By Laura Hudson
In the beginning there was just a name, but it was a damn good one: Bitch Planet.
From there, comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick worked backward, creating a feminist, sci-fi tale about gladiatorial ladies in space prison. It takes some of the most exploitative tropes about incarcerated women, tears out their sexist heart, and shoots what remains into another galaxy.
Although details remain vague in this week’s debut issue, Bitch Planet is set in a dystopian future where women who deviate from traditional gender roles are punished as criminals by a totalitarian government. Do something that gets you labeled as “non-compliant” and you might be exiled to the off-world penal colony colloquially known as Bitch Planet. DeConnick says the comic was inspired by the women-in-prison exploitation films of the 1960s and ’70s, a genre notorious for inflicting voyeuristic, sexualized abuse on incarcerated women—and one that has a complicated place in her heart.
“They’re packaged as though they’re really progressive, but the crimes against these women are meant to be titillating,” says DeConnick, sitting in a coffee shop in Portland, Oregon. “They set up these scenes with the intention of the viewer taking voyeuristic pleasure in the degradation of the woman, but then all is forgiven because she gets her revenge. It’s sort of the dictionary definition of exploitation.”
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