Ecofeminist control and planetary patriarchy in the graphic narrative Bitch Planet: Extraordinary Machine

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This article foregrounds a comics studies approach to ecofeminism by close-reading Bitch Planet: Extraordinary Machine (2015), the first volume of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s Bitch Planet comic series. The study analyses how Bitch Planet constructs an ecofeminist dystopia by drawing a sustained parallel between the simultaneous regulation and penalisation of women and the instrumentalisation of a ‘prison’ planet to which they are exiled by the patriarchal order governing Earth. Following a concise exposition of the theoretical frameworks underpinning ecofeminism and an outline of the text and context, the article analyses the comic by close-reading panels and narratives that foreground ecofeminist concerns. To do so, the article demonstrates how patriarchal authority seeks to control both women and the Bitch Planet through epistemic violence, gaslighting, ideological indoctrination, and physical punishment among others. Drawing on theories from Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Laura Mulvey, among others, this analysis examines how the chosen text positions both nature and women as subordinate and mere tools for men. In sum, the article demonstrates the ways in which the reciprocal operations of control and punishment accentuate the convergence of physical, psychological, and epistemic violence enacted upon both the women and the planet, which are rendered as mere expendable objects under the logic of patriarchal hegemony.