Women as Plot Devices: Women in Refrigerators

This is part two~! Read the introduction and part one ♡

The Women in Refrigerators name originates with comics author Gail Simone in 1999, when she and some fellow superhero fans began a website dedicated to discussing another strangely violent trope for women characters (isn’t that a cool origin story? I love when fan-made terms become part of the common lexicon). It’s another rather infamous plot device nowadays, but to summarise the origin of its name: it all began in 1994 [dream sequence music], when Kyle Rayner, the titular hero of Green Lantern #54, arrived home to discover that his girlfriend had been killed and stuffed into his refrigerator by the series’s villain. The website collated a list of fictional women in comics who had met similar fates in the name of plot, saying:

“Not every woman in comics has been killed, raped, depowered, crippled, turned evil, maimed, tortured, contracted a disease or had other life-derailing tragedies befall her, but given the following list… it's hard to think up exceptions.”1

Surprise! 

Image from Newsarama ♡

The Woman in Refrigerator is commonly an innocent female character who is important to the male protagonist in some capacity, and who is maimed, abused, brainwashed, or killed for the sole purpose of affecting the protagonist. For variety, this is also sometimes a child, or even an anonymous ‘good’ or ‘innocent’ woman. She is easily disposable; indeed, her brutal disposal is required as a plot device to spur a male protagonist to action, and to provide motivation and direction.

The previous Damsel in Distress trope is troubling in its reliance on a helpless, passive, threatened woman, and its assumption that men need to save women. The Woman in Refrigerator is an unfortunate extension of this plot device, devaluing a woman’s life and employing brutal violence against a woman as cloyingly self-righteous motivation for a male character to “avenge” her in some way.

Some links:

Here’s Simone et al’s original webpage and list. 

This article lists 10 of the mostbrutal, clear cases of Women in Refrigerators (ie, as the title suggests, “violence against women”) in comics. 

The Woman in Refrigerator woman-as-plot-device is lazy, silly, sexist, disturbing violent, and boring. Next!

The dreaded Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

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1 “Character List,” Women in Refrigerators, 2000, http://www.lby3.com/wir/women.html.