Questioning Chelsea Cain’s Feminist Agenda
June 10, 2019 Jamey Alea 0 Comments
It’s not breaking news that Chelsea Cain, author of Marvel’s Mockingbird, has seen her share of criticism lately for her new comic, Man-Eaters, published by Image Comics. Hailed by some as feminist critique, numerous aspects of Man-Eaters have also been slammed by critics for being insensitive to various groups of people. Cain has acknowledged these critics in the past, going so far as to publicly pledge to do better.
The very premise of the book — a mutation causes menstruating women to turn into dangerous were-felines — has been criticized for being gender essentialist and ignoring the existence of trans people, despite Cain’s claims otherwise. (It also features a plot point where estrogen is added to the water, which is uncomfortably reminiscent of real life fear-mongering about the trans community.) Additionally, more recent issues of the comic have featured (white) women in concentration camps and being forced to drink out of different water fountains than men, garnering criticism that she’s being hypothetically alarmist about things that have actually happened (and are, in fact, still happening) to people of color.
Read the whole article on WWAC! This is the article that almost ruined my career, haha. (Just kidding, mostly.) But the controversy over this was pretty big and wild and it got me really heated so I wrote this whole article about everything that had gone down and why it mattered. And I’m glad I did! Even though I got caught in the controversy a little, it felt worthwhile to lay it all out like this for people who were trying to catch up with why it was important. Plus, if you ain’t got haters, you ain’t popping.