Abstract: The Armored Body

1) summary

Tank Girl is a comic book from 1988 featuring a seemingly emotionless, bloodthirsty, alcoholic and possibly insane yet somehow very sexy girl who joins the army in her homeland of Australia in search of blood and guts. She becomes outlawed from the army after they fail to give her any assignments of merit and decides to live in the tank and basically deal with what comes to her. She kills a pack of rogue kangaroos (after having sex with one of them, apparently) and a man who claimed to be her long-lost "bastard" father as a joke. Then she kills his cronie. There is no plotline to this comic and it has said to be a manifestation of women's growing power, especially in the British punk movement. Also, this comic was the brainchild of a man who was infamous for drawing huge penises on any piece of paper given to him (wikipedia).

Theweleit's text (and the foreword) talks about the absorbtion of fascism into the body, and how bodies were viewed by both the fascist ideology and by the self in the post-WWI German world. Theweleit concentrates on the Freikorps because he discovered a huge primary source from soldiers at the time. Theweleit's theory states that the fascists feared the feminine, associating wickedness with floods and "softness." They also feared the feminine within thsemselves and so idealized a sort of man-machine with no emotions and no mother. Theweleit argues that misogyny plays a bigger part in Freikorps sentiment than anti-Semitism.

2) key terms - pretty straightforward...

• sensuous anti-sensualism - preoccupation of the warrior with the perimeters of the body, a disembodied dis-sensuality

3) questions

1. Why doesn't Tank Girl have a name or a father?

2. Who's that guy that appears asking for Jane then terrorizes the tank?

3. Who does the comic strip ridicule? What does this reveal about the political and social ideology of the time?

4. What sort of values are applauded in the comic, if any?

5. Is Tank Girl portrayed as an ideal character?

6.Have diguised fascist ideals been transferred to American culture? Do we see masculine women and feminine men as "threatening," as Theweleit says of fascists?

7. How are gender roles in fascist Germany similar to gender roles in American pop culture today?

8. Why do fascist men fear pleasure? How is pleasure associated with Judaism?



Uhh... wow. Tank Girl is a hilarious parody of "girl power" and fascists were just pathetic...