Recovering The Radical Promise Of Superheroes

Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the superhero world and beyond, much is made of the genre's utopian and dystopian landscapes, queer identity-play, and transforming bodies, but might it not be the case that the genre's overblown normative framing, or representation, serves to muzzle, rather than express, its protagonists' radical promise? Why, when set against otherwise unbounded, and often extreme, transformation-human to machine, human to animal, human to god-are certain categories seemingly untouchable? Why does this speculative genre routinely fail to fully speculate about other worlds and ways of being in those worlds? For all their nonconformity, superhero stories do not live up to the idea of a radical genre, in look, feel, or tone. The mainstream American superhero genre, and its surrounding discourses, tells and facilitates an astonishingly seamless tale of opposing ideologies. But how? Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds serves a speculative response, detailing not so much a hunt for genre meaning as a trip through a genre's meaningscape. Looking anew at superhero meaning-making practices allows a distinct way of thinking about and describing the creative, formal, and ideological conditions of the genre and its protagonists, one removed from corralling binaries, one foregrounding the idea of a synergy-often unseen, uneasy, and even hostile-between official and unofficial agents of superhero meaning and one reframing familiar questions: What kinds of meaning do superhero texts engender? How is this meaning made? By whom and under what conditions? What processes and practices inform, regulate, and extend superhero meaning? And finally, superhero narratives present a new question: How might we reimagine its agents, surfaces, and spaces? Centering the experiences and practices of excluded and marginalized superhero fans, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes reveals that genre meaning is not lodged in one place or another, neither in its official creators or fans, nor in "black and white" conservatism or in a "rainbow" of progressive possibilities. Nor is it even located somewhere in the in-between; it is instead better conceived of as an antagonistic, in-process nexus of meaning undergirded by systems of power. Ellen Kirkpatrick, based in northern Ireland, is an activist-writer with a PhD in Cultural Studies. In her work, she writes about activism, pop culture, fan cultures, and the transformative power of storytelling. She has published work in a range of academic journals and media outlets and her writings and work can be found at The Break and on Twitter @elk_dash.

Superheroes and Masculinity examines how heteropatriarchal representations of gender are both perpetuated and challenged within the superhero genre. This collection critiques stereotypical portrayals of hegemonic masculinity and explores queer alternatives to such formulations within superhero comics, film, and television.

Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men explores the changing depiction of superheroes from the comic books of the 1930s to the cinematic present. In this anthology, scholars from a variety of disciplines â " including history, cultural studies, Latin American studies, film studies, and English â " examine the superheroâ (TM)s cultural history in North America with attention to particular stories and to the historical contexts in which those narratives appeared. Enduring comic book characters from DC and Marvel Comics, including Superman, Iron Man, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Avengers, are examined, along with lesser-known Canadian, Latino, and African-American superheroes. With a sweep of characters ranging from the Pulp Era to recent cinematic adaptations, and employing a variety of analytical frameworks, this collection offers new insights for scholars, students, and fans of the superhero genre. The anthology comprises three chronologically-divided sections corresponding to the well-established distinction in comics of the Golden Age, Silver Age, and Modern Age. Section I, â oeDefending the American Wayâ , connects the emergence of the new superhero genre to the social, political, and economic issues of the Progressive Era, the Great Depression, and World War II. Section II, â oeCrisis of Consensusâ , examines the rebirth and evolution of the superhero comic in the context of Cold War anxiety. Section III, â oeThe Modern Ageâ , explores the ongoing development of the superhero in the post-Cold War world, with a narrowed but more sophisticated comic book readership and, ultimately, an expanded new audience in other media.

Finding the superhero genre in need of further investigation from philosophical standpoints that value excess as a creative drive, rather than denigrate it as a problem to be resolved, this book opens up discussions that highlight different approaches to 'the creative excess of being' as expressed through the genre. While superheroes are an everyday, culturally dominant phenomena, philosophical methods and investigations have a reputation for lofty superiority. Across thirteen chapters, this book facilitates a collision between the superhero genre and the discipline of philosophy, resulting in a voyage of exploration where each illuminates the other. The contributions in this book range from new voices to recognized scholars, offering superhero studies a set of critical interventions that are unusual, conceptually diverse, theoretically grounded and varied in practice. These chapters consider 'excessive' traits of superheroes against schools of thought that have attempted to conceptualize and understand excess by analysing texts and figures across a variety of mediums, such as The Fantastic Four, Captain America, The Vision, Logan, Black Panther and Super Hero Girls. With its unique approach to the superhero genre, this book will be an invaluable read for students and scholars working on comic studies, transmedia studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and superhero studies.

A history of comic books from the 1930s to 9/11.

How fantasy meets reality as popular culture evolves and ignites postwar gender, sexual, and race revolutions. 2017 The Association for the Studies of the Present Book Prize Finalist Mention, 2017 Lora Romero First Book Award Presented by the American Studies Association Winner of the 2012 CLAGS Fellowship Award for Best First Book Project in LGBT Studies In 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as “new mutants,” social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and “freaks” soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America’s most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies – including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants –alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.

The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities—disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies—José Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol. Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series—some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar United States as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body’s “imperfection” comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series as The Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri, and the landmark graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel, all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.

Split into four sections, Seeing Fans analyzes the representations of fans in the mass media through a diverse range of perspectives. This collection opens with a preface by noted actor and fan Orlando Jones (Sleepy Hollow), whose recent work on fandom (appearing with Henry Jenkins at Comic Con and speaking at the Fan Studies Network symposium) bridges the worlds of academia and the media industry. Section one focuses on the representations of fans in documentaries and news reports and includes an interview with Roger Nygard, director of Trekkies and Trekkies 2. The second section then examines fictional representations of fans through analyses of television and film, featuring interviews with Emily Perkins of Supernatural, Robert Burnett, director of the film Free Enterprise, and Luminosity, a fan who has been interviewed in the New York Magazine for her exemplary work in fandom. Section three explores cultural perspectives on fan representations, and includes an interview with Laurent Malaquais, director of Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. Lastly, the final section looks at global perspectives on the ways fans have been represented and finishes with an interview with Jeanie Finlay, director of the music documentary Sound it Out. The collection then closes with an afterword by fan studies scholar Professor Matt Hills.