Description
This paper presents core arguments of my book with EUP, titled Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century. Through the paper I will repackage important foundational aspects of IR for audiences that require a modern and accessible imagination. It engages with superheroes in a way that illustrates not only their long history but furthermore elaborates crucial changes of foreign policy and security discourses and practices through time via superheroes. Superheroes’ cinematic appearances have been shaping and (co-)constituting the ‘War on Terror’ and post-‘9/11’ security discourses, positioning popular culture as a series of political artefacts with important things to tell us about the real world. Far beyond the mere representational and symbolic reading of superheroes, the paper reveals important elements of post-‘9/11’ discourses and international security that might otherwise not be understood at best and misunderstood at worst. In doing so it paints a picture of life-worlds that are produced through popular culture and the everyday in which these worlds are constantly negotiated.
