Psylocke is Dead, Long Live Psylocke: On Body Swapping and Orientalism

Here we go again. In Marvel's current Wolverine-focused event, Hunt For Wolverine, writer Jim Zub is promising to put X-Men franchise mainstay Psylocke through another round of her perennial body swapping ordeal. From a leaked variant cover to #4 of the Hunt for Wolverine: Mystery in Madripoor mini-series and Zub's own confirmation, fan communities and comics journalists have discovered this plot point some weeks before the reveal. Before we delve into the torrid discussion surrounding the politics of body swapping (particularly in the case of Psylocke), let's first recap some history.

Psylocke, the telepathic, telekinetic mutant with a proclivity towards focused totalities and leather thongs, has had a series of debuts. Her first appearance, from creators Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe, was in 1976 in Marvel UK's Captain Britain #8. Long before she was identified as a mutant, Psylocke was Elizabeth Braddock, twin sister of Brian Braddock aka Captain Britain. Her US debut was not until 1986, in New Mutants Annual #2, and her debut as Psylocke was in Uncanny X-Men #213. Already, we can see that the character has a more complex history than most iconic superheroes, whose debut most often occurs in only one comic book. But, it only twists more from there, as we reach the crux.

What is the most common visage of Psylocke? I'd wager it is this figure, from the 90s, the hyper-sexualised Asian body.

Yet, the Psylocke who debuted in Captain Britain, and was later seen in Uncanny X-Men, was not Asian. Not just that the character, as sister to Captain Britain himself, hailed from Britain, but that the character was Caucasian. A mild-mannered, upper-class styling of femininity, that belied a hidden strength, comic book creator Alan Davis once compared her to Thunderbirds' Lady Penelope.

So, what exactly happened? As with all things concerning the continuity of superheroes, it's complicated. Put simply, Psylocke, upon anticipating tragedy would befall the X-Men, entered through a magical MacGuffin that transported her to Japan and rendered her amnesiac. A dastardly villain sees this as a chance to groom a new master assassin for his nefarious purposes. Psylocke is brainwashed and is then, due to an incapability to abide outsiders, subjected to bodily transformation. She comes into conflict with some X-Men, she overcomes her conditioning, defeats the villain and gets the happy ending. Only there's no such happy ending, considering her body is no longer her own, but that of a Japanese ninja. This new iteration of the character is confrontationally sexual, alluringly deadly and suddenly an expert of Eastern martial arts. Psylocke is dead; long live Psylocke.

There was also a later incident of retroactive continuity that posited that there was another character who Psylocke had simply transferred minds with. This is a complete logical mess and beyond the scope of this particular piece. Even if I had the space for it, I wouldn't want to delve into that matter because, quite frankly, it makes my brain hurt. Regardless, this transition from British body to Japanese happened under the pen of the character's creator: Chris Claremont. With fairness to Claremont, the questionable ethics surrounding minds and body are a repeatedly explored topic in his X-Men comics (many of a similarly problematic nature, including turning two other White characters into Native Americans) and he would later return to this character and revise the transformation into an Asian woman, returning her to her British body. After a brief period of disuse (she had been killed, but silly things like that don't tend to stick), Psylocke returned in her original body in Uncanny X-Men #455.

For some time it seemed like the British Psylocke was to be a victim of "hypertime", a term borrowed from Grant Morrison's conceptualisation of a DC meta-universe, where canonicity is determined by a readership's almost-democratic decision and doesn't adhere to what is strictly in texts. Whilst Psylocke had returned to her British identity, comic book artists simply refused to stop drawing her as the hyper-sexual Japanese ninja. After spending some time in flux, (textually white, yet aesthetically Asian) Psylocke would experience yet another body swap (courtesy of Matt Fraction) in Uncanny X-Men #508-511, this time reconciling artist measure and definitively situating Psylocke in the Japanese body. So definitively, in fact, that over the course of this story Psylocke's original body was mutilated and destroyed; a bizarre realisation of the idiom, "you can't go home again".

There are actually few enough differences between the renderings of the two ethnicities that you could get away with saying that Psylocke had always been, in some part, Asian. It would not be the most ridiculous moment of retroactive continuity in X-Men franchise history. Certainly, this is one solution posed by those who see both the problematic nature of the character's Asian body and the value of such a popular Asian character. Yet what is abundantly clear is that the moments of sexuality diverge with the change of ethnicity; the Japanese woman is afforded a fetishisation and sexualisation that the White, British woman simply never is. What's even more interesting here is that Psylocke did not merely go through the body swap and come out on the other side a newly sexualised character; she was always objectified, her modelling career backstory serving as an opportunity for male creatives to curate her for male audience consumption. What we then see are two distinct sexualities and femininities- both curated for male consumption, yet disseminated in separate ways.

I think it's fair to say that the femininity associated with the British Psylocke is privileged in the readership's eye. Her objectification can be considered a higher, more sophisticated cultural process than the comparatively crass and base depictions of Japanese Psylocke. You can see this in the distinct costumes the different realisations wear, but also in how the body is posed by artists. The Japanese body is almost always contorted in some unnatural way so as to always deliver some element of sexuality. The White body, meanwhile, is allowed some dignity in its objectification. Whilst still a conservative realisation of beauty standards, the White body is at least allowed to look human.

It is also worth noting that, alongside the new body, Psylocke gained new traits and abilities that had never been realised in her British form- particularly ninjutsu and an affection for all things Japanese, or, at least, all things Japanese by way of America. This is a woman who had been raised in a privileged, upper-class British household, with no feasible connections to the culture she had now become endowed with. The Japanese Psylocke had, for the swathe of the character's popularity, become the preferred reading. It is this version of Psylocke which is realised in cartoon adaptations and even in Olivia Munn's portrayal of the character in X-Men: Apocalypse. Her dated costume was criticised widely, but, to fans of the comic book, this was merely an apt adaptation of the source material. So the Psylocke of the wider consciousness is this crass, dated character of a Japanese superhero, yet therein lies the inherent danger of further meddling with her identity. She is known to be a significant Asian character and to obliterate her is a serious mark against a brand that focuses itself around sympathy towards identity diversity, if not identity diversity itself.

To question Marvel's fetishisation of the East is vital, considering the context of the recent promotion of Akira Yoshida (the alter-ego of white comic book creative C.B. Cebulski) to Editor-In-Chief; white people using Asian identities to promote themselves isn't just a textual phenomenon but a metatextual one also. What, then, does this return to Britishness and whiteness signify? Is it an attempt to remove the criticisms of authorial orientalism, or, perhaps, audience orientalism? Does Jim Zub seek to absolve Marvel of these issues or to simply allow fan communities to overcome this point of contention? After all, the constant re-switching and renegotiation can be attributed to a synoptic fan community, where the many (an audience devoted to multiple realisations of genre and character) interact with the few (the creatives actually involved with the generation of new stories) and all each proclaim themselves as arbiters of true representation. To me, though, I think there is something more profound and zeitgeistic at hand. Despite the surface-level diversification, wherein which a Caucasian character is replaced by an Asian one, we can read the Japanese Psylocke as actually endemic of the homogenising force of the 90s- the superhero comic book's "Dark Age". Where Psylocke had previously been allowed to exist as her own unique entity, complementing the make-up of the X-Men franchise in her own way, the onset of the 90s came with a clear, decisive mission. Everything has to be cool. Everything has to be dark. Everything has to be big. And everything has to be sexy. This new return to Psylocke's original body feels like a condemnation of the "Dark Age" design ethos, in a context where superhero audiences beyond the straight, adolescent male are finally being considered. By abolishing the Asian body, Jim Zub may also be abolishing the dehumanising sexuality associated with that body. Rather than to reconcile the inhuman, orientalist subject with dignity, the subject is to be replaced by the White: dignity present by default.

Then we are finally faced with the impossible question. To return Psylocke to Whiteness is to obliterate one of the franchise's most significant Asian representations, whereas to persist with the Japanese body is to likewise persist with the American fetishisation of Asian identities. With any new property or adaptation, it's an easy decision to just meld these characters together. Reproduce Psylocke as an Anglo-Asian character, from birth, and you side-step a lot of the concerns at hand. This does not, and can not, hold up in the ongoing, serial format of contemporary comic books. The format would resist it, fans of the format would resist it, and soon enough you would see a return to the status quo, proving any noble work done to progress the character moot. Only time will tell if Mystery in Madripoor can finally quell Psylocke's existential questioning for good, but, whatever the answer to this conundrum is, I think that it is clear that it cannot be found in the constant switching, re-switching and re-re-switching of bodies.

In a way, the answer means little. Such a fraught cultural issue benefits more from the question. The fictional Psylocke is no ubiquitous battleground for debates around orientalism in contemporary popular culture, but, rather, is a microcosm from which we can further scrutinise issues of representation at large.