Mary Marvel [SEP] sex or gender
of Captain Marvel's alter-ego, Billy Batson. Like her brother, Mary has been granted the power of the wizard Shazam, and has but to speak the wizard's name to be transformed into the superpowered Mary Marvel. Mary Marvel was one of the first female spin-offs of a major male superhero, and predates the introduction of Superman's female cousin Supergirl (also created by Otto Binder) by more than a decade.
Following DC's licensing of the Marvel Family characters in 1972, Mary Marvel began
of a specific 'biological' sex within a categorical gender. The second wave feminist view that gender is socially constructed and hegemonic in all societies, remains current in some literary theoretical circles, Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz publishing new perspectives as recently as 2008.
Contemporary socialisation theory proposes the notion that when a child is first born it has a biological sex but no social gender. As the child grows, "...society provides a string of prescriptions, templates, or models of behaviors appropriate to the one sex or the