For all the wrong reasons, The Killing Joke might well be the most talked-about comic in history. Since its publication almost 30 years ago, Alan Moore’s controversial graphic novel has been widely celebrated and often vilified. It certainly seems as if most comic book fans have an opinion on the matter. In the Guardian last week, Professor Will Brooker criticised DC’s decision to adapt The Killing Joke, which contains a scene where Batgirl is assaulted by the Joker, as an R-rated animated film. He also censured DC for starting to promote the film in the week that US student Brock Turner was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.
Here, Brooker makes his stand on moral terrain, rather than academic study. Not that there’s anything wrong with that as far as it goes; but it does silence one half of the story. Brooker’s polemic fails to acknowledge that there can be catharsis found in such representations; survivors can feel able, and empowered even, to speak out about their own personal traumas or identify with such depictions as a healthy coping strategy. I have written about this before in relation to Game of Thrones: representations of rape do not equal promotion of rape and can do important cultural work. As feminist scholar Tanya Horeck argues: “Images of rape function as the site of collective identification.”
There is no doubt that Barbara Gordon/Batgirl is the site of collective identification for many fans, and many of them disagree on how to interpret The Killing Joke. But as Brooker has written before, this is all part and parcel of “the democracy of interpretation” and there are a whole host of competing, but equally valid, viewpoints.
One such perspective is that the Joker does not sexually violate Barbara. Indeed, there is an interpretative dimension at work here: we never see the sexual assault, although it is definitely implied. That readers have interpreted it in this way, however, means that this perspective must be taken seriously. As Brooker points out, what we do see vividly is the Joker parading photographs of Barbara, unclothed and in a state of acute distress, to torment her father, Jim Gordon. It is quite horrific. It should be horrific.
In the wake of the controversy surrounding artist Raphael Albuquerque’s Batgirl variant cover in 2015, I began speaking to female fans as part of a larger research project to capture the thoughts, feelings and opinions of those to whom Batgirl matters most. One interviewee, Claire, an undergraduate student, describes her experience as a rape survivor:
I am a Batgirl fan. And I’ve been raped. Rape is a horrible, horrific, violent and traumatic event that happens to countless women every day. Barbara Gordon represents that trauma and is a way that some women can work through their trauma. For people like me, it shows that what I think, feel, and experience, is NORMAL […] I took comfort in seeing a fictional character suffer through PTSD in a similar way to how I have battled my horrible trauma for the last 15 years. Gail Simone’s run of Batgirl was comforting to me. Here was a kickass woman, a scholar, who had a horrific thing happen to her – out, functioning in her life in the best way she could. That she emerges from The Killing Joke as Oracle? That was inspiring!
PhD candidate Jessica, who was raped when she was 18, said: “The implication of rape in The Killing Joke may shock some readers, but it certainly doesn’t glamorise rape or rapists. Rape happens in the real world and it is brave of the writer to bring the issue to light.”
Looking at the internet during this period, one could see that this issue swiftly became a site of conflict. Writing for Time, in an article titled Comics Like Batgirl Shouldn’t Require a “Good Feminist” Seal of Approval, Cathy Young argued that “when feminist criticism becomes an outrage machine that chills creative expression, it’s bad for feminism and bad for female representation”. Albuquerque’s decision to pull the variant cover from publication did not, however, censor the material as some fans claim. Given that the Batgirl titles sell, on average, 30,000 comics each month globally (by contrast, the highest-selling comic title in 2015 was Star Wars #1, which sold more than 1m), the media coverage of Albuquerque’s cover pushed the comic in to the global spotlight.
What these examples convincingly demonstrate is that feminism is not a singular “thing” but, rather, a spectrum of perspectives and viewpoints. To wonder whether or not The Killing Joke – and, by extension, Albuquerque’s variant cover – is feminist or anti-feminist, is daft. It is neither one nor the other and is entirely dependent on individual interpretation. A complex debate is not an either/or situation; the democracy of interpretation means that we might not agree.
Although Brooker does not call for censorship in his Guardian article, he asks that The Killing Joke not be “recalled, reactivated and celebrated”. Superhero comics are not encased in amber, but perpetually open to revision – as demonstrated by the multiple retellings of Batgirl’s story over the years. As a metaphor for trauma, the repeated retelling of Barbara’s PTSD is quite striking and apt – but, unlike superheroes, real survivors do not have the luxury of reimagining their traumas. As my interviewee Claire told me:
How is that possible, to erase rape? Barbara has an eidetic memory! I am sure the millions of women (and men) who have been raped across the world would LOVE to erase the images emblazoned on their minds of their own violations. How dare a creative team try to hide, ignore and run from a character’s history. How dare they! I, like countless others, wake every morning, hoping this is the day that I’m not standing in Tesco and I get triggered – a whiff of a smell, a song on the radio, a snippet of conversation. I live with my trauma daily. It doesn’t always affect me; I’m a survivor most days, but on trigger days, I’m a victim.
In the 1970s, the feminist goal was to open up ways for survivors to speak out. As feminist academics Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray argue: “Speaking out serves to educate the society at large about the dimensions of sexual violence and misogyny, to reposition the problem from the individual psyche to the social sphere where it rightly belongs”. That people like Claire, Jessica and journalist Samantha LeBas are speaking openly about their personal experiences as rape survivors suggests that Batgirl might well be a catalyst for breaking the wall of silence. That they each provide competing positions on Batgirl challenges us to a proper democratic debate as well, rather than employing the gestures of the morality brigade.
And who in their right mind would want to silence that?
- Dr William Proctor is a lecturer in media, culture and communication at Bournemouth University.
