The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics
The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics

Author: Scott Jeffery

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1137549505

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This book examines the concepts of Post/Humanism and Transhumanism as depicted in superhero comics. Recent decades have seen mainstream audiences embrace the comic book Superhuman. Meanwhile there has been increasing concern surrounding human enhancement technologies, with the techno-scientific movement of Transhumanism arguing that it is time humans took active control of their evolution. Utilising Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome as a non-hierarchical system of knowledge to conceptualize the superhero narrative in terms of its political, social and aesthetic relations to the history of human technological enhancement, this book draws upon a diverse range of texts to explore the way in which the posthuman has been represented in superhero comics, while simultaneously highlighting its shared historical development with Post/Humanist critical theory and the material techno-scientific practices of Transhumanism.

Uncanny Bodies
Uncanny Bodies

Author: Scott T. Smith

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0271086300

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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.

The Posthuman Imagination
The Posthuman Imagination

Author: Tanmoy Kundu

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-02-08

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1527565939

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This volume, including an extended interview with noted philosopher of posthumanism Francesca Ferrando, explores the contemporary philosophical, literary and cultural landscapes that have emerged as a response to the unavoidable crisis faced by humans in the Anthropocene era. The essays gathered here map posthumanism both as theoretical posthumanism, which primarily seeks to develop new knowledge, and as practical posthumanism, which emphasizes socio-political, economic, and technological changes. Posthumanism, which explores how one can address the question of what means to be human today, is a burgeoning area of interest among universities across the globe. Written in accessible, yet scholarly, language, this volume introduces posthumanism in its diverse ramifications and explicates the subject through various literary and filmic texts in order to cater to the needs of researchers and students in the humanities.

Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America
Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America

Author: Edward King

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 191157650X

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Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world. Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America '...well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful...' Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4

Superhero Bodies
Superhero Bodies

Author: Wendy Haslem

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2018-11-20

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0429663803

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Throughout the history of the genre, the superhero has been characterised primarily by physical transformation and physical difference. Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation explores the transformation of the superhero body across multiple media forms including comics, film, television, literature and the graphic novel. How does the body of the hero offer new ways to imagine identities? How does it represent or subvert cultural ideals? How are ideologies of race, gender and disability signified or destabilised in the physicality of the superhero? How are superhero bodies drawn, written and filmed across diverse forms of media and across histories? This volume collects essays that attend to the physicality of superheroes: the transformative bodies of superheroes, the superhero’s position in urban and natural spaces, the dialectic between the superhero’s physical and metaphysical self, and the superhero body’s relationship with violence. This will be the first collection of scholarly research specifically dedicated to investigating the diversity of superhero bodies, their emergence, their powers, their secrets, their histories and their transformations.

Superevil. Villains in Silver Age Superhero Comics
Superevil. Villains in Silver Age Superhero Comics

Author: Anke Marie Bock

Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH

Published: 2023-10-18

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 3832556931

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Superevil: Villains in Silver Age Superhero Comics sheds light on the often-disregarded supervillains in the American superhero comic of the 1960s. From Loki to Killmonger – they all possess famous cinematic counterparts, yet it is their comic origin that this study examines. Not only did The Silver Age produce countless superheroes and supervillains who have conquered the screens in the last two decades, but it also created complex villains. Silver Age supervillains were, as the analyses in Superevil show, the main and only means to include political and societal criticism in a cultural product, which suffered from censorship and belittlement. Instead of focusing on the superheroes once more, Anke Marie Bock pioneers in putting the supervillain as such in the center of the attention. In addition to addressing the tendency to neglect villains in superhero-comic studies, revealing many important functions the supervillains fulfill, among them criticizing Cold War politics, racism, gender roles and the often unquestioned binary of good and evil on the examples of i.a. The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and Black Panther comics.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies

Author: Frederick Luis Aldama

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-17

Total Pages: 1007

ISBN-13: 0429559305

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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.

Uncanny Bodies
Uncanny Bodies

Author: Scott T. Smith

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0271086327

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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.

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Disability Studies
The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Disability Studies

Author: Katie Ellis

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-12-26

Total Pages: 541

ISBN-13: 1040230229

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Disability impacts everyone in some way. Approximately 10-20% of the world’s population live with disability, and the associated issues affect not just these individuals but also their friends, family, and colleagues. When looking at it this way, it is strange that disability continues to be thought of as an anomaly—either as a medical problem located in a damaged body or something that exists exclusively outside the body, in a society that takes little account of non-normative bodies. Critical disability studies both questions these existing notions of disability and interrogates how they have become a part of the academic attitude towards the field. As the first comprehensive handbook on critical disability studies, this volume provides an authoritative overview of the subject. Including 32 chapters written by established scholars and emerging, next-generation researchers it also includes contributions from activists, writers, and practitioners from the global north and the global south. Divided into three parts: Representation, art, and culture; Media, technology, and communication; and Activism and the life course, it offers discussions on core critical disability studies topics including the social model, technology studies, trauma studies, representation, and queer theory, as well as ground-breaking work on emerging and cutting-edge areas such as neurodiversity and critical approaches in the Middle East, United States, Australia, and Europe. It is required reading for all academics and students working in not just critical disability studies but sociology, digital accessibility and inclusion, health and social care, and social and public policy more broadly.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism

Author: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 1350090484

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As our ideas of the human have come under increasing challenges – from technological change, from medical advances, from the existential threat of climate crisis, from an ideological decentering of the human, amongst many other things – the 'posthuman' has become an increasingly central topic in the Humanities. Bringing together leading scholars from across the world and a wide range of disciplines, this is the most comprehensive available survey of cutting edge contemporary scholarship on posthumanism in literature, culture and theory. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism explores: - Central critical concepts and approaches, including transhumanism, new materialism and the Anthropocene - Ethical perspectives on ecology, race, gender and disability - Technology, from data and artificial intelligence to medicine and genetics - A wide range of genres and forms, from literary and science fiction, through film, television and music, to comics, video games and social media.