How and why have Tintin’s gender and sexuality been questioned?

There has been much debate over the course of Tintin’s adventures, about his gender and sexuality by many different readers and critics alike. In Mountfort’s (2020) article on topics of gender and desire in relation to Tintin, many critics have proposed several considerations on Tintin’s supposed gender and sexuality, including psychoanalytic criticisms to point out oedipal subtexts from different Tintin stories.

Objectively, Tintin’s sexuality has remained ambiguous, but has been criticized to exist somewhere outside of the heteronormative contexts. For example, one critic Mountfort (2020) cites, compares Tintin to Joan of Arc, as he exhibits feminine-like qualities of tenderness, being silent, as well as observant, and especially after meeting Haddock which, results in Tintin taking on a more passive role. These inferences consider whether Tintin is in a closeted relationship with Haddock, proposing ideas for Tintin’s sexuality. Furthermore, there is little to no female roles in Tintin’s stories, and women are visually scene as part of the background as bystanders, or part of a crowd, which leaves little romantic interests for Tintin in the heteronormative perspective.

Another point that is considered among Tintin’s ambiguous identity is that his stories are primarily fictional adventures for children, with Tintin supposedly being between 14 to 15 years of age. Although, his design was based on an actual journalist, Albert Londres, who was an adult rather than an adolescent. Overall, as Tintin is a fictional cartoon character, he does not have an actual biological age, which leaves many arguments about his gender and sexuality still up for debate.

In terms of sexuality, an example of Tintin’s homoerotic subtext can be found in Tintin’s The Crab with the Golden Claws, where Tintin and Haddock are both suffering from dehydration in the Sahara. Tintin has a hallucination of being stuck in a bottle of Burgundy with his head sticking out, signifying a cork. Then, Haddock bends over him with a raised corkscrew and the allotted speech bubble reads, “I’ll uncork it…”. Critics read this as Haddock symbolically penetrating and screwing Tintin in this scene, questioning the interchangeable gender roles, and whether Tintin could symbolically be bi- or pansexual. These criticisms along with many others show that Tintin is a more feminized character in comparison to Haddock. Mountfort (2020) also suggests that the term ‘male’ seems incidental to Tintin’s identity, as envisioning him as either a boy or a girl in his canon would make little difference to his depiction in the adventures.

Ultimately, Tintin’s gender and sexuality are quite enigmatic as he can be read as a boy or a girl, or as bi- or pansexual. Most of these criticisms come from the observations made on Tintin’s lack of ‘normative desires.’ His feminine qualities, and interesting relationship with Haddock also raise questions to Tintin’s persona.

References

Mountfort, P. (2020). Tintin, gender and desire. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Doi: 10.1080/21504857.2020.1729829  

In what specific ways is Tintin a forerunner of late 20th – 21st century transmedia storytelling franchises?  

In Mountfort’s (2016) review, it is said that Tintin has been recalled as one of the greatest global transmedia franchises of the early twenty-first century and quickly gained popularity in popular culture through its dependence on its spread over different medias. From its first success in the magazine Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century) as a strip cartoon, Tintin then got published into an album a year later in the same newspaper. This spurred Tintin from being a simple strip cartoon to a more novelistic form of media. This also influenced Hergé to create more fully plotted stories for Tintin which in turn made it easier to be commodified and more appealing to the public audience. Tintin also presented new aesthetics in its medium as Tintin’s first colorized debut, The Shooting Star was published. Colorization during this period of printmaking made the product a more “premium” product and elevated its appeal for the market as it cost more to produce. This marked a big transition for Tintin, from being a strip cartoon to a finished comic book. Tintin also easily became a brand that was merchandised across puzzles, calendars, cushions, etc, further increasing its spread over different mediums. 

Moreover, Tintin was published in many different forms of media such as albums, and feature film adaptations. Tintin had rapidly gained popularity and dominated the popular culture in Europe and is seen as one of the forerunners of late 20^th-21^st century transmedia franchises from its beginnings as a simple strip cartoon to fully fleshed out comic books. Tintin’s influence on popular culture encouraged its transmediation as Tintin became published in a range of narratives of film, comics, and more.  

References 

Mountfort, P. (2016). Tintin as Spectacle: The Backstory of a Popular Franchise and Late Capital. Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 1(1). 

What issues do his albums raise in terms of representation of ‘race’, and particularly ethnic and cultural stereotyping?

Historically, The Adventures of Tintin has had a troublesome past with its disturbing caricatures and depictions of various ethnicities, which can be traced back to the origins of Tintin in the early 1930s. In which, the original volumes of The Adventures of Tintin are heavily littered with racist caricatures.

In the volume Tintin In The Congo, originally published in the early 1930s, the native Congolese are caricatured as unintelligible and unsophisticated, displaying distinctly racist traits such as ‘juju lips’ (Mountfort, 2012). Additionally, the native Congolese only communicate through pidgin English, delivering lines such as “white master very fair…! him give half hat to each one! him very good white!” (Tintin In The Congo, 1931). Throughout this volume, Hergé frames Tintin as the white saviour sent to civilise and educate the Congolese. However, ‘Tintin In The Congo’ serves to promote the brutal colonisation of Congo in the late 19th century, that inevitably led to the death of millions of Congolese. Unfortunately, Hergé’s caricatures of Africans would continue to appear in later volumes of The Adventures of Tintin.

However, Hergé representations of different ethnicities in The Adventures of Tintin would begin to change in the mid-1930s with the creation of The Blue Lotus. The success of which can be attributed to Hergé’s newfound friendship and collaboration with a Chinese art student, Chang Chong-chen. Through this friendship, Hergé gains a competent level of knowledge and respect for Chinese culture which is then represented in the complexity and humanisation of Chinese characters and settings. While The Blue Lotus makes notable strides in its depictions of Chinese culture, it is not without its flaws. In particular, its depiction of the Japanese through the villain, Mr Mitsuhirato, as a pig-snouted and visibly subhuman (Mountfort, 2012).

After the publication of The Blue Lotus, Hergé, while not flawlessly, has been more cautious with his depictions of other cultures in his adventures. Additionally, Hergé republished earlier volumes of Tintin to address some of the troublesome content.

References.

Hergé (1931). Tintin In The Congo.

Mountfort, P. (2012). ‘Yellow skin, black hair…Careful, Tintin’: Hergé and
orientalism’. Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 1(1), 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc.1.1.33_1

1. What gaps are there in Hergé’s representations of women?

In The Adventures of Tintin, it is clear that much has been addressed and corrected on the issue of representations of race. Still, not much has been addressed on the topic of representations of women. Hergé explains why women are not expressed by saying that “Women have nothing to do in a world like Tintin’s. I like women far too much to caricature them. And, besides, pretty or not, young or not, women are rarely comic characters” (Mountfort , 2020). But this lack of representations of women causes problems as it is read to many public.

 First of all, in every adventure series, the woman faces come out almost invisible. Unlike men, women not only don’t get a chance to speak, but they are just used as a background. Women, for example, are visually behind the status of simple figures in the crowd in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Also, in Tintin in America, women remain background figures, limiting women’s agency by being divided into the domain of someone’s guardian and mother.

 Women are also divided into the realm of labour. Housekeepers, housewives and mothers are mostly portrayed as characters representing female labor. Furthermore, “Wives may or may not double as housekeepers, depending on their station, but they are depicted almost exclusively as homemakers, care-givers or otherwise domiciled”(Mountfort,2020). It limits the role of women in families and prevents women from entering the daily lives of a wide variety of men. Of course, it does not rule out women in providing them with career options, but by limiting the jobs they can have to nurses, flight attendants and assistants, this is also feminized labor. These factors, when viewed in the context of the times, were understandable in that the status of women was low, but were sufficient to create a reactionary and wave of feminism in modern times.

Reference

Mountfort, P. (2020). Tintin, gender and desire. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. https://doi-org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.1080/21504857.2020.1729829 

What gaps are there in Hergé’s representations of women?

Throughout Hergé’s albums, there are notable gaps in his representation of women, specifically in how little they feature throughout the series, and the limited character development they are given when they do feature.

In many of Hergé’s albums there is an almost total absence of female characters, and the only women we do see are background characters who do not speak (Mountfort, 2020). For example, in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, women are only seen as figures in the crowd rather than fully realised characters who interact in the storyline. In Tintin in the Congo, while we do see a few female characters speaking, they are just one-liners served to move the plot along, such as the woman who is upset over her husband being sick, or the woman who bemoans Tintin for running into her (Mountfort, 2020). Hergé justified his erasure of women in his albums when he said, ‘[w]omen have nothing to do in a world like Tintin’s. I like women far too much to caricature them. And, besides, pretty or not, young or not, women are rarely comic characters’ (Mountfort, 2020, p. 2). This is problematic in the sense that under the guise of liking women, Hergé’s lack of female representation is really doing more harm by relegating them to background characters with no agency. This attitude is known as benevolent sexism, which are views towards women that may appear positive but actually do more harm (Glick & Fiske, 1996). This is because these ‘positive’ views, such as idolising women in the domestic sphere or romanticising them to the point of objectification, still imply that women are inferior and need protecting, and that men have a duty to protect them (Glick & Fiske, 1996). While Hergé’s justification for his near erasure of women may appear to have positive intentions, they are still rooted in misogyny.

Another gap in Hergé’s representation is that when women are featured they are given little to no character development and are relegated to the domestic sphere. For example, female characters are often portrayed as wives, mothers, housekeepers, nurses, maids and flight attendants, all roles that are serving others, particularly men (Mountfort, 2020). It could be argued that this is in keeping with roles women were able to do at the time, however, this argument holds little weight when we see that the first woman to have flown in space, Valentina Tereshkova, embarked on this mission in 1963, during the same time that female characters in Tintin are given less exciting domestic roles (Mountfort, 2020). This limits the amount of development and fulfilment female characters can enjoy. While the men in Tintin get to go on fabulous adventures and enjoy varied careers, women are portrayed as extensions of their husbands with no agency of their own (Mountfort, 2020). They are not well-rounded, fleshed out characters that help Tintin on his adventures, but are confined to the ‘ordinary’ world while Tintin gets to experience the ‘extraordinary’ world (Mountfort, 2020).

When women are given more fleshed out characters, their character portrayal is hardly flattering. In Tintin and the Picaros, Peggy Alcazar is portrayed as a domineering shrew who bosses around her intimidated husband (Mountfort, 2020). This trope reinforces the idea that women who are assertive and in control are dismissed as being bossy, and that the men in their lives are meek and only listen to them out of fear, rather than because they want to be an equal partner. Arguably Tintin’s most developed female character, Bianca Castafiore, is given much more depth than other female characters. She extends beyond the domestic sphere by being a self-made celebrity opera singer, and appears in multiple Tintin albums (Mountfort, 2020). While it’s positive to see a female character given more depth and exposure, one problematic element is that she is portrayed as annoying, shrill and intolerable. Her singing voice is so high-pitched that it shatters glass, much to the annoyance of Tintin and Captain Haddock (Mountfort, 2020). While not every female character needs to be well-liked and without flaws, it seems particularly problematic that one of Tintin’s only developed female character is found to be a nuisance to the male protagonists, further reinforcing Hergé’s statement that women have no place in the world of Tintin.

References

Glick, P. & Fiske, S. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3), 491-512. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.3.491

Mountfort, P. (2020). Tintin, gender and desire. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. https://doi-org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.1080/21504857.2020.1729829