New Mutants, The
Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
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
How fantasy meets reality as popular culture evolves and ignites postwar gender, sexual, and race revolutions.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fawaz, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, takes a hard look at the politics behind superhero comics in this uneven but satisfying debut. Drawing on queer theory, Fawaz proposes that superhero comics from the Silver Age (mid-1950s to early '70s) onward have consistently reflected contemporary political debates, particularly around marginalized groups. In his view, post-WWII superheroes, in contrast to their prewar counterparts, were "queered" by their portrayal as vulnerable and threatening outsiders. For instance, the Fantastic Four, introduced in 1961, gain their powers through "bodily vulnerability" after being accidentally exposed to "cosmic rays" that made their bodies' molecules "unstable." These abilities, Fawaz writes, "produced nonnormative or queer' effects" shown as "expressions of deviant gender and sexuality." By contrast, the X-Men, from their first appearance in 1963, are outsiders empowered by genetic mutations and confronted by an intolerant public. For Fawaz, their appearance "dramatized the politics of inequality, exclusion, and difference" in line with the concurrent civil rights movements. This is a strong work with minor pacing problems; some studies are more fleshed out than others. Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable and perceptive study and any failings would be easy to fix in a (fingers crossed) follow-up.
