‘A Different Kind of Power’?: identification, stardom and embodiments of the military in Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman is a warrior, not a soldier. Those archetypes, so often fused in concepts such as ‘warrior masculinity’ (the traditional combat-oriented military masculinity that Claire Duncanson (2009, 65) has argued became complemented by peacekeeping and counter-insurgency masculinities after the Cold War), are opposed instead in Wonder Woman (2017), where the Amazon princess Diana confronts Ares, the kin-slaying god of war, across a Belgian battlefield during World War I. The film constructs its gendered binary of ‘virtuous’ (Der Derian 2009) and ‘excessive’ violence by contrasting two homosocial spaces: Themyscira, where the all-female Amazons train to protect humanity against Ares’s rage; and the twentieth century’s emblematic zone of total war, the Western Front, the symbol of the exclusively masculine, industrialised, endless warfare that Ares has imposed on the world and that Diana fights to overcome. Diana and her US pilot sidekick Steve Trevor suspect that Ares has embodied himself as General Erich Ludendorff, historically Germany’s strategist of ‘total war’ (Strachan 2000, 348), who has recruited the masked and ethnically ambiguous female chemist ‘Doctor Poison’ to create a terrible new weapon: to stop Ares and stop Ludendorff, Diana and Trevor believe, will end the war. Wonder Woman’s constructions of gender, violence and legitimacy, and its silences of coloniality, are irresistible to feminist scholars of security. But why, besides giving feminists something to do, would the producers of a film about a superhero whose character has so much to say about today’s gender politics choose to set the narrative in World War I? Partly because the rival Marvel Cinematic Universe has World War II. In 2011, Captain America: the First Avenger merged superhero cinema and the historical war film: heroic but once-frail Steve Rogers, transformed through ‘super-soldier serum’ into the finest physical specimen of the USA’s ‘greatest generation’ and its imagined military masculinity, leads a squad of Allied commandos to defeat the alliance of a Nazi officer (the disfigured ‘Red Skull’) and another rogue chemist, only to sacrificially crash-land, where his body is cryogenically preserved in Arctic ice. His discovery in 2011 binds popular geopolitics’ paradigmatic ‘nationalist superhero’ (Dittmer 2012), nostalgia for Rogers’s ‘moral purity’ (Brown 2017, 105) and the myth of America’s ‘good war’ into Marvel’s cinematic present (Vernon 2016), as it did in comics when the character, first published in December 1940, was revived in 1964. The masculinities of Captain America divide along axes of civilian–military and of perfection–monstrosity: the same transformation that aligns Rogers’s physicality