With the recent release of promo photos featuring Jared Leto as the Joker for the upcoming Suicide Squad movie, flashbacks of the trauma inducing The Killing Joke story came back to share the comic spotlight once again. The Killing Joke, for those unaware, was one of the more popular Batman based graphic novels, winning multiple awards and creating a controversy about the treatment of Barbara Gordon. This same controversy reared it’s head again with the variant cover of Batgirl #41 which rehashed Barbara’s traumatic ordeal of humiliation by the Joker.
In this story, the Joker forces his own traumas onto Barbara Gordon in an effort to deal with his own mental health issues by proving that anyone, even Commissioner Gordon, could be pushed to insanity under the right circumstances. Unknowingly, Alan Moore created a societal commentary on how men reenact their own insecurities and force them on the women in their lives, leading to the creation of very real abusive power structure that promotes a lot of the real world violence against women today. On top of these stories being an excellent example of the Women In Refrigerators trope, it teaches the young male reader that the quickest way to obtain their own empowerment is by keeping a women in a subservient state and disposable.
The Joker in The Killing Joke has flashbacks to his life before his creation as a villain. We see him with his pregnant wife, struggling to make ends meet and to pursue his career as a comedian. He made the decision to leave a well paying job for an unsure future at the expense of his wife and future child. The pain the Joker experiences is not only in losing his wife, but in the light of his own survival re-experiences the trauma. The Joker then experiences his original ordeal a second time as he survives his brush with Batman and comes out of the chemicals, finally becoming the villain we know him as. Stating that “all it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy,”the Joker admits that his plan of humiliating Barbara Gordon was to get to her father. However, after the mind rape of Commissioner Gordon and the sexual assault of Barbara Gordon, both come out in a better state of mind than the Joker.
Despite making it out better than the Joker, we are shown Barbara as an emotional, traumatized wreck as she wakes up on the hospital, while after the events, Commissioner Gordon, while shaken, remains calm and steadfast in his desires to bring Joker in by the book. Not only do we see Barbara as weaker, but we see her ability to physically function has been taken away by a man. This is extremely problematic for her character and results in issues she has to deal with for years to come. Of course she becomes the Oracle eventually, but this is essentially reducing her to a secretary in the superhero world.
The Joker successfully enacted his traumatic past by creating a trauma for Barbara and thus rendering her unable to be the person she physically once was. Just like our society today, where men actively work to cripple women in both their everyday life and the fields of work they persue. She is used in the Joker’s story arc as a tool for manipulating her father’s mental health. This is one of the main examples in well known stories that makes a woman out to be a prop and dehumanizes her character as an individual. On the variant cover of Batgirl #41, in case the viewer is not familiar with the homage that the scene is referencing, we see the Joker humiliating Batgirl (again) by drawing across her face with lipstick while she is bound in a sexualizing pose. Thankfully due to enough people speaking out this variant was not released, so Batgirl escapes the clutches of dangerous tropes this time but it does not change the fact that it did happen and that it took an outcry from fans to change it.
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