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Wonder Woman: Female Power and Male Imagination

Wonder Woman is a child of World War II. She was born when the United States needed strong women in their fight against Nazi-Germany: Superman needs, therefore meets Wonder Woman. She was born an Amazon with miraculous strength. In order not to upset her compatriots, she was not only „wise like Athena“, but also „lovely like Aphrodite“.1
Alongside fierce GIs, she was clad in a bobbing skirt in the colors of the Stars and Stripes and with cute boots on her feet fighting brown Nazi monsters. One of the creators of Wonder Woman, psychologist William Moulton Marston—the other one being his wife Elizabeth— hoped that a tender peaceloving woman could heal a (men’s) world smashed to pieces.2 William invented not only the comics character but also the polygraph aka lie detector, Therefore, it seems no coincidence, that Wonder Woman carries a golden magic lasso which forces everybody who gets caught to tell the truth.

In the decades since we have got used to meeting Wonder Woman every once in a while, only slightly changed, according to prevalent gendered body aesthetics. She always kept jumping and swinging, saving people, fixing things. She was always there when you needed her, used to be self confident and calm in everything she did—the perfect screen to project whatever is needed or en vogue: fervent patriotism, feminist empowerment or sexual lust.

Wilfried Gerstel’s Wonder Woman, however, is different: When she came to this world she was dead at first, lying stretched in a feretory3 among the fourteen saintly helpers in need4. Her lasso is tucked limply under her belt, none of the energetic bolts she used to throw is to be seen.
What could be meant by this transformation?
Does this woman in her velvet suit get her superhuman powers only if she sacrifices herself—just like the catholic martyrs did, who were, although or because of their being purely good, tortured and killed? Who, at the start of the 21st century, believes in the heroin out of the comic? Were the saints something like premodern popular comics heroes? Or is it just the other way round: Are those trashy media products our present day saints? Has conspicuous consumerism replaced ancient contemplative worship? Does Mr. Gerstel tell us, that the time of brave and determined heroes who always know the right thing to do is over?

The latter interpretation seems only confirmed by the Wonder Woman who can be seen in the more recent series of computer generated collages.5
She is a stranger in the world she is in, hardly pulls herself together for a proper demonstration of her power, plays her role as a savior only rarely and incidentally, for example when—with her lasso—she prevents dangerously shaking towers evocative of modern highrises from burying a group of people dancing oblivious beneath them. In most of her appearances Wonder Woman seems tired, maybe disillusioned after all her activism during the decades which have passed since the 1940s. Doubt has superseded determined action. Wonder Woman seems to shake her head at the human crankiness around her. However, she is not amused by the temporally distant but otherwise very present day human mannerism she observes. She is perturbed, sometimes like frozen in her tragic gesture. She no more uses her once powerful magic lasso on whatever adversaries to force them to tell the truth. Instead, Mr. Gerstel has Wonder Woman herself search for a truth that power cannot find.

However, having arrived in the 21st century after traveling all the way from post-World War II-comics the heroine puts her speech balloons, or more exactly her balloons of thoughts, in a world that has changed. In his eclectic approach Mr. Gerstel takes up the polymorphic and richly colored images known from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He puts the now more pensive than power exerting Wonder Woman among defamiliarized Gothic apostles made of stone, among late medieval flagellants6 and among strange beings, neither animal nor human, maybe coming from ancient cathedrals. His Amazon appears in the mirror of a goblin princess who now combs her hair virtuously but at the end of the 14th century played the role of the Whore of Babylon7 , or she shows up among unicorns and mythical lions. She brandishes her salvaging magic lasso above Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s zanies bowling in front of the towers of the Castle of Vincennes out of the 15th century.8

The resulting clash of epochs and pictorial cultures provides—beyond the tragic of a weary heroin—an ironic and very contemporary perspective on the conditio humana. Wilfried Gerstels Wonder Woman uses a very different force to open up space for the questions of those who look at the pictures. Thus, he adds a novel and original twist to the old story of Wonder Woman’s wondrous power.

Maria Mesner
Professor of Modern History and Gender Studies at the University of Vienna

1 Introducing Wonder Woman, in: All Star Comics #8, quoted in: Les Daniels, Wonder Woman. The Life and Times of the Amazon Princess. The Complete History, San Francisco: Chronicle Books 2000, 30.

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Moulton_Marston [October 2, 2011].

3 sarcophagi, clay, acrylic glass inserts, printed foil (2003).

4 Installation, 14 pieces, wooden pedestals, acrylic glass cylinders, loudspeakers, ceramic elements, artificial blood. 14 figurines of saints crown 14 acrylic glass vessels filled with artificial blood. Underneath, hidden in the wooden pedestals, loudspeakers perodically generate heartbeats, which makes the blood of the saints pulse (2003).

5 Photo prints, mounted behind acrylic glass (Diasec) on aluminium dibond (2008).

6 Pietro di Domenico da Montepulciano, Vergin of Mercy, 15th century.

7 Les tapisseries de l'Apocalypse, 1375B1379, Castle of Angers.

8 Illustration of the month December out of The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry (Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry), 1410B1416, completed 1485B1489