Empowered and Strong: Muslim female community in Ms. Marvel (sample) (original) (raw)
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The “Worlding” of the Muslim Superheroine: An Analysis of Ms. Marvel's Kamala Khan
The Popular Culture Studies Journal, 2019
When it comes to portraying Muslims in popular culture, the overwhelming trend is to depict Muslim women as oppressed. However, American superhero comics have recently begun to portray Muslim women in a more sensitive manner with strong Muslim female superheroes. The current rebooted Ms.Marvel which stars a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager Kamala Khan, is the comic industry’s best example of a Muslim superheroine that straddles a life of seamless moderation between her Muslim and American identities. A crime-fighting, patriotic Muslimah superhero like Kamala Khan has been warmly received by critics who welcomed a change from oppressed to visibly empowered. But how is this construction played out in popular culture and what does it mean? This paper explores the construction of the Muslimah superhero by providing an analysis of Kamala Khan, using Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “worlding”. It illustrates how the reconfigured third world women that was used as a marker for modernity in nationalist movements in early post-colonial eras, can be applied to a reconfigured Muslim woman in popular culture.
African Journal of Gender and Religion, 2018
Over the past decade, we have witnessed a comic book renaissance. The impact of this renaissance can be described as threefold. First, we have seen comic books emerge as a compelling component of popular culture; second, as a "hybrid" form of texts and graphics, comic books have attained a new level of literary acceptance; and third, we have seen the advent of comic studies as an academic discipline in various higher education institutions. In addition, by drawing on myth and history, fantasy and reality, comic books have reproduced society's values, ideals, prejudices, and aspirations, thereby producing various ideological contestations. It is within this context that Marvel Comics' latest creation Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), portraying a first-generation American Muslim female teenager, born of Pakistani immigrants as the legendary Ms. Marvel-an American superhero-offers a unique opportunity to unpack the socio-cultural and political nuances embedded in comic books. Hence, by drawing on Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan) as a case study, this paper seeks to provide a critique of the intersections between religion, race and gender in contemporary comic books. To do this, we employ "social constructionism" as an interpretive and analytical theoretical approach to a selection of scenes from the Ms. Marvel corpus. Our hypothesis is that the intersections between religion, race and gender as "played" out in Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan) serve to foreground a socially constructed reality of religious (Islamic) bigotry; immigrant socio-cultural and political assimilation 1 Johannes A Smit is Professor and former Dean and Head of the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He is the founding editor of the SAPSE journal Alternation and served as research chair of the Humanities in the early 2000s. He teaches Comparative Religion (focus Christianity), and is the head of the Programme in Religion and Social Transformation since 2002. He has a lifelong commitment to interdisciplinary learning and critical research capacity development in the Arts and Humanities. Email: Smitj@ukzn.ac.za. 2 Denzil Chetty is an academic and researcher at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in the College of Human Sciences, School of Humanities, Department of Religious Studies and Arabic. Much of his work focuses on contemporary religion; religion and popular culture; religion, technology and civil society; religion, subalternity and resistance; and the digital humanities. He has published and presented several papers both locally and internationally within this niche. He is also an Abe Bailey Fellow (United Kingdom), a Shanghai Open University Visiting African Scholar (China), and the recipient of UNISA's Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award. Email: Chettd@unisa.ac.za. 2 Smit and Chetty predispositions; and gender and power disparities embedded in both Muslim immigrant worldviews (internal) and American social ideals (external).
Girlhood Studies journal , 2015
This article examines the production and operation of Kamala Khan, a muslim, American-Pakistani superheroine, of the Ms. Marvel comic series to glean what she reveals about Islam and muslims, with particular attention to representations of muslim masculinities. We argue that Ms. Marvel’s invitation of visualizing muslim girls as superheroes is framed by a desire to interrupt rampant Islamophobia and xenophobia, yet in order produce such a disruption it relies on, and (re)produces, stereotypical conceptualizations of muslim masculinities as conservative, prone to irrational rage, pre-modern, anachronistic, and even animalistic. However, as the series progresses we notice the emergence of complex and complicated muslim masculinities that cast doubt around tired representations, making way for comics to undertake the pedagogical work of resistance. Hence, we see these novel comics, like the shape-shifting Kamala herself, as wielding potentially dynamic and transformative powers in social imaginaries.
The Muslim Superhero in Contemporary American Popular Culture
Heroism, while universally valued, is not unanimously conceptualized, with one culture’s hero lacking the qualities sought in another’s. The American comic book superhero features nearly all races, creeds, and nationalities (at least in passing). It is no surprise, then, that Muslim characters have appeared any number of times within the genre (though their presences have frequently been fleeting and feeble). Over the last several years, however, the roster of Muslim superheroes has grown as has the thoughtfulness of their depictions. Beneath the surface of their inclusion lies the underlying question of whether Muslim morality meshes with the superheroic principles of the U.S.-based genre. Ultimately, while some gulf does exist between Islamic ideals of heroism and the superheroism of American comic books, it is no wider—and should be no more incongruous—than the principles of a model Jewish or Hindu champion and those of the pop cultural superhero.
Ms. Marvel – A Semiotic Alternative
Comics and graphic novels, and their predecessors, have been around for a very long time, but the last decade or so has seen a massive upswing in popularity and wide variations in the material covered. G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel comics, which introduce the third variation of the Ms. Marvel character, is a recent addition (2014) to comics literature and it has taken the world by storm. The comic introduces a young Pakistani and Muslim Ms. Marvel whose powers are activated unexpectedly and which causes major shifts in both the character’s sense of self-worth and in her interactions with her cultural heritage in relation to “mainstream” American culture. This paper will work to examine the character of the “All-New Ms. Marvel” and how her story relates to ongoing issues of cultural misrepresentation, of unrealistic standards of beauty, and how the medium of comics can be used as a form of popular, semiotic resistance to hegemonic systems of power. First, I will describe the text in some detail along with the reasons why I chose it. Second, I will lay out a theoretical framework based on the works of Chandra Mohanty, Amina Yaquin and John Fiske. Finally, I will integrate the text and the theory in order to defend my pairings and to place Ms. Marvel as a positive role model and as an example of semiotic resistance.
Drawing Fear of Difference: Race, Gender, and National Identity in Ms. Marvel Comics
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2019
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, this article uses a Queer feminist poststructuralist approach to look at the ways that Ms. Marvel comics destabilise and contest those racialised and gendered discourses. Specifically, it explores 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, the article concludes 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 ...