BOBC |
Resource type: Web Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed BibTeX citation key: Liu2017 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Watchmen", Gender, Gibbons. Dave, Mask, Moore. Alan, United Kingdom, USA Creators: Liu Collection: Gender Forum |
Views: 32/875
|
Attachments | URLs Whole issue |
Abstract |
The image of many American male superheroes is always represented as being ‘phallic’ in their costumes. Even though it is a long-term reality that the representation of superheroes often connotes an ideally mythic but essentially un-realizable embodiment of men, such a costuming more often than not involves, as Harry Brod sees it, a process of men’s conscious self-masquerade. How well, or how falsely, do male characters accommodate themselves to their masculine costuming as superheroes? How does this costumed heroism affect men’s lives, both in public and in private? This article is inspired by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel, Watchmen, with regard to the metaphorical representations of the bodily images of men and their associations with justice and masculinity. If the actualization of superheroes in the reality of Watchmen debunks heroism itself, then the graphic representations of those male superheroes’ masculine but masked bodies also belie an apotheosizing but simultaneously dehumanizing dimension through such a male masquerade. By juxtaposing the different representations and embodiments of male superheroes in Watchmen, the article focuses on how men’s negotiations between a performative identity and an unmasked selfhood are relentlessly exposed and problematized. Accordingly, the artificiality of men’s masculine images is not only highlighted in the graphic representations of Watchmen but also subversive to the conventional notions of super-heroic male embodiments.
|