The X-Men are everywhere this summer: from a blockbuster movie, to a highly anticipated video-game, and a newsworthy return to their original Marvel comic book series. And in “Speculative Fictions,” the just-published issue of American Literature, the X-Men are getting the scholarly treatment. Ramzi Fawaz’s article,
" 'Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!’ Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America,” offers a close reading of the X-Men in the mid-to-late 1970s. Fawaz shows how the comic book visually absorbed the cultural politics of the women's movement and the gay liberation movement to figure "mutation" as an expansive form of cultural difference that wedded fantasy to the ideals of radical politics.
Read the article for free here.
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