Boudica, the Warrior Queen, as seen through DevianArt

The paper aims to investigate the image of the Warrior Queen Boudica (Boudicca, Boadicea) in contemporary pop culture through the lens of the website DeviantArt (®), providing valuable information about the countries and the gender of the creators, along with the possibility of studying the creative scene in real-time by artists who are most often not professionals but young creators and even more importantly, young female creators. From a general point of view, Boudica-the-Warrior is winning the battle in the other representations of Boudica and certainly over Boudica-the-Mother. But while there is hardly any difference when it comes to carrying weapons, this is not the case for the portrayal of aggression. Here, the rate is twice as high among male contributors. The difference is even greater for the sexualization of Boudica’s body. Several general trends observed for Boudica are also true for Cleopatra. Each is represented more often standing alone. Each is more often described as a powerful embodiment of strong women: in arms for Boudica, with felines for Cleopatra. And in each case, their images have been simplified in order to be understood by large audiences. A sexualized Egyptian (i.e. pharaonic) woman is now necessarily Cleopatra. The same holds true for Boudica: a warrior woman with red hair and blue paint on her visage seems only to refer to her

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Cleopatra · Human sexuality · Literature · Sexualization · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Digital Games and Media · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · History