Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Theses Department of Communication 7-16-2008 A Genealogy of Absence & Evil: Tracing the Nation's Borders with Captain America Christian J. Steinmetz Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Steinmetz, Christian J., "A Genealogy of Absence & Evil: Tracing the Nation's Borders with Captain America." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2008. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses/38 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A GENEALOGY OF ABSENCE & EVIL: TRACING THE NATION'S BORDERS WITH CAPTAIN AMERICA by CHRISTIAN STEINMETZ Under the direction of Dr. Mary Stuckey ABSTRACT Although research has previously connected comic books and national ideology, there has yet to be a study examining the role of villains in this relationship. By analyzing representations of evil and villainy in the long-running series Captain America and understanding them in light of the model of the circuit of culture, the transforming imaginary space of the American nation can be traced. INDEX WORDS: Comic Books, National Ideology, Captain America, Nation, Limit Attitude, Circuit of Culture. A GENEALOGY OF ABSENCE & EVIL: TRACING THE NATION'S BORDERS WITH CAPTAIN AMERICA By CHRISTIAN STEINMETZ A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2008 Copyright by Christian James Steinmetz 2008 A GENEALOGY OF ABSENCE & EVIL: TRACING THE NATION'S BORDERS WITH CAPTAIN AMERICA by CHRISTIAN STEINMETZ Committee Chair: Mary Stuckey Committee: Greg Smith Ted Friedman Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University August 2008 DEDICATION For Kelly Jean. Thanks for being my support, my conscience and my companion in villainy. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the guidance and support of my committee. I am especially grateful to Mary Stuckey for never pressuring me to do something I did not want to. v TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v 1 Introduction: A Genealogy of Evil and Absence in Captain America 1 Comic Books & Ideology 4 Comic Book Regulation, Representations and National Ideology 5 Comic Books: Identity, Consumption and Production 8 Conclusions From the General Literature on Comics and Ideology 11 Captain America in Scholarly Research 12 Methods & Theory 15 Theory 16 Conclusions on Theory 21 Research Strategy 21 The Role of the Researcher 23 The Moment of Regulation 25 The Moment of Representation 28 The Moments of Identity & Consumption 30 The Moment of Production 32 Data Collection 33 Conclusions on Method 35 Discussion: Implications, Strengths and Limitations 36 2 Border Disputes: Production, Consumption, Identity and the Captain America Nation 40 The Transformation of Comics into Subculture 43 vi The Ten-Year Gap: Four Factors That Silenced Captain America 45 Advertising, Identity Construction and Negotiation: Communication between Captain America's Consumers and Producers 54 Patriotism, Pedagogues and Consumerism: Captain America's Advertising Supporting the National Narrative 55 Negotiating Meaning in Captain America's Letters Forum: 1960s-1970s 62 Negotiating Meaning in Captain America's Letters Forum: Mark Gruenwald's 1980s 76 The Destabilization of Captain America's National Narrative by Production Crises 82 Frustration, Bust and Boom: The National Narrative Disabled 84 Conclusion 89 3 Borders of Evil: Representations of the Nation's Fear, Hatred and Anxiety in Captain America 91 The External Borders of Evil 93 Nazis: Devils, Racists & Nostalgia for a "Good War" 96 The Commie Smashing Cold War 101 Not us: Other Representations of Xenophobia 107 Arab Terrorism and America's Schizophrenic Borders 112 Conclusion: External Borders of Evil 118 The Internal Borders of Evil 119 Big Business: Suicidal Capitalists & the Corporate Entity 120 The Fifth Column: Spies and Sympathizers 125 Prejudiced Villains: The Borders To Civic Nationalism 127 Omnipresent Crime and Disciplined African-Americans 135 vii MODOC = Machinery's Odium and Danger Outside the Community 138 Stolen Independence: Defamation, Domination and the Psychoanalyst's Couch 140 Government Corruption: "Those men are not my country" 144 Apathy & Nihilism: Chaos for the Sake of Chaos 150 Conclusion 157 4 Borders of Absence: Regulation, the Implicit and Failed Auditions 161 Regulated Absences: Adherence to and Violations of the Comics Code Authority 163 Adherence to the Code: Regulated Borders 166 Crossing Borders: Violations of the Comics Code 169 Implicit Absences: Sudden Revelations of the Invisible 175 Authenticity vs. Invisibility: African-Americans in Captain America 177 The Invisible Multi-Faceted Woman 181 There and Gone Again: Native Americans and Homosexuality 186 Wartime Schizophrenia 190 Conclusion 193 5 Conclusion: Necessary Villains 195 Works Cited 204 Comics Cited 207 viii Introduction: A Genealogy of Evil and Absence in Captain America What would public reaction be if Captain America punched a pregnant soccer mom in the face? Or if he encountered a gay rights advocate on the street and crushed the man with his unbreakable red, white and blue shield? If a 2007 story featured this hero beating up a grossly stereotypical Asian villain—with yellow skin, a distended head, long fingernails, a sumo wrestling outfit and a long Fu Manchu style moustache—would Americans find that representation racist? Likely, public reaction to these three extreme examples would include shock and disgust, while the media might express concern about such violence in sexist, homophobic or racist depictions. Such victims—despite their other ideological complexities— are not usually represented as enemies of the modern American nation or subject to violent punishment in our mainstream fiction. Yet, in the 1940s issues of Captain America, this character fought multiple Asian enemies as described above. Today, such villains would not be acceptable. Instead of being symbols of evil, they represent racism and ignorance. Between 1940 and 2007 the meaning of "evil" has clearly transformed, and the borders to the American imagined community have shifted. Some scholars have analyzed superhero comic books as texts that reproduce ideologies of nationalism and capitalism (Emad, 2006; McAllister, 1990; Wolf-Meyer, 2003), but none have examined the important recurring archetype within these narratives: the villain. Villains are rejected, excluded and disciplined (often violently) by heroic protagonists. Yet, regardless of the role they play in determining the borders of the acceptable, villains have largely been ignored by the literature connecting comics and national ideology. This literature focuses heavily on the representations within comics, overlooking the content's link to its production, consumption and regulation. All of these factors contribute to the nationalistic meanings derived from such texts, 1 but are disregarded in most interpretations of comics. Although some of the comics analyzed have decades of history, few longitudinal studies of their relationship to our nation's history exist. Clearly, the imaginary space of the nation has changed drastically over the years, but most research focuses on one particular moment rather than outline the shifts it has undergone since Americans started defining their identity in connection with the imagined idea of a nation. Drawing on theories of the limits constructed within public discourse (Foucault, 1977), this study addresses that problem. How do depictions of evil and villainy in Captain America represent the changes to the nation over the last seventy years of American national history? Using Foucault's concept of the limit attitude, together with Paul Du Gay's (1997) circuit of culture methodology, I hope to trace the shifting borders of the imagined nation, performing a kind of fluid cartography. For the purposes of this project, when I refer to the American "nation" I mean the interior of its imagined community maintained by cultural texts. This is the same as Benedict Anderson's "nation," but I understand it as a spatial metaphor, with an inside and an outside delineated by borders. This is not the same as the concrete, geographic space constituting the country of the United States. Nor is it accurate to lump this together synonymously with either "national identity" or "national ideology," as I believe those terms encompass something broader. Similar to the way that geometry allows us to find the area of a triangle, I am seeking to locate the area of the imagined nation, by first locating its contours within a cultural text and then noting what is on either side of these borders. Since this area is constantly shifting, both over time and over various texts, the only national space this study can document is the constituent one maintained by Captain America. 2 I have chosen Captain America as a cultural site of importance to begin this mapping, because of 1) the comic book medium's documented connections with ideology, 2) Captain America's iconic symbolism of American idealism and,