An Open Letter

On the Topic of Stephanie Brown

By Katherine Keller
April 1, 2007

Once upon a time in Gotham, there was a bright, plucky girl named Stephanie Brown. Her father was a third rate villain named Cluemaster. She donned a costume, called herself Spoiler, and set out to thwart his crimes. She became an ally of "the Bats."

She even became Robin.

She was fired (after being held to an unrealistic double standard) and set out to prove herself again. Her motives were pure, but the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. She was captured and suffered hours of brutal torture and still held true to the ideals of her father-figure. She died in his arms.

And Dan DiDio? Well ... he thinks she doesn't count, that she doesn't matter, that in the grand scheme of things Bat, she wasn't important. That she wasn't really a Robin.

The problem is, she's become much more than a mere Robin.

She's a very powerful symbol to many women, myself included.

Dear Dan DiDio,

On the matter of Stephanie Brown, there are so many things I'd like to say to you, I hardly know where to begin. But I have my degree in English, so I will begin with the tools I am most comfortable with, the tools of literary analysis and criticism. That is to say, I'm going to be sprinkling this letter with a few quotes from various chapters of Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, because it's a damn good book and so many of its ideas are applicable beyond the scope of literature.

When I rose a few weeks back and asked you at Wondercon when we would be seeing a memorial to Stephanie Brown in the Batcave, you tried to kick the answer over to Jann Jones, who promptly boomeranged it back to you. You responded that there were no plans to put a memorial for Steph in the Batcave because Steph became Robin "by her own resort," was never really accepted, died out of costume, and was Robin only for a short time. When two women rose and asked you similar questions at Wizard World: LA you replied that in your opinion, Steph was never really a Robin.

"Once the informal prohibitions have failed to work, what can be done to bury the art, to explain it away, ignore it, downgrade it, in short make it vanish?

Whatever these techniques will be, they will have one thing in common: they will be logically fallacious. And their fallaciousness — indeed their sheer idiocy — leads to a major problem in trying to talk about them, i.e., how can people actually believe such stuff?"

— Joanna Russ "Bad Faith"

Replace the word "art" with "girl Robin" and I think this gets to the heart of the matter of trying to compose a logical response to your aforementioned comments. They are so utterly devoid of logic (I mean, Batman is Batman by virtue of his own resort, as are most of the rest of the vigilantes running about the DCU) that I don't know whether to howl with laughter or be scared shitless. (Usually when I see such intellectually bankrupt arguments being made, it's by those who put the "fun," the "duh," and the "mental" into "Christian Fundamental", like the folks documented in Jesuscamp.)

It's not that I had OMGWTFBBQ-it-goes-to-elventy-one love for Stephanie Brown. I barely knew her as a character, I had only a passing interest in the Batbooks — rekindled in part by her elevation to Robin — but I've pretty much surfed back out now that all the elements that did engage my interest as a reader have been largely eliminated. But I do know that the considerable hype surrounding Steph's elevation to Robin did garner a lot of excitement amongst the female superhero comics fans I knew.

See, Steph became Robin, not Batgirl. Robin is the icon. Robin is Batman's closest, most intimate relationship. Robin is the heir apparent. Robin (whether adopted or not) is Batman's child. And I was interested in how the dynamics would change now that a father-son relationship had become a father-daughter relationship. But, alas, it was not to be. However, stunt casting doesn't change the fact that a girl had become Robin.

So, Steph doesn't matter to me that much a character, but she matters to me as a very powerful symbol. And unfortunately, that symbol is now one of how the contributions of women are systematically denied, ignored, explained away, and undercut in every way. Of how one standard exists for males (Jason Todd) and how another standard exists for women (Stephanie Brown).

"What to do when a woman has written something? The first line of defense is to deny that she wrote it. Since women cannot write, someone else (a man) must have written it."

— Joanna Russ "Denial of Agency"

Or, in other words: What to do when a girl has become Robin? The first line of defense is to deny that she donned cape and domino. Since girls cannot really be Robin, someone else (a boy) must have been Robin.

Because Steph's a girl and didn't happen to have the Robin costume on at the time she died her time as Robin doesn't count? Is that the message you want DC male and female fans to be receiving? Because, sir, it's the one you're delivering: the female doesn't count.

Or as "foomf" over on LJ very succinctly put it: If it helps, think of it as a black boy and what it would mean if Batman kept a memorial of every other Robin except the black boy. (And you might want to read Rachel Edidin's response, too. It's the absence of the memorial that speaks the loudest, and what that absence says is profound.)

Your extremely public and pretzelicious efforts to deny, undermine, and eradicate what for many women comics fans was a moving, cool, and empowering role-model baffles me, given that DC tries to present itself as progressive and is going to such efforts to court female readership with the Minx imprint of books. Yet, you seem so hell bent on alienating the established female superhero readership by turning Stephanie Brown in to the poster child for all the ways in which women get the short end of the stick. Are you hoping that we'll all skip off and go play in the Minx sandbox that's being created for us?

Because, if so, that's not a sandbox, it's a ghetto.

And you're extremely misguided if you think we're going to put smiles on our faces and rush on over to the place you boys in the big chairs have been nice enough to condescend to give us and rejoice in it.

I'll see you in San Diego. I hope I don't have to stand up and call you out again at a panel. Your word-salad responses on the matter are amusing, but not that amusing.

Batman: Hate Crime? — My 2005 exploration of misogyny in the Batbooks.
Girl Wonder — A confederation of sites exploring the depiction of female characters in mainstream comics.
Spoiler — Wikipedia page on Spoiler. Gives a detailed history of the character.