REYNOLDS-Richard-super2-dpaper

Richard Reynolds
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Icy white is the colour of all Emma’s most empowering performances. Teenage
Emma creates herself through her steadily more self-empowering performance of
her gender and sex. She becomes what Camille Paglia has termed a ‘psychologist,
actor, and dancer, a performance artist of hyper-developed sexual
imagination….’ 31 As Butler observes: ‘…gender proves to be performative …
gender is always doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist
the deed’. 32 Occasions for such performance are offered at every turn: at the
prom, at family parties, at a casino, and (most dramatically) when performing a
staged bondage video for her kidnappers, in an attempt to extort a $250,000
ransom payment from her father. 33 This is the crisis which provokes Emma into
using her telepathic abilities for the first time as a weapon, sowing distrust amongst
the gang of amateur kidnappers – who in consequence eliminate each-other and
facilitate Emma’s escape. Emma then collects the ransom money from the agreed
drop-point, which she uses to fund her own college education: the kidnappers’
payoff buys Emma’s freedom from parental control. Next time we see Frost, she
has transformed into a bleached blonde, and is completing her education at New
York’s Empire State University – Peter Parker’s alma mater. 34 At ESU Emma is
inducted into the complexities of both human-mutant and mutant-mutant relations.
When provoked, her powers are manifest in even stronger ways. 35 Frost’s
education, her emotions and superpowers come together at this point to form the
template of the future White Queen – and beyond.
Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon, Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen 36 have all used
Emma Frost as a key member of the X-Men team, and as the instigator of plotlines
which expose the emotional vulnerabilities of their other characters. But the
development which has embedded Frost at the emotional core of the X-Men is her
relationship with Scott (Cyclops) Summers, team-leader and successor-elect to
Professor Xavier. Morrison has Emma engaging Scott in sessions of telepathic
therapy (‘as the X-Men’s only qualified sex therapist’), 37 during which their
relationship blossoms – at the expense of Scott’s deteriorating marriage to Jean
Grey. Morrison explicitly links Emma’s telepathic powers with her performance of
both gender and sex, drawing out a theme which had been implicit in Claremont’s
original villainess. In New X-Men 139, Jean Grey enters Frost’s mind and finds
Scott already in residence, and Emma dressed-up in Jean’s Phoenix costume:
JEAN
I knew I’d find my husband here in your head, Emma.