Peer Webinar: Chapter 16, The Department of English

The Department of English, The Bhawanipur Education Society College organized Peer Webinar: Chapter 16 on 27^th February, 2023 at 7 pm. The speaker was Ms. Soumyosree Banerjee; her paper was entitled- “Dis-ability and the American Superhero: the Perfect and the Perfected”. The webinar was held on Google Meet; it was attended by the faculty members and the PG Semester III students of the Department of English.

The Peer Webinars are a unique monthly endeavour by the Department of English, The Bhawanipur Education Society College that has facilitated an amiable atmosphere for the exchange of research ideas. In the sixteenth and the final chapter of this series of webinars, Ms. Banerjee tried to bring out the politics behind the projection of the ‘disabled body’ in the American Superhero comics. Her paper focused on three canonical superheroes from the Marvel comic universe, namely Captain America, Ms. Marvel and Daredevil and how each of them has been portrayed differently between 1970 and 1985. She observed while Captain America emerged in the 1950s, a time that was obsessed with the idea of the ‘perfect body’, the other two superheroes originate in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Disability Movement was at its peak in the United States. This varying representation of the ‘disabled’ superhero therefore delineates a sense of plurality within the American political discourse.

Ms. Banerjee began her presentation by locating and dismantling the concept of ‘disability’ along with the terms ‘impairment’, ‘malformed’ and ‘deformed’, through Foucault’s understanding of bio-power and bio-politics. She goes on to deduce how Captain America conveniently gets rid off his ‘disability’ in order to be a perfect representative of the American military services and Ms. Marvel’s disabled status leads to her superheroic self. Both the heroes depict a political legitimisation of their bodies, in order to turn into the perfect American superheroes. The body finds acceptance through Daredevil as his blindness becomes a significant aspect of his superhero identity. Unlike the other two heroes, Daredevil is more of a social hero who distinctively alienates himself from any significant political ideal. After answering the questions related to the disability movement concurring with the popularity of the comics, Ms. Banerjee tried to locate the ‘body politics’ in the representation of the ‘supercrip’ chronologically.

Ms. Banerjee’s presentation began with the portrayal of the metahumans-the mythical God-like perfect bodied superheros and ended with the depiction of the more human-like presentation of the new superhero, thus demonstrating the temporal changes in representation of disability.