Overview

Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics investigates girl superheroes published by DC and Marvel Comics in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, asking who the new-and-improved super-girls are and what potentials they hold for imagining girls as agents of change, in the genre as well as its socio-cultural context. As super-girls have grown increasingly numerous and diverse since the turn of the millennium, they provide an opportunity for reconsidering representations of gender and power in the superhero genre. This book offers the term agentic embodiment as an analytical tool for critiquing the body politics of superhero comics, particularly concerning youth, femininity, whiteness, and violence. Grounded in comics studies and informed by feminist cultural studies, the book contributes a critical and hopeful perspective on the diversification of a genre often written off as irredeemably conservative and patriarchal. Super-Girls of the Future is a key title for students and scholars of comics studies, visual culture, US popular culture, and feminist criticism.

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9781032478340

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Reviews

"Treating superheroes with nuance is no easy task, but Fabricius does so with style. As major comics publishers finally try to take girls seriously, Fabricius asks to what extent these fictional girls can help us engage with the differences that weave through real life. But hers is not a simple cataloguing of successes and failures; Super-Girls of the Future rethinks how empowered girls stretch our ideas of what counts as diversity and what communities—and solitudes—girls will have to embrace. In thinking through meanings and uses of representation, Super-Girls of the Future helps us navigate the path to the best future for our own super-girls to champion. Joe Sutliff Sanders, University of Cambridge, UK ""This book breaks new ground in spectacular fashion while being thoroughly grounded in existing research. It goes beyond positive and negative models of evaluating issues of representation in favour of nuanced, formally adept, and innovative discussion of webs of industrial and artistic conflicts. In this respect, it is positioned at the forefront of important and provocative research in this area."" Anna F. Peppard, editor of Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero"

"""Super-Girls of the Future earns that rare trifecta in cultural scholarship: it is unapologetic, nuanced, and timely. It explains how comics provide a place for emotions, bodies, dreams, and discourse to intersect. It produces a way of reading how girls constantly renegotiate with adulthood, masculinity, violence, race, visibility, gender, community, and the bodies they inhabit to perform and resist. It’s exactly the book we need right now as we plot the best future for our own super-girls to champion."" Joe Sutliff Sanders, University of Cambridge, UK. ""This engaging and comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the form and content of contemporary super-girl comics investigates how they both conform to, and create spaces in which to challenge, the norms of the superhero genre and the world in which it is embedded. Focusing on embodiment, agency, and affect, Fabricius deftly explores the potential for super-girl representations (and their readers) to critique power relations at the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, race, national origin, religion, and language, and to imagine and negotiate more solidaristic alternatives."" Carolyn Cocca, author of Eisner Award-winning Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation. ""This rich and invigorating exploration of super-girls of recent decades shows how comics featuring these characters serve as critiques of, or are used to support, dominant cultural discourses. It beautifully analyses the different ways in which these complex characters function, addressing topics including language, costume, kinship, and violence. The author establishes and develops the powerful concept of agentic embodiment and flags up how and why the cultural status of the girl is key in both understanding diversification in the genre, and resistance to it, as well as pointing to wider cultural shifts around gender norms. A fascinating and resonant study."" Mel Gibson, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. ""It’s rare to see analyses of representation in comics that go beyond identifying ""good and bad"" representation. It’s rarer still to see analyses that fully embrace the medium’s visuality, showcasing how intricacies of style affect meaning. Fabricius’ book stands apart in its informed, nuanced, visually oriented analysis of comic book super-girls as both embodiments of conservative cultural norms and assemblages of radical possibility. Using the liminal figure of the super-girl to emphasize the subjective multiplicity of encoding and decoding comics, Fabricius makes a convincing case that comics and super-girls are vital to the scholarship of the future."" Anna F. Peppard, editor of Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero."

Author Information

Charlotte J. Fabricius is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research emerges from the intersection of comics studies, cultural studies, and feminist critique. She has published work on the body politics of superhero comics and contemporary Scandinavian comics and has work forthcoming on Instagram comics as expressions of feminized labor.

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