May 14, 4:30 PM: Artists' Salon: Ramzi Fawaz, "'Flame On!': Nuclear Families, Unstable ...

Released to popular acclaim in 1961, Marvel Comics’ The Fantastic Four told the story of four anti-Communist space adventurers who gain extraordinary powers when cosmic rays alter their physiology, respectively granting them control over living flame, invisibility, impenetrable rock-like skin, and physical pliability. The Fantastic Four depicted the monstrous transformations of its four heroes as placing them outside the bounds of Cold War gender and sexual norms, their bodies now mutated in ways that destabilized their assumed gender and sexual identities. In this talk, Ramzi Fawaz explores the surprisingly queer evolution of the series, which used the mutated bodies of its heroes to depict the transformation of the bread-winning father, doting wife and bickering male siblings of the 1950s nuclear family into icons of 1960s radicalism: the left-wing intellectual, the liberal feminist, the political activist, and the potential queer. Ramzi Fawaz is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his PhD in American Studies from George Washington University. His forthcoming book, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics will appear from NYU Press in Fall 2015. It explores how the American superhero came to embody the political aspirations of racial, gender, and sexual minorities in the post-WWII period. In 2013, the The New Mutants received the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship award for best first book manuscript in LGBT Studies. His research has been published in American Literature, Callaloo, Anthropological Quarterly, and most recently, GLQ. Along with Damon Young, Dr. Fawaz is also co-organizer of the Sexual Politics/Sexual Poetics Collective, a national working group of early-career queer studies scholars in the humanities. The Collective will hosted its first annual conference, "Queer/Art/Poetics," at Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities this past April. Presented by the Artists' Salon at the Center for the Study of Gender of Sexuality

Date: May 14, 2015
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

See:https://www.facebook.com/events/863836363658121/