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 the show’s creators incorporated 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.
There is a dearth of scholarship on this still-young character and her unprecedented pop cultural transmutation; 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 acknowledgment and celebration of non-normativity in many of its varied psychosocial configurations. Using a critical lens informed by several fields of scholarship, I undertake an intensive character analysis of Harley Quinn while mapping her metamorphoses across multiple media.
Drawing upon queer theory, disability theory, and postfeminist scholarship, I probe the character’s popularity and her unique translation across television shows, graphic novels, films, and fan-mediated creative spheres. I argue that the character is a prism through which audiences can situate themselves in close relation to Harley Quinn’s singular place in pop culture as a paradigm of particularly palatable queerness.
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