Superhero bodies: identity, materiality, transformation (1st)

Throughout the history of the genre, the superhero has been characterised primarily by physical transformation and physical difference.

This book explores the transformation of the superhero body across multiple media forms including comics, film, television, literature and the graphic novel.

How does the body of the hero offer new ways to imagine identities?

How does it represent or subvert cultural ideals? How are ideologies of race, gender and disability signified or destabilised in the physicality of the superhero?

This volume collects essays that attend to the physicality of superheroes: the transformative bodies of superheroes, the superhero's position in urban and natural spaces, the dialectic between the superhero's physical and metaphysical self, and the superhero body's relationship with violence.