"It's a Batman's World": Regulations of Gender, Sanity, and Justice in Batman Comics, 1986-2011
Date
2015-06-02
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Abstract
Batman, or Bruce Wayne, is a famous DC Comics superhero without superpowers
who fights crime at night in the guise of a bat after his parents’ murder. He has
starred in dozens of animated and live-action films and TV shows, graced
YouTube with a fan-written musical, and been continuously published in comics
since his first appearance in 1939. While many readers and viewers can likely recall
iconic moments, such as Batman: The Animated Series’ “I am vengeance! I
am the night! I am Batman!”, it is less likely that they have considered the full
weight of those words, and the institutions and infrastructures Batman has enacted
and regulates in Gotham City.
In this thesis, I examine three modes through which Batman/Bruce Wayne exerts
control over Gotham City: first, by performing and enforcing specific standards of
masculine and heterosexual gender identity and sexual orientation; second, by
hypocritically designing and implementing systems of regulation for the insane;
and third, by challenging his system of justice and crime-fighting through the person
and experiences of Jason Todd. This project is implicitly Foucauldian, and
draws heavily from Michel Foucault’s writings in Madness and Civilization and
“About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th Century Legal Psychiatry,”
as well as existing scholarship on masculinity and superhero comics, specifically
those focusing on Batman.
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Keywords
Batman, comics studies, comics, Foucauldian analysis