43 Moore 22. Escobar 40 standards of horrific violence set by the Joker in previous comics. Barbara must be completely doomed to topple the power, prestige, and sanity of the dignified, capable Commissioner

Gordon, and the uncontested most obvious, or most obviously horrifying, means by which to doom her is to give her a disability. If the possibility of a positive future for Barbara after her injury were mentioned at all, the shock value of the Joker’s actions would be undermined,

Gordon would seem at less of a for mental collapse, and The Killing Joke’s narrative stakes would be greatly lowered.

The catastrophic consequences of The Killing Joke further hinge on the shocking tragedy of disability as the Joker inundates Gordon with representations of disability as threats to

Gordon’s life and safety. After Gordon is kidnapped at the scene of Barbara’s injury, he is taken to the Joker’s carnival, where he is stripped by dwarfs.44 Represented with menacing, vacant gazes, hair ribbons, and bondage attire, they are meant to immerse Gordon and the reader into an unsettling mixture of confusion and fear. The nude Gordon is yanked by a collar from his cage to the Joker’s throne, then is quickly whisked to a rollercoaster as the Joker espouses the practical virtues of insanity. The dwarfs ride alongside Gordon, forcing him to watch the Joker sing and dance with a band of classic “circus freaks” in a performance that urges Gordon to give into madness as the only appropriate response to disaster.45

44 Moore 24. 45 Moore 29. Escobar 41

Fig. 1. Selected Panels from Moore, Alan (w). Bolland, Brian (p), (i). The Killing Joke. (March 1988). Batman, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2012, p. 30.

The performance is interrupted by images of Barbara, bleeding, naked, in pain, projected along the ride’s walls (see fig. 1). Gordon is hesitant to believe that he recognizes his daughter in the images, his “... Barbara?” crowded into the lower right corner of a panel packed with the

Joker’s singing, a dwarf insisting that Gordon stay seated, and Gordon’s look of utter horror.

Widened eyes, wrinkles and white hair lined with shadows, mouth hanging open, he stares beyond the panel’s frame, unconscious of, or unable to make contact with, the reader. The face of one of the dwarfs looms in the upper left corner, hanging over Gordon’s shoulder. Their bulging eye, fixed on Gordon, and their bared, elongated teeth increase the presence of Gordon’s distress, filling the panel to its visual and affective limits, so that there is barely enough room for

Gordon’s tentative recognition. The next panel is not large enough to contain such horror either, overflowing with snapshots of Barbara’s pain-ridden body —sliced apart by each polaroid frame, no longer whole, objectified— and with the fiery-colored text of Gordon’s scream. Escobar 42

Aside from their compatibility with the Joker’s aesthetic and thematic links to the circus, the representation of circus freaks in the moment that is intended to destroy Gordon signifies The

Killing Joke’s investment in disability as both a tragedy and a horror. After surveying the history of displaying disabled and/or racially exotified individuals as freaks in the U.S., Rosemarie

Garland-Thomson contends that a freak is “not only a cultural spectacle but a token of the anxieties and aspirations of a society intent upon publicizing the freak’s body with its stares.”46

The Joker’s looming, unsympathetic band of freaks —which appears to include dwarfs, a fat woman, a person with microcephaly, conjoined twins, a , a person covered in hair, and a two-headed infant— solidifies and exaggerates this scene’s sense of danger. Where Gordon is known to be a dependable of legal , ally to Batman, and dedicated father, the circus freaks threaten all that he values and expects, a monstrous “testimony to our tenuous hold on the image of perfection.”47 Their very presence echoes the Joker’s assertion that the average man’s

“frail and useless notions of order and sanity” will snap under pressure.48 The circus freaks function as the narrative prosthesis49 through which danger is communicated; the disabled Other is what Barbara has become, what the circus freaks already are, and what Gordon might turn into if the Joker’s plan succeeds.

Here, disability is represented as horrifically tragic; its significance can not be captured or processed by a man’s mind or by a comic panel without rupturing them. Disabled people, in the form of circus freaks, and Barbara’s injury, which her doctor has declared will doom her to lifelong disability, Gordon with the threat of abjection. The looming presence of disability

46 Garland-Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body 17. 47 Garland-Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body 65. 48 Moore 38. 49 Goodley 15. Escobar 43 threatens his and his daughter’s futures,50 “frustrates modernity’s fantasy that we determine the arc of our own histories,”51 and destroys “the belief that life is predictable.”52 Barbara’s injury and the Joker’s carnival throw Gordon far from the predictable, controllable future essential to the habitable, normative life afforded to him as a subject. The injured Barbara and the Joker’s circus freaks have already been abjected from society, and the Joker threatens Gordon with that same abjection. If disabled people were granted the status of social subjects, the Joker’s carnival would lose its unsettling, destructive atmosphere and Barbara’s injury would not appear to entirely doom her; Gordon’s capacity to survive both would not be in .

In what I have identified as the second era of her narrative life, Barbara works as the disabled hero, Oracle, and is largely absent from physical crime-fighting scenes, focusing, instead, on providing intel and support to the heroes who do use brute and direct contact to stop villains. As Oracle, Barbara must navigate internal and external tension related to the primarily virtual presence she maintains as a result of her disability. In their interactions with

Oracle, other characters imply that the Bat Family has lost the more useful, valuable Batgirl to disability; Oracle is not imagined to be contributing as much to their team as Batgirl would. In the first collected volume of War Games, Nightwing is skeptical of the advice Oracle gives over their in-ear communication devices, insisting that he does not need her looking over his shoulder because he’s the one that can “see what’s happening out here.”53 Batman similarly dismisses her help, demanding radio silence from her while he prepares to stop a shooting at the school of the

50 Kafer 31. 51 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 352. 52 Davis 155. 53 Brubaker, Ed, Andersen Gabrych, Devin , et al. (w). Bachs, Ramon, Al Barrionuevo, Tom Derenick, et al. (p). Campanella, Robert, Jesse Delperdang, Raúl Fernández, et al. (i). Batman: War Games (Nov. 2015, ), Comixology ed. Vol. 1. DC Comics, 2015-2016, 402 Escobar 44 former Robin, .54 Working as the Birds of Prey, Black Canary rejects Oracle’s assistance as well, arguing that she has a better understanding of situations because she’s on the ground,55 rather than behind a computer screen. Oracle’s team members believe her view on, and participation in, crime fighting scenes to be lacking because their notion of victory is contingent on the presence of a nondisabled body, wielded as a weapon against the criminals they are facing.

Barbara, however, actively resists this continued underestimation, expressing more frustration over her team members’ repeated dismissal of her and her work than she does over her supposedly tragic confinement and distance from the action. Unlike her team members,

Oracle’s grasp on any given crime scene is not bounded by the material, momentary reality of whatever problem she is facing; she has practically unrestricted access to information by way of internet technology, and her technical skill set, in combination with the —borderline mythical— online presence of Oracle as a hacker, grants her enormous influence over agencies and individuals, throughout Gotham and beyond. She resents her relegation to minor coordination duties between the physically present heroes, insisting that Oracle is more than “a glorified operator.”56 When the breadth of her crime-fighting capabilities in War Games is underestimated one too many times, she says, “Dammit, Bruce, I’ve got detailed plans of the school. I’m monitoring the communications traffic inside and outside the building—I know what’s going on down there! So, for the love of God, let me coordinate the troops!”57 In these moments, Barbara

54 Brubaker, Batman: War Games, Vol. 1 460. 55 Dixon, Chuck and Jordan Gorfinkel (w). Gary, Frank, Matt Haley, Stefano Raffaele, et al. (p). Dell, John, Bob McLeod, Wade Von Grawbadger, et al. (i). Birds of Prey (Nov. 2015), Comixology ed. Vol 1. DC Comics, 2015, 200, 214. 56 Brubaker, Ed, Andersen Gabrych, Devin Grayson, et al. (w). Bachs, Ramon, Al Barrionuevo, Tom Derenick, et al. (p). Campanella, Robert, Jesse Delperdang, Raúl Fernández, et al. (i). Batman: War Games (Nov. 2015), Comixology ed. Vol. 2. DC Comics, 2015-2016, 12. 57 Brubaker, Batman: War Games, Vol. 2 460. Escobar 45 does not align herself with the “plucky yet mourning” paradox58 that would have her assume a cheerfully passive attitude, happy to be included among the heroes at all, but secretly, endlessly grieving the tragic loss of her true (nondisabled) hero identity. She clearly understands that the nature of her heroic work is not inferior simply because it is different from that of the rest of the

Bat Family or the Birds of Prey; her disability has not meant the loss of her heroism, or her status as social subject.

The same era contains Barbara’s loaded interaction with Lady Spellbinder, a villain who immerses her victims into illusory worlds. As part of the villain Blockbuster’s larger plan to defeat Oracle, Spellbinder is hired to capture Barbara, and deludes her into believing that she is still working as Batgirl. The illusion begins with a fairly routine action scene in which Batgirl and Black Canary defeat Jervis Tetch’s mind-controlled henchmen. Canary’s suggestion that they call Batman for help and Batgirl’s dizziness, which she quickly dismisses, are the only hints that something might be off about the scenario, aside from the presence of Barbara as Batgirl within the comic itself.59

58 Goodley 115. 59 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 261. Escobar 46

Fig. 2. Selected page from Dixon, Chuck and Jordan Gorfinkel (w). Gary, Frank, Matt Haley, Stefano Raffaele, et al. (p). Dell, John, Bob McLeod, Wade Von Grawbadger, et al. (i). Birds of Prey (Nov. 2015), Comixology ed. Vol 1. DC Comics, 2015, p. 278.

Batgirl does not recognize the incongruity of her identity until the mention, and subsequent presence, of the Joker60 sparks disorienting flashbacks (see fig. 2). Apart from these scenes, the comic’s panels are neatly, predictably rectangular, but the memories of the injury that ended her career as Batgirl interrupt the pages’ gutters with tilted panels and jagged borders.

After Batgirl meets the Joker, Batgirl is catapulted into glimpses of the Joker —shadowy, sinister, gun poised, camera hanging around his neck—, her and her father’s hovering pained expressions, backlit surgeons, and a wheelchair.61 The warped panels tumble down the page

60 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 268. 61 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 178. Escobar 47 against a starry backdrop, while Batgirl’s shocked expression appears in the lower right corner, cast in a dramatic, uneven light. The image of the empty wheelchair hangs beside her face, and while the chair itself is relatively unremarkable, the same lighting that darkens Batgirl’s expression outside of the panels casts a shadow on the wall adjacent to the wheelchair, stretching the dark silhouette of a seated figure —which, presumably, belongs to Barbara— against the bare backdrop.

Batgirl is saved from the intense flashbacks once Canary reappears, but it is soon revealed that Spellbinder has been Canary all along. Returned to reality, a bound, crying Barbara listens as Spellbinder says, “You bought into my illusions because you wanted to. For just a while you were Batgirl. Pretty absurd fantasy for a cripple, don’tcha think?”62 Spellbinder is not interested in who Oracle is, dismissing Barbara as “an invalid” and a “crippled nerdette,” but

Barbara frees herself, crawls to her wheelchair, and beats Spellbinder unconscious.63 The moment further discredits Spellbinder’s underestimation of Barbara, and proves that Barbara’s heroism is more than a fantasy, through Barbara’s insistence that Spellbinder has a disability, her offense that a “coldhearted witch” like Spellbinder would think of her as handicapped, and her references to herself as Batgirl as self-encouragement.

Barbara’s experience in Spellbinder’s illusion and her defensive tactics complicate our understanding of Barbara’s take on the supposedly tragic loss that disability entails. While the strategic, active role she plays in defeating Spellbinder, as well as Blockbuster’s interest in

Oracle in the first place, show that she is an important hero worthy of respect rather than a minor character in a universe of heroes that she is largely disengaged from, she does use disability as a

62 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 282. 63 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 284. Escobar 48 demeaning accusation against her foe. As Barbara lands hit after hit on the villain who underestimated her as a disabled person, she insists that Spellbinder believing she is handicapped is ridiculous, that Spellbinder has a handicap, and that she would not trade places with her for a second64— implying that Spellbinder’s circumstances are more tragic than her own because she is disabled by the beating Barbara gives her.

Barbara may not see herself as a useless, tragic figure, but she does equate disability with inferiority, and she is portrayed as taking more pride in her lasting identification as Batgirl than as Oracle. According to Spellbinder, the illusion worked because Barbara wanted to believe she was Batgirl, directly fighting crime alongside Black Canary; indeed, the illusion is only disrupted by reminders of the real Barbara’s traumatic injury, of her disability. When Barbara congratulates herself, she uses the title “Batgirl,”65 as if the most encouraging, convincing way to validate her heroic capabilities is to connect them with her former alter ego, rather than the one she currently works under. While Barbara certainly deserves to take pride in the role she played as Batgirl, and erasing all traces of her identification with the Batgirl persona would over- simplify her character, the rarity of Barbara’s demonstrated confidence in, and respect for, herself as the disabled hero Oracle, is cause to wonder whether she feels internal resistance to valuing Oracle as is, whether she feels Batgirl is more worthy of her esteem.

The continued appearance of ambivalence in Barbara’s narrative points towards the role of nostalgia in the representation of, and identification with, disability. As a disabled hero,

Barbara teeters between pride in her new Oracle identity and longing for her lost Batgirl self.

Regardless of how much respect for Oracle is demonstrated by other characters, or how fiercely

64 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 288. 65 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 289. Escobar 49

Barbara defends herself as a capable hero, her character is haunted by the question of whether she would rather be her past self as Batgirl. All possible responses to this question —whether they are explicitly or implicitly found within the comic panels or imagined by her audience— are saturated with the ambiguity inherent to trauma-induced disability.

In the second era of Barbara’s narrative life, the association of disability with tragedy and inferiority is fluid and complex, reflected differently between characters and scenarios. Barbara repeatedly resists the underestimation and dismissal of her heroic efforts from allies and adversaries alike. She uses her extensive skill set to validate her position among heroes, particularly as a direct response to implicit or explicit claims that her capabilities are diminished by her disability. Her efforts to assert her own independence and leadership occasionally include distancing herself from disability through the ableist line of reasoning that she is not disabled because she is a capable hero; disabled people cannot be capable heroes. While she projects the ableist notion that disability is inferior onto others, how she understands herself in terms of disability is blurred by the nature of trauma-induced disability.

Barbara is not only nostalgic for a nondisabled self; she is nostalgic for a past self that had not yet experienced misogynistic violence and is preferable to her current state for having not been traumatized. It is not purely that she rejects or avoids identification with Oracle in favor of her Batgirl persona as a result of internalized ableism; she might understand references to herself as Batgirl as a separation from her trauma, as a reclamation of her power before she was cast as an expendable plot motivator. Altogether, it is unclear whether Barbara locates herself among other heroes because of the crime-fighting work she continues to accomplish as Oracle, or because she still identifies herself as Batgirl, or because of an interwoven pride in both of her alter egos and their respective crime-fighting methods. The difference model of disability would Escobar 50 frame the ambiguity of Barbara’s self-image as a devaluation of difference, when that ambiguity in and of itself is a difference that deserves representation.

Era Three: Batgirl’s Return (2012) – The Present

By the third era of her life, Barbara’s disability has been cured, and she has been reinstated as Batgirl, but she is unable to fully shake the tragedy of her past disability. She triumphantly swings through Gotham, using both her body and the technical skills she learned as

Oracle to take down criminals, but is haunted by the events of The Killing Joke and her resultant disability. In the DC Rebirth Birds of Prey, Barbara discovers that someone else is using her

Oracle identity for crime and, shaken by the revelation that her “past is apparently prologue,”66 she narrates the events that have led up to her donning the Batgirl mantle once again. The first panel in this backstory narration that pictures Barbara in her wheelchair is saturated with gloom

(see fig. 3.) Barbara’s back is to the reader, with one hand resting limply on one of the chair’s wheels and the hood of her jacket pulled over her lowered head. The somber seeps out into the window she faces; dark clouds hang over the cityscape, a black bird perches on the windowsill behind the -streaked glass, and it is unclear whether it is night, or just a particularly dark day. Barbara’s narration cascades diagonally down the scene, reading “I didn’t feel sad. (Lies) I didn’t feel sorry for myself. (Lies) I had been helping others 24/7, but now others thought I needed 24/7 help. That’s what was depressing.”

66 Benson 12. Escobar 51

Fig. 3. Selected panel from Benson, Julie and Shawna Benson (w). Antonio, Roge and Claire Roe (p), (i). Batgirl and the Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Who is Oracle? (April 2017), Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017, p. 14.

Fig. 4. Selected panel from Benson, Julie and Shawna Benson (w). Antonio, Roge and Claire Roe (p), (i). Batgirl and the Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Who is Oracle? (April 2017), Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017, p. 16.

The description of Barbara’s past concludes with another panel of her wheelchair in front of a window, overlooking the same cityscape, but Barbara is absent from the image (see fig. 4.)

The wheelchair is empty, its wheel gleams in the sunlight of a sunrise or sunset filtering through the window, and the silhouette of a bird hovers in the sky, wings outstretched in flight. In thought bubbles arranged similar to those of figure 3, Barbara’s narration explains that an experimental surgery enabled her to walk again, and that the Birds of Prey disbanded because

Dinah Lance, a.k.a. Black Canary, felt that nondisabled Barbara did not need her anymore. From Escobar 52 the subtle sunlight to the soaring bird, this image conveys a sense of change that, while bittersweet, is undoubtedly more optimistic than the leaden scene of Barbara in her wheelchair.

Birds of Prey: Vol. 1 complicates this established vision of Barbara’s life as distinctly different before and after being cured by expanding Barbara’s disability as not only a dark, tragic moment in her past, but also as a threat to the nondisabled future she is currently living. The discovery that traces of her disabled hero identity are living on outside of herself destabilizes the curative time frame that should position the cured Barbara as “the sign of progress, the proof of development, the triumph of the mind or body,”67 contaminating her life as Batgirl with the memory of her disability. Disability becomes a “terrible unending tragedy”68 from which she must release herself by unmasking whoever has claimed her Oracle identity for themselves, by re-solidifying herself as Batgirl.

Barbara also faces a Batgirl imposter— eventually revealed to be the famous artist

Dagger Type who has been showcasing images of Batgirl in a more revealing costume and sultry, model-like poses. Prior to discovering the faux Batgirl’s identity, Barbara attends a

Dagger Type show, and is particularly shocked by a depiction of Batgirl in a wheelchair.69

Frankie, Barbara’s disabled friend who is aware that she used to use a wheelchair, points out the image, saying, “It just speaks to me, Babs. You must be able to relate…” Titled “Vulnerable,” the piece starkly contrasts everything else at the exhibition; Batgirl is largely featureless, with her cowled head hanging and hair covering her face, the barest outline of the Bat Symbol visible on her chest. She is bathed in shadowy against a cascading darkness. The image is heavy and

67 Kafer 28. 68 Kafer 2. 69 Fletcher, Brenden and , (w). Stewart, Cameron and Babs Tarr (p). Tarr, Babs (i). Batgirl Vol.1: The Batgirl of Burnside (June 2015), Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2015, 54. Escobar 53 hopeless, and spurs Barbara to suit up in search of Dagger Type. When Barbara confronts

Dagger Type, she asks about the wheelchair piece specifically, and Dagger Type explains that an anonymous patron requested the image as part of a larger plan to make Dagger Type famous.70

Barbara’s unexplained distress over the depiction of her alter ego in a wheelchair makes for an ambiguous interpretation of her conceptualization of disability. Aside from the shock of learning that someone is masquerading as her hero persona and is showcasing artwork centered around that persona without her permission, it is unclear why she takes issue with the image of

Batgirl in a wheelchair over everything else. She might simply be concerned that someone has managed to connect disability, and perhaps, Oracle or Barbara Gordon, with Batgirl. She might feel more violated by the showcasing of a disabled Batgirl than a non-consensually sexualized one71 because it represents a difficult time in her life, or because she is more offended by the image of her disability than of her sexuality. She might feel that the portrait tarnishes her reputation as the capable, fierce Batgirl. Most optimistically, perhaps, she might resent Batgirl’s association with the artistic equation of disability to a dark tragedy.

Batgirl Volume 1: The Darkest Reflection further saturates Barbara’s past disability as tragic and as cause for abjection by putting Batgirl up against a false dichotomy between tragic victimhood and heroism. Barbara’s return to Batgirl begins with Bat Symbol shaped panels depicting her traumatic injury three years prior, accompanied by the confession that Barbara panicked every time she heard a doorbell for months after, “But I survived. The Joker never beat

70 Fletcher 64. 71 Barbara’s initial reaction to the gallery of model-like Batgirl images is one of complete shock; she is nearly speechless until she manages to say, “I feel so… violated” (Fletcher, 53.) Aside from her reaction to the one image of Batgirl in a wheelchair, which I analyze in this thesis, the diegetic and non-diegetic implications of including a feminine, sexualized Batgirl as a plot device merit further analysis. Escobar 54 me. The bullet never beat me.”72 Already, the audience is to understand that Barbara is succeeding as Batgirl in spite of her trauma, that she has overcome tragedy through bravery.

Still acclimating to the results of her miracle cure,73 Barbara faces a villain who seeks retribution for surviving a traumatic event that killed his family by murdering other miracle survivors. This villain, Mirror, reflects Barbara’s own survivor’s guilt back to her, pushing her to ask herself why she got to leave her wheelchair behind when so many others never will.74 After learning of Mirror’s origins, she confronts him, saying, “Millions of people have suffered tragedy, and had the courage to continue living. To kill innocent people to stop your own pain and guilt is the act not of an , but of a coward.”75 Against Mirror, Barbara asserts herself as more than a victim and more than consumed by guilt; she is using her miraculous return to nondisability to contribute to society through crime fighting.

In the same graphic novel, Barbara faces Gretel, a mind-controlling villain whose backstory is a contorted version of Barbara’s own. Once an aspiring journalist working undercover in Gotham’s mafia, Gretel turned villainous after her near-death experience at the hands of a mob boss and her subsequent recovery without sympathy or support from loved ones sent her on a vendetta against powerful men of all kinds.76 Barbara identifies with her as another

“ambitious, smart woman, nearly put in a casket by a sadistic killer who thought her life meant nothing—absolutely nothing,”77 but she urges Gretel to give up her attachment to the man who hurt her, to concede that “Power does not give up power […] They win because they always

72 Simone 17. 73 Simone 18, 50. 74 Simone 71. 75 Simone 82. 76 Simone 125. 77 Simone 133. Escobar 55 win.”78 While both Gretel and Barbara are haunted by the men who stripped them of their power,

Barbara attests that she has been able to overcome the fear of experiencing powerlessness again through the support of her loved ones.79 Gretel is vengeful, wounded —she would kill to stop powerful men and she would prefer death to feeling — but Barbara characterizes the difference between their responses to trauma with the assertion that “revenge never heals what’s broken.”80

Mirror and Gretel provide the proof that, despite the difficulties adjusting to her miraculously cured state, Barbara is healed. Her traumatic injury and resultant disability have neither trapped her in the role of a victim, nor twisted her into a vengeful villain; Batgirl has returned, heroic as ever, untainted by her past. What is left unexplored, however, is the evaluation of Barbara’s life pre-cure as anything other than negative. While her dehumanization at the hands of the Joker for the sake of his plans against Gordon and Batman —in other words, her place in the Women in Refrigerators Syndrome— warrants critique, the impact of the Oracle persona on Barbara and her trauma is relatively untouched. Barbara has been distanced from her disability as much as possible, which, in and of itself, is taken as a sign of her healing from trauma, just as the absence of disability from society signals progress.81 She was traumatized and she was disabled, but she is obviously better now; Batgirl is capable of defeating villains entangled with their own past trauma because she is so far removed from her own past trauma.

78 Simone 132. 79 Simone 134. 80 Simone 134. 81 Kafer 73. Escobar 56

Conclusion

Throughout Barbara’s narrative history, the characterization of disability as an unending tragedy, as a foreclosure of all hope for the future, accumulates from her assumed inherent inferiority as a woman superhero to the presumption that disability will ruin her life, culminating in her recuperation from disability. At the start of her narrative life, Barbara is inevitably and irreversibly inferior because she is a woman; to and against the men that surround her, she is the abjected Other. She is an accessory to Batman and Robin— always one step behind Batman,82 her femininity is an obstacle to crimefighting83 and she is prone to careless naivete around cute conmen.84 She is barred from the fullness of superhero status, of subjecthood itself, regardless of what she accomplishes or learns as Batgirl. Whatever she has to offer Batman —notably, what she might offer the wider DC Universe, rather than merely the men that surround her, as an individual is given little attention— is diluted by her gender. The narrow vision of womanhood that she is written into constrains hope for the future of Barbara and Batgirl.

Barbara’s disability is borne of the perception that disability guarantees tragedy, and that nondisability is the obviously superior state of being. The horror and tension of The Killing Joke relies on disability as the “threatening and vengeful figure of wounding, death, collapse, and explosion,”85 from the Joker’s band of circus freaks, to Gordon’s push towards madness, but most significantly through the portrayal of Barbara’s traumatic injury as, first and foremost, motivation for Batman and Gordon. As her narrative moves from the traumatic events of The

Killing Joke, she continues to be linked to death, horror, and tragedy as a disabled woman, and

82 Fox, “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” 33. 83 Fox, “Batgirl's Costume Cut-Ups." 84 O’Neil 76. 85 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 340. Escobar 57 must constantly challenge assumptions of her inferiority. Her Oracle persona allows her to assert herself as a full subject, but also allows her to find subversive power within the realm of the abject. She simultaneously resists the supposedly inevitable connection between disability and inferiority, and reaffirms it, as a powerful disabled superhero who occasionally insists that her enemies are the ones who are truly disabled, or that she is successful in spite of her disability.

Barbara’s paraplegia is ultimately cured to restore the hopeful potential for her future that was lost to her disabled self. Regardless of how the second era of her narrative life affected

Barbara’s crimefighting skills, reputation, personality, and relationships, she is cleanly separated from her physical disability and returned to the whole personhood of nondisability. While she does wrestle with survivor’s guilt, PTSD, and villains who mirror her experience with trauma, the superiority of her regained nondisabled state is never questioned. As Batgirl, Barbara is free, capable, and respected in ways that Oracle never could have been. She has overcome her disability to become the greatest version of herself; unburdened and untainted by the tragedy of physical disability and guaranteed a hopeful future because she possesses ability once again.

The continued depiction of disability as an obstacle to be overcome, a horrific tragedy to be threatened by, or an obviously inferior state of being within Barbara’s narrative history pushes the difference model of disability out of view. Disability is not a fluid fact of existence, and difference within humanity is not to be valued or encouraged; rather, there is a single vision of normalcy, of success. Within Barbara’s world, to be self-contained, agentic, and productive is to be headed towards a hopeful future, while unruly bodies —among whom lies the disabled woman Barbara— must be made docile if they are to no longer threaten, and be barred from, the future. Disability is represented as limiting potential and success, as an undesirable and unlivable difference, as an obstacle to be overcome on the path to heroism. Escobar 58

While the embrace of the difference model would afford Barbara greater room to survive and thrive as a disabled woman, and would not necessitate her cure, it does not fully account for the circumstances of her disability. Her disability is not only depicted as a tragedy because of the supposedly inherent tragedy of disability itself, but also because of the misogynistic violence that led to her disability. Thus, recuperation does not only offer freedom from the inferiority and abjection that disability is entangled with, but it also offers a remedy to her traumatic treatment at the hands of men who deemed her worthless. Barbara is nostalgic for her nondisabled self as unburdened by disability and as never having experienced the humiliation and dehumanization of the Women in Refrigerators Syndrome. These particularities make for a narrative history that is saturated with multiple shades of tragedy and abjection, of nostalgia and recuperation; Barbara is both a woman who moved from nondisabled, to disabled, to cured, and a woman who is traumatized by misogynistic violence. The difference model of disability appropriately problematizes the vision of her disability as inferior to her nondisability, but speaks little to the vision of her traumatized, disabled self as inferior to her not-yet-traumatized, nondisabled self. Escobar 59

RECUPERATION FROM DISABILITY

Construing the presence of disability as invariably tragic results in the formation of a curative imaginary that “not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention.”1 Preferring and pursuing the absence of disability are imagined to be common sense processes supported by the self-evident distinction between nondisability and disability. Repairing disability as one might broken machinery2 is a neutral or, even, benevolent action that alleviates the problem of suffering3 to bring society closer to a utopian future.4 Typical responses to disability isolate the disabled individual as a problem that must be solved in order to shape a future worth living, demanding that disability be overcome for an idealized normalcy, (re)creating an omnipresent system of compulsory able-bodiedness.5

As discussed in the introduction of this thesis, the normal body/mind that disabled individuals must strive for is defined against the disabled body/mind as everything disability lacks, as wholeness itself. To be a normal individual is to be the ideal individual:6 “a private, egocentric, self-sufficient, independent, agentic cultural ”7 who pursues and constitutes social progress towards masculine, individualized productivity. The perfectly average man is articulated in contrast to the image of disability as “vulnerable, broken, exotic, or überdifferent”8 and as being incapable of productive labor.9 The line between disability and nondisability is

1 Kafer 27. 2 Hayes, Jeanne and Elizabeth “Lisa” M. Hannold. “The Road to Empowerment: A Historical Perspective on the Medicalization of Disability.” Journal of Health and Human Services Administration, vol. 30, no. 3, 2007, pp. 352–377. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25790713, 358, 3 Garland-Thomson, “The Case for Conserving Disability” 350. 4 Kafer 73, 5 McRuer 9. 6 Davis 6; Goodley 87. 7 Goodley 89. 8 Goodley 117. 9 McRuer 2. Escobar 60 taken to be obvious, just as normalcy is taken to be the obviously superior state of being, regardless of the actual impossibility of the self-contained individual that neoliberal capitalist society, which Dan Goodley characterizes as a “globalised biopolitical machine,” reveres and demands.10

By defining normalcy as the obviously preferable choice for the individual, and, therefore, for society, overcoming disability through adherence to normalized body/mind functioning and appearance becomes a social imperative. Framing the imperative to recuperate as “overcoming” —rather than “removing” or “losing”— disability is symptomatic of the definition of normalcy as disability’s superior opposite. Supposedly, disability is overcome through individualized recuperation efforts. Disabled individuals are expected to comply with — if not joyously commit oneself to— adhering to social norms that reaffirm the “pernicious myth that it is possible to avoid almost all pain by controlling the body,”11 that the presence of disability is the absence of well-being. If overcoming non-normative ways of being is not possible, as discussed previously in the context of euthanasia, abjection through institutionalization and/or death are the sole alternatives.

Rhetoric and practice surrounding deinstitutionalization and “community entry” is emblematic of the personal responsibility of disabled individuals to improve their lives by assimilating into normalcy, thereby validating the normal individual as the ideal. A User’s Guide to the Community Entry for the Severely Handicapped (1986) communicates the necessity for recuperation in its vision of institutions or, more innocuously, “community living” as a stepping stone on the path towards “community entry.” According to this administrative manual, an

10 Goodley 207. 11 Wendell 109. Escobar 61 institution that houses disabled people should be singularly motivated by normalization, whereby every resident will lead a life that is at least as good as that of any average person.12 Ridding residents of all deviant behavior would be impossible, so efforts should be centered around training residents to possess enough “competent behavior so that the remaining deviant behavior will be more tolerated by others.”13 Norms that institutionalized people are trained to meet include adequate utilization of leisure time14 and responding well to delayed gratification,15 all of which are aimed at (re)shaping disability into normalcy. Once an individual has become productive and independent within the purview of the institution, the next step towards normalization is entry into alternatives to the institutional model of community living. According to how well an individual has met the criterion of ultimate functioning and has compensated for their deviance with demonstrated competence, they might be relocated to various smaller-scale settings, with independent living that closely mirrors normal life being the ideal option.16

The effort to shape ideal, normal individuals can also be seen in the 1986 report released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operations and Development (OECD) on disabled adolescents’ transitions from childhood education to the adult workforce.17 Adulthood includes personal autonomy and independence, productivity that leads to economic self-sufficiency, social interaction, and leisure, where the measure of success is “the range of choices available rather than any particular choice or pattern of choices.”18 While the report does recognize the ableist

12 Blackwell 6. 13 Blackwell 10. 14 Blackwell, 124 15 Blackwell 92. 16 Blackwell 17. 17 An in-depth discussion of every finding and suggestion within this OECD report is beyond the scope of this thesis. Further inquiry into the global of disability narratives that originate in “the West” is one research area that might warrant greater engagement with this extensive report. 18 Fish, John. Young People with Handicaps: The Road to Adulthood. Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development, Paris, 1986. Print, 7. Escobar 62 systems that shape disabled adulthood and the need for alternatives to standard work, its vision of integration does little to challenge the standards or institutions that mark nondisability as preferable, as something to strive towards. If institutions do not coordinate the smooth transition from student to employee, with each role meeting normative independence and productivity standards, such “neglect increases the long-term burden on society of those deemed handicapped.”19 Thus, even with the uncommon generosity of suggesting that a “concept of paid employment which embraces open employment, supported work, sheltered work and productive activity”20 might ease the burden placed upon disabled adolescents to grow into normal adults, failure to become a legibly successful adult within the context of the neoliberal capitalist society results in an individual’s total devaluation. Disabled individuals who fail to make up for their disability through compliance with social norms hinder society’s progress towards a utopia populated by productive, independent, nondisabled individuals.21

Era One: Barbara Gordon’s Debut (1967) – The End of Batgirl’s First Stint (1988)

In the first era of Barbara Gordon’s narrative life, Barbara’s master status as a woman is perceived as the primary source of her inferiority and, thus, as the identity that she most needs to overcome. Barbara initially decides to assume the Batgirl mantle to prove that she is “a far more imposing girl” than the “colorless female ‘brain’” she is perceived as despite, or as a result of, her PhD, brown belt in , and successful career.22 Barbara imagines the Batgirl mantle to be the means by which she can overcome the limitations of her gender, impressing the men in her

19 Fish 62. 20 Fish 56. 21 In-depth exploration of how the notion of ideal normalcy is implicated in SF’s visions of utopian futures lies beyond the reach of this thesis, but feminist analysis of the futures that have been imagined by SF creators so far is another crucial project in claiming futurity for marginalized individuals. 22 Fox, “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” 19. Escobar 63 life by becoming something greater than an ordinary woman. Bruce Wayne and her father’s relations to her contribute particular weight to this initial vision of who and what Batgirl might become; Batgirl is not the “mousy sort of person”23 that Barbara is because Batgirl is capable of rescuing Wayne, and Gordon bitterly wishes that Barbara was more like the superhero who has earned Batman’s praise.24 However, even though Batgirl is an improvement upon the average woman —Barbara— it is impossible for her to fully overcome womanhood to reach Batman’s ideal masculinity.

As discussed in the previous section in the context of the woman being constructed as the

Other, Barbara’s gender is represented as an obstacle that must be overcome if she is to be an effective crimefighter. To Batman and Robin’s heroics, to become something more than the Other, she attempts to overcome her “feminine instincts by sheer concentration.”25 The exercise in recuperating from her femininity proves futile, but she does eventually learn to use her “feminine weakness”26 to her advantage by distracting adversaries with her ripped tights. The equation of her womanhood with frailty is never contested, although strategically using femininity in combat does, at the very least, allow Batgirl to participate in Batman and Robin’s crime fighting scenes.

Era Two: The Killing Joke (1988) – The End of Oracle (2011)

Throughout the second era of her life, Barbara’s evaluation of her own disability, and her desire to return to normal ability, fluctuates. In the Birds of Prey, Black Canary typically interacts with adversaries in direct, physical combat, while Oracle relays information and advice

23 Fox, “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” 20. 24 Fox, “The Million Dollar Debut of Batgirl!” 33. 25 Fox, “Batgirl's Costume Cut-Ups" 65. 26 Fox, “Batgirl's Costume Cut-Ups" 75. Escobar 64 remotely. During one confrontation, Canary is nearly beaten unconscious, and when she insists that she is unable to get back up, Oracle motivates her with the memory of Batgirl.27 Canary is pictured sprawled on the cement —nose dripping blood, eyes wrenched shut beneath tangled hair— while her foe, , towers over her. Oracle appears in her base of operations, the glow of one of her computer screens washing her face in black and white. She grits her teeth, eyes downcast, and raises her fist as the silhouette of Batgirl appears over her shoulder, backlit by a yellow spotlight. Canary does not understand what the memory of Batgirl has to do with her, so

Oracle replies, “It’s got everything to do with me! Do you think I like sending out agents to do my dirty work? Do you think I get my thrills living vicariously?” The next panel centers on

Canary’s opened eye, before Oracle raises her own gaze and declares, “I can’t get off the mat to take down thugs like Lynx on my own but you can. And by God, you will,” with Batgirl’s silhouette now out of view. While it is never explicitly stated that Oracle would rather be working as Batgirl, physically taking down villains at Canary’s side, the distinction between

Canary and Oracle, between normal and disabled heroism is clear.

As previously discussed, Barbara’s subsequent encounter with Spellbinder28 further illuminates Barbara’s understanding of herself as a disabled hero as tinged with negativity and nostalgia. Spellbinder immerses Barbara in an illusion of working as Batgirl within the Birds of

Prey; a “pretty absurd fantasy for a cripple” that is only convincing because Barbara wants the illusion to be real.29 After defeating Spellbinder, Barbara refers to herself as “Batgirl,” seemingly congratulating herself for maintaining Batgirl’s strength and resourcefulness in combat.

Barbara’s selective invocation of her previous alter ego, as well as her apparent desire to work as

27 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 49. 28 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 256. 29 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 282. Escobar 65

Batgirl once more, suggests that her current Oracle identity is lacking, or is, at the very least, not compelling enough to overshadow the nostalgia Barbara feels for Batgirl, for normal ability.

The implied desire within Barbara to recuperate from her disability speaks to both the complications of representing her as abjected from society, as discussed in the previous section, and to the particular difference of trauma-induced disability. Barbara’s nostalgia for the past nondisabled Batgirl as a superior version of herself might reflect her understanding that she is abjected as a result of her disability, and that the only means by which she can become a subject is to recuperate from disability. Rather than explore the subversive potential of finding or creating power within the abject, this narrative replicates the image of disability as inherently inferior and undesirable, which she must overcome because she obviously wants to be the ideally normal, nondisabled citizen. Her heroic traits and actions elevate her from “crip” to “supercrip,” but she is not, can not be a full superhero who is wholly set apart from disability. Within this dynamic of never quite reaching the superhero status, it is important to note that Barbara’s disability results from a traumatic injury, which inevitably casts Barbara’s implied desire to return to nondisability in a different light.

Unlike Batgirl, Oracle is rooted in trauma; alongside Oracle’s reputation as “a cyber legend. A . in the ether,”30 and the freedom and purpose that Barbara finds working as Oracle, there exists an ever-present specter of traumatic injury. Forced into the Women in

Refrigerators Syndrome, Barbara is shown that her life has no importance save in relation to

Batman, that she is merely perceived as a weaker version of him.31 She was “nearly put in a casket by a sadistic killer who thought her life meant nothing—absolutely nothing,”32 and

30 Dixon, Nightwing Volume 5: The Hunt for Oracle 222. 31 Ostrander 176. 32 Simone 133. Escobar 66 subsequently became paraplegic, for the sake of larger plans involving her father and Batman.

Carving her Oracle persona from the aftermath of misogynistic violence does not erase that violence from Barbara’s world.

In challenging the devaluation and mandatory curing of bodies and minds that differ from ideal normalcy, the difference model of disability does not fully account for Barbara’s understanding of her trauma-induced disability. According to the difference model, the

“problem” of Barbara’s disability is constructed by ableist systems of oppression that encourage only one particular “healthy, rational, autonomous, educated, economically viable, self- governing and able”33 way of being. Problematizing her own disability and desiring a return to nondisability, then, is solely reflective of her lingering investment in ableist notions of disability as inferior. Granted that Barbara does indeed appear to link disability with inferiority —for example, within the aforementioned encounter with Spellbinder she defends herself by insisting that her foe is the truly disabled one34 and cheers herself on by calling herself “Batgirl”35 rather than “Oracle”— she also expresses resentment over her disabled state specifically in terms of her trauma. It is not simply that Barbara believes nondisability to be ideal, and therefore wishes to be cured of her disability; it is that the traumatic events of The Killing Joke made Barbara feel humiliated and demeaned,36 that the mention of the Joker is enough to throw her into intense

PTSD flashbacks,37 and that she meant nothing outside of how Batman and Gordon reacted to her traumatic injury and resultant paraplegia. In this era of her narrative life, Barbara’s longing

33 Goodley 207. 34 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 288. 35 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 289. 36 Ostrander 176. 37 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 368. Escobar 67 for recuperation from disability is a longing to escape from disability as hopeless inferiority and a longing to have never suffered misogynistic violence.

With the (momentary) impossibility of curing her disability as a remedy for her nostalgic desire to return to superior nondisability, to the version of herself who had experienced gendered trauma, Oracle’s superhero role functions as a remedy to Barbara’s disability. Consumed by fears of dependency, victimhood, and the world outside of her father’s apartment, Barbara decides to use the “skills and abilities [I had] long before I became Batgirl”38 to earn money online. Barbara describes the digital world as the first spark of happiness and purpose she felt since her traumatic injury, saying “I found an enormous freedom—and complete acceptance— there and, for a time in my life, the cybernet was more real to me than the world outside my window.”39 Working as a hacker, she feels “more real” to herself than she had felt navigating the aggressive crowds between doctors’ offices and her dreary bedroom, despite —or because of— the anonymity offered online.

The stark affective contrast between panels that show Barbara’s life before and after discovering the internet40 convey the depth of influence that hacking, which would eventually evolve into digital crime fighting as Oracle, has on Barbara’s understanding and navigation of her disability. The first panel is partially concealed by two later panels, a bustling city street further crowded and constricted by Barbara’s sequence of memories. The city is pictured slightly above eye level; the view skims police caps and fedoras to stretch out into a grayscale Gotham cityscape. Tucked in the upper left corner, far above street signs and an elevated railway, there are three arched windows glowing a dull yellow. The following panel zooms in on the windows

38 Ostrander 181. 39 Ostrander 182. 40 Ostrander 181. Escobar 68 and reveals that the tiny silhouette in the centermost window is Barbara. She looks down at the congested city scene, fingers interlaced and brows furrowed, unaffected by the yellow light behind her. The thick black borders of the windowpanes dissect her dejected portrait and separate her from the city that is now out of view.

Fig. 5. Selected panel from Ostrander, John, and Kim Yale (w). Stelfreeze, Brian (p). Story, Karl (i). “The Batman Chronicles.” (June 1996). No. 5, Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [173-190], p. 181.

At the center of the page, the third panel overlaps the visions of Barbara’s life before and after her internet discovery, sliding slightly further up into the city than the page’s later depictions of Barbara’s bedroom (see fig. 5.) A high-angle shot of a featureless person in a wheelchair —presumably, Barbara— flanked by Wayne Foundation trucks being unloaded is washed in light gray; more neutral, less weighted than the two earlier panels. The last panels show the inside of Barbara’s bedroom as she sits by the arched, yellow windows and gazes at her many computer screens. The fourth panel distances the audience from Barbara with pale blue- Escobar 69 gray bedroom furniture, her back turned from a neatly folded blanket here, a stack of books there. One hand stretches towards a computer , while the other clutches a pen below her chin; when the fifth panel shifts much closer to hover at her side, her firm, focused expression is shown. Her coloration is more lifelike, and her features are more detailed here than in the rest of the page. She is not a grayish, bent silhouette; she is the familiar Barbara at work, purposeful and certain.

The significance of these contrasting images of Barbara as she adjusts to her new disability lies in their compatibility with ideal normalcy, wherein the supercrip role replaces

Barbara’s isolation and fear with freedom and fulfillment. Faced with an of ineffective rehabilitation efforts and patronizing treatment from loved ones and strangers alike, Barbara lives as a disabled person who is “presumed deserving of pity—instead of respect—until he or she proves capable of overcoming a physical or mental limitation through extraordinary feats.”41

She must fight to meet the norms set by an ideally productive, independent citizen, as previously described, to achieve “unlikely success.”42 Notably, Barbara locates more than financial or social prosperity in the pursuit of a digital career; she finds a sense of self in online anonymity that is, eventually, compelling enough to craft an entire hero identity around.

While the actual and fictional importance of Oracle as a hero is incredibly extensive and cannot be overlooked in terms of empowering representations of disability, Oracle’s anonymous, digital identity does potentially reaffirm the superiority of normalcy, as I explained in the introduction of this thesis. Unless Oracle is proudly announcing herself as disabled on the internet —which is unlikely, considering how difficult it is for to uncover any

41 Shapiro 16. 42 Silva and Howe 175. Escobar 70 information about Oracle and how surprised they are to find that a disabled woman is behind the legendary hacker persona43— her anonymity masks her differences. Much of Oracle’s legendary status is wrapped up in the notion that Oracle could be “anybody,” and if the average man is nondisabled, it follows that, in her anonymity, Oracle is presumed to be nondisabled.44 This intertwining of anonymity and presumed nondisability gives rise to the notion of the supercrip, where Barbara’s potential as a superhero is bounded by her disability; she only finds freedom, purpose, and respect as a superhero once she virtually sheds her disability. The ambiguous representation of Barbara’s disability leaves space to wonder whether Barbara finds strength in

Oracle because she is able to assume a of normalcy, or if she consciously subverts the expectations of those who make incorrect assumptions about her identity and gains strength from knowing that she is challenging ableism.

Fig. 6. Selected panels from Ostrander, John, and Kim Yale (w). Stelfreeze, Brian (p). Story, Karl (i). “The Batman Chronicles.” (June 1996). No. 5, Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [173-190], p. 188.

43 Dixon and Gorfinkel, Birds of Prey 282; Dixon, Nightwing Volume 5: The Hunt for Oracle 222. 44 Cocca par. 22. Escobar 71

The fantastical, prophetic dream she has leading up to the construction of her Oracle identity (see fig. 6) imbues this new stage of her life with power and possibility at a time when the waking world offers her very little besides isolation and loss. The first two panels of the dream sequence picture Barbara in the Batgirl uniform for the first time in this comic; the masterful, confident crime-fighter bearing the Bat symbol that she and the reader are familiar with, poised as if she is walking. White, sharply outlined birds surround her, flying out over a valley speckled with sparse greenery and ancient Grecian structures, apparently guiding her down the mountain or urging her to look. There is an of discovery and curiosity, of unbreeched territory, an inclination that she will follow the birds.

In the subsequent panels, she meets a cloaked figure seated among the ancient ruins, gazing sternly at what appears to be an incense pot in their manicured hand. There is intense concentration and power in the masked face, its pupil-less eyes and hooded skull persuading the reader to question the humanity of what lies beneath. Zigzags neatly cover the forehead portion of , reminiscent of brainwaves. Barbara pushes her cowl over her head with brows furrowed and lip slightly parted, and privately processes an event that the reader is not yet privy to, expressing surprise, confusion, and understanding. The final dream scene reveals that the masked figure is also Barbara. The cloak has slid off her shoulders to show the soft contours of her upper torso, the mask is clutched over her breast, and her hair swings forward; she is sensual, relieved, and open against a circuit board-like background. This is a Barbara who is familiar and foreign, exposed and bold, unexpectedly herself.

Escobar 72

Fig. 7. Selected panel from Ostrander, John, and Kim Yale (w). Stelfreeze, Brian (p). Story, Karl (i). “The Batman Chronicles.” (June 1996). No. 5, Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, Comixology ed. DC Comics, 2017. [173-190], p. 192.

The understanding and representation of Barbara’s disability is further complicated by the final panel of this issue (see fig. 7.) Granted the aforementioned complexity of the Oracle identity’s potential relation to anonymity and productivity, it is clear that the new hero identity allows Barbara to find hope and purpose in her new disabled identity. Pictured from a low angle,

Barbara moves her wheelchair through a sea of nondescript individuals with an easy smile, not seeming to mind the bustling city or the flapping birds that surround her. The word “END” appears inside a yellow Batman symbol in the lower right corner of the panel. Barbara’s movement, her eager and open expression, and her presence among the birds saturate the scene with the promise of hope. Contrary to the previously analyzed cityscape, this scene portrays independence, rather than isolation, and the return of the white birds from figure 6 fills the image with the same sense of discovery found in her prophetic dream. It is not clear whether Barbara knows where the birds are leading her, but the positive atmosphere convinces the reader to trust that she is moving forward.

More explicit challenges to the supposed necessity of Barbara recuperation from her disability before she can lead a meaningful life appear in this era as she settles into her Oracle Escobar 73 identity. Growing beyond representations of the disabled Barbara as isolated and aimless, she is pictured as a skilled fighter, insecure, a diligent caretaker, sexually and romantically desirable, prepared, and honest. As Oracle becomes “a cyber legend. A ghost. Smoke in the ether,”45

Barbara becomes a multi-faceted character who belongs in the Bat family, taking on major villains and coming into conflict with allies just as her teammates have been portrayed doing all along. She accepts her disability without erasing the difficulties her new state presents her, saying, “It wasn’t until I realized that I’d always miss my legs. It wasn’t until I realized I’d never not miss them. That’s when I could get on with my life.”46

Era Three: Batgirl’s Return (2012) – The Present

What I have identified as the third era of Barbara’s life, however, is invested in the idea that nondisability is ideal. Prior to Barbara’s reinstatement as Batgirl, her partial paralysis is cured with an experimental procedure in South Africa,47 which Barbara describes as a miracle.48

Her father smiles incessantly because he is overjoyed “to see his beautiful, gifted daughter walk,”49 and she is continuously awestruck by and grateful for her renewed nondisability. The cure has released her from hopeless, rain-soaked panels into shining sunlight (see figs. 3, 4), freed her “to speed up. Get stronger,”50 and made her determined to never freeze out of fear again.51

The second era’s depiction of Barbara’s desire to recuperate as involving both internalized ableism and a resistance to misogynistic violence is largely absent from this third

45 Dixon, Nightwing Volume 5: The Hunt for Oracle 222. 46 Dixon, Nightwing Volume 5: The Hunt for Oracle 89. 47 Simone 75. 48 Simone 18, 43, 51. 49 Simone 18. 50 Benson 7. 51 Simone 29. Escobar 74 era. As Oracle, Barbara was nostalgic for her Batgirl persona, at least in part, as a version of herself who had not experienced the trauma inherent to the Women in Refrigerators Syndrome; returning to her past nondisabled self would be a return to someone who had not been shown just how worthless she was perceived as, in comparison to the men around her. However, now that

Barbara has returned to her nondisabled Batgirl identity, the change is primarily framed in terms of nondisability as bodily freedom, rather than in terms of rectifying the traumatic effects of misogynistic violence.

Barbara’s reflections on her past disability are laden with the sense that she has overcome the problem of disability through cure to become the most superior version of herself yet. She remembers her disabled self as depressingly helpless,52 her Oracle persona as a means of self- empowerment,53 and her recuperation as the return of hope.54 She understands her disabled self as past, remarking that, “For three years, I couldn’t move or feel my legs. Then a miracle happened. I can’t believe it even now”55 and that, now that the past is behind her, she’s “ready to speed up. Get stronger.”56 Gordon is caught smiling to himself at seeing “his beautiful, gifted daughter walk,”57 and Barbara is haunted by the thought that she has stood up and left her wheelchair behind when so many others never will.58 Curing her paraplegia has given her life possibility and meaning, has given her life itself; hope for her future is contingent on whether her body functions in a manner that is perceived as normal. The joy, relief, confusion, and guilt that

52 Benson 14. 53 Benson 15. 54 Benson 16. 55 Simone 18. 56 Benson 7. 57 Simone 18. 58 Simone 71. Escobar 75

Barbara, and those around her, feel about her recuperation is about her physical ability— not about her trauma as past, lingering, or evolving within the context of this new era.

This focus on Barbara’s “fixed” body can be partially attributed to the impossibility of her return to a pre-traumatized self within a linear narrative. In the second era of her life, Barbara is nostalgic for a version of herself that she can never be again; the Barbara who had not been used as motivation for Batman and Gordon’s story arcs —as narrative prosthesis— and was not yet disabled can only exist in memory. The social construction of the disabled/nondisabled binary enables Barbara to be split from her physical disability and emerge as her restored whole self. However, to release Barbara from her traumatic experience would be to revert her to another self entirely in a manner that, apparently, the shift from abnormally functioning Oracle to normally functioning Batgirl does not. Thus, if Barbara is to remain herself, her nostalgia for her pre-traumatic injury self can never be completely remedied as her defective physical body can.

Batgirl and the Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Who is Oracle? further complicates our understanding of Barbara’s post-cure self-image as she confronts a villain masquerading as

Oracle. At the start of the graphic novel, Barbara is frustrated by the resurgence of her past identity —that her “past is apparently prologue”59— and frames the recollection of her transition from disabled to cured with the sense that, although the Oracle identity helped her through a depressing period,60 she has left it all behind for the sunshine (see fig. 4) and Batgirl, and that her bright present has been interrupted by her dark past. She eventually discovers that the villain,

Gus Yale, was a former fan of Oracle’s, and has brought Oracle back into Barbara’s life in an attempt to draw Oracle back out.61 Her encounter with Yale leads her to say, “Am I still Oracle?

59 Benson 11. 60 Benson 15. 61 Benson 119. Escobar 76

Barbara Gordon? Or Batgirl? I’m all damn three,”62 but, despite the difficult self-examination and the intrusion of her past into her present, Barbara and Yale part on good terms. Barbara resolves to continue working as Batgirl, agrees to let Yale serve as the new hacking and intelligence expert for the Birds of Prey, and tells Yale that he helped her understand that

“Oracle is more than a name—it’s an idea. I’ll always be Oracle.”63

In the face of a seemingly well-meaning villain who prefers her Oracle persona, Barbara simultaneously chooses to continue working as Batgirl and asserts that she will always be

Oracle. Her actions suggest that she sees herself as not entirely removed from Oracle, disability, and trauma now that her physical body has been “fixed.” Her motivations for working primarily as Batgirl remain unclear; she might ally with her nondisabled superhero persona as superior because of its detachment from disability, or she might simply prefer Batgirl’s work to that of

Oracle. Batgirl and the Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Who is Oracle? challenges Barbara to understand her recuperation in a non-linear manner, to understand her present self as inseparable from her past. Who Barbara identifies as is uncertain and multidimensional, regardless of her repossession of ability and subsequent reinstatement as Batgirl, which reflects insufficiencies in the normative model of disability as obviously inferior and in binary opposition to nondisability.

Barbara’s renewed career as Batgirl contains a continuous struggle with disability, regardless of her body’s “regained” physical freedom. Barbara’s changing relationship with disability is put into conversation with several of the villains she faces; Mirror’s parallel backstory of having survived a deadly accident forces Barbara to confront her survivor’s guilt,64

62 Benson 131. 63 Benson 157. 64 Simone, Batgirl, Volume 1: The Darkest Reflection. Escobar 77

Dagger Type provokes her with the image of a disabled Batgirl,65 and Gus Yale attempts to manipulate her into reassuming her Oracle identity.66 She suspects that her loved ones’ eagerness to help or comfort her is actually rooted in the patronizing urge to pity and protect that she was subjected to while still disabled.67 She is abandoned by allies who believe that, as a nondisabled person, she no longer needs help from others.68 Life after cure is not smooth or simple, but her need to be cured and the idea that she is ultimately better off nondisabled than she is disabled are never contested.

Conclusion

Situated in a world that expects, assumes, prefers, and pursues nondisability, Barbara is persistently challenged to overcome inferiority and abjection, which most often take the shape of disability, in order to be a legitimate superhero. To be a superhero is to be a “unified, self- contained corpus/text,”69 whose possession of ability is central to the success of their work towards a utopian future, so Barbara must necessarily strive to distance herself from the “always- erased though always-implied disabled/dying/dead body.”70 Prior to the traumatic events of The

Killing Joke, this dynamic primarily appears in the positioning of Barbara’s gender as an obstacle for her to overcome. Womanhood and femininity hinder her success as a crimefighter, unavoidably consigning her to the role of Batman and Gordon’s inferior, and depreciating her work as what little she can accomplish in spite of her gender.

65 Fletcher, Batgirl Vol.1: The Batgirl of Burnside. 66 Batgirl and the Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Who is Oracle? puts fan response 67 Simone 65. 68 Benson 16. 69 Alaniz 17. 70 Alaniz 25. Escobar 78

The second era of Barbara’s life begins with the horrific tragedy of her disability that is stretched forward in time because recuperation from disability is (momentarily) impossible, and because that recuperation is imagined to be necessary for her hopeful future. She does grow to be the disabled superhero Oracle, challenging ableist standards of superheroism through her actions and her very existence, but her success is bounded by her disability. Rather than a superhero, she is a supercrip, incapable of reaching the full status of superhero, she is condemned to be perpetually lacking, nostalgic for the nondisabled superhero self she might have been. The traumatic roots of her disability complicate this nostalgia, simultaneously implicating the ableist equation of disability with inferiority and the suffering of misogynistic violence in her desire for nondisability.

By way of a “miracle cure,” Barbara does recuperate from her disability, portraying her distance from paraplegia and her return to the role of Batgirl as the restoration of hope. Once

Barbara possesses ability, she is whole and she is alive, she is allowed to move towards the future, regardless of how her past experiences with disability and trauma continue to haunt her.

The cured Barbara has overcome her disability; further discussion on where her nostalgia for her un-traumatized self fits into this recuperative era, or how she imagines her role as Batgirl against that of Oracle, is unnecessary because the superiority of nondisability, of ideal normalcy is unquestionable.

The difference model of disability is rejected in Barbara’s narrative history in favor of the construction of disability as an obstacle to be overcome. Difference, in and of itself, burdens

Barbara, who might be a capable, respected superhero, if it were not for her differences as a woman and/or as a disabled woman. What value and life she does manage to scrape up throughout the three eras of her life is accomplished in spite of her differences. As such, Escobar 79 recuperation from difference is essential to the future of her crimefighting career, and while it is impossible for her to be cured of her womanhood, she is allowed to become nondisabled.

The curative framework of disability that Barbara is written into, however, does challenge the limits of the difference model of disability in important ways that demand more from the representation of fictional disability. While problematizing the construction of nondisability as the superior state of being and, therefore, recuperation from disability as a necessity in Barbara’s narrative is an important project for imagining a different future for disability representation, her disability and recuperation are layered with misogynistic violence and trauma. These added factors test the difference model, in that nostalgia for a self who had not yet been traumatized is not simply or solely an ableism-laden desire to be nondisabled.

Barbara’s desires for a life and for a future might be shifted by the disentanglement of ableism from how she sees herself and her disability, as well as how others view her as a disabled woman superhero, but those desires might also linger as the impossible wish to have never been traumatized.

Escobar 80

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A DIFFERENT FUTURE

Through my analysis of Barbara Gordon’s past and present, I have challenged Science

Fiction to create a radically different future that imagines more for Barbara than the world she has been written into up until now. As a novum between SF and reality, Barbara demands the impossible from both realms, stretching their boundaries to represent her difference in all of its contradictions and ambiguities. Envisioning a radically better future for the representation of disability in SF necessarily rejects the limiting notions of compulsory nondisability and ideal normalcy, of what constitutes a superhero or a utopia, and of whose life belongs in the future.

Concurrently, expanding the representation of disability in fiction compels feminist crip theory to account for bodies and desires that have been imagined otherwise, to account for the impossible. Barbara Gordon’s narrative has represented possible and impossible movement through disability and womanhood, and it could still represent something more, something different.

In “Disability as the Abject,” I explored Barbara’s expulsion into the realm of the abject throughout the course of her narrative history, first as a result of her gender and, then, as a result of disability. Set against the definition of the superhero as the ideal human who possesses ability,

Barbara’s potential as a crime-fighter is inevitably restricted by womanhood and disability. The nondisabled/disabled —and, furthermore, the desirable/undesirable— binary that structures her world leads to constant underestimation of her and her work. Her accomplishments are relegated to the realm of the supercrip, wherein she is measured against the standard of ideal normalcy, but is never afforded the full respect of her counterparts, or a place in their successful future. She is the Other, tragically inferior and abnormal, who does not— can not fit into the realm of the subject, unless she repossesses ability. Escobar 81

I analyzed the preference and pursual of nondisability throughout Barbara’s narrative in

“Recuperation From Disability,” where the backdrop of disability as obviously inferior to nondisability informs and complicates Barbara’s eventual “return” to nondisability. Barbara’s traumatic injury and subsequent partial paralysis bar her from full subjecthood, (re)establishing the possession of ability as essential to hope for her future. The perception that she would definitively be better off if she were nondisabled —that, as a disabled woman, she can only accomplish so much— colors Oracle’s narrative. Barbara’s demonstrated, fluctuating desire to be cured of her disability is attached to the ableist equation of disability to inferiority, but, crucially, it is also linked to the specific experience of trauma-induced disability. Her narrative represents not only an ableist devaluation of difference, but also the difficulties of the difference model of disability in accounting for the nebulous relationship between Barbara’s trauma and her disability.

The difference model of disability, which values disability as pure difference,1 as well as the multiplicity of human experience, argues that disability belongs in the world —fictional or real, past or present or future— as more than a problem to be solved.2 As I detailed throughout my analysis, Barbara’s narrative most often adheres to a vision of disability that expects and assumes recuperation3 from disability to the “productive, functional, and efficient”4 individual on their way into the “radical infinitude”5 of the future. This vision is affirmed as Barbara expresses her own belief in the obvious inferiority of disability,6 in the use of disability as narrative

1 Wendell 84. 2 Davis 2. 3 Kafer 27. 4 Silva and Howe 180. 5 Davis 314. 6 Dixon and Gorfinkel 284. Escobar 82 prosthesis7 to convey horror and danger in The Killing Joke, and in her eventual recuperation from disability as part of the 2011 company-wide DC Universe continuity relaunch. While including the difference model within her narrative would allow for her disability to continue into the future and would challenge the nondisabled/disabled binary that has shaped her superhero career thus far, this inclusion of feminist crip theory through the difference model is not critical enough to fully account for Barbara’s narrative.

Valuing Barbara’s disability as difference oversimplifies its traumatic roots as understood and represented through nostalgia. If Barbara’s experience of disability were only communicated through a model of disability as abnormal and, therefore, inherently inferior, then a feminist crip theory lens would reveal that her narrative is not bounded by her disability, that she and her differences deserve a place in the future. However, in my analysis I have not merely discovered that the representation of disability in Barbara’s narrative might be complicated and expanded in important ways through the difference model. I have discovered that the difference model would disregard the roots of Barbara’s disability in traumatic, misogynistic violence.

After the events of The Killing Joke, Barbara is not only nostalgic for her pre-disability self because she imagines that past self to be obviously superior, to live in ways that she no longer can; she is nostalgic for an un-traumatized self who had not yet been shown how little her life meant compared to the lives of the men who surround her. The notion of her eventual recuperation from disability, then, is more than a depiction of the repossession of ability as key to superheroism, or as confirmation that disabled womanhood is inherently tragic, horrific, and fatal. Her recuperation is imagined as a rectification of misogynistic violence, and as a partial remedy to her trauma. As I argued in “Theoretical Framework,” disability resists definition as a

7 Goodley 15. Escobar 83 swelling, fluid state of being, which includes Barbara’s tangled, contradictory relationship with and to disability. In order to fully account for and value the complexities of human difference, any models of disability that seek to solidify disability’s appearance and meaning must be challenged. Not only can Barbara’s disability not be fully understood as a tragic, horrific end to her life— it also can not be fully understood by a valuation of disability as pure difference that speaks nothing to her trauma.

Demanding more from SF in its representation of disability goes hand-in-hand with demanding more from feminist crip theory in its future articulations of disability. The nostalgia that renders SF’s futures legible also opens Barbara’s narrative to a curative imaginary sculpted by trauma. The past and present inform visions of the future; how Barbara has experienced, and is experiencing, disabled womanhood shapes the future she imagines for herself. Adherence to the perception of disability as inherently inferior and as the hopeless abject makes her future dependent upon her recuperation from disability. Additionally, imagining disability as difference without value judgments carves space into the future for her disability, but leaves trauma’s role in her disability and her nostalgia for her pra-traumatized, nondisabled self unconsidered. A future that includes recuperation and disability, failure and success, life and death is among the countless that have not yet been imagined for Barbara.

I understand this thesis to be the very beginning of my work between the realms of fiction and reality, where past, present, and future difference finds room to flourish. I have only begun to examine the entanglement of feminist crip theory and Barbara Gordon’s narrative, both in regard to what that entanglement looks like now, and what it might look like in the future. I expect that my work will expand into the investigation of how Barbara’s movement through Escobar 84 disability and womanhood tracks alongside real-world disability activism and the SF genre over time.

In particular, I am interested in the work of SF texts such as The Feminist Utopia Project:

Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder

Nalebuff and Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements edited by

Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne M. Brown to (re)present difference. Brodsky and Nalebuff’s collection of feminist visions embraces the notion that “by simply imagining and claiming a right to a better, freer life, women reject the lives we are allowed and the people we are allowed to be.”8 I align myself and the future of my work with the editors’ assertion that “Our demands are necessarily shaped by intimate knowledge of our pasts and presents. What we dream of for the future tells us about our lives today, too.”9 This notion of the past and present being used to imagine the future, of nostalgia being key to claiming a better future, is one that I have explored in this thesis through Barbara as a novum, and I hope to continue that exploration. I understand nostalgia to be particularly useful in the construction of disability and, therefore, in determining disability’s place in the future. With this framework, there is still much analysis to be done on the representation of disability in SF —of which Brodsky and Nalebuff’s work is a part— to understand what sorts of futures have been, and must be, imagined for disability.

Imarisha and Brown situate Octavia’s Brood within Science Fiction because “whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction.”10 They remember the ancestors of oppressed communities

8 Brodsky, Alexandra, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, editors. The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future. E-book, Feminist Press at CUNY, 2015, 8. 9 Brodsky 10. 10 Imarisha, Walidah, and Adrienne M. Brown, editors. Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. E-book, AK Press, 2015, 10. Escobar 85 who “dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us”11 in the generative, liberatory work of their collection of imagined futures. As I move forward in my career, I hope to gain a better understanding of how speculative fiction improves the lived realities of marginalized people, in terms of diverse representation, fan culture, and feminist activism. In particular, my ambition is to highlight the reality bending that goes into extending the narrative of Barbara Gordon as a disabled woman and superhero into the future, as Imarisha and Brown describe. Such a project would necessarily extend into SF as a whole, examining how the genre’s features can be sculpted with feminist theory, and why such an exercise matters in a reality rife with oppression.

I hope to join the continuation of my work in feminist crip analysis with collections such as The Feminist Utopia Project and Octavia’s Brood by putting the past and present of the representation of disability in fiction in conversation with its future, with our future. As I have discovered through this thesis, the realm of Science Fiction has bent around Barbara Gordon as a disabled woman, and her claim to a future in SF has hinged on her disabled womanhood. I have yet to discover how her narrative has been shaped by SF up until now, or how it might still come into contact with feminist visions for, and claims to, futures such as those presented within The

Feminist Utopia Project and Octavia’s Brood. As a nova, I understand that Barbara is more than one single character who happens to represent disability and womanhood. The narratives offered to her as a disabled woman in Science Fiction challenge the genre as a whole to account for the

(im)possibilities of her character— most significantly when Critical Disability Studies and feminist crip theory are used to determine who her character is, or who she might become.

As I move into my own future, I hope to better understand how narratives like Barbara

Gordon’s brush against or interlock with the lived realities of her disabled fans. Seemingly

11 Imarisha 11. Escobar 86 impossible futures are communicated in SF through nostalgia, while futures for disability seem impossible; my feminist crip analysis of the past and present of Barbara’s narrative has explored the points of contact between these two incongruous notions. Furthermore, my work has begun to unravel the role of nostalgia in representing the complex, fluid experience of disability. I have come to recognize that there is still much work to be done in improving the representation of disability in media, and in understanding what it means for that representation to be “improved.”

In terms of Critical Disability Studies and feminist crip theory, all that is possible for Barbara

Gordon, and the representation of disability in fiction more generally, is still to come, is not yet here, is in a radically better future. Escobar 87

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