Everything Including the Girl: On Bisexuality and Batman
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| Title: | Everything Including the Girl: On Bisexuality and Batman |
| Creator: | Justine |
| Date(s): | April 24, 2002 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fan Fiction, Batman |
| External Links: | Everything Including the Girl: On Bisexuality and Batman/WebCite |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Everything Including the Girl: On Bisexuality and Batman is an essay by Justine.
It is part of the Fanfic Symposium series.
Excerpts
Someone was commenting on my little live-journal icon, a picture from Birds of Prey where Nightwing takes Oracle to the circus and they're swinging on the trapeze. "Isn't that het? Is that okay, if you're a slash fan?"
Gaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh! Sex police!! I HATE these guys! Yes, het is okay if I'm mainly into slash, and men's bodies are okay even if I'm mostly into women's, and getting married is okay, and so is celibacy, and any act of sex can be an act of personal power, okay? I mean, it isn't always. But any of them can be.
I want people to recognize Oracle on sight, because she's so amazing as a character, especially as a character for fen, in the way that Chloe or Tara or Sam Carter has become a character for fen -- the observer, the keeper of secrets, the woman with her own strengths and sensuality just bubbling under her skin. We like those chicks. Or at least I do. (And if you don't, that's okay too, because desire can be an act of personal power, when you control what you want and what you don't.)
So. The redhead is Barbara "Babs" Gordon, daughter of the famous commissioner, and yes, you pre-Crisis types, the original Batgirl -- much as Dick Grayson (Nightwing), her best friend/agent/weakness/lover, was the original Robin. Barbara got shot in the spine by the Joker -- and unlike many of the traumatic injuries suffered by vigilante types, she is not going to get better. She's in a wheelchair, and she can't use her legs. Period.
And no one would have blamed Barbara -- who had already left the vigilante business, who had already decided she was best able to help from within the system -- if she had just become a victim, a sorry example of yeah, that Joker really is a fucking psychopath, isn't he?
But she didn't -- she still had two strong arms, so she learned escrima and self-defense from her wheelchair. And she still had immense organizational capacities, a photographic memory, and a Bat-trained sense for crimefighting -- plus she was a librarian, on the Net at a time when it was still all in ASCII and had newsgroups. Barbara played her strengths, milked her contacts, and healed -- and with a dollop of transformative rage, she became Oracle, information broker for the entire Justice League. She knows more, about more, than anyone else in the DC Universe.
Her superpower is her determination -- nothing else. She's smart, she's capable, she gets the job done, however she needs to do it -- barring the Bat-Family vow to never kill.
Personally? I find that woman sexy. And worth writing about, and criminal to ignore.