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Superhero comics reckon with issues of corporeal control. And while
they commonly deal in characters of exceptional or superhuman
ability, they have also shown an increasing attention and
sensitivity to diverse forms of disability, both physical and
cognitive. The essays in this collection reveal how the superhero
genre, in fusing fantasy with realism, provides a visual forum for
engaging with issues of disability and intersectional identity
(race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality) and helps to
imagine different ways of being in the world. Working from the
premise that the theoretical mode of the uncanny, with its interest
in what is simultaneously known and unknown, ordinary and
extraordinary, opens new ways to think about categories and markers
of identity, Uncanny Bodies explores how continuums of ability in
superhero comics can reflect, resist, or reevaluate broader
cultural conceptions about disability. The chapters focus on
lesser-known characters-such as Echo, Omega the Unknown, and the
Silver Scorpion-as well as the famous Barbara Gordon and the
protagonist of the acclaimed series Hawkeye, whose superheroic
uncanniness provides a counterpoint to constructs of normalcy.
Several essays explore how superhero comics can provide a
vocabulary and discourse for conceptualizing disability more
broadly. Thoughtful and challenging, this eye-opening examination
of superhero comics breaks new ground in disability studies and
scholarship in popular culture. In addition to the editors, the
contributors are Sarah Bowden, Charlie Christie, Sarah Gibbons,
Andrew Godfrey-Meers, Marit Hanson, Charles Hatfield, Naja Later,
Lauren O'Connor, Daniel J. O'Rourke, Daniel Pinti, Lauranne
Poharec, and Deleasa Randall-Griffiths.
Superheroes and Critical Animal Studies explores and puts into
dialogue two growing field of studies, comic studies and critical
animal studies. The book's aim is to create a form of praxis that
people can use to actualize many of the values superheroes strive
to protect. To this end, contributor chapters are divided into
sections on the foundation of superhero representation and how to
teach it, criticisms of particular superheroes and how they fall
short of truly protecting the planet, and interpretations of
specific characters that can be read to produce a positive
orientation to the nonhuman world and craft strategies to promote
liberation in the real world. Altogether, the book produces a form
of scholarship on the media that is both intersectional in scope
and tailored to have an impact on the reader beyond theorizing
superheroes for theorization's sake.
This volume charts a new course in animal studies that re-examines
Jacques Derrida's enduring thought on the visualization of the
animal in his seminal Cerisy Conference from 1997, The Animal That
Therefore I Am. Building new proximities with the animal in and
through - and at times in spite of - the visual apparatus, Seeing
Animals after Derrida investigates how the recent turn in animal
studies toward new materialism, speculative realism, and
object-oriented ontology prompts a renewed engagement with
Derrida's animal philosophy. In taking up the matter of Derrida's
treatment of animality for the current epoch, the contributors to
this book each present a case for new philosophical approaches and
aesthetic paradigms that challenge the ocularcentrism of Western
culture.
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--Jose 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.
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-- Jose 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 U.S. 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."
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