How I Should Feel – Fetishism and Feminine Power in Witchblade

What it says -
the Witchblade

Psychoanalytically fetishism is the substitution of an object (or objects) for the penis that the mother is found to be lacking, thereby allaying the young boy’s shock of this realisation. Jean Baudrillard theorises that the fetishised female body is produced as a phallic body, a phallic effigy (substituting the body or body parts of the female for the penis) that reflects a male narcissistic desire to revel in what he knows to be true – that he is possessor of the phallus, of power. Baudrillard theorises that the body has become a representation, a sign that is constructed via a structuralist mode that posits the phallic effigy/body fragment as signifier and sexuality as signified. In this system, the phallus becomes the general equivalent against which everything is defined –‘everything is resolved into a phallic equivalent, even the female genitals, or any gaping organ or object traditionally listed as a symbol of the feminine’ (Baudrillard 102). This theory leaves little room for female bodies to have any other meaning than phallic, however Sara in Witchblade and her union with the Witchblade itself, I believe actually subverts this phallic model and phallocentric ideology by forming a positive, distinctive model of feminine power that does not rely on a concept of the masculine to define itself.

Witchblade (Vol. 1 #1-8, 1998) is the story of New York detective Sara Pezzini, who through fateful coincidence becomes the wielder of the Witchblade. Ken resolves to befriend Sara and then erode her confidence and spirit so she will transfer the Witchblade’s power to him. The Witchblade is a sentient symbiote that bonds to the wearer’s body, mind, and soul. Its primary form is a gauntlet, but can reduce in size to a bracelet or expand to armour the body in a spiky exoskeleton. At times it has an organic, plant-like appearance. When ‘activated’ by the wielder (or of its own accord) the Witchblade can create deadly whip-like tendrils, and fire blasts of energy. The Witchblade is a source of feminine power because it can only ever be wielded by a woman. Anyone who tries to don the Witchblade, but is not the rightful recipient, receives terrible injuries from the Witchblade itself. Sara is pursued by Ken Irons, a wealthy businessman who has researched the history of the Witchblade and wants its power for himself.

Ken Irons as a totality
(and looking quite grumpy)

Witchblade’s opening pages provide a stark contrast between representations of men and women. Ken Irons is shown from a distance in his high-rise apartment, then in a medium shot (head to knees), and finally in a close-up of his face. This sequence of images presents him as a totality, a "whole" person. Our introduction to Sara is quite different. Sara is shown dressing–putting on lipstick, a tight, short dress that fixes around her neck, knee high stiletto boots, elbow length gloves, and G-string underwear with the accompanying display of buttocks, legs, breast, arms, and lips. This attire makes Sara’s body parts closed and smooth, a pre-requisite in Baudrillardian theory for them to be produced as phallic effigies (1993:104). In contrast to Ken, who is shown as a totality, Sara is presented as dismembered, a “cut-up” of highly sexualised body parts exhibiting all the attire – ‘Ankle boots and thigh boots… over the elbow gloves and stocking top on the thigh, hair over the eyes or the stripper’s G-string’ (1993:101) –which Baudrillard cites in Symbolic Exchange and Death that demarcate the body, establishing the foot, leg, arm, neck, and waist as erectile parts. This imagery is what Naomi Wolf describes as the pornography of beauty where the most sexually central parts of women, breasts, thighs, buttocks, bellies are fetishised (Wolf 1990:119). As many comic readers would agree, depictions of females in comics often employ imagery that borders on the pornographic.

Sara as dismembered body parts

Sara thus begins Witchblade embedded in the Symbolic Order, conforming to a stereotypical image of a woman in order to achieve results in her job. The Symbolic Order (or simply the Symbolic) designates the ‘objective order of language, law, morality, religion, and all social existence which is held to constitute the identity of any human subject who enters it’ (Baldick 327). It is in opposition to the Imaginary. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the pre-Oedipal (as Freud describes it) or Imaginary phase of development consists basically of two terms: the child and the image of the other, which is usually the mother (Eagleton 165). Elisabeth Grosz states that as the child develops, this dyadic structure is disrupted by the father who represents ‘law, order and authority for the child’ (1990 68). The father is a ‘Symbolic or imaginary father’, a representative of the Name-of-the-Father that stands for patriarchal ownership. Taking on the Name-of-the-Father positions the child beyond the structure of dual imaginary relations (Grosz 1990 47). Recognition of this ‘paternal metaphor’ charts the child’s entry into the Symbolic Order and the social world beyond the family structure (Grosz 1990 104). Therefore, the Name-of-the-Father signifies the ‘Law’ or Law-of-the-Father that is the wider set of social and sexual roles rules upon which the Symbolic Order rests and relies. What this means for Sara is that she has taken on the wider set of social and sexual roles that are designated “female”. This is how Sara (and indeed women in general) is “forced” to conform to a feminine ideal. Indeed as a police officer Sara enforces the law and is also an agent of the Law-of-the-Father. From an early age Sara conditioned herself to be an agent of the Law knowing that she wanted to be a cop and imitating the male cops on the 1970s television show, Starsky & Hutch. Thus she has for along identified with male roles and ideals.

However the clothes Sara is wearing are for an undercover police operation in order to right an injustice perpetrated in an earlier case. She comments ‘Starsky never had to do this to make a bust’ (Wohl et at 1998:5). Later, after being told she is ‘dressed like a slut’ she retorts, ‘Hey! You think I like wearing this?’ (Wohl et al 1998:10). That Sara doesn’t actually like wearing this apparel is an indication that something is “wrong” (because don’t all women like dressing this way?). It is a semi-conscious realisation of her knowing she is conforming to a male ideal of a woman and that she’d rather resist than accept this ideal.

The first time Sara wears the Witchblade, when it crawls and attaches itself to her and in the process saves her life, she unleashes the Witchblade’s power and suddenly feels ecstatic: I am power. This is freedom. I am... insane!’ (Wohl et al 1998:22-3). In accessing the Witchblade’s purely feminine power Sara becomes free from the Symbolic Order, yet this freedom seemingly comes (at least for a moment) at the cost of her sanity. The insane feeling is her experiencing a new paradigm of real power, one that grants her control, which is so overwhelming it feels like insanity. Later when she tries to take the Witchblade off it resists, cognisant of Sara opting to, and trying to stop her, returning to her “safe” and “sane” position in the Symbolic Order. All indications point to the Witchblade trying to wrench Sara from the Name-of-the-Father.

The second time Sara dons the Witchblade she has similar feelings of freedom, feeling ‘Unbound... she should be afraid, now she’s never been more confident’ (Wohl et al 1998: 66). This time she chooses to accept the feeling, the insanity – ‘That was the trouble while she was fighting it. But now... she’s strangely at peace with it. Connected to it’ (Wohl et al 1998: 67). The Witchblade’s power brings Sara peace, becoming more comfortable with feminine power free from patriarchal constraints. The Witchblade facilitates her realising what she already seems to unconsciously recognise–which is why the Witchblade chooses her.

Sara covered by the organic-looking Witchblade
while she sleeps

Sara takes the Witchblade off to sleep but while sleeping it sentiently reattaches to her body and covers her completely. In the morning in a full page illustration she lies asleep in a foetal position which is at once an image of rebirth and a voyeuristic tour de force, she recounts ‘I felt it on me, like some protective shell... it felt right on me. And I didn’t want to wake up because it felt so good... so safe’ (Wohl et al 1998: 98). This is in contrast to a coat Ken had loaned her the night before, which she wished would make her feel safe but doesn’t. This is another indication that Sara recognises something is “wrong” and acknowledges (albeit unconsciously) the protection of the Symbolic Order of which Ken’s coat is a sign is simply a ruse. The idea of safety and comfort is paramount for Sara but this male/patriarchal safety is a false consciousness. True safety and comfort for Sara can only come from embracing the Witchblade’s feminine power which enables real freedom. When fellow cop Jake intrudes into Sara and the Witchblade’s privacy the Witchblade suddenly feels ‘bulky. Alien’ (Wohl et al 1998:99). Jake’s intrusion breaks Sara and the Witchblade’s utopic bond. Female power suddenly becomes alien and discomforting as Jake’s male presence reminds Sara of her place in the Symbolic Order.

Sara in her 'wedding' dress
(and with impossibly long legs)

Bonding with the Witchblade however doesn’t stop Sara from further interpellation into the Symbolic Order, invoked in a scene reminiscent of a marriage. To garner the Witchblade, Ken romances Sara and she eventually falls for his extravagant lifestyle (he’s a Fortune 500 member), culminating with them attending a charity function at the ‘Prosperite Church’. Sara arrives in what could easily be mistaken for a wedding dress. Harking back to Sara’s dislike of her undercover clothes, she reflects on this dress:

This is how I should look… how I should feel. It just seems so right to be wearing something so soft… so caressing to my skin. It makes me feel… so beautiful. It doesn't confine my body like the Witchblade does. It’s not bruising me. Nor do I believe that when I take it off, will it resist like the Witchblade did… I feel safe. I feel good (Wohl et al 1998:155).

Marriage, especially for women, is invariably linked to the Name-of-the-Father (being renamed, becoming the “property” of the husband) and the submission with which it is traditionally associated. Sara is bowing to gender stereotypes, believing that soft, caressing things are feminine; that a woman’s appearance being the centre of attention is what being a woman is all about. She positions herself in the comforting symbolic. This is the final gambit to keep Sara in her “place” and prevent her accessing the full feminine power of the Witchblade, indeed acknowledging the genuine threat that the Witchblade represents. After the function, Ken and Sara argue, and Ken reveals his diabolical plans. In response the Witchblade activates, tearing Sara’s dress to shreds. After some hesitation and self-doubt, Sara rediscovers her willpower and realises she doesn’t want to be annexed to a phallic order that condemns her to a non-existence (Baudrillard 104). Sara finally accepts the legacy of the Witchblade and defeats Ken in battle. She has rejected the things that the Symbolic Order and gender stereotypes position as feminine in favour of the Witchblade’s true feminine power.

Sara and the Witchblade triumphant

Sara’s evolution from Baudrillard’s phallic fetish, a body in parts, to her (symbolic) rejection of the Name-of-the-Father, to her final acceptance as wielder of the symbiotic Witchblade, something that cannot (at least in Baudrillard’s terms) be classified as phallic is indeed a remarkable one even for comics. Most indicative of her transformation is her representation in the final pages. In two splash pages Sara is covered by the Witchblade resisting phallic fetishism. On the final page Sara is shown as a totality. The Witchblade’s spiky, organic, bony appearance resists closure making Sara’s body neither smooth nor closed off (it doesn’t completely cover her like armour). The exoskeleton could not in any way be construed as bracelets, necklaces, rings or a belt that would establish the accompanying body parts as erectile. The Witchblade is also labile, never assuming the same form twice, and are thus not contained by any fixed category. Sara becomes:

not the oppositional other safely fenced off within […] boundaries, but the otherness of possible worlds, or possible versions of ourselves, not yet realized (Shildrick 8).

Sara’s “other” version of herself, one with the Witchblade as a part of her being, enables her to evolve as an autonomous owner of feminine power and resist and transgress patriarchal phallocentric society. The Witchblade enables Sara to operate outside the boundaries of phallocentric culture, while not deforming or transforming her natural body, i.e.: becoming a monster. It is an extension of herself specifically highlighted by the fact that the Witchblade has been, and can only ever be, wielded by a woman. Sara with the Witchblade embodies a mode of difference that isn’t produced through a concept of oppositional otherness. Nor can it be co-opted back by being based on the concept of the phallus. Sara Pezzini and the Witchblade entity in the comic Witchblade provide a model of feminine power that is positive, distinctive, original and does not define itself against any masculine concepts. This is not to say that the actual narrative that surrounds and involves Sara, and the way she is portrayed at certain stages when compared with men, is not without its problems, but it does to a large extent overshadow these problems by concluding with a positive definition and direction for Sara. Metaphorically the Witchblade coincides with the feminist belief of women in general–their power may be thought to be “owned” by men but it can never be possessed.


Reference

Baldick, Chris. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 1993.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.

Grosz, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Shildrick, Margaret. “Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body.” Body & Society 2.1, 1996.

Wohl, David. & Z, Christina. (w), Turner, Michael. (p), and D-Tron (i). Witchblade Deluxe Collected Edition. Fullerton: Image Comics (Top Cow), 1998. [Collecting Witchblade v1 #1-8, 1995-6].

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. Routledge, 1990.

Part 2 - Notice the Difference? Eliminating the Feminine in Superhero Comics

Part 2 of 'Notice the Difference? Eliminating the Feminine in Superhero Comics' uses Baudrillardian theory to analyse the superhero comic Wetworks demonstrating how the phallicised female body is eliminated when it is used as a mirror that reflects male dominance and desire. The female is further not allowed to become a body due to her potential threat of castration (the vagina dentata and the phallic woman) which is eliminated when she is eliminated as female. 

Read Part 1

In the Image comic Wetworks the characters are covered by a gold bio-metalloid compound that’s like ‘having a suit of armour for a second skin… I feel as though it’s reading my mind and working with my body, making me stronger and faster than ever before’ (Portacio & Choi, Jun. 1994, 15). On initial contact the compound covers every orifice, one character having to fight desperately to open his mouth . This ‘symbiote’ makes the body smooth, shiny and enclosed, even the eyes. A goggle wearing character now finds them incorporated into his body. The Wetworks team walks naked and smouldering from their symbolic (re)birth by fire and explosion, their bodies completely covered and protected by the symbiote. Their sex differences erased and the bodies now ‘lacking’ nothing, they literally wear Baudrillard’s second skin becoming ‘more nude than nude’ and a phallic effigy at the same time.

The ‘nudity’ of the energy being superhero is best of all. These energy beings have no corporeal body. As Baudrillard writes, the corporeal body is–

denied in the interests of a second, non-porous skin that neither exudes or excretes, that is neither hot nor cold (it is “cool” and “warm”: optimally air-conditioned), with no proper density…and above all without orifices (it is smooth)…All these qualities (coolness, suppleness, transparency, one-piece) are qualities of closure… (105).

The energy being must have a suit, a second skin (their only one) to contain their ‘design(at)ed nudity’. As Baudrillard argues design(at)ed nudity–

implies that there is nothing behind the lattice of signs that it weaves, especially not a body: neither a body of labour, nor a body of pleasure; neither an erogenous body nor a broken body (106).

The suits could be any shape because these energy beings resemble Brigitte Bardot, who is ‘“beautiful because she fits her dress exactly”’ (Baudrillard 106). They fit into their suits perfectly. Because the energy being’s body is only a body because of their suit, their body is faultless. It has no gaps, no orifices and is completely smooth. These energy beings in their suits are simulacra of ‘real’ bodies but without the lack that comes with a real body. Like the Wetworks characters, the energy being is ‘more nude than nude’, lacking nothing and a phallic effigy.

Both aspects of the fantasised phallic ideal are covered in the depiction of female and male bodies in superhero comics. The first is the exaggeration of the ‘erectile’ legs in the female creating the ‘ideal’ long penis. The extra muscled legs and arms of male characters resemble ‘ideal’ thick and ‘veined’ penis. Although uncommon, some depictions have all three in one– a long, wide and veined leg/phallus.

In superhero comics the female body is incorporated into a system of phallic exchange ‘whereby woman becomes erect and man’s desire will be received in its own image’ (Baudrillard 103). The body of the female superhero is merely a disguised phallus which signals the homoerotic/narcissistic undertones of the superhero comic. This homoerotic desire is also present in mainstream media as Jane Ussher recognises–

The mass media encourages heterosexual women to desire masculine bodies, which are hard, lean and slim – at least in their ideal state. It is this that many women measure themselves against (and are certainly measured against in the media – those cellulite free thighs are very like those of boys; we may wonder whose fantasy is at play here, given it is largely men who create this imagery) (71).

Indeed, as Lynda Nead argues, representations of the female nude created by male artists not only testify to patriarchal understandings of female sexuality, they also endorse certain definitions of male sexuality and masculinity (283). In the case of the representation of female superheroes, the patriarchal understanding of female sexuality is not of woman as ‘other’ as may be expected, but of woman as mirror. The tough, strong, and independent female superhero becomes a mirror reflecting male dominance and desire. It is just as Baudrillard states that when woman is annexed to a phallic order she is condemned to a non-existence (104).

Eliminating Castrating Women

Barbara Creed argues in her book The Monstrous Feminine that the vampire’s fanged mouth is a symbol of the castrating vagina dentata (22). The Wetworks team leader, Jackson Dane, has a dream where he is attacked by a vampire of the “Night Tribes”, (the vagina dentata), and in typically feminised fashion is unable to fight back– ‘All he can do is bleed… and take the pain’. In a scene reminiscent of a rape, the vampire stands behind Dane snarling. Dane screams ‘SSS-stop! No more! PLEASE!’ The vampire replies – ‘Giving up already, my pet?’. Dane hopes his newly acquired symbiote will protect him, but it moves aside revealing his flesh for the ‘fanged monster’ (Portacio & Choi, Aug. 1994 23-4). Fortunately for Dane and reader alike, this is only a dream and could never happen for “real”. Still, this sequence demonstrates how the threat of castration could happen, impregnated as it is with the ideas of passivity, feminisation, rape and violence. In fact it says that castration could only happen through the male being passive and overpowered.

For Baudrillard, as with Freud, the fetishised object/phallic body part is caught up in the denial of castration. The phallic/castrating woman is mirrored in Klaus Theweleit’s description of the proletariat women who appeared in Freikorps literature. These rifle-women (flintenweiber) were depicted as cold-blooded killers, often in the company of several men (which obviously made them whores) and in no way could be trusted. Theweleit describes one image of the rifle-women that was so feared– ‘Hair flying, packing pistols, and riding shaggy horses, the women present an image of terrifying sexual potency. It is a phallic, not a vaginal potency that is fantasized and feared’ (73). This phallic potency also translates to the fear that the rifle-women have a concealed weapon (a gun or a grenade) under her skirt. The phrase that is of interest here is the phallic potency that is ‘fantasized and feared’, which plays right into the depiction of the female superhero – fantasised as phallic effigy, feared as the phallic castrating woman. But we cannot have both. They cannot co-exist.

The pervasive threat of castration embodied by the female superhero is eliminated by eliminating the castrating potential of women. This is done in a number of ways. In Wetworks the threat of woman as vagina dentata is eliminated through the symbiote’s ability to seal all orifices of the body (especially the female body) as well as protect the penis with its armouring properties. The threat of the castrating woman as a phallic woman is eliminated when her body is given male body characteristics. When she is phallusised she is eliminated as female by incorporation into a masculine ideal. Although what I am talking about here is not as extreme as Theweleit’s dissertation on the German Freikorps where the soldier seeks to eliminate the female and the threat of castration by reducing her to a ‘bloody mass’, the parallel is more to do with what he states as a ‘dissolution of the body itself, and of the woman as bodily entity’ (196). If the ‘standard’ female body is dissolved, it has no presence, no corporeality, and no representation. If, as Baudrillard theorises, the body has moved into representation, feminine specificity is thus eliminated, and the only representation that remains is that of the masculine.

To give the female a body of her own is to give her representation, to recognise her difference. Denying female representation denies her an existence, thus eliminating her, leaving only the image of the male.

Read Part 3

Reference

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 
1993.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London & New York: Routledge, 1993.

Nead, Lynda. 'The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality' In Segal, Lynne. & Mary McIntosh (eds). Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate. Virago Press, 1992.

Portacio, Whilce, (w,a). Brandon Choi (w). Wetworks. v1 #1 (Jun. 1994), Image Comics Inc, 1994.

---- Wetworks. v1 #2 (Aug. 1994), Image Comics Inc, 1994.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Volume 1.: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Polity Press, 1987.

Ussher, Jane. Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex. Penguin Books, 1997.