Flame On!”: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of the Fantastic Four
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NYU Press Chapter Title: “Flame On!”: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of The Fantastic Four Book Title: The New Mutants Book Subtitle: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics Book Author(s): RAMZI FAWAZ Published by: NYU Press. (2016) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15zc697.6 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms NYU Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The New Mutants This content downloaded from 128.148.254.57 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:25:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2/ “Flame On!”: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of The Fantastic Four Few tales of teenage angst could compete with the experience of young Johnny Storm as his body bursts into flame before his very eyes. Watch- ing horrified as his three closest friends, among them his sister, miracu- lously transform into a human plastic, an invisible trace, and a rock-like behemoth, Johnny can only imagine they have become nothing short of monsters. As a terrifying heat overtakes his body, Johnny’s horror at his own violent transformation quickly evaporates into a newfound sense of freedom: he can survive the flame. He can fly. Released to popular acclaim in 1961, the inaugural issue of Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four tells the story of four companions who attempt an unauthorized rocket flight into space, hoping to outrace the communist menace. Their fateful trip ends with their bodies bombarded by “cosmic rays” that would alter their molecular structure, their skin absorbing substances once thought alien to the touch. Ben Grimm’s rocky epidermis, Johnny Storm’s flam- ing body, Sue Storm’s invisible silhouette, and Reed Richards’s physical pliability were marvelous gifts and social burdens that collapsed objects and bodies in decidedly abnormal ways. Now the four had been made as deviant as the threat they had sought to contain.1 More than any previous figuration of the superhero, The Fantastic Four dramatized a fantasy of bodily vulnerability to the forces of science and to the social norms of national citizenship in the era of anticommu- nism. The transformation of the team’s biology into “unstable molecules” that mimicked the malleable plastics and synthetics of postwar material science revealed that the interaction between the physical self and the This content downloaded from 128.148.254.57 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:25:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms “flame on!” / 67 material world could produce nonnormative or “queer” effects. I use the term nonnormative to describe those behaviors that mark the failure to conform to the proper performance of gender and sexuality; this wider designation folds within it distinctly queer modes of intimacy and affili- ation, or ways of being in the world that thwart the assumed direction of heterosexual relations. In the logic of cold war containment, those who stepped outside the bounds of sexual and gender norms—including homosexuals, people practicing premarital sex and nonmonogamy, and gender outlaws—were understood as abnormal or queer, and hence lack- ing the qualities associated with good citizenship.2 As David Serlin and Robert McRuer have shown, this mark of sexual or gender perversion implying failed citizenship commonly extended to the disabled, people whose apparent distance from the “normal” human body was inter- preted as a material expression of their inability to perform the proper functions of able-bodied heterosexuality.3 The Fantastic Four’s powers played on this logic as a physical mark upon the flesh that indicated their failure to live up to the sexual and gender norms of cold war culture and, more broadly, their abjection from proper humanity. Consequently the narrative’s central conceptual conflict was not the split between a civilian and a superheroic identity, as it had been in The Justice League of America (unlike most heroes, the four claimed no secret identities) but between what the members of the team felt or believed themselves to be and what their mutated bodies suggested they actually were: something “more than just human.” By rewriting the superhero as a figure that highlighted the impossibility of suturing an unpredictable body (and identity) to the narrowly construed social norms of cold war America, the series presaged and oriented itself toward the radical political reappraisals of self-making that would take place in the coming decade. In The Fantastic Four between 1961 and 1967, the series’ first sixty issues, writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby developed the foundational attributes of the fantastic foursome and introduced more than a hundred supporting characters, a cadre of fellow superheroes, villains, cosmic beings, and human allies who collectively made up a growing “Marvel Universe.” I frame The Fantastic Four as a popular fantasy that bridged the gap between the ideological conservatism of 1950s anticommunism and the emergent radical political sensibilities of the 1960s. It accom- plished this by visually critiquing the relationship between sexual and gender identity and cold war politics, namely McCarthyism’s powerful political framing of the heterosexual nuclear family as a bulwark against This content downloaded from 128.148.254.57 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:25:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 68 /“flame on!” communism.4 Against this worldview The Fantastic Four imaginatively crafted a new kind of citizen capable of engaging cosmopolitan political projects without an attachment to narratives of heterosexual normaliza- tion and bodily regimentation. In so doing The Fantastic Four became a visual repository of an array of nonnormative identities, affiliations, and kinships that were gaining public visibility due to the politics of civil rights, the New Left, and an emergent counterculture, movements that resisted the political constraints placed on private life by the imperatives of the cold war security state. During the cold war the state increasingly sought to regulate pri- vate life—particularly individuals’ sexual orientation, gender identity, and intimate social relations—with the rationale that private conduct was symptomatic of political loyalties. Government officials argued that deviant forms of gender and sexual identity indicated a tendency toward communist sympathies.5 This attitude was bolstered by the popularization of psychoanalysis, and the rise of a postwar therapeutic culture, as a medical practice that purported to identify nonnormative sexual proclivities as expressions of underlying neurosis and expunge them through sustained investigation of the “interior self” or individual psychology. Psychoanalysis promised to cure neurotic psychosomatic symptoms by helping the mind conform to the prevailing sexual and gender norms of the time; in so doing it echoed the ideological thrust of a variety of cutting-edge medical treatments—including plastic surgery, hormone replacement therapy, and prosthetics—which sold people on the idea that they might remold their physical body to comport with their mental self-image.6 The most publicized expression of this will to align the psyche with an ideal body was the case of Christine Jorgenson, a former U.S. naval officer who, in 1952, was the first American to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. Jorgenson’s public declaration of having transformed her for- merly male body to comport with her female self-image was celebrated as an act of unprecedented individual empowerment.7 In Jorgenson the public saw proof of people’s capacity to use the tools of modern medicine to remake themselves into the image of the ideally normal American. The alignment of popular discourses of normalcy with institutions of politi- cal and medical coercion that Jorgenson’s case exemplified produced a cold war regime of normalization that enforced a prevailing set of ideals about what a healthy and adjusted life (and body) should look like. That well-adjusted life was overwhelmingly heterosexual, able-bodied, family- oriented, upwardly mobile, and traditionally gendered.8 Jorgenson was This content downloaded from 128.148.254.57 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:25:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms “flame on!” / 69 celebrated because medical technology had helped transform her into a blond bombshell who embodied the ideals of postwar femininity and because that femininity was “purchased” through a willful act of self- making; however, when Americans realized that Jorgenson’s procedure had not given her a female reproduction system, many were disgusted by what they now perceived as an inauthentic performance of femaleness. Jorgenson found herself trapped between a valorized practice of empow- ered self-fashioning and the drive to conform to real or imagined sexual and gender norms. The Fantastic Four visually celebrated the transitional body and depicted perceived “neurotic” or pathological social types who failed to live up to unrealistic sexual and gender ideals as paragons of heroic non- conformity. In so doing it linked existing critiques