At Marvel Comics, X-Men and its family of spinoffs have long been viewed as metaphors for racial conflict and tolerance. From the parallels between Professor X/Magneto and Martin Luther King Jr./Malcolm X to the ethnically and internationally diverse lineup launched in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (1975), Marvel’s mutant titles have consistently appeared to urge for tolerance and understanding in the face of racial conflicts. However, coinciding with this appeal are other more retrograde representations of race. In both X-Men and its first spinoff title, New Mutants, white characters—specifically Betsy Braddock/Psylocke in X-Men and supporting cast members Tom Corsi and Sharon Friedlander in New Mutants—undergo racial transformations, becoming Japanese and Native American, respectively. In both titles’ transformations, racial identity represents both corruption/evil and brings with it a hyper-sexuality, rendering race as “abject.” In these associations of race with evil, corruption, and hyper-sexuality, Marvel’s mutants participate in a thematics of racial abjection that contrasts and undermines its tolerant aims, making the mutant family of titles, at best, ambiguous in its understanding and representation of race.
About the presenterPatrick Hamilton
Patrick Hamilton is a professor of English at Misericordia University, specializing in U.S. multi-ethnic literature and popular culture. His books include Of Space & Mind: Cognitive Mappings of Contemporary Chicano/a Fiction (2011, University of Texas Press), All-New, All-Different?: A History of Race and the American Superhero (with Allan W. Austin, 2019, University of Texas Press) which received the PCA’s 2020 John G. Cawelti Award, and George Perez (2024, University Press of Mississippi).