Castrating Superman: Rachel Pollack’s Transgender Mutant Cyborg Superhero in Doom Patrol

This essay argues that in her run on the serial DC comic Doom Patrol Rachel Pollack, transgender activist and science-fiction author, seizes on the figure of the mutant superhero to explore an affirmative account of transgender subjectivity. Pollack’s depiction of Coagula, one of the few transgender women to appear in mainstream comics, responds to concurrently emergent discourses about trans subjectivity, specifically the anti-identitarian formulations of gender, sexuality, and embodiment through which modern transgender studies countered the essentialist roots of antitrans feminism and began to radicalize understandings of gender subjectivity.