NAVIGATIONEN QUEER(ING) POPULAR CULTURE BODIES IN TRANSITION Queering the Comic Book Superhero BY DANIEL STEIN ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the comic book superhero as a popular figure whose queer- ness follows as much from the logic of the comics medium and the aesthetic prin- ciples of the genre as it does from a dialectic tension between historically evolving heteronormative and queer readings. Focusing specifically on the superbody as an overdetermined site of gendered significances, the essay traces a shift from the ostensibly straight iterations in the early years of the genre to the more recent appearance of openly queer characters. It further suggests that the struggle over the superbody’s sexual orientation and gender identity has been an essential force in the development of the genre from its inception until the present day. The comic book superhero has been a figure of the popular imagination for eight decades, if we count Superman’s appearance in Action Comics #1 (June 1938) as the beginning of the genre. Almost as old as the genre itself are associations of the superhero with what the American amateur psychologist Gershon Legman de- scribed as »an undercurrent of homosexuality and sado-masochism« 1 in his book Love and Death (1949). These associations became part of the broader public dis- course when the German-born psychiatrist Frederic Wertham expanded on them in Seduction of the Innocent (1954), a flawed but popular study of the effects of comic-book reading on juveniles that played into the climate of sexual anxieties at the height of the so-called comics scare. Wertham’s work is still cited in discus- sions of superhero sexuality, and the present essay is no exception, as I take Leg- man and Wertham’s observations as a launching pad for an investigation of what I call the queering of the comic book superhero. My understanding of queering the comic book superhero is deliberately am- biguous, as it enables at least two interpretations. First, it suggests a process in which a figure that had originally been considered straight by the majority of readers as well as by its producers is queered over the course of the genre’s de- velopment. Second, it evokes a process of bringing to bear a queer reading on a 1 An earlier version of this essay was presented as a keynote lecture at the student con- ference »Made of Flesh and Blood: The Bodies of Superheroes«, organized by Lukas Et- ter and Maria Verena Peters (University of Siegen, Jan. 21, 2017). I thank them for the invitation and their critical feedback as well as Christopher Hansen for reading a manu- script version of this essay and for his many useful suggestions. See: Legman: Love and Death, p. 42. See also Heer: »Batman and Robin«.