Harley Quinn (alternately known as Dr. Harleen Quinzel, the Clown Princess of Crime, the Joker’s girlfriend, and Poison Ivy’s best friend and occasional paramour) is a character in the DC comic book universe who has recently experienced a meteoric rise in exposure and popularity due to her prominent inclusion in Warner Brothers’ Suicide Squad. She has established herself as a fan favorite, cultivating such a devoted following since her inception in 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series that its creators felt compelled to incorporate her initial single-episode appearance into an integral series-long residency. She has since emerged as a perennial presence across almost all strata of the DC universe, garnering such audience and critical enthusiasm as to earn her own eponymous comic series. Despite this unprecedented transmutation across multiple media, there is a dearth of scholarship on this still-young character; most academic work exploring her multifaceted macrocosm is dedicated to psychological, philosophical, and sociological discourses on Batman, the Joker, and the larger universe they cohabit. In an attempt to rectify this disparity, I examine Harley Quinn as an unlikely proponent of a peculiar phenomenon: the acknowledgement and celebration of nonnormativity in many of its varied psychosocial configurations. Drawing upon queer theory, disability theory, and neofeminist scholarship, I probe the character’s enduring popularity and her unique translation across television shows, graphic novels, films, and fan-mediated creative spheres. I engage the character as a prism through which audiences can situate themselves within a uniquely dynamic manifestation of the third wave feminism movement and its emergent principles by arguing for her singular place in pop culture as a paradigm of a particularly palatable queerness. Using a critical lens informed by several fields of scholarship, I undertake an intensive character analysis of Harley Quinn while mapping her metamorphoses across myriad media.
