Emma Frost Is the Original Shiny, Happy Homeschool Mom

The X-Men's White Queen has a lot to teach the homeschooling quiverfull movement, if they'll listen to her.

My non-comic book subscribers will have to forgive another X-Men post this close to that Nightcrawler one, but that post was pretty popular and, in any case, once I started thinking about Emma Frost as a sort of bizarro homeschool champion, I really couldn’t let it go. Sorry not sorry! Hopefully, I can bring all this around in a way that makes sense even for people who’ve never heard of Emma Frost until today. And if this post just isn’t for you, then I promise the next one will be X-Men free, probably.

In X-Men comics, mutants are an oppressed minority feared by humanity, and mutant leaders like Magneto and Professor X have very different ideas about what to do about that. Professor X recruits mutants to the X-Men as part of his project to seamlessly integrate with the rest of the world. Magneto recruits mutants to the Brotherhood as part of his project to subjugate the world. That was how it was all originally depicted in X-Men comics, and it’s about as simplistic as it sounds. Eventually, creative teams tried to insert some offensively shallow, unforgivably white MLK/Malcolm X comparisons to provide a real world analog to Magneto and Professor X. The less said about all that, the better. 

But in the ensuing decades, writers have gotten a little more nuanced at handling all this, exploring the shortfalls of Xavier’s dream and the merits of Magneto’s. They have also introduced a few other mutant leaders with their own visions for the future of mutantkind. One significant one is Emma Frost, the White Queen.

When Frost debuted as a psychic femme fatale in 1980, she had two purposes. The first was to indulge writer Chris Claremont’s penchant for fetish gear, not that he’d ever needed an excuse. The other, more interesting purpose came into focus over time, as Frost became less an out-and-out bad guy and more of a “third way” between Magneto and Professor X.

As headmistress of the Massachusetts Academy, her mutant students weren’t interested in eradicating humanity (like Magneto) or full equality (like the X-Men). Rather, Emma Frost saw human institutions as something that could be bent to mutant purposes, if only mutants could be savvy enough to infiltrate them. As the White Queen of a shadowy collective of wealthy freaks called the Hellfire Club, Frost is at her most compelling when she’s manipulating governments, private corporations and other capitalist institutions for mutantkind, supplanting existent hierarchies with her own loyal soldiers for her own ends. 

I thought about Emma Frost a lot while watching Shiny Happy People, and not just because she has the mutant ability to turn into a solid diamond (a shiny person!).