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Cargando... The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (Postmillennial Pop)por Ramzi Fawaz
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"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."--Publisher's description. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)741.5The arts Graphic arts and decorative arts Drawing & drawings Cartoons, Caricatures, ComicsClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Fawaz links the Justice League to postwar internationalism while arguing that the Fantastic Four’s “recurrent depiction of the family as a site of generative conflict and willed affiliation aligned its values with left-wing political movements that similarly sought to recast social relations as chosen bonds anchored by shared values rather than social conformity or biological kinship” (pg. 72). He analyzes the tone of books like Silver Surfer and the space sagas of the X-Men though the lens of feminist theory, arguing that both the Surfer’s maudlin soliloquys and Jean Grey’s unleashed power tapped into more typically coded female storytelling archetypes. Back on Earth, Fawaz argues that the urban folktales that permeated books like Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Captain America and the Falcon, and Luke Cage: Hero for Hire “absorbed and redirected the burgeoning language of identity politics in the post-civil rights period” (pg. 176). They similarly tapped into creators’ concerns amid the restructuring of the comic book industry that limited creators’ power and right to their work. The last third of Fawaz’s study focuses on the theme of demonic possession, either in the form of the Phoenix Force that possesses the X-Man Jean Grey or the alien symbiote that attempts to bond with Spider-Man. Fawaz argues, “By linking demonic possession to visual expressions of nonnormative or ‘perverse’ performances of gender and sexuality, these stories paradoxically relied on a misguided erotophobic (or antisex) logic that indirectly echoed another emerging discourse of this period: the feminist sex wars” (pg. 203). The stories captured the backlash against capitalism co-opting social movements just as comic book creators entered a period of greater uncertainty in the profession. Fawaz concludes with an examination of the Death of Captain America, suggesting “that the contemporary obsession with images of the superheroic body subjected to physical torture or death is ultimately related to public perceptions of citizenship as a bankrupt category of political life and the failure of postwar human rights discourse to prevent mass suffering and global violence” (pg. 271). In place of these movements, “creators now promise audiences the pleasure of seeing their own diverse identities – as gays and lesbians, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, and African and Asian Americans – represented in their favorite superhero comics, but no sense that the heterogeneity of those identities could and should change the world” (pg. 279). ( )