The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies

Frederick Luis Aldama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429559303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Criticism

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies is a comprehensive, global, and interdisciplinary examination of the essential relationship between Gender, Sexuality, Comics, and Graphic Novels.

A diverse range of international and interdisciplinary scholars take a closer look at how gender and sexuality have been essential in the evolution of comics, and how gender and sexuality in comics demand that we re-frame and re-view comics history. Chapters cover a wide array of intersectional topics including Queer Underground and Alternative comics, Feminist Autobiography, re-drawing disability, Latina testimony, and re-evaluating the critical whiteness and masculinity of superheroes in this first truly global reference text to gender and sexuality in comics.

Comics have always been an important place for the radical exploration of feminist and non-binary sexualities and identities, and the growth of non-normative comic book traditions as a field of inquiry makes this an essential text for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers studying Comics Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Part I

Interrogating restrictive frames

1

Translating masculinity

The significance of the frontier in American superheroes¹

Patrick L. Hamilton

In 1893, at the World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago and before the assembled American Historical Association, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered the speech that would later be published as the essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In it, he outlined how the American frontier experience had shaped the nation’s history; as well, he attributed to the frontier what he described as the “striking characteristics” of “the American intellect”:

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil; and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. (Turner)

Here, Turner set the terms for how the nature of Americans would be understood not just in American history but also in popular culture, including the American superhero.

But this litany of characteristics is not so benign as it may seem. What Turner presented as intellectual traits are simultaneously the characteristics of a—if not the—hegemonic masculinity operating within US society and culture. Developed by R.W. Connell, the term “hegemonic masculinity” refers to a “pattern of practice (i.e., things done, not just a set of expectations or an identity) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue” (Connell and Messerschmidt 832). Turner’s entire history of the frontier’s significance—which, for him, is America’s history—is precisely such a pattern in its iterative nature. The frontier—and all that comes with it—constantly shifts west with the forces of civilization coming in subsequent to each move. This unfolding process describes what Turner sees as having been “done” on the frontier, and thus constitutes, in Connell’s terms, a “pattern of practice.”

Connell furthermore describes the “normative” function of hegemonic masculinity: “It embodied the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men” (Connell and Messerschmidt 832). That Turner established such a normative ideology is patently clear. For one, women are almost wholly absent from this history, thus placing them in an obviously subordinate position. Nor is it in any way rare to link what Turner describes as “American” to masculinity. Michael K. Johnson, for example, states explicitly that though “[s]pecific definitions of masculine behavior shift during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, […] a patriarchal and very often violent masculine ideal remains central to articulations of the frontier myth” (10). Similarly, James J. Donahue asserts not only that “the frontiersman […] has long stood as the model of American masculinity” but also that “the myth of the American frontier is central to our modern understanding of masculinity and definitions of manhood” (1, 9). Turner, in addition to what else he accomplished, becomes the foremost maker of what masculinity comprises within American culture. To talk about the traits of the frontier is, then, to talk about what constitutes normative, hegemonic masculinity in the United States.

At the same time that it explicated this frontier pattern, Turner’s essay attempted to draw a line between what it casts as America’s past and its future. Turner ended his essay—notably, immediately after he identified the defining traits of Americans—declaring the end of the frontier’s literal existence. His essay thus clearly marks the end of what he terms “the first period of American history,” in this way differentiating between what had been and what was yet to come.

But no such demarcation occurred regarding the ideological functions of this frontier myth, including those related to gender and masculinity. In many ways, it is possible to cast much of American culture—popular and otherwise—in the twentieth century as an effort to re-imagine the frontier and, with that, its masculine ideal. As Richard Slotkin observes, such reinvention of the frontier myth within a context of “world power and industrial development” was “a central trope in American political and historiographical debates since the 1890s” (3). Theodore Roosevelt, for example, cast the “American West as a crucible in which the white American race was forged through masculine racial conflict” (Bederman 178), while Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan would deploy frontier imagery in service of anti-Communism and the Cold War (see Slotkin 1–3, 645). American literature and popular culture of the twentieth century, too, function to transform and thus carry the ideologies of the frontier beyond their assumed expiration. Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, published in 1902, seeks to “project a larger vision of the ‘significance of the Frontier’ for a post-Frontier world order,” and does so in the racialized terms of Roosevelt as well as the gendered ones of Turner (Slotkin 175–177); two years later, Jack London’s Sea Wolf would imagine the ocean as a new but similarly gendered frontier. As Aldo J. Regalado explains, popular fiction writers of the early twentieth century such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft similarly trace their lineage back to the “heroic fiction” of the nineteenth century; more to the point, “these fictions privileged heroic identities that were expressly masculine in their articulation” and “tended to champion aggression, competition, [and] individualism […]” (Regalado 41). Jumping to the latter half of the twentieth century, the original series of Star Trek began with its nigh-ubiquitous tag line—“Space: the final frontier”—and ended with the gendered “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” thus again revealing and perpetuating the grounding of the frontier myth in a masculine ideal.

As present as the frontier myth and its patriarchal ideology are within American popular culture more generally, when it comes to superhero comics specifically, its establishment has proven to be more vexed. There are those, not unlike Turner, who attempt to draw a clear line between the superhero and this problematic past. Bradford Wright does so largely by delimiting the ideology of the frontier hero to the conflict between civilization and the wilderness. He claims, “the explicit problems and solutions expressed in the Western myth are historically most relevant to American civilization before the twentieth century. Postindustrial American society raised new tensions” and so, implicitly, required a new kind of hero (Wright 10). Ramzi Fawaz makes a similar point. At the same time that he places “the American superhero at the tail end of a long tradition of mythic folk heroes, namely the frontier adventurers and cowboy vigilantes of nineteenth-century westerns,” he also largely distinguishes these latter-day heroes from their earlier ilk: “Though the superheroes of the 1930s limned these figures through recourse to heroic masculinity and the embrace of vigilante justice, the superhero is distinguished from these previous icons by its mutually constitutive relationship to twentieth-century science and technology” (Fawaz 6). Between them, Wright and Fawaz argue that the context of industrialization and/or technological development distinguishes the twentieth century, which they then use to distance the superhero from the frontier hero and, in effect, its accompanying ideologies of gender.

Other scholars draw a firmer line between the superhero and this frontier past. Regalado does so explicitly. According to him, those same qualities inhering within nineteenth-century heroic fiction, “[f]or better or worse, […] served as the foundation for the crafting of early twentieth-century heroes” (Regalado 41). Lorrie Palmer similarly identifies an explicit connection between the comic book superhero and the gendered values of the frontier when she writes, though largely focusing on the film version of Marvel’s Punisher, “that the modern comic book hero is the descendent of the Western hero” (293). Others, if not directly invoking the frontier myth in their descriptions of superhero masculinity, connect the latter to normative beliefs about gender of the kind that the frontier helped foment. Derek Lackaff and Michael Sales state outright that “[c]lassical comic book depictions of masculinity are perhaps the quintessential expression of mainstream cultural beliefs about what it means to be a man” (67). Jeffrey Brown makes similar claims for the superhero and masculinity. He casts superheroes as revealing “some of our most basic beliefs” about, among other things, “gender and equality” (“Panthers” 134). The way in which these scholars tie superhero comics to fundamental beliefs about gender within US society and culture invokes a further connection between these texts and the frontier myth generative of those ideas.

Furthermore, the ways in which these critics more generally characterize superhero comics are evocative of frontier ideologies. For example, the freedom associated with the frontier finds expression when Lackaff and Sales describe how “[s]uperhero comic books give the male id an unbridled place to be freed and play like a child” and “are a symbolic playground where we let our idealized versions romp” (67). Furthermore, when Brown describes the traits common among male superheroes, they overlap significantly with Turner’s traits. Brown describes them as “incredibly powerful, smart, confident, and always in control” (“Panthers” 134), which echoes, to paraphrase, Turner’s strong, acute, masterful figure. And just as Turner’s conception can be linked to hegemonic masculinity in American society and culture, Brown, too, casts the superhero as “an adolescent fantasy of hegemonic masculinity” (“Panthers” 135).

However, the significance of the frontier to the American superhero and his representation of its hegemonic masculinity are even more direct than the most explicit of those above connections. The American superhero is, in many if not all ways, not just grounded in the foundational ideologies of masculinity from the nineteenth century, nor just overlapping with them as its own instantiation of a hegemonic masculinity. Instead, the American superhero is a translation of that masculine ideal from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, from the rural/agrarian past within which it originated to the modern/urban environment that would seem, but only at first, to invalidate this connection.

That purported invalidation hinges largely on context. For Wright, it’s that superhero comics do not appear to partake of the frontier myth’s basis in a conflict between the wilderness and civilization: “Whereas heroes of the previous centuries, like Daniel Boone, Natty Bumpo [sic] and Wyatt Earp could conquer and tame the savage American frontier, twentieth-century America demanded a superhero who could resolve the tensions of individuals in an increasingly urban, consumer-driven, and anonymous mass society” (Wright 10). Even Regalado at times softens this connection via the comic book superhero’s basis in modernity (4, 8, 79). Fawaz adopts a variant tack: he refers to the frontier’s opposition to civilization as curtailing the superhero’s basis in this myth; however, it is not because the binary conflict is absent but rather resolved. Fawaz describes the superhero’s relationship with twentieth-century advancements as “mutually constitutive” and thus, rather than exhibiting a conflict with these elements, embodies a “synthesis” between this figure “and the technologies of industrial society” (6, original italics). But that binary opposition between wilderness and civilization is, in one way or another, only seemingly neutralized within the pages of superhero comics.

Seemingly, because what that binary opposition produced remains intact within superhero comics. What the frontier so facilitated, and that Turner revealed as fundamental to the functioning of his pattern, was movement. He makes this clear in the close of his essay:

[T]he people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. (Turner)

Thus, what Americans—or, more specifically, American men—“are” in Turner’s conception is a product of how this allegedly open space provided an unfettered...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Gender and sexuality in comics: the told, untold stories
• Part I Interrogating restrictive frames
• Part II Ethnoracial queer and feminist space clearing gestures
• Part III Back to the future
• Part IV Counterpublics
• Part V Worldly interventions
• Part VI Queer and feminist intermedial textures
• Index