Rorschach Doesn’t Do Dirty Communist Liberal Gender: A Look At Gender Through One of Watchmen’s Resident Sociopaths

The impressions I hear most often regarding Watchmen are all concerned with its copious amounts of violence and sexuality, which is why I find it interesting that so much of the story is framed by Rorschach’s perspective. Though assuredly violent in his own right –nearly as much so as the trigger-happy Comedian – Walter Kovacs is possibly the least sexualized character in the entire novel. He wears a costume that’s anything but skintight, continually expresses disgust for most sexual evidence he comes across, and seems to be one of the few vigilantes who hasn’t slept around with a colleague or two (or anyone at all, really). Throughout the novel, Walter doesn’t have a set or expressed gender or sexual orientation. While other costumed heroes use their alternate personas to perform gender identities, Walter uses Rorschach to distance himself from any such identification.

Before discussing further what Rorschach represents, we should look at Walter himself in comparison to other heroes in the novel. To begin with, he is short, scrawny, and viciously unattractive, contrasting with other characters who serve as the epitome of masculinity. Ozymandias has disciplined his mind and body to the peak of perfection and has a fortune to boot; the Comedian is the incredibly violent and misogynist soldier boy; and Doctor Manhattan just defines power, period. Walter is strong and a capable fighter, but his fighting style is compared to that of a mad dog: a caged, rabid animal, lashing out indiscriminately (Moore ch. 6, page 7). He’s paranoid, fascist, and for the most part, completely without friends. Though possessing a male name and body, he pushes away any concepts of sexuality or romance one might apply to him. Whereas Daniel expresses shame and disappointment at his sexual impotence, one gets the distinct impression that Walter wouldn’t care either way if he couldn’t perform as a man. While other heroes both define and are defined by manhood, Walter could literally care no less about the concept.

Unlike the other vigilantes in Watchmen who very strongly identify as masculine or feminine through their clothing, Walter uses his costume to completely eliminate the pretense of gender. Though comprised primarily of men’s clothing, his costume is loose and layered enough to obscure any defining sex characteristics. Others identify him as male because the norm in vigilantism holds that a woman would dress in tight, revealing clothes, and to dress otherwise clearly removes one from that category. Rorschach designed his costume with practicality rather than performance in mind: a large coat for warmth and storage, shoes to boost his height, gloves to eliminate fingerprints, and a mask that completely shields his face. He doesn’t leave an inch of skin uncovered, giving him complete freedom when he removes his mask. He could be any race, class, or gender, but he refuses identification. The only time he willingly removes even part of his mask is to eat, and that is only done in front of those he explicitly trusts with his life.

Walter’s mask deserves further comment, as it was the only aspect of his costume that originally came from women’s clothing. The material came from a dress Walter took home and altered specifically so that “it didn’t look like a woman anymore.” (Moore ch. 6, page 10) Years later he adapted that fabric into a mask for his vigilante personality, named after the infamous inkblot test designed to gauge one’s interpretations of reality. Watchmen delights in the heavy symbolism (and irony) that comes from a moral absolutist donning a mask based on a psychological test that only works because every individual sees and reacts to the world in different ways. Readers can look at Rorschach and see the hyperviolent, physically male characteristics, or they can see that his mask is part of a woman’s dress and that the only non-neutral color in his costume is purple. Neither interpretation is the complete picture. Walter did not choose a gender, nor does Rorschach care which one people see; it won’t change how hard he throws criminals down an elevator shaft.

Part of what facilitates Walter’s gender non-identification is the fact that, as Rorschach, he heavily dissociates from his own body. There’s no mention of him holding down a day job to pay for his rundown, messy apartment, and one could easily assume that he mooches food off Daniel because he doesn’t have means to keep a stocked kitchen at home. Unmasked he looks dirty, unkempt, and a stranger to his own skin. He views his body as little more than a tool, much like his grappling hook, that he has to remember to keep fed and breathing so it works well enough to aid him in his mission. This is taken to the extreme in Antarctica, where he chooses to walk outside wearing only a trench coat. (Moore ch. 10, page 27) The final emphasis placed on his identification as Rorschach, not Walter Kovacs, is his repeated use of referring to his mask as his “face.” At one point he falls asleep with his mask on – a huge taboo in the genre – but merely refers to it as haven “fallen asleep without removing the skin from my head.” (ch. 5, page 11) Rorschach doesn’t have a body, so it makes no sense to Walter to assign his alternate persona anything related to a body – including gender.

Works Cited
Moore, Alan. Watchmen. New York, NY: DC Comics, 1986-1987.