‘WONDER WOMAN HAPPY MAGIC FUN SWORD GIRL SEXY! SEXY! FIGHT! FIGHT!’

Abstract: In this thesis I explore the conceptual relationships between Parody, the body and space in via the writer Gail Simone’s version of the comic book heroine Wonder Woman. I develop a critical re-imag(e)ination of performativity, space and the body in contemporary mass culture via Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman. As the title suggests the thesis also elaborate on sexuality understood as a phantasmatic screen. I highlight the relationship between the Russian Linguist M.M. Bakhtin and the Belgian scholar Luce Irigaray’s concepts of mimesis and masquerade in order to unearth the conceptual separation that the parody achieves in the work of the Simone. I take Bakhtin’s idea of another’s speech and fuse it with Irigaray’s theories about the masquerade and mimesis. Two concepts that allow the body to be the operating crux of an advanced process were the concepts of space and sexuality can be described as intertwined. However first I explore the ideological driving force behind Wonder Woman’s creator W.M. Marston, and connect his intellectual project in the 40’s to Simone’s contemporary rendition of the same character. This connectivity then moves this thesis through the seemingly trivial kind of laughter produced by the parody as the operating concept in both of their work. Unveiling of the discursive regimes regulating, in this case – the Feminine. The Feminine, which is expanded on as a way to understand the projection of preformativity, this is in part put in to an understanding of using points in space as reference points for the hegemony. In were the mimicry of the feminine is used to expose a masculine phallocentric gaze. I also emphasizes the intertwined relationship and future potential of combining critical theory, in particular feminist theory, with the extensive work of M.M. Bakhtin who I would argue is largely over looked in contemporary research, and its implications on contemporary mass cultural objects. Gustav Thoreson