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Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero
African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Jeffrey A. Brown
Comic Books and Masculinity
Before turning specifically to the reading of Milestone comic books, one must understand the traditional gender framework against which these new black superheroes are read. Classical comic book depictions of masculinity are perhaps the quintessential expression of our cultural beliefs about what it means to be a man. In general, masculinity is defined by what it is not, namely "feminine," and all its associated traits - hard not soft, strong not weak, reserved not emotional, active not passive.
One of the most obvious and central focal points for characterizing masculinity has been the male body. As an external signifier of masculinity, the body has come to represent all the conventions traditionally linked to assumptions of male superiority. "Of course," Susan Bordo has observed in her discussion of contemporary body images, "muscles have chiefly symbolized and continue to symbolize masculine power as physical strength, frequently operating as a means of coding the 'naturalness' of sexual difference" (Unbearable 193). The muscular body is a heavily inscribed sign: Nothing else so clearly marks an individual as a bearer of masculine power (I will be returning to the symbolic significance of muscles in relation to both black and comic book masculinity later). In fact, muscles are so adamantly read as a sign of masculinity that women who develop noticeable muscularity - e.g., professional body builders - are often accused of gender transgression, of being butch or too "manly," in much the same way that underdeveloped men are open to the criticism of being too feminine.
The status and the power of the hard male body is only achieved in contrast to those cultural identities represented as soft and vulnerable. This myth of idealized masculinity which is still incredibly pervasive remains dependent upon the symbolic split between masculinity and femininity, between the hard male and the soft Other. And in the misogynistic, homophobic, and racist view of this ideology, the despised Other that masculinity defines itself against conventionally includes not just women but also feminized men.
It is, I think, important to note that this standard of masculinity so vigorously reinforced in Western culture is largely focused on white masculinity and is at root a fascist ideology. In his 1977 exploration of masculinity and fascist ideology, Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit outlines the existence of two mutually exclusive body types observed by German fascists: The first was the upstanding, steel-hard, organized, machine-like body of the German master, and the second was the flaccid, soft, fluid body of the perennial Other. According to Theweleit the hard masculine ideal was the armored body - armored by muscles and by emotional rigidity, and marked by a vehement desire to eradicate the softness, the emotional liquidity of the feminine Other. But the emasculating (i.e., castrating) criticism of effeminacy was also routinely projected by the dominant onto those marked as Other, primarily by their cultural or religious backgrounds. Although the feared body of the Other was most directly modeled on the feminine it was, as we know from Nazi practices of extermination, also projected onto the body of the homosexual, the Jew, and a long list of non-Aryan Others. While Nazi Germany may be an extreme example, the underlying rhetoric is far from alien to modern Western culture. Even today, for example, gay men are labeled as excessively feminine; Jewish men are characterized as meek, frail, and hen-pecked; and Asian men are derided in stereotype as skinny, weak, small, and humorously near-sighted. We must keep in mind that the standard phallic version of the masculine ideal is deeply grounded not just in misogynistic and homophobic ideology but also in thinly veiled racist terms.
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