Comic Book Villain's Body: Deviant Sexuality and Gender-Transgression

Abstract

Oftentimes, superheroes are recognized in the fields of visual rhetoric, popular culture, and literature as means for persuading and influencing masculine identity. With the explosive popularity of comic books and the presence of them in varying media, comic books necessitate the exploration and investigation in regards to how they affect a mass consumerist audience and society. Despite this new found attention to comic books as viable scholarly material, supervillains remain largely dismissed from the academic discourse regarding their influence on gender and sexuality under the umbrella of masculine identity and performance. By examining the first explicitly homosexual character in a comic book and his portrayal, along with a supervillain that has amassed considerable popularity and has changed drastically overtime, this paper intends to set the groundwork for future academic scholarship over identity, gender, sexuality, and comic books. Ultimately, it appears that comic books, whether explicitly or unintentionally, reiterate and reinforce a heteronormative agenda and social framework by having the supervillains embody gender-transgressive characteristics and deviant sexuality.