A good bit of background on Kate in today's issue. A friend of mine wrote his Master's thesis on representations of trauma in female superheroes, and he looked specifically at Batwoman as a way of thinking through reactions to trauma. Everyone in Gotham is traumatized. That should be clear to even the most casual of Bat-fans. To throw yourself at the kinds of monsters that prowl those streets, you have to be damaged in some way. Though said throwing is also a way of addressing said damage.
There hasn't been much on Kate's life outside of the Bat in the last few issues. We do have an interesting moment in flashback where Kate worries that her twin sister (!) is telling a boy that Kate likes him. She stresses that she doesn't even. It's not blatant, but it puts me in mind of when those sorts of thoughts start to cross one's mind. I've read many reports where gay people have said they'd known from a very early age. I don't know how early early is, but I probably started having inklings around 11 or 12. I could just never quite understand why anyone would limit themselves based on gender. Weren't we always told it's what's on the inside that counts?
We'll take a break from Detective Comics for a bit, though we will return to Ms. Kane's adventures later in the month. Tomorrow we'll have a look at some other badass gay icons.
More to come...
(Edit: I was thinking that I didn't really address the idea of trauma in this comic very well, and it's such an important piece of the puzzle that is Kate Kane. It's definitely not my strong suit from a theoretical perspective, so take any of this with a grain of salt! We'll see her striving for an ordered existence in the military, one that focusses her hurt until that existence clashes with her sense of what is right. And then she sees a symbol - Batman. She takes up that symbol to channel the pain of what she went through into something just. What's important about Kate's story is that it doesn't come out of the Batman story, in the way that Robin or Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) do, nor is it a story that serves to solely push forward Batman's story. It is a story that comes to the Batman story, a character with enough similarity of purpose to Batman's mission that she too comes to emblematize what it is that Batman does. In Kate's story we get a perspective on the difference between law and justice from a vantage that the Bat-titles, in my limited knowledge of them, rarely do: that of the military. There's a clash coming between Kate and her father that will touch on this, and I think we'll have a bit more to think about when we return to the title, as the final pages of this issue feature Batwoman testing some of Alice's DNA for...well. That would be telling.)
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