Women in Refrigerators Syndrome is a literary trope where female characters are injured, sexually assaulted, killed, or depowered (an event colloquially known as fridging), sometimes to stimulate "protective" traits, and often as a plot device intended to move a male character's story arc forward. The phrase is used to analyze why such plot devices are used disproportionately on female characters.

History 
The term was coined by Gail Simone in 1999. It refers to an incident in Green Lantern vol. 3 #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz, in which Kyle Rayner, the title hero, comes home to his apartment to find that the villain Major Force had killed his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, and stuffed her in a refrigerator. Simone and a number of collaborators created the website Women in Refrigerators which hosts a list of works which they believe express the trope.

Related concepts

"Dead Men Defrosting"
In response to fans who argued that male characters are also often killed, content editor John Bartol wrote "Dead Men Defrosting", an article arguing that when male heroes are killed or altered, they are more typically returned to their status quo. According to Bartol's claim, after most female characters are altered they are "never allowed, as male heroes usually are, the chance to return to their original heroic states. And that's where we begin to see the difference".

Discussing the site in his book Dangerous Curves: Action Heroes, Gender, Fetishism and Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University professor Jeffrey A. Brown noted that while male comic book heroes have tended to die heroically and be magically brought back from the dead afterwards, female characters have been likelier to be casually but irreparably wounded or killed, often in a sexualized fashion. To support his claim, he cited the Joker shattering the original Batgirl's spine just for fun, resulting in her being written as a wheelchair user for over a decade. He also cites the torture and murder of Stephanie Brown by the villain Black Mask.

In popular culture
Courtney Enlow, editor at Your Tango, criticized the death of Kathy Stabler, the wife of detective Elliot Stabler in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, as an example of the "tired, sexist" trope.

Brian Tallerico of Vulture, when reviewing "The Whole World Is Watching", an episode of the 2021 live-action Disney+ miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, was critical of the death of Lemar Hoskins, a black person, as an example of racial, rather than sexist, fridging, to further the story arc of John Walker, a white person.

Deadtown
In December 2018, Deadline Hollywood reported that Amazon Studios was developing a television series called Deadtown, an adaptation of the Catherynne M. Valente novel The Refrigerator Monologues. The story centers upon five recently deceased women who meet in a purgatory-like location called Deadtown, where they discover that their entire lives, including their deaths, were merely in service of providing emotional backstory for male superheroes.

See also
 Comic book death
 The Hawkeye Initiative
 Portrayal of women in American comics
 Redshirt (stock character)

References 

Women and comics
Tropes