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Gender and especially the differences between 'men' and 'women' is a primarily socially constructed divide, created by a cycle of oversimplification and assumption that leads to expectations perpetuating these oversimplifications and assumptions. As stated in Chapter Nine of the Textbook, "Gender identities emerge in relation to perceived sex differences in society and culture, which in turn shape and even perpetuate those differences."

One step in the perpetual cycle of socially constructed gender expectations is depictions of Gender in Fictional media, with Comic books being a prime example of this. Since these action packed stories are targeted towards young men and boys, comics are inclined to create stories with a heavy bias towards men. They are known for portraying various male power fantasies, giving men extraordinary powers and vast/ varied stories while women -if they significant to the story at all- are often depicted as demure love interests, femme fatales whos only power is seduction, or the 'token girl'. These portrayals of women do not treat them like characters but instead objects for the male audience to ogle or disregard.

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The Claremont Run refers to sixteen years (1975-1991) where Chris Claremont was the lead writer of Marvels X-men comics line. Within this sixteen year period, he and his team wrote some of the most iconic X-men story lines of all time, the stories that defined the story of the X-men as a whole in modern times, such as the Phoenix Saga, Days of Future Past, The Trial of Magneto, and Lifedeath.

During the Claremont Run, we also got to see a change in the way that women in comic books are written. Instead of having a singular girl character with the occasional love interest cameo, Claremont introduced and explored a variety of women as main characters. Women that were considered powerful, heavy hitting members of the team that go into the front lines, women who's story lines centered around their own identities rather than their relationships with other men, and most importantly, enough dimension and nuance as characters that they shared equal if not greater narrative relevance and impact to their male peers.

There was also a significant diversity between the women of X-men. You have women of Color like Storm and Jubilee, openly non christian girls like Shadowcat, and Women with physical and mental disabilities like Rouge and Destiny. (He was also known for wanting to write a lesbian couple between two major women where they have a biological son together, but this was shot down by the publishers)

This allowed Claremont and his team to explore narratives of intersectionality, tying explorations of women's rights with multiple other minority struggles that cannot be addressed separately. "Without frames that allow us to see how a social problem impacts all the members of a targeted group, many will fall through the cracks of our movements." (Kimberle Crenshaw) by having a diverse cast of women, the exploration of feminism in the X-men comics is allowed to be much less supeficial and much more reflective of the nature of feminism in real life.

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Jean Grey was the original "token girl" of X-Men's cast before their group expanded after its international revival. As 'Marvel Girl' she spent the majority of her time supporting every other character in combat, not often depicted as powerful despite her telepathy and ability to move objects with her mind. She was used as a love interest often times, and peoples attempts to subdue or capture her were not because she was powerful, but because the other more powerful characters cared about her, so she acted as an effective hostage/sheild

This changed significantly in the Claremont Era with the Pheonix Saga storyline. With Claremont focusing in on her character, Jean Grey, goes from the supportive token love interest to a literal force of cosmic nature, changing her epithet to "the Phoenix" being Reborn in more ways than one under Claremont's writing.

Her character is developed further in the Dark Phoenix saga, which is one of the first times a comic narative writes a character going from being a good guy to being a bad guy. Jean gets manipulated, not because harming her would hurt the team, but because she as a character became an actual threat and major power, and the devastation she caused as a villain cements her as one of the most powerful X-Men of all time.

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Below is a list of just some of the main female characters during the Claremont era, and what made their stories compelling both narrative and in the grand scheme of comics.

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As the first Woman added to the X-Men cast after Claremont took over, Ororo's writing as a mutant woman of color leads to some of Claremont's most compelling character writing. Despite the very real dangers of her powers if they go out of control, she sees her abilities as a divine gift, and closely ties her pride as a mutant to her pride as a black woman.

During the Claremont era, she has multiple storylines exploring what being Black means to her, and how this connects to her identity as both a woman and as a mutant. The comic story line "Lifedeath" is considered one of Claremonts best works of Character exploration during his run of the X-Men, acting as a full character dissection of Storm and who she is without her powers.

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A character also original to Claremont, Kitty Pryde often takes on the role as the audience stand in for much of the Claremont era, making her a common fan favorite. Most of her storylines are far less fantastical compared to the others, leaning more towards the Slice-of-Life in genre. Multiple issues center around her experincing normal life that happens to have the X-men in it, giving the young intended audience of X-men a more grounded and relatable perspective.

The idea of characters role being that of anstand in for the more youthful audience is not unheard of in comics (robin and Jimmy Olsen from DC comics comes to mind in this era), but the the choice to have that role be fufilled by a girl was very subversive, as it effectively understands and is proud of the fact that girls will read and enjoy comics too. Also, despite being a "weaker" character she still is not a depiction of the 'token girl' role, since shes only one of many women in the X-men, most of which are proper powerhouses.

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Rouge started out as one of the villains in the X-men Rouges (hah) gallery, being the adopted daughter of the Shapeshifting villain Mystique. After a significant redemption arc though rouge joins the X-men and subsequently becomes their primary front line combatant meant to take on the biggest of the X-men's enemies along with Wolverine and colossus. Given her flight, super strength and ability to steal other people's powers and memories with a touch, She's one of the main extremely powerful mutants in the X-men team that is able to use her powers in proper physical melee.

Beyond her unique role in the X-men, Rouge also has a lot of story arcs about personal identity and trust. Her power to steal peoples memories and powers cant be turned off, forcing her to starve herself from human contact and leading to a lot of trust and self worth issues. She also has some harrowing mental health storylines as the memories thats shes taken affect her mental well being, further isolating herself from possible connections. These messy psychological storylines for someone that is a redeemed villain makes rouge into a very emotionally complicated woman.

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With these examples of well written women in the X-men series given the context and the comic's contemporaries, a fair question to ask is: Why the Claremont Run? Why did this comic series during this writer's career become much more progressive in both its writing for women and also in the other social issues it tackled compared to other comics? Is it really just because this one writer was that progressive for his time?

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In terms of the comics general diversity, the reasoning for that can be traced back to before Claremont. After Stan Lee stopped writing for X-Men, the producers and writers in charge of X-Men decided to appeal to international demographics, since the comic was not doing as well as its other Marvel counterparts. The plan was was to introduce a new set of X-Men characters, each from a different country that the comics could be marketed towards. This lead to an active incentive to make the cast more ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse, and for the writers to take writing these different forms of representation seriously.

Early into developing the ideas for these new international characters, the inital writers they planned on having for this new run of X-Men became too busy for the project, leading Chris Claremont to take their place as the lead writer, hence why the beginning of this international writing was called the "Claremont Era"

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In a documentary called "Chis Claremont's X- Men," Chris Claremont himself goes into his writing philosophy extensively. His writing focused on trying to humanize characters as much as possible, taking them out of the 2D archetypes they began with. He also loved delving into the intersectionality of the X-Men's Lives, how their status' as other minorities directly and indirectly affected the views on their mutanthood.

This extended to how he wrote the women in X-Men as well, having his own issues with portrayal of women in other Marvel comics. “Every team had a female character who was ‘the girl’ never ‘the woman’ always ‘the girl’ I figured ‘why cant we have more exciting people?'” (Claremont) He wrote the Women in X-Men with equal amounts of attention as the men on the team, and also actively pusehd to write more female main characters beyond a token girl. As comic curator Karen Green States, "Whenever he has sat down to create a character he would always say first… 'is there any reason that this character can’t be female?'"

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To say that Chris Claremonts progressive writing philosophy was the primary reason the women were portrayed better in X-Men would be disingenuous, however, especially since he was only one of the main writers in this era. The other most prominent writer during the Claremont era was Louise Simonson, a woman who worked both as one of Claremont's editors and occasionally his Co-writer (the other main editor of Claremont's work was another woman, Ann Nocenti) It was confidently stated by both Chris and other members of the documentary that Louise and Ann were vital to helping create the most compelling stories in the Claremont era. "They provided a perspective that was rarely available elsewhere”, Claremont Stated. Louise Simonson herself also mentioned that a major reason why their synergy worked was because of a mutual respect between Her and Chris

“The advantage that x-men built is that it was fundamentally the product of two people. Two writers, me and (Louise)” -Chris Claremont

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Crenshaw, Kimberle. The Urgency of Intersectionality. TED Talk, 2016, Accessed 2025.

Giddens, Anthony, et al. “Gender Inequality.” Essentials of Sociology, 8th ed., W. W. Norton & Company , New York, NY, 2021, pp. 262–272.

Meaney, Patrick. Chris Claremont’s X-Men. Performance by Chris Claremont, et al., Youtube, 2023, https://youtu.be/A_6qVaux1d0?si=sOY7y_VYB76ja580. Accessed 2025.