Women in Refrigerators
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Type of site
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Comic book |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Gail Simone |
| Created by | Daniel Merlin Goodbrey Rob Harris Gail Simone Beau Yarbrough John Bartol |
| Website | lby3.com/wir |
| Registration | No |
| Launched | March 1999 |
| Current status | Online |
Women in Refrigerators (or WiR) is a website created in 1999 by a group of feminists and comic book fans, and more broadly a common comic book trope from which the website took its name. The website features a list of female comic book characters who have been injured, killed, or depowered as a plot device within various superhero comic books, and seeks to analyze why these plot devices are used disproportionately on female characters.
The term "Women in Refrigerators" was coined by writer Gail Simone as a name for the website in early 1999 during online discussions about comic books with friends. It refers to an incident in Green Lantern #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz, in which Kyle Rayner, the title hero, comes home to his apartment to find that his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, had been killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed into a refrigerator. Simone and her colleagues then developed a list of fictional female characters who had been "killed, maimed or depowered", in particular in ways that treated the female character as merely a device to move a male character's story arc forward, rather than as a fully developed character in her own right. The list was then circulated via the Internet over Usenet, Bulletin Board System, e-mail and electronic mailing lists. Simone also e-mailed many comic book creators directly for their responses to the list.
The list is considered "infamous" in certain comic book fan circles. Respondents often found different meanings to the list itself, though Simone maintained that her simple point had always been: "If you demolish most of the characters girls like, then girls won't read comics. That's it!"
Simone received numerous e-mail responses from comic book fans and professionals. Some correspondents reacted with hostility at the creation of the list and assumed a radical feminist agenda on the part of Simone. Some responses were neutral and others were positive. Additionally, arguments on the merits of the list were published on comic-book fan sites in early 1999. Discussions developed regarding the use of gruesome injury, death or depowerment of friends and acquaintances of heroic comic book characters as a plot device.
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