Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics

2. Gendered Nation-state, Gendered Hero

2 Gendered Nation-state, Gendered Hero C aptain America’s body was failing. The super-soldier serum that gave him his superpowers was breaking down after many decades of service. He had followed the supervillains Cobra and Mr. Hyde into the deserts of the American Southwest, but there his muscles gave out for the final time. He considered the impact of his muscular deterioration on his sense of self: What a complete and total waste I am. Anyone who ever admired or looked up to me is a fool. They backed the wrong man. They thought they were backing a guy who could win against anything life threw at him[.] . . . [T]hey were wrong. I can’t even win the fight for control over this useless body of mine!1 Captain America’s expression of self-loathing results from the centrality of his physical body to his identity as a hero of America. As fan Daniel Bigelow wrote regarding this story line: [Writer Mark] Gruenwald has pointed out a personality flaw in Cap that no one else has seen: his obsession with doing things himself and seeking physical solutions to his problems. This was not a problem when he could meet any threat with physical force. Now that he can’t, he’s on foreign ground.2 Iconic Bodies Of course, a solution was found to this particular medical dilemma, but the incident illustrates how the superheroic body is central to many analyses of superheroes; for instance, Scott Bukatman argues that “superhero comics embody social anxiety, especially regarding the adolescent body and its status within adult culture.”3 Bukatman’s embodied relationship between the superhero and something beyond the realm of the text—for instance, the adolescent Gendered Nation-state, Gendered Hero 25 body or the body politic—hints that this iconic relationship can exceed simple metaphor. Extending Bukatman’s argument, Marc Singer argues that superhero continuity relies on metonymy rather than metaphor. Unlike metaphor, through which it is claimed two things are alike in some unidentified aspect, metonymy simply claims that “one term figuratively displaces another, closely related one.”4 At the core of the nationalist superhero is the essential premise of the otherwise binary nation-state being identifiable in a single human body. This metonymic relationship poses many intriguing questions about nationalist super­ heroes, most obviously: why are they almost all male?5 This chapter ad­ dresses this simple question from two perspectives: first by looking at the masculine superhero body in action, through which the state is produced as a “hard” masculine shell protecting the “soft” feminine nation. This material appreciation for the superheroic body is paired with a second perspective, that of the textual representations of domesticity and feminist values. The remainder of this chapter begins with a review of the feminist literature on the intersection between the body, the nation, and the state. The empirical section that follows addresses the ways that gender is manifested within nationalist superhero texts, as well as occasional forays into readers’ reactions as manifested in letters to the editor. Three themes are examined: masculinity and misogyny, hetero-heroism, and feminism. From Bodies Politic to Bodies on Parade The nation has itself long been a profoundly gendered notion, with a particular relationship to the human body, often identified through the metaphor of the “body politic.” Claire Rasmussen and Michael Brown have argued that this metaphor is not politically innocent.6 The body politic works to take the complexity of a political formation, such as the nation-state, and reduce it to something of which we all have some experience—the human body. This metaphor long predates the superhero, but nationalist superheroes similarly take the modern, Western nation, with its complex histories, dynamics, and multiplicities , and reduce it to something familiar, tangible, and comprehensible. The body politic naturalizes ethical and political questions as health concerns, with the preservation of one’s life legitimated under almost any circumstances. With this question of defense comes the gendering of the nation. For example, John Bell argues that early twentieth-century “Canadian cartoonists had frequently personified Canada as a beautiful young woman named Canada or Miss Canada. Often forced to spurn the advances of Uncle Sam (or Brother Jonathan), the demure Miss Canada was the Canadian equivalent of such established female cartoon symbols as Columbia (the U.S.) and Britannia (the U.K.).”7 As this quotation indicates, nation-states often have both male and female personifications , each of which is used to reflect this notion...