“Façade”: identity, performativity, and abjection of the female body in Sandman’s graphic short story

Abstract

The comic short story “Façade”, by Neil Gaiman (2010), published in the Sandman series, offers a powerful critique of the symbolic violence that shapes the female body in patriarchal societies. The trajectory of Urania Blackwell – a former superhero transformed into a state experiment – reveals the subjective void produced by aesthetic, institutional, and ideological norms. This article analyzes the narrative through the lens of feminist theorists such as Beauvoir (2012), Butler (2018), Irigaray (2017), and Xavier (2021), highlighting how the devices of the mask and the mirror operate in the construction of an abject, impossible, and performative identity. Urania’s body, at once indestructible and unnameable, embodies the contradiction of a system that demands women adapt themselves to the point of collapse. Not even death is granted to her without the approval of a male divinity. Façade thus exposes the limits of female agency under regimes of symbolic control, emphasizing the urgency of discourses that break with the grammar of exclusion.