MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In discussing the viability of a female superhero having her own movie, a popular meme made its way around the Internet: “DC/WB is all like ‘Wonder Woman’s too confusing for a movie!’ and Marvel/Disney is all like ‘Here’s a raccoon with a machine gun,’” referring to the funny animal character Rocket Raccoon in the 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy film. This comparison between female heroes and funny animals is not as off as one might think. Funny animals have long since graced the side of Disney’s fairy tale princesses, and now that that Disney owns Marvel, Marvel female superheroes come close to being the Disney princesses of the superhero film genre.

This presentation would examine the relationship between two characters in Guardians of the Galaxy, Rocket Raccoon and the female anti-hero Gamora, using three feminist theories. First, although Donna Haraway’s cyborg metaphor is often mistakenly literalized, the cyborg bodies of Gamora and Rocket dramatize Haraway’s rhetoric by fusing oppositions between power structures of ability and disability, hero and villain, abject and beauty, male and female, and so forth. Secondly, the Bechdel Test examines a film’s agentic representation of women and displays of gender equality. Despite passing the Bechdel Test, Guardians of the Galaxy also displays how female characters negotiate and reject male presence in a way that might be considered a failure of a revised Bechdel test. Rocket acts as a surrogate in this negotiation. Lastly, Laura Mulvey’s male gaze is subverted in multiple ways. In the remediation from graphic narrative to film, Gamora’s image is stripped of visual pleasure and the gaze re-directed onto hyper-masculine bodies. Most poignantly, Rocket Raccoon’s naked, furry, neuter but still male, cyborg body connects with another deconstruction of the male gaze where it is presented with repeated images of visually abject female bodies.