Description
The superhero genre of cinema has been around since the 1970s but has come to flourish since 2008 with the release of Ironman. During this time the US has been preoccupied with three major foreign policy challenges from the Wars on Terror, increasing tensions with Russia, and the rise of China. This has seen the US attempt to reassert its preeminence in response to these threats in a variety of ways. With the electoral success of Donald Trump in 2016 and the emergence of Trumpism as a masculine antidote to a perceived crisis of US global status, the superhero genre has come to embody an attempt to reestablish US order by reasserting its cosmic and masculine dominance in the face of a perceived loss of agency in an increasingly turbulent world. Building on feminist critiques of the masculine practices of US foreign policy and critiques of the hyper-masculine themes of 1980s action cinema this paper will argue that the superhero genre has become a site for the US to resolve the perceived crises of masculinity, identity, and global status since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It will do so by analysing the films from two trilogies within the Marvel Cinematic Universe that centre on the characters Iron Man and Captain America.
