While it may be surprising in , this is the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film to have a female character in the title - Wasp is a woman. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige announced plans last month to have more female superheroes than male. It's a huge shift for a franchise that has previously been criticised for its lack of female representation. The Smurfette Principle typically describes a cast that consists entirely of men aside from one woman, such as Black Widow in The Avengers. Marvel had been criticised for the character of Black Widow being one of only two original Avengers to not have a standalone movie Hawkeye hasn't had one either - before one was announced earlier this year. See more stories and videos like this.

The male gaze is a term used in feminist theory to talk about media, often visual media like comic books, art pieces, movies, and television. Representation of women from the male gaze means that female characters are to cater to and represent only the fantasies of male authors and readers. But on the other side of that coin is the idealization of hyper-masculine bodies. The difference here is that when women are animated or written from the male gaze, they were only objects in their stories and not actors with agency.

David Ehrlich. Captain America is a virgin. Spider-Man is a virgin. Ant-Man is a loveless divorcee, and Hawkeye barely even gets to see his wife with her clothes on.

Before delving into the study of how the eroticized male super body is presented in the MCU , I briefly outline the current situation of women in the superhero fandom, with emphasis on the growth of female audience in the case of comic book blockbuster movies and how the presence of an eroticized male body might be a tool for gaining female audience. Traditionally, superhero comics are considered to be a site of male power fantasies, something that is exclusively meant for men. Using a circular kind of logic, editors at the major comic companies continue to produce sex object-heroines which appeal to a male audience. Conventional wisdom would then suggest that the superhero genre, the superhero blockbuster movie included, only caters to the male tastes, and has nothing to offer to the female spectator. Although female objectification is still prevalent, both in print and on screen, the change mentioned above is palpable.