Wonder Woman’s super impact on girls
Female superheroes provide powerful role models, documentary’s director says
Fourth- grader Katie Pineda says comic- book superheroines like the iconic Wonder Woman “inspire” her.
Pineda is one of the girls and women featured in a soontobe- released documentary called Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines.
Directed by Los Angeles native Kristy Guevara- Flanagan, the film traces the evolution and legacy of the popular comic book- character- turnedTV star, Wonder Woman, and “how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society’s anxieties about women’s liberation.”
Its world premiere will be at the SXSW ( South by Southwest) Film Festival in Austin, Texas, Saturday.
Guevara- Flanagan said she remembers how watching Wonder Woman on TV made a lasting impact.
“As a kid, nothing else was out there,” she told Postmedia News. “It was incredibly inspiring. I loved the physicality of it ... being adventurous, being the centre of your own story. She was a fantasy figure that really captured my imagination. Women and girls need strong, active, powerful heroes they can relate to.”
Speaking in an online sneak peak of her movie, Guevara-Flanagan added: “They don’t give up, they just keep fighting.”
Yet not all superheroes have powers, she qualified. “Most of them are just regular people, but they became something more, and that’s how they inspire me.”
It’s a lesson Pineda has applied at school when she gets picked on. “I just tell myself: Keep going, keep going ... . You can be more.”
The movie includes interviews with actresses who played comic- book heroines on TV, such as Lynda Carter ( Wonder Woman) and Lindsay Wagner ( The Bionic Woman), as well as comic- book writers, artists, and feminists like Gloria Steinem.
“They did not think that a woman could carry a show,” Carter says in the documentary. “Well, we proved them wrong and made a lot of money for the network.”
“As a little girl, Superwoman was the only female superhero, so she was irresistible,” added Steinem.
The film looks at Wonder Woman’s coming of age at a time when women “had to step out of the private sphere into the public sphere” during wartime, said scholar Jennifer K. Stuller. “The early Wonder Woman [ comic books] were some of the most feminist stories in comics,” Stuller said. “She believed that you didn’t need a man to take care of you. She had a crush on Steve Trevor, but she didn’t need him. He actually needed her.”
To view the film’s trailer and chat live with the film’s director and producer today at 9 a. m., visit www. vancouversun. com/ wonderwomenchat.