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"Flame On!" Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of the Fantastic Four

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. His forthcoming book, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics will appear in print from NYU Press in this December. 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.

Presented by Visual Studies at UC Irvine