MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

U.S. popular culture is currently dominated by superheroes—from revived, re-booted, or reinvigorated comics franchises to film, TV, and digital media adaptations. Whether the result of post-9/11 anxieties (within the context of which the comfort of familiar stories, clear-cut morality, and the assured defeat of those who pose threats to the safety of U.S. citizens is appealing), or the result of industry shifts that emphasize remakes and adaptations on the part of corporate media producers (who see them as safe bets in terms of audience appeal, as well as rich sources for the kinds of transmedia synergy that dominate in the era of media convergence), when it comes to recent movie and TV superheroes, most have their origins in the period between the late-1930s and the late-1960s. Thus, adapting them for movies/TV has also required updating them for 21st Century audiences. As Behm-Morawitz and Pennell note, for female superheroes this has meant that becoming a superhero is linked to the acquisition of behavioral traits culturally-coded as masculine, a representational convention they attribute to changing conceptions of gender in the wake of the U.S. feminist movement. Significantly, though, the same is not true for male superheroes, for whom being a superhero is still tied exclusively to rigid embodiments of patriarchal masculinity. This presentation examines the ways in which The Flash constitutes an exception to this pattern, linking Barry Allen’s assumption of the role of superhero to the acquisition of behavioral traits culturally-coded as feminine. It argues that, in the process, the show provides an alternative to both patriarchal ideology’s valuing of the “masculine”/devaluing of “the feminine” and the Men’s Rights Movement’s valorization of toxic masculinity, as well as countering the majority of recent superhero narratives, whose updates to their male superheroes do not extend to more varied conceptualizations of masculinity.