Making WonderWomen: Recursive Tendencies in Feminist Utopias

Making Wonder Women: Recursive Tendencies in Feminist Utopias argues that reduplications of patriarchal hegemonies exist in William Marston’s Wonder Women. Using several close readings of Marston’s original comics as well as three modern (2011, 2017, 2020) reimaginings by Greg Rucka, Grant Morrison, and Daniel Warren Johnson, this thesis highlights how the design of Paradise Island, the Amazons, and Wonder Woman serve to reproduce Rockwellian demands of femininity through the guise of sexual radicalism and the religious rhetoric of liberation through servitude. This culminates in the position that Marston’s feminist ideals calcified into pop-culture a confusing and muddled icon of white colonial feminism.