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The cinematic representation of Wonder Woman, released in 2017, was lauded as a feminist superhero film, featuring female empowering content in a multiverse usually dominated by males. Yet the film was deeply disempowering for women, engaging in many of the usual undermining tactics used within patriarchal storytelling to silence and restrict female agency.
This article examines how elements of patriarchal narrative construction and erasure of goddess mythological concepts within the film create a "pseudo-empowerment" Wonder Woman narrative for women by using a Hidden Goddess narrative archetype. The article examines and deconstructs the Hidden Goddess archetype, a construction designed as a patriarchal response to the power of the original divine feminine archetype in theology and mythology.
An analysis of the mythological concepts of the film is undertaken, contrasting it with the original Wonder Woman comic book narratives of the 1940s, as well as with ancient and modern mythological representations of divinity in Greek mythology. I also briefly examine other popular cultural representations of the Hidden Goddess to strengthen the argument of its purpose within patriarchal-based narrative frameworks and ideologies.
Using evidence from ancient and contemporary mythological studies, feminist theory and popular cultural analysis, the article argues that The Hidden Goddess is a subversion of the Goddess archetype and is designed to undermine female agency and establish women as "the other" within their own story genres, because it purports to support and uphold female empowerment.
The highly anticipated 2017 Wonder Woman film, written by Allen Heinberg and directed by Patty Jenkins, was lauded as a feminist superhero film, featuring female-empowering content in a multiverse usually dominated by males (Gibson 2017, Coogan 2017). Yet the film was, I would argue, deeply disempowering for women, engaging in many of the usual undermining tactics used within patriarchy to silence and restrict female agency. It is not empowering, nor feminist, but is instead an excellent example of "benevolent sexism" or what I refer to as a "pseudo-empowerment" narrative.
Peter Glick and Susan Fiske define benevolent sexism "as a set of interrelated attitudes toward women that are sexist in terms of viewing women stereotypically and in restricted roles but that are subjectively positive in feeling tone (for the perceiver)" (491): although not as obvious as blatant or hostile sexism, benevolent sexism creates...