Description
This paper introduces my book Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and US Foreign Policy in the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) through an inversion: by outlining what the book is not about. It is not a fan study of cinematic universes, nor a simple reading of superheroes as metaphors for America. It is not about predicting policy outcomes or ranking “good” and “bad” representations of power. Instead, it is an inquiry into the political unconscious of US security culture as it materializes through the superhero genre’s aesthetics, affects, and mythologies. The book argues that superheroes are not mirrors but authors of security imaginaries: they do not reflect geopolitics—they produce it. Moving from 9/11 to the Trump era, it traces how narratives of exceptionalism, surveillance, and redemption migrate from policy discourse to popular media and back. By clarifying what the book refuses to be—a mere add-on to IR or a celebration of heroic spectacle—it gestures toward a broader project: understanding popular culture as the space through and in which security is imagined, desired, and lived.
