With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

2014

Knight trilogy the more I began to consider the representation of masculinity within the darker aspects of these adaptations. Reviewing the episodes of the two seasons of Arrow, the Dark Knight trilogy, and the four films incorporating Iron Man/Tony Stark, connections formed about these characters suffering from psychological traumas, specifically Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Survivor's Guilt. Thinking back to my examination of hegemonic heteronormative masculinity, I began to think about the way that male bodies are portrayed in countless forms in popular culture today. Then my research questions started to grow. What were the connections between scars and physical and psychological trauma? Was there a connection between masculinity and scars? Did that connection pertain to these representations? What do these connections have to say in the larger sense? And so forth. My continued research associated tattoos with scars, as they have both have similar natures: they are both the tangible result of skin being penetrated. My research stems from an interest in the history of the Green Arrow comic books. On a whole, my experience with comic books up to that point had only been with film/television adaptations, but I was continuously coming across articles, chapters, and books that discussed the comic books themselves. During my research that I came across the cover of "Ulysses Star is Still Alive" and then pursued that comic as my final project for Native Writing and Rhetorics course. These avenues of research lead me to further explore the history of the Green Arrow comics themselves, as well the representations of Indigenous Peoples within mainstream comics. The result was a paper that allowed me to familiarize myself with writing within Indigenous Rhetorics through the Green Arrow canon and the evolution of that canon into contemporary representations. Thus, when it came time to put together my thesis, I had the pieces that would ultimately weave together, but there were many avenues to clarify and explore further. Polson 5 The different film and television sources referenced for this research were multiple episodes from seasons one and two of Arrow, episodes of Smallville that pertained to the character of Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, the Iron Man trilogy, The Avengers, and an episode of Teen Wolf that specifically, though briefly, discussed tattoos and the nature/history of tattoos. This collection of media allowed an opportunity to explore these various characters in similar situations and with a similar idea in mind. How are their bodies marked in ways that emphasis their masculinity? Do these mark(er)s have a connection to their traumas? Under what conditions were these mark(er)s generated? Roughly, the characteristic similarities these three characters have in common are that they are white, male, billionaire superheroes/vigilantes. They go about the way they conduct their lives differently, but they evolved into their superhero/vigilante alter-ego as a result of psychological trauma that developed from warlike conditions. Queen was marooned on a military island in the Pacific Ocean, and Stark was held captive in the Middle East and then later on had a near death experience saving New York alongside the other Avengers. Wayne, though he was witness to the murder of his parents as a child, immersed himself within the criminal underworld and training within the League of Shadows, a group of assassins. In addition to Wayne's choices, Gotham is often referred to as being a war zone between the criminals and the authority. Thus, each character was continuously exposed to situations that required them to become survivors. When looking into The CW, Arrow, and the "Hey Girl" promotional campaign, I examined The CW website (cwtv.com) and focusing the Arrow page had to say about the show and what it said about the character of Oliver. I was also interested in the typical audience that The CW network targeted. The CW's Blog provided more about the promotional campaign. These particular sources demonstrated The CW's penchant for targeting a female audience, a Polson 6 summarization for what the show and character are about, and the beginning pieces of understandings of why and how the promotional images were portraying masculinity in relation to the perceived female audience. I was curious about the success of Arrow and another superhero show that was running concurrently with Arrow. An article on the ratings of Arrow, Tim Molloy's "Ratings: 'Arrow' is CW's Most-Watched Show in 3 Years; 'Nashville' Solid," James Hibberd's "'Agents of SHIELD' ratings stabilize and…improve?," looked at the possibility of renewal for the 2014-2015 season. TV Guide News reported in "Fall 2014 TV Scorecard: Which Shows Are Returning? Which Aren't?" that Arrow had already been renewed as of February 24, 2014, and that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had not been renewed yet, but appeared to be in a good position of getting renewed. While familiar with television from a viewers' perspective, there was a need to understand more about the decisions made in pre-production. For that I found Steve Craig's "Selling Masculinities, Selling Feminities: Multiple Genders and The Economics of Television," Felicia D. Henderson's "The Culture Behind Closed Doors: Issues of Gender and Race in the Writers' Room," Jason Mittell's "Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television," John Fiske's Television Culture, Lester Faigley's "Material Literacy and Visual Design," and Willaim M. Keith and Christian O. Lundberg's The Essential Guide to Rhetoric to be most helpful. The different perspectives brought s better understanding of how decisions are made for the production of a show beyond cast, plot, and characterization. Rather, they gave insight to how decisions on how to portray genders and the way that despite the way audiences are essentially manipulated into finding something interesting there is also the fact that producers cannot simply create a space where audiences will find something interesting, but rather there Polson 7 has to be an existing space for it in society already. It was also interesting to have an explanation of the different interactions with audiences that in person speeches provide verses a television program, where the speakers cannot have that same intimacy and connection with the audience. That aspect of the research provided a different perspective for me, to see the production of a program from both perspectives, that of the audience and producers.

Journal of Popular Culture 40.2, 2007

theoretical interest surrounding the lived body and popular representations of the body. Examples include embodied phenomenology (developed from the writings of Marcel Merleau-Ponty), Foucault's work on sexuality and institutions, and a renewed investment in cognitive studies. Adopting Spinoza's rejection of the Cartesian cogito (which implicitly divides the subject into mind and body), contemporary theorists are beginning to embrace a much more corporeal worldview. The shift of critical foci away from dichotomous conceptualizations of the human subject is not a return to biological determinism. It is a recognition that the subject and his/her corporeality are not mutually exclusive. One's somatic existence is not distinct from one's psychic existence. Body is no longer that which is not mind-a mere vessel that houses the brain. Furthermore, the latter is no longer privileged over the former. Physicality is not base unruliness in need of discipline from a transcendent intelligence; the two are integral to lived experience and work in tandem. The relocation of critical attention to issues of corporeality is a major shift for Grand Theory and signifies an abandonment of archaic epistemologies that do not credit the inescapable fleshiness of the human subject.

2004

York University, 2017

The goal of this project is to identify, analyze and historicize the operation of embodied multiplicities within superhero comics from the postwar era using the example of comics produced by the Marvel group between 1961 and 2005. This project argues that the superheroes created during this era reflect major social and cultural upheavals that continue to reshape the postwar era; this includes the dawn of the Atomic Age as well as the rise of the Civil Rights movement, second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and liberal multiculturalism. This project furthermore argues that superhero comics are especially useful vehicles for exploring both the practice of polysemy in popular texts as well as the ongoing evolution of popular bodily desires and fantasies within postwar American society and culture. Reading superhero comics as a body genre, this project offers a formally and visually driven analysis focusing on evolving representations of gender, race, sexuality, and disability, and the fantasies and anxieties those representations reflect, resist, and negotiate. Ultimately, this project argues that superhero comics' embodied multiplicities offer especially rich opportunities for subverting hegemonic narratives that would devalue the meaning of bodily expression and the diversity of bodily experience. It also argues, however, that superhero comics possess especially sophisticated tools for negating such subversion, routinely mobilizing seeming resistances to hegemonic narratives in ways that in fact reassert those narratives in new, bright costumes and fantastical metaphors.

The Journal of Men's Studies, 2005

Foucault (1985) points out in The Use of Pleasure that historically sex characteristics have defined sex roles and that "the gods endowed each of the two sexes with particular qualities" (p. 158). Men, he notes in his discussion of the writings of Xenophon, were assumed to have been created "brave," while women were created with a "natural fear" (p. 158). Sex roles were perceived as essential, divinely ordered sex differences. Foucault reviews the early "aversion to anything that might denote a deliberate renunciation of the signs and privileges of the masculine role" (p. 19). He cites Seneca the Elder's condemnation of effeminate youth: "`Libidinous delight in song and dance transfixes these effeminates. Braiding the hair, refining the voice till it is as caressing as a woman's, competing in bodily softness with women, beautifying themselves with filthy fineries'" (p. 19). This perception persists. Men who are culturally perceived as manifesting nonmasculine qualities are considered aberrations by mainstream culture. [Chuck Palahniuk] (1996) in Fight Club, which is probably the strongest novelistic examination of this issue since the 1960s, describes American culture at the end of the 20th century as full of "a generation of men raised by women" (p. 50), men who have become as soft as "a loaf of white bread" (p. 51), men who are obsessed with the fineries of material culture-Ikea furniture, "Swedish furniture" and "clever art" (p. 46), "hand-blown green glass dishes" (p. 41), and "Njurunda coffee tables" (p. 43), sensitive men who attend support groups to find comfort from their pain. Despite their politically correct postures, these men are still generally labeled by popular culture as effeminate. The qualities associated with manhood-those underwritten by testosterone-are still generally equated with masculine value. In Palahniuk's novel, for example, the unnamed narrator praises his alter ego, [Tyler Durden], for "his courage and his smarts," claiming that Durden is "forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world" (p. 174). Durden is violent, sexually aggressive, domineering, controlling, fearless, and able to endure pain without flinching. He appears through most of the novel as the embodiment of the heroic ideal in his quest to single-handedly bring down modern civilization. In the novel, Durden is revealed in the end to be inept, his fallibility exposed, as his great plan to destroy civilization fails because he improperly mixed "nitro with paraffin" (p. 205). The myth of Durden, however, continues after his death. Contemporary American men are caught in a paradox. On one front, they face social dynamics hostile toward those characteristics culturally defined as masculine. The solution to what has been widely perceived as hegemonic masculinity is "to distance the male self from the complex of male traits" (Ehrenreich, 1983, p. 122). On the other front, the more distanced men become from masculine traits, the less they are perceived as men. Michaelson and Aaland (1976), in a study of how masculine and feminine personality traits are perceived within culture, illustrate that men are perceived as masculine when they exhibit agency, which the Michaelson and Aaland define as behavior that is "emotionally controlled, independent, and assertive" (p. 253). Agency was also key to descriptions of admired men. The ability of men to be "sensitive" to others contributed to the admiration of men only when coupled with "control" (p. 254), which the authors labeled "androgyny" (p. 254). Women were not perceived as feminine or admired for their agency. The primary valued characteristic attributed to women was "communion" (p. 254), or "identification with and sensitivity to others" (p. 254). The hero figure encompasses both agency, in the aggrandizement of masculine accomplishment, and androgyny, in the exaltation of self-sacrifice. The first is manifest in the arrival of Achilles at the battle of Troy and the apotheosis of sports figures; the second is evident in the adoration of rescue workers and fire fighters. Even philanthropy can be characterized as controlled sacrifice for human well-being, rendering the man who donates to the public good a heroic figure. The mythic figuration of the hero thrives in contemporary American culture, functioning as both an unattainable ideal against which contemporary masculinity is measured and a mythic means of assuring survival. This figuration places contemporary men in a double bind, or paradox, which offers two alternatives: (1) reject traditional definitions of masculine behavior and risk being labeled by culture as less than a man, or (2) embrace the testosterone-based behaviors that define the hero figure and pursue the impossible acquisition of superhuman qualities, a goal that by its nature must result in failure.

Social thought & research, 2013

This study analyzes the changes in physical presentation of several DC comic book superheroes, finding that the bodies of superheroes have become far more sexualized, exaggerated, ■ and unrealistic in recent years. The comic reader's "gaze" upon the bodies of the characters produces an intersection of spectacle and narrative that cannot be disconnected from both the physical body and the costume of the hero. Literature on the bodies of male and female bodybuilders reveals a connection to the hyper-embodiment of male and female superheroes, which represent the ego ideal of Western representations of "perfect" gendered bodies. The study concludes by asking if contemporary comic books must shift from the "Modern Age " to the "Postmodern Age " in order to break out of their practices of reaffirming gender binaries. The argument expands on work by Jean Baudrillard and Judith Butler.

In this research paper I present an Althusserian critique of what I have titled the ‘Black Panther Phenomenon’. Employing Althusser’s eminent work ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, I aim to convey how Althusser’s concept of Interpellation and his notion of ‘ideology ’can help deconstruct ideology which services to exemplify how a movie, such as ‘Black Panther’ reproduces the ‘imaginary’ relation of viewers to their real lived experiences. Furthermore, embracing Jacques Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage, I will further argue that this onward discussed Lacanian dimension offers a psychoanalytic mirror which conversely can be substituted with the Black Panther movie, demonstrating how viewers are made into subjects.

2017

International Journal of Arts, Humanities & Social Science

The present multimethod research examines different stereotypes about race via a comic book superhero lens. This study focuses on the ascription of traits to a superhero figure developed specifically for this research, examining differences in trait ascription based on the race and sexual orientation of the hero. A diverse sample of participants (N= 371) were presented random drawings of either White, African American, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Asian, or Native American superhero images and asked questions about their perceptions of the hero’s traits, character role (hero, villain, sidekick), powers, and socioeconomic status. Additionally, hero sexual orientation was manipulated (Heterosexual x Gay), bringing 12 conditions of hero identity that were randomly assigned to participants in a 6 (Race: White x Black x Latinx x Asian x Arab x Native American) x 2 (Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual x Gay) cross-sectional design. Results indicated that participants ascribed certain traits dif...

Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres (pp. 165-184)., 2013