title: Comics, corps, and culture war
title: precarious discourses in Marvel’s feminist branding
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Griffin, Matt
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2024
Subjects: Fandom
Gender
Movies
Race
Superhero
Multimedia communications
Popular Culture

description: Comics, Corps, and Culture War examines American conversations about race, feminism, and progressive politics from the 2010s into the 2020s through a case study on the multimedia brand Marvel (which publishes comic books as Marvel Comics and produces films as Marvel Studios). I examine how discussions about patriarchy, systemic racism, economic inequality, and other potentially feminist concerns appear throughout the branding and reception of Marvel’s 2010s and 2020s media texts. I use semiotics and cultural studies theory to argue that, in these corporate media contexts, terms such as “feminism” and “diversity” act as what I call “precarious signifiers,” or branding tools that encourage consumption by discursively constructing a commodity as a representation of precariously positioned cultural values. Precarious signifiers and the related “precarious discourses” around them elicit strong audience emotions and thereby encourage consumption of corporate texts as commodity activism. As branding tools, precarious signifiers leverage the abstract and inconsistent meanings of terms such as “feminism” to frame consumption as political progress. In reception contexts, consumers and fans push back against these hegemonic, corporate-friendly feminisms and construct negotiated or oppositional definitions of these terms and discourses.
description: This project uses precarious signifiers and discourses to examine shifts in American white supremacist patriarchy and hegemony through the lens of branding, consumption, and fandom. I draw on cultural studies scholarship to theorize “precarity” as a space that consumers recognize as culturally important yet firmly outside mainstream hegemonic culture. For example, in the 2010s and 2020s the representation of women and people of color in popular culture has been precarious in that many Americans are aware of it is as a meaningful cultural topic but understand that it is still subordinate to the representation of white men in popular media texts. When a media text represents a precarious discourse – such as a film that represents a version of feminism by centering women or people of color – consumers see the consumption of that text as a way of bringing those values closer to the mainstream, or the act of protesting the text as a way of pushing the values further into obscurity. In the 2010s, feminist discourses were just “mainstream” enough for white American consumers that Marvel could rely on those discourses to make their content seem precarious: important and subversive, yet still safe and consumable.
description: The first half of my project is a branding and production analysis that outlines how Marvel leverages precarity to present itself as feminist and progressive in ways that appeal to a critical mass of consumers. I examine advertisements and paratexts to argue that Marvel is a popular feminist company that values feminist discourses insofar as it can commodify them; it embraces feminist discussions of diversity but runs counter to other forms of feminism due to its exploitation of workers and partnerships with hegemonic, racist institutions. In the 2010s Marvel’s branding embraced terms such as “feminism” and “diversity,” which are ambiguously defined but gesture towards the precarious margins of American society. By marketing its content as “feminist,” Marvel tells consumers that they must support the company’s content to make those increasingly appealing ideals more mainstream and hegemonic.
description: The second half of this project examines how critics, fans, and consumers negotiate the meaning of precarious discourses. Audiences and fans critique corporations’ uses of precarious discourses about “feminism” by arguing those discourses represent ideals that run counter to capitalist consumption. I examine reception documents and share interviews I conducted with fans to argue that throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, consumers widened their conceptions of feminism and diversity in ways that created critical interruptions in Marvel’s corporate uses of the terms. During this time, anti-capitalist discussions about systemic change in American culture grew in visibility, and consumers increasingly took issue with the idea of achieving meaningful feminist political progress through consumption.
description: This project traces shifts in American white supremacist patriarchy and hegemony through the lens of precarity and consumption. I examine multiple sites of media activity – production, text, reception, and sociocultural context – to demonstrate how the signification of precarity can drive consumption, political activism, and the joys of fandom. Ultimately this study demonstrates how we determine both what our cultural values should be and what meaningful political progress looks like.