Dean Cooper-Cunningham presented the first ‘First Friday’ seminar on ‘Drawing Fear of Difference: Race, Gender, and National Identity in Ms. Marvel Comics’ at Deakin Downtown on 6 March 2020.

Drawing Fear of Difference: Race, Gender, and National Identity in Ms. Marvel Comics

Feminist scholars have provided important analyses of the gendered and racialised discourses used to justify the Global War on Terror. They show how post-9/11 policies were made possible through particular binary constructions of race, gender, and national identity in official discourse. Turning to popular culture, in this seminar I use a Queer feminist poststructuralist approach to look at the ways that Ms. Marvel comics destabilise and contest those racialised and gendered discourses. Specifically, I explore how Ms. Marvel provides a reading of race, gender, and national identity in post-9/11 USA that challenges gendered-racialised stereotypes. Providing a Queer reading of Ms. Marvel that undermines the coherence of Self/Other binaries, I argue that to write, draw, and circulate comics and the politics they depict is a way of intervening in international relations that imbues comics with the power to engage in dialogue with and (re)shape systems of racialised-gendered domination and counter discriminatory legislation.

About the Series

Deakin University Gender and Sexuality Studies holds a public monthly seminar series on the first Friday of each month at Deakin Downtown in Melbourne’s CBD.

Find out more and register for future seminars

Monthly postgraduate masterclasses are also open to Deakin University students.

JACK KIRNE

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