Thrown to the (Were)Wolves: Sisterhood, Vengeance, and Liberal Feminism in Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s Squad

Abstract

In Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s graphic novel Squad, protagonist Becca and her new friends at Piedmont High are not human adolescents but a pack of werewolves who must kill to stay alive and select teenage boys—“the WORST ones” (70)—as their meal of choice. The power of the pack’s “monstrous” bodies is a dangerous privilege and responsibility that Squad suggests is often misused to victimize innocents. The book critiques individualistic Western/liberal feminism—an ideology also critiqued by contemporary feminist writers—that encourages women and girls to gain power for themselves and then use it to perpetuate hierarchies of domination. Through an analysis of the figure of the werewolf and fantasies of revenge, this article suggests that both Squad’s narrative and its comic images guide readers toward an understanding of how liberal feminist ideology impedes collective empowerment. This article ultimately argues that Squad can be wielded as a potential feminist consciousness-raising tool for teaching about the ethics of different feminist ideologies.

1. Introduction

As I talk to the young women in my life about Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s Squad (Tokuda-Hall and Sterle 2021) and describe a narrative about vigilante feminist werewolves who feed on their teenage male peers, most are intrigued by the description of a novel that imbues its female characters with the physical power to enact bloodthirsty revenge on men who have wronged them. Indeed, at first glance, Squad seems to tempt its readers with the possibility that, in reading, they might engage in the vicarious enjoyment of a revenge fantasy. Laura Ruby, whose quote in review is the first to appear on Squad’s back cover, recognizes this when she writes that the novel is “for every girl who’s ever felt like prey”. I argue that the text deliberately subverts these expectations, pulling readers deeper and deeper into the vicarious enjoyment they seek in order to then confront them with the realities of choosing to become the oppressor rather than working to reject or break down oppressor–oppressed hierarchies. Laura Mattoon D’Amore (2021) defines the “vigilante feminist” in young adult (YA) texts as a character who “is nearly always violent, but not for the sake of dominating or taking power. It is violence against violence—a corrective action taken against those who harm girls and women” (4). Squad’s characters violate these boundaries, seeking a dominating power of the same kind they originally intended to resist. YA paranormal and fantasy texts like Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s Squad hold up mirrors to reality for young readers—especially young women—so that they are able to see more clearly the power dynamics present in their own lives. In this way, a text about vigilante feminist werewolves can actually be a tool used to teach readers about the necessary rejection of liberal feminist ideologies.

When Lola Olufemi (2020) writes that “[f]eminism is a political project about what could be. It’s always looking forward, invested in futures we can’t quite grasp yet” (1), she identifies herself as participating in a post-structural feminist ideology that claims the destruction of oppressive hierarchies is necessary for the achievement of collective liberation. In its introduction, “Feminist work is justice work”, Feminism, Interrupted (Olufemi 2020) notes that this achievement is hindered significantly by a more conservative type of feminism that has many different names: “mainstream feminism”, “‘boss girl feminism’”, “neo-liberal feminism” (3), and “liberal feminism” (4), to list a few. Importantly, the existence of liberal feminism divides feminists because it “clashes with a radical and critical version of feminism” (3) and in fact seeks to uphold such hierarchies so that certain privileged women—white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender, and wealthy women—can join or replace those at the top rather than participate in dismantling oppressive systems altogether. According to Olufemi, “[l]iberal feminism’s obsession with getting women ‘to the top’ masks a desire to ensure that the current system and its violent consequences remain intact… A feminism that seeks power instead of questioning it does not care about justice” (4–5, my emphasis). In seeking to create a world where feminists are unified in an understanding that activism must be guided by empathy toward justice, media that is marketed toward young women and girls can be a powerful tool for radicalizing young people to turn away from ideologies of hierarchy and domination and toward the ideologies of peace, equality, and freedom championed by writers such as Olufemi.

Tokuda-Hall and Sterle’s Squad (Tokuda-Hall and Sterle 2021) can be wielded in classrooms, book clubs, and online reader spaces as one such feminist consciousness-raising tool. This young adult graphic novel about a vigilante-feminist werewolf pack ultimately works to encourage its readers to turn away from liberal feminist ideologies and toward a more emancipatory vision of the future. The text thus participates in a trend of YA novels focusing closely on the subjectivity of young women, although Squad also questions the responsibilities of individual actors within systems of power. In the first section of this article, I analyze how Squad recognizes and expands the female werewolf’s traditional representation as a figure of repression through its racialized and queer protagonist, Becca. While authors such as Purdue (2016), Priest (2015), and Pulliam (2012) identify the female werewolf, when written sympathetically, as a vehicle for expressing frustration with the need to repress oneself in order to “properly” perform femininity, Squad emphasizes the futility of this performance through the figure of Becca, who is non-white and non-heterosexual and therefore is excluded on the basis of several identity categories from being able to embody the image of the “ideal” woman or girl. In the second section of this article, I expose how Squad manipulates perspective in its comic images and plays with power dynamics in its narration in order to first excite the reader about Becca and her pack’s vigilante-feminist mission and then to show the reader the gruesome and immoral realities of recreating violent hierarchies. In the third section of this article, I explore Sterle and Tokuda-Hall’s vision for a radical feminist future in which girls no longer need to repress themselves and perform an idealized version of femininity because the hierarchies that necessitate such a performance have been rejected. Becca’s choice to leave the pack and pursue a queer relationship with her love interest, Marley, presents readers with an alternative path toward happiness and satisfaction that is not dependent on the subjugation of others. In short, this choice presents readers with an invitation to think differently. I conclude by acknowledging Squad’s use not only as a tool for feminist radicalization but also as a method through which readers can indulge in revenge fantasies while also engaging with themes that emphasize the futility of enacted revenge. Squad’s subversive messaging, transgressive images, and hopeful vision for a radical feminist future make it a powerful literary tool for expressing the need for unified and liberatory feminist action.

2. The Werewolf: A Symbol

• In vain he attempted to speak; from that very instant
• His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted
• For blood, as he raged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter.
• His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked;
• A wolf,—he retains yet large trace of his ancient expression,
• Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid,
• His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of fury.
(Barings-Gould 1865, p. 10)

This translated passage, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, marks one of the first mentions of werewolves in recorded history. Barings-Gould (1865), a folklorist whose 1865 text The Book of Werewolves set out to collect such records, marks this passage as part of the story of Lycaon, King of Arcadia, who offended the god Jupiter and was turned into a wolf as punishment. Notably, the passage focuses closely on Lycaon’s body and emotional state, emphasizing the physical and mental trauma inflicted by his curse. As readers, we are made to feel sympathy for Lycaon’s “attempt[s] to speak” that are made in vain, for the “foam” on his jaws that represents his thirst and exhaustion, and for the emotion in his features that reminds both the reader and subject of the humanity he has not lost: his “ancient expression”, his “hoary… countenance”, and the glittering “fury” in his eyes. The tortured and distraught werewolf who is cursed with transformation and cannot reconcile his human and animal selves is therefore a feature of werewolf fiction that stretches back thousands of years. Marie de France’s famous lais, Bisclavret (“The Werewolf”) (de France et al. 1982), repeats the motif along with other famous (and more contemporary) werewolf media such as films The Wolf Man (Waggner 1941) and An American Werewolf in London (Landis 1981), as does Stephenie Meyer’s hit novel series The Twilight Saga (Meyer 2005–2008). In each of these texts, the reader is made to feel sympathy for the plight of a man-turned-wolf who struggles with a fate that forces him toward pain, violence, and isolation. Despite the over two-thousand-year-old strength of this motif, its appearance in werewolf stories seems dependent on one small but influential factor: gender. When the werewolf is not a man-turned-wolf but a woman-turned-wolf, the perspective and trajectory of the story usually diverge from the above description of the “typical” werewolf narrative.

According to Barings-Gould, the first recorded mention of a female werewolf is from an Ancient Norse tale in the Völsunga saga. The focus of the tale is the plight of ten brothers, who are murdered one by one over the course of nine nights by a fierce she-wolf who mercilessly kills them and devours their flesh. She is finally defeated when the last brother, Sigmund, under the advice of his sister, smears honey all over his face and in his mouth. The wolf stops to lick the honey, and Sigmund is able to take advantage of this moment of hesitation to kill the beast by grabbing hold of her tongue and ripping it from her maw. The translated passage from the saga ends with this statement: “it is the opinion of some men that this beast was the mother of King Siggeir, and that she had taken this form upon her through devilry and witchcraft” (Barings-Gould 1865, p. 21). Readers will note that, in this story, we are made not to feel sympathy for the werewolf but for her victims, and that any mention of the werewolf’s humanity or suffering is lost. In fact, this werewolf is not represented to readers as suffering at all but as insidiously welcoming her transformation in order to freely enact violence and chaos. Instead of a cursed young man, the werewolf in this story is an older woman whose allegiance with the devil precludes her from any sympathetic narrative treatment. Later werewolf media featuring female rather than male werewolves (a rare trope that is more common in contemporary young adult fiction), such as the 1913 film The Werewolf (MacRae 1913), follows this pattern. In these stories, bloodthirsty and irredeemable she-monsters callously terrorize innocent male victims. It is telling that in the Völsunga tale, the female werewolf is defeated when her ability to speak is violently taken from her; perhaps this tongue removal serves as a symbolic lesson in suppressing female power. While the depiction of male werewolves encourages an exploration of male subjectivity, the cruelty of fate, and the morality culpability of those who commit acts of violence under duress, female werewolves traditionally serve as reminders of women’s inherent animality, the danger of their unrestrained bodies/minds, and their therefore necessary subjugation.

Scholars who analyze representations of female werewolves in fiction agree that such figures are symbols of a gendered experience in sympathetic depictions or a gender stereotype in misogynistic depictions. Jazmine Cininas’s chapter in Werewolves, Wolves, and the Gothic (McKay and Miller 2017), “Wicked Wolf-Women and Shaggy Suffragettes: Lycanthropic Femmes Fatales in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras” (Cininas 2017), describes early women werewolves written by men as vehicles to express “anxieties surrounding the largely middle-and-upper-class New Woman, [who had a reputation] for destroying families and long-standing social and domestic hierarchies founded on gender” (37). Cininas, as the title of her chapter implies, connects depictions of female werewolves to depictions of and anxieties surrounding suffragettes, whose rejection of hegemonic male dominance threatened to emasculate British and American men in the 19th and early 20th centuries. She specifically notes MacRae’s (1913) film The Werewolf, mentioned above, in which an Indigenous woman transforms into a werewolf to violently attack a population of men. Just as the female werewolf in this film highlights women’s perceived moral inferiority and is a symbol of the danger of placing power in the hands of women, the images of suffragettes Cininas includes “emphasi[ze] the suffragette not only as threatening, but also as a retrograde human” (55).1 Melissa Purdue’s article “Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf: A Cautionary Tale for the Progressive New Woman” (Purdue 2016) discusses a more sympathetic depiction of the New Woman in a turn-of-the-century novel that exposes how the female werewolf can be reflective of women’s lived experiences instead of simply projections of misogynistic fears. Using the character of White Fell, Housman’s (1896) text The Were-Wolf serves to warn the progressive New Woman about the challenges she faces in defying gendered expectations. According to Purdue, “the story warns that the New Woman’s strength and deviance from accepted norms will be perceived as dangerous signs of societal decline, and that more conservative individuals will attempt to destroy her progress” (43). Importantly, Houseman does not present the turn to the New Woman as an “easy decision” (48) because it is accompanied by rejection from men as well as from other women who seek to find favor with men and fear association with social outcasts. As Purdue states, “the story repeatedly suggests that White Fell is not inherently evil but that society—particularly those invested in traditional Christian ideologies—views and reacts to her as such. It is the repeated insistence that White Fell is not ‘normal’ and that she poses a threat, and Christian’s ultimate physical attack of her, that finally change her into a true monster” (52). The struggle for women to be represented sympathetically rather than oppressively is one that defines the much larger category of texts that fictionalize women’s lives, and it is a theme that can certainly be observed in the sub-genre of werewolf fiction.

Contemporary young adult werewolf fiction largely works to express concerns surrounding identity for young women in the modern age, as Houseman’s novel does for turn-of-the-century women in 1896. Hannah Priest, in “I Was a Teenage She-Wolf: Boobs, Blood and Sacrifice” (Priest 2015), and June Pulliam, in “Blood and Bitches: Sexual Politics and the Teen Female Lycanthrope in Young Adult Fiction” (Pulliam 2012), each understand the symbol of the female werewolf to express the ways in which young women are pressured to limit and restrict their own identities in order to “properly” perform femininity. Priest describes this restriction as a “sacrifice” (144) of identity and claims that “lycanthropy is the means through which… young women’s identities can be understood, rejected, and transformed” (143). However, Pulliam, by contrast, claims that lycanthropy represents a repression of identity and serves as a warning to readers that “normative femininity is not the natural response of being female, but is a fragile construction that can be maintained only at a terrible cost to young women” (249). Indeed, lycanthropy metaphorizes the shamed and oft-repressed changes that children assigned female experience during puberty. Just as werewolves grow larger and hairier, are overwhelmed with strange desires and emotions, and participate in a bloody 28-day cycle, so too do human girls experience a similar transformation. Through an analysis of Annette Curtis Klause’s novel Blood and Chocolate (Klause 1997) and the film Ginger Snaps (Fawcett 2000), Pulliam exposes that “the trope of lycanthropy is used to explore how girls resist being cowed into a subordinate feminine subjectivity, which necessitates that they silence their voices and repress their desire for sex, and sometimes even food, and then disavow the resulting anger over being subordinated” (240). According to Pulliam, stories of female lycanthropy created for young adults teach audiences that “repressing emotions” and “denying the body in order to become normatively feminine” only serve to dangerously “stifle” “essential facets” of girls’ humanity (240). These narratives complicate ideas of agency and autonomy under patriarchy by exploring the social consequences of resistance. As Priest attests, “autonomy, while encouraging some degree of self-determination, is understood and mediated through a wider framework of grace, duty and sacrifice, as well as a sense of a ‘greater good’ that extends beyond personal choice and desire” (144). Unlike male werewolves, who are only made more masculine by their bestial forms, female werewolves are made unfeminine by lycanthropy and therefore are forced to choose between confronting the social consequences of embracing their monstrous identities or repressing themselves to be accepted by their peers and desired by men. Women’s inability to both express authenticity—if such a thing exists—and to win approval under the patriarchy is a struggle that defines coming-of-age for female characters in YA texts, and one that is poignantly represented in the figure of the female werewolf.

Queer desire, as represented in Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s graphic novel Squad, adds another layer to the authenticity/approval conflict expressed in YA texts featuring female werewolves. When Squad’s protagonist Becca starts school at Piedmont High in the novel’s first chapter, her peers immediately both racially other her and question her about her sexuality.

In this scene, Becca becomes acquainted with the school’s “queen bees”; these girls later reveal themselves to be werewolves and invite Becca to join their pack. All of the assumptions, suggestions, and inquiries of Marley, Amanda, and Arianna are reminders to Becca of normative and acceptable feminine behavior: Becca should “wax [her] upper lip”, should not eat “white bread” for its caloric nature, and should “get good grades” (Figure 1). As they grill her about her adherence to feminine standards of behavior and presentation in what is represented visually as an interrogatory cloud that surrounds Becca on the page, Marley also asks if Becca is “Chinese or Japanese? Or like, Korean or something?” (12). She further suggests that the group “set [Becca] up with Bo Chan… the best-looking Asian guy in school” (13) (Figure 2). Marley’s attempts to demystify Becca’s ethnicity and determine exactly what kind of “other” she is are quickly followed by assumptions of a normative sexuality and borderline anti-miscegenation comments regarding whom Becca should be sexually attracted to according to normative standards. Becca avoids a direct response to Marley’s final question, “[a]re you a lesbian?” (14) (Figure 3), yet readers see in the series of “flashback” or “memory” panels on page 15 that Becca has previously been ostracized by her peers for expressions of non-normative sexuality. The bright pink envelope in this otherwise-colorless memory serves as a symbol for the lesbian attraction that Becca learns to keep hidden—or sealed—in exchange for community (Figure 4). The smaller size of the speech bubble relative to Becca’s face when she answers Marley’s question and admits she has “[n]o boyfriend, anyway” (14) encourages the reader to see and hear Becca’s words as diminished out of shame and fear (Figure 3). Becca’s non-normative (non-white and non-heterosexual) race and sexuality are presented to readers at the beginning of the novel as aspects of her identity which make it difficult or impossible for her to meet the standards of normative femininity that determine a woman’s social value.

The intersectional identity of Squad’s Asian and lesbian protagonist Becca therefore serves to emphasize the symbolic value of the female werewolf as a tool to warn readers of the dangers of repression and the veritable impossibility, for most (if not all) women and girls, of adhering to the normative expectations of femininity.2 If white, able-bodied, cisgender, and heterosexual girls like the protagonists of Blood and Chocolate and Ginger Snaps struggle to meet the expectations of feminine presentation, characters who are marginalized based on their race, ability, and/or queerness in addition to their gender presentation are required to further repress themselves in futile attempts to align with a normative feminine ideal. Intersectional feminist writers frequently reiterate this message. In Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism (Kendall 2020), Kendall identifies a “good girl” as someone who “values fitting in and embracing the status quo”, then tells readers that she will never be able to “fit into that mold” because she would have to “cut away the parts of [her] that protrude in the wrong directions” (xi). Olufemi (2020), in Feminism, Interrupted, recalls witnessing over the course of her life “how black women were locked out of womanhood as defined by white supremacy and how anyone outside of those boundaries simply did not exist in the eyes of mainstream feminism” (2). In mainstream or liberal feminist spaces, Becca’s race and sexuality remain roadblocks to acceptance and to accessing power. The tension between who Becca is and who she feels she must be in order to gain acceptance and access community is mediated by her werewolf form.

Squad’s lesbian werewolves also participate in a Gothic tradition of queer monstrosity as originally described by scholars such as Jack Halberstam in Skin Shows (Halberstam 1995) and by Harry M. Benshoff in Monsters in the Closet (Benshoff 1997). Halberstam, in Skin Shows, argues that “the emergence of the monster within Gothic fiction marks a peculiarly modern emphasis upon the horror of particular kinds of bodies” (3) and that a deviant (queer) sexuality exists as the “dominant mark of otherness” (7). They go on to claim that the figure of the monster therefore “marks the distance between the perverse and the supposedly disciplined sexuality of the reader” (13). Halberstam and Benshoff, alongside other scholars in the fields of Victorian studies, queer theory, and horror studies, largely agree that classic literary monsters born out of the Gothic tradition, as can be found in Mary Shelley’s ([1818] 2001) Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s ([1897] 1998) Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ([1886] 1967) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, embody a deviant sexuality that necessitates their destruction. Squad’s protagonist, as a lesbian werewolf, is not only a monster but a monster-among-monsters. Becca hides her “deviant” sexuality even from the members of her pack and ultimately resists assimilation both into dominant society and the society of werewolves who seduce her with false promises of sisterhood and community. By bringing together two fantastic symbols—the female werewolf and the queer monster—Squad presents readers with a representation of the queer feminine experience that is defined by both the pressure to assimilate to an impossible ideal and the alienation from a society which perceives queer women as a dangerous threat to the status quo. However, in its visuals, its plot, and its dialogue, the text also participates in a project of reclaiming and reshaping monstrosity to fight back against oppressive systems of power by opening up spaces for difference and by making visible the possibility and potential for change in the way readers consider “monstrous” subjects.3

3. Bloodthirsty Feminists

Squad is, in part, a feminist revenge fantasy wherein predatory men are themselves preyed upon by Becca and her all-female werewolf pack. Rosemary Jackson, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (Jackson [1981] 1988), identifies the fantasy genre as one that is defined by yearning: “fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss” (2). YA fantasy, therefore, is a genre that seeks to fulfill the perceived desires of young people and to replace frustrating absences with satisfying possibilities. Squad entices its young female readers by fulfilling, with the fantasy elements of the narrative, their desires for power. This fantasy is not simply a fantasy of emancipation from oppression, but of experiencing the awesome power of being the violent oppressor. The text manipulates perspective in its comic images in order to first make this fantasy appear desirable to readers and then to show them its violent realities. Will Eisner (2000), explains that comic artists’ use of perspective can “manipulate and produce various emotional states in the reader” because “a viewer’s response to a given scene is influenced by his position as a spectator” (92). By shifting perspective between predator and prey—and blurring the boundaries between these categories—the text produces emotions in the reader that forces them to recognize not that one group should have power over another, but that power should be ethically used to pursue justice and not to enforce oppressive hierarchies.

The desperate hunger of Becca and her wolfpack to consume the flesh of young men exists as a metaphor for their anger and their desire for power over the male peers that they identify as their direct oppressors. Becca herself acknowledges that, until she became a werewolf, she “never understood… how close anger and hunger are, really… They can be hard to differentiate” (102). In order to convince Becca to join the pack, Arianna, Amanda, and Marley frame lycanthropy as an opportunity for their prospective member to satisfy her anger and gain both physical and social power.

Arianna, Marley, and Amanda promise Becca dominance, influence, and community when they tell her that being a werewolf will make her “strong”, “popular”, and a “part of something bigger” (73) (Figure 5). However, they also use arguments of injustice as leverage to convince her that the price of being a werewolf—the need to kill and consume male flesh—is empowering and righteous rather than unjustifiably violent and morally degrading. Arianna’s impassioned speech about the material inequalities of sexism, when she asks Becca whether she has “ever thought about how guys get away with everything, and [girls are] just left to fight over the leftovers” (74), suggests that seeking vigilante justice for all women by viciously murdering “creeps”, “jerks”, and “predator[s]” (70) is a noble cause (Figure 6). Becca is convinced to embrace lycanthropy because it satisfies a desire for an otherwise inaccessible power, and more specifically, for revenge.

Sterle’s comic images highlight the disparity between the pack’s idealized mission and its gruesome realities. Sterle and Tokuda-Hall’s aforementioned scene, represented in Figure 7, uses perspective in order to expose how Arianna’s emotional manipulation blinds Becca from the realities of violence. The two panels in the middle of the page feature close-ups of first Arianna’s angry face and shaking fist and then Becca’s smirking expression. In the backgrounds of these panels, readers see not the darkness of the evening sky but a blood-red color that mirrors the rage these characters feel. However, the final image on the page is of the pack, as human girls, looking down at the dead and partially eaten body of the boy they have just killed. Readers realize that the first two panels are inserted over-top of a full-page picture where Becca looks not smug but horrified, as she exclaims, “Oh god. Gross” (74). The extreme emotional shift that occurs on this single page is jarring, as is the sudden perspective shift from an extreme close-up of Becca’s face to the wider shot of the pack and their victim. In these moments, where the perspective of the reader dramatically shifts, possibilities for discussion (in classrooms, online, and amongst peers and family) are created where readers might interrogate the emotions that the text attempts to manipulate. It is only when Becca—and the readers themselves—cannot see the realities of the pack’s violence that the idea of it is able to sound and feel empowering and exciting.

Despite Arianna’s claim that only “creeps”, “jerks”, and “predators” (70) will be on the menu when the pack hunts, readers quickly understand that the pack’s definitions for these terms are loose enough to ensure there is never a danger that the girls will have trouble finding a meal. In the novel’s fourth chapter, the pack is depicted killing five boys over the course of roughly five months. In November, they kill a boy who they witness carrying a girl away from a party and into the woods. In December, they kill a boy at a party who complains to Marley about being in the “friend zone” (90) with another woman, and then becomes angry when he attempts to kiss Marley and she refuses him.4 In February, the pack kills a boy who is pictured leaning over Becca and then kissing her at a Valentine’s Day dance while she shoots a worried look at Marley—possibly implying this kiss is an unwanted advance. Marley then interrupts and helps Becca to lure the boy away with the promise of a threesome. The next time they kill on the page, the lines become even blurrier.

In the scene represented in Figure 8, the pack uses Marley as “bait” (102) and she targets a boy who tells her to “slow down” (103) and to “wait” when she attempts to kiss him. Rather than being a predator, this boy is very clearly preyed upon. Marley lures him away from a party and into the woods, where the rest of the pack is waiting to feed (reluctantly, in Amanda’s case). The boy’s shocked expression, his flushed cheeks, and his leaning away from Marley when she moves forward to kiss him might indicate a sexual innocence that should shield him from the pack’s attention and that narratively mirrors his innocence as a victim of the pack’s violence. This is a complete role reversal and perspective shift from the November kill I describe above; in this later scene, the pretense of justice is done away with as readers witness the pack kill only to satisfy their own hunger. Amanda’s comment after the boy is killed, “[s]o much for the ‘worst ones’ rule, huh?” (105), is met only with an order from Arianna to “eat up.” Becca’s narration, visible in the yellow text boxes, further identifies their actions as misguided—as driven by a blind anger rather than as taken in the pursuit of justice. The final kill of chapter six is an accidental one: Becca shoves Arianna’s boyfriend, Thatcher Lang, with such force that she kills him after he lures her up to his bedroom, attempts to kiss her without her consent, and refuses to allow her to leave. Despite all of the other murders in which Becca has participated, and Thatcher’s clear identity as a “creep”, a “jerk”, and a “predator”, she is horrified by what she has done and the pack is similarly shaken by their proximity to the victim and the possibility that this death will cast suspicion on their activities. Readers understand, based on the comparison between the pack’s reaction to Thatcher’s death and the previous murder the pack commits, that their moral degradation is complete, and their initial mission is wholly corrupted.

The pack’s attempts to desperately claw back power for themselves and to satisfy their anger by calling revenge “justice” are complicated by their own proximities to power as well-connected women living in a wealthy neighborhood and attending a prestigious school. This is evidenced in chapter six, when Arianna, Becca, and Marley are forced to stop hunting teenage boys amongst a new police inquiry into the deaths and disappearances for which the pack is responsible. They attempt to sate their desperate hunger by killing a “homeless” (143) man but are stopped by Amanda, who sees this activity as straying too far from their original mission.

In Figure 9, we again see a dramatic perspective shift in the panel images. The reader’s changing perspective of the mural of the giraffe on page 140 is representative of their changing perspective of Becca and her pack’s status as victims. At first, readers might expect that the giraffe—a prey animal—is meant to represent the pack, who is huddled underneath the animal almost as a calf would be. However, when readers get a closer look at the face of the giraffe at the bottom of page 140, they recognize its fearful expression—and their new understanding of the girls as predators is solidified by the fang Arianna flashes in the final panel on page 141. When readers consider that the giraffe itself is a large prey animal who has the ability to defend itself but can also be targeted by predators, they might then understand it to be representative of the men the pack victimizes. Depending on the context, anyone can be a victim or a perpetrator of violence. The pack’s violent attempt to take the life of someone who is so socially and economically disadvantaged by comparison, because these disadvantages make him an easy target whose life is not valued by the capitalist state, clearly establishes Becca and her friends as severely abusing the privilege of their socio-economic positions to maintain a violent status quo.

The sequence represented in Figure 9 illustrates that power cannot be understood in the black-and-white terms Arianna originally presents to Becca: boys/men have power and girls/women do not. The intersections of socio-economic status, race, ability, sexuality, and other categories inform an individual’s relationship with power, how they exercise it, as well as how it is exercised upon them. The dangerous assumption that women cannot be oppressors is tied to white feminist and liberal feminist beliefs that women enact feminism by taking the places of men and gaining power over others and not, more specifically, by exercising the power they have to further a mission of collective equality. Squad critiques individualistic, Western feminism that encourages women and girls to gain power for themselves and then use it to perpetuate the ideology of hierarchy and domination that patriarchal societies are built upon. The actions of the wealthy Arianna, whose father “practically owns all of Emeryville” (28), and her willing peers, who repeat the oppressions they pay lip service to resisting, are reminiscent of Olufemi’s claim in Feminism, Interrupted that “solidarity is impeded by… a refusal to recognize that women can be perpetrators of structural violence too” (142). Indeed, even within the structure of the pack, it is the wealthy, white, and heterosexual Arianna who rules, while Becca and Marley must hide their non-normative sexualities to maintain her friendship and Amanda, a Black woman, must endure Arianna’s constant dismissal. The concept and purpose of victimized girls enacting violent revenge upon predatory boys, at first presented to readers as empowering and exciting, is complicated when the text presents us with many different kinds of both victims and aggressors.

4. The Queerafter

Becca’s spiral into complete moral degradation in the pursuit of acceptance from her female peers is not without an exit ramp. The text shows readers a path away from the authenticity/approval conflict that initially causes Becca to befriend the pack. When Becca begins giving into her queer desire for Marley, both girls are presented with an alternative to the pack’s restrictive and destructive ideals and find the courage to embrace authenticity and reject approval without sacrificing their common desire for community. Their decision to aid in killing Arianna in order to cure their own lycanthropy and leave the pack is one that is made in the pursuit of a queer utopian future of the kind that José Esteban Muñoz (2009) describes when he defines queerness as “a structuring and educating mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (1). Muñoz insists that “seeing queerness as a horizon rescues and emboldens concepts such as freedom that have been withered by the touch of neoliberal thought and gay assimilationist policies” (34). Muñoz and Olufemi contend with the same problem of “neoliberal thought” in their works. Each theorist identifies fissures in progressive movements between those that wish to hold onto hierarchies and those who wish to eradicate them. By using the comic space to create a world that upsets heteronormative conventions, Squad participates in a project of what Frederick Luis Aldama (2021) refers to as “troubling the representational map” (3) in a space that frequently recreates and reinforces “problematic stereotypes and attitudes toward women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ peoples, and those differently abled, among others” (7). It is Becca’s desire for Marley that gives her the ability to envision a queer future on the horizon and inspires her to turn toward a path of peace and liberation.

Readers see Becca first embrace this radical vision of an egalitarian future when her romantic relationship with Marley begins. Becca’s turn away from the pack is a turn toward Marley’s acceptance of Becca’s authentic self. In Figure 10, Becca, while grappling with the dissatisfaction of her life with the pack, is shown approval by Marley not for her ability to adhere to a feminine ideal but for the genuine personality traits—intelligence and kindness—that Becca uses to connect with others. When she kisses Marley, the world is changed. Scott McCloud, in Understanding Comics (McCloud 1993), notes that “when the content of a silent panel offers no clues as to its duration, it can also produce a sense of timelessness” (103). Eisner states that “a wide panel suggests plenty of space on which to move—or escape” (Eisner 2000, p. 92). The glittery pink void that expands to fit the width of page 158 during Becca and Marley’s kiss is representative of the fantasy of a utopian queer future where the girls can exist apart from both the oppressive society they live in and the violent hierarchy that the pack has recreated. In Becca’s panicked attempts to explain why she has kissed Marley, she reveals that she is not sure of the emotions that have compelled her to participate in the pack’s mission any longer: “I’m like SO. Hungry?” (159). At first confident in the anger/hunger that prompts her to take part in killing boys, Becca now questions how this anger/hunger is connected to a repressed queer desire that, even within the pack, she cannot express. Figure 11, which contains the full-page panels that end this scene once Marley kisses Becca in return, recreate the “timelessness” of the pink void through their lack of both dialogue and sequence. In contrast to the smaller panels shown in Figure 10, the expansive space of the panels in Figure 11 is representative of Becca and Marley’s newfound peace and freedom—of their discovered ability to “escape”. The full moon outside, visible in Figure 11, is a symbol of their lycanthropy that lingers in the background and reminds readers of the work that still needs to be done before this queer future can be fully realized. Through embracing authentic expression, rejecting the pack, and finding community and pleasure with each other, Becca and Marley might find a true satisfaction, one that killing and revenge cannot provide.

Becca and Marley’s opportunity for true escape comes when Amanda secretly organizes a coup against Arianna with the help of another werewolf pack. The text’s recognition of Arianna as an enemy or villain who must be defeated reinforces its message that the boundaries of “victim” and “perpetrator” identities are permeable and unfixed. Arianna identifies herself as a victim of the patriarchy when she convinces Becca to join her pack, but also, as pack alpha, represents a liberal feminist ideology that seeks to recreate violent hierarchies.

Becca and Marley ultimately decide, once Arianna is dead, to cure their lycanthropy and escape the pack by eating the heart of their dying alpha. In this moment, Becca passionately states, “[t]his isn’t a sisterhood. This is bullshit” (187) and is pictured turning away from the other werewolves and toward Marley in order to kiss her (Figure 12). Becca ends the authenticity/approval struggle by completely rejecting approval in favor of authenticity to embrace an identity that rightfully threatens an oppressive status quo. Alienation from society is not something Becca needs to fear when a queer community with Marley exists as a place where difference might be celebrated and non-normativity is an avenue for pleasure and joy. This is reflected in Sterle’s illustrations. The angry blood-red backgrounds the pack are frequently pictured in are replaced by soft pink ones when Becca and Marley are alone in a panel together (Figure 12). Their escape is a necessary one, as the elimination of hierarchy needed to experience such pleasure and joy is incompatible with the liberal feminist agenda of the pack.

In the text’s final chapter, Becca and Marley skip their high school prom to watch the sun set over the ocean together in a final rejection of convention and hierarchy and in celebration of their new freedom.

Becca narrates in Figure 13 that she and Marley are “better than [they] were before. Better than popular. Better than perfect” (206). In finally letting go of aspirations of embodying idealized, normative femininity—or “perfection”—the girls realize that this image of perfection is severely flawed because it is incompatible with authentic expression. As Becca or Marley says (the speaker is not clearly identified), “it wasn’t us” (207). The image we see of Amanda at the prom in Figure 14—alone, angry, unsatisfied—is the image of who Becca and Marley would be if they had not broken free from the pack and all of its limiting expectations. The final image of the text, which stretches past pages 212 and 213 into a timeless eternity, shows a naked Becca and Marley together in the same vast soft-pink void readers first saw during the scene of their first kiss (Figure 15). This final image makes clear that the harms of repression, embodied in the figure of the werewolf, have been wholly exchanged for the joys of expression, embodied in this representation of queer sexual pleasure.

If their first kiss offered Becca and Marley a glimpse at what a utopic queer future might look like, Figure 15 shows readers that Becca and Marley have succeeded in creating such a future in this moment. By choosing her relationship with Marley and the authentic expression of her queerness over her loyalty to Arianna and the pack, Becca presents readers with an alternative form of resistance that is about turning away from and eliminating hierarchies instead of rebuilding them.

5. Conclusions

Even when a text presents readers with “perfect” victims and perpetrators, revenge fantasy narratives are a failed genre. Harming those who have caused harm never undoes or heals the original damage done, as Becca ultimately discovers. However, indulging in revenge fantasies can be a way to work through or to satisfy the underlying emotions that cause one to desire revenge in the first place. As Olufemi (2020) notes in Feminism, Interrupted, “[v]isual art, painting, sculpture, photography, and literature provide a space for us to test our limits” (83). The very act of creativity—imagining and creating something outside of the oppressive systems one exists in, and then sharing that image with others—can be understood as a form of resistance.5 In a 2023 study that sought to examine the gender differences in revenge fantasy experiences, authors Boon and Yoshimura (2023) conclude that “revenge fantasies may be one way in which humans safely and appropriately exercise their intrinsic desires for justice while avoiding the costs of harming others, destroying their social connections, and becoming targets of counter-revenge themselves… revenge fantasies could be a cost-free, creative, safe, and sometimes enjoyable way of managing interpersonal offenses” (435). What Yoshimura and Boon’s study also seems to illuminate is women’s greater propensity for engaging in revenge fantasies, perhaps because they are less able to harm others, their social connections are more fragile, and the possibility of counter-revenge presents a greater threat. In three out of the four categories of revenge fantasy identified by Boon and Yoshimura (direct/overt, direct/covert, indirect/overt, and indirect/covert), women are twice as likely to engage in that type of revenge fantasy when compared to men. The only type of revenge acts that men fantasize about more than women are direct/overt acts of revenge, and even in this category there is only a three-percent difference in these reportings (men’s 21.7% to women’s 19%). Furthermore, men are 14.6% more likely to be the target of anyone’s revenge fantasy. Reading about Becca, Arianna, Amanda, and Marley’s mission to enact violent revenge upon men may be a way for young women to both vicariously live out their own fantasies for revenge, and, through Becca, come to realize why the actual enactment of revenge does not heal trauma, satisfy feelings of powerlessness, or contribute to the realization of a feminist future.

Haen and Weber (2009) further explore the psychology of revenge, especially as it is felt by teenage subjects. By drawing on both individual case studies and trauma theory, these authors claim that “[t]he desire for revenge can be viewed as an attempt to counteract the powerlessness, shame, and isolation that the victim felt [during a traumatic event] … When children seek revenge against someone who has hurt them, they wish to disavow their inability to act… and instead experience the aggressor’s capacity to control the situation” (85). Victims wish to transform—as Becca does—into something or someone with the power and control they see themselves as lacking. Haen and Weber also acknowledge a gendered component to the experience of revenge fantasy when they note that “[i]n Western society, girls have historically been more frequently socialized toward being “good victims” than boys. As such, their responses to trauma have classically been thought of as being more internally directed” (86). With this context, readers of Squad can identify the figure of the werewolf as being not only an expression of frustration surrounding women’s need to repress themselves to adhere to standards of femininity but also surrounding women’s socialized impulse to accept their victimization and repress feelings of injustice or desires for revenge. In their own work with young people working through trauma and revenge fantasies, Haen and Weber explain that “[t]he ultimate goal of working through revenge fantasies is to help traumatized clients return to the stream of life, moving beyond the need for splitting, traumatized attachment to the perpetrator and dangerous impulsivity, better able to integrate their trauma experience(s)” (91). Squad’s narrative does not conclude with either forgiveness or retribution; instead, Becca finds peace, joy, and community in her new relationship with Marley. The text thus encourages its readers to choose authenticity rather than approval and to seek happiness rather than attempt to satisfy anger.

Squad therefore uses the figure of the female werewolf, traditionally representative of feminine repression, to explore the ethics of different feminisms in addition to the challenges of individual empowerment. Olufemi’s understanding that “[w]ithout the capacity to imagine… feminism is purposeless” identifies the fantasy genre as a powerful place in which feminists can use their desire to create a “vision” that their “demands [can then] spring from” (9) and can, importantly, share these visions for the purpose of feminist consciousness-raising. Just as the figure of the wolf is paradoxically linked to individual action (the “lone wolf”) and pack mentalities, Squad encourages readers to recognize that while individual empowerment is a goal to be sought after by young women, they should not ignore how the actions of their communities further or impede the collective empowerment of marginalized peoples. This is why Becca ultimately turns away from a pack that is focused on the individual fulfillment they receive from performing violent acts of “revenge” against men (representing the liberal feminist mission) and toward a queer future that is focused on authentic expression and the construction of a peaceful community (representing the post-structural/intersectional/radical feminist mission). Her individual desire for power is less important than the imagined possibility of creating a space where everyone might feel safe, fulfilled, and empowered to engage in their own version of authentic expression. In such a space, the pressure to perform femininity in a certain way and repress one’s identity in order to do so is eliminated. It is this space that Squad compels its readers to imagine, to believe in, and to strive toward.