Comic-Con 2014

Ayanna Dozier (New York University Steinhardt) examines the transformative properties of the pornokitsch aesthetic featured in Golden Age comics, tracing the sociological-historical narratives that link pornokitsch to mainstream and erotic comics and questioning their use of gender, race, and sexuality. Cameron C. McKee (Northwestern University) and Shane Duncan (San Francisco State University) engage with various gay comics series to argue that the tongue-in-cheek humor of camp was (and remains) a central strategy for the construction of queer identity against the oppression of heteronormativity. And using psychological and sociological research, Benjamin Varosky (California State University, Fullerton) looks at Matt Fraction's run on Hawkeye, a single story told through the separate lenses of the masculine and feminine qualities that every superhero secretly-or not so secretly-embodies, to explore how the successes and failures of Clint and Kate individually pale in comparison to those that they share as the unified Hawkeye.