REDEN. Revista Española de Estudios Norteamericanos

The Dollhouse and Mobility of the Southern Gothic Legacy in Sharp Objects

Veronika Klusáková — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The text explores several issues connected to the relationship between the gothic house and its miniature double, a dollhouse, on the example of a Southern Gothic TV series Sharp Objects, an HBO production from 2018. It addresses their similar position as gendered spaces (the house being a profoundly feminine business, the dollhouse a field for girls to practice femininity), their gothicization (both host traumas and secrets of the past), and the work they perform in the perpetuation of their Gothic legacy. The foregrounding of mobility and agency in the treatment of the gothic dollhouse helps to question and reread one of the basic building blocks of Southern Gothic fiction: its reliance on the sense of place. In this view, the dollhouse operates as an interface between the world outside and inside and thus dissolves the boundaries set by the master house. It is not just its mirror image, propelling a mise-en-abîme project of perpetual proliferation, but, when properly noticed, provides a tool for the healing of past wounds and traumas via their contemporary embodiments, and sets new directions for the social relevance of Southern Gothic fiction.

Introduction

Anna Marta Marini; Marica Orrù — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Looking for the Arab Superheroine: Layla El-Faouly, Marvel’s Moon Knight, and the Imperial Gaze

Zvonimir Prtenjača — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Seen through Hollywood’s colonialist and masculinist lenses, the Arab woman is exoticized as a veiled, taunting belly dancer, eroticized as a licentious slave concubine confined to a harem, and monstrified as an alluring temptress or a conniving terrorist. Excluded from any possibility of a dialectical response, this Othered damsel in distress is reduced to a commodity first gazed upon and then (ab)used by the Western man. But, what happens when the Arab woman returns the Westerner’s voyeuristic and fetishistic gaze and avoids his gendered stereotypes? This paper pursues the answer to that question by scrutinizing Layla El-Faouly’s depiction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s sixth television series, Moon Knight (2022), wherein the Egyptian explorer, archaeologist adventurer, and superheroine engages in what E. Ann Kaplan terms “the looking relation” (1997, xviii, original emphasis) with the overzealous American leader of the Disciples of Ammit, Arthur Harrow. The paper traces Layla on her “complex intellectual/psychic journey” through Harrow’s “objectifying imperialist gaze,” concluding that she effects the “renewing process of inter-racial looking relations” (Kaplan 1997, 14) for the Arab woman by refusing to be perceived as voiceless, passive, and foreign.

Submitting to Loving Authority: Wonder Woman’s DeleuzoGuattarian Ethics

Troy Michael Bordun — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

In this article, I read Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette’s Wonder Woman: Earth One, Volume 1 (2016) through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy to challenge the superhero comics narrative convention of using violence as the sole means in a hero’s transcendent pursuit of justice. Deleuze and Guattari critique goal-oriented sexuality as a call for different modes of thinking about ethics and interpersonal relations. I apply their insights to superhero comics wherein we find heroes’ aggressive climaxes of physical power that set things right, i.e., back to the way things were. Most heroes are thus goal-oriented, hyper-violent, and conservative; they beat the villains into compliance to return the world to its previous order. Wonder Woman, on the contrary, turns towards what I call the ethics of the caress. She deploys intimate conversation and physical affection as well as espouses vulnerability to thereby transform her interlocutors – whether men or fellow Amazons – into submissive counterparts to “change the world for the better” (Morrison and Paquette 2016).

The Politics of Antihero Aesthetics: Andy Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men at the 1964 World’s Fair

Elena Sidorova — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The current paper examines a series of portraits called Thirteen Most Wanted Men that the famous American Pop artist Andy Warhol created on the occasion of his participation in the World’s Fair that took place in New York in 1964. The paper explores the economic-political context of the 1964 World’s Fair and explains how and why Warhol’s work got it to the façade of the New York State Pavilion designed by the prominent American architect Philip Johnson. The paper reveals the ambiguous nature of the antihero representation of Thirteen Most Wanted Men and studies the contribution of one of Warhol's art dealers Ileana Sonnabend to the international circulation of these paintings in the aftermath of the 1964 World’s Fair.

WandaVision through the Sitcoms: A Study of the Series’ Narrative Construction

Ana Sánchez-Asenjo — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Marvel series WandaVision has been acclaimed for its outstanding rendition of classical sitcoms. It has been considered a homage to this genre. More accurately, the references to certain sitcoms have been deemed Wanda Maximoff’s trauma response to the loss of her partner, Vision. The present paper takes a step further by exploring the contribution of sitcoms to the series’ storytelling. In order to contextualize the parallelisms of WandaVision to some classical sitcoms, it will be helpful to provide an outline of the characteristics of the genre and specific features that matched the preoccupations of American society through the decades. Subsequently, each episode of the show will be analyzed, paying attention to diegetic and non-diegetic elements, the plot, personnel, world-building, cinematography, and mise en scène. The different choices in each case recall the ideals behind particular sitcoms while accounting for the evolution of the genre and portraying the changes in the American culture. All these allusions and echoes are key for conveying Wanda’s personal story.

The Chivalric Romance in the Age of its Neoliberal Reproducibility: The Orlando Furioso Transcodified in Marvel’s Iron Man Saga

Alice Balestrino — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article interprets Marvel’s Iron Man saga, including the Avengers’ chapters, as a particularly interesting instance of the latest stage of American exceptionalism, here understood as imbricated in the neoliberal society. This reading is built upon the hypothesis that the Avengers’ adventures may be viewed as a twenty-first century development of the chivalric romance and of the knights’ quests, both in narrative and ideological terms. A key facet of this interpretation lies in the realization that technological reproducibility is a crucial aspect both of neoliberalism and of the Marvel’s saga, the latter being the articulation of the traditional chivalric genre according to the contemporary neoliberal principles. Against this background, the article presents the Iron Man movies in continuity with the literary tradition established by Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

The Twenty-First-Century Avengers: Exploration of War, Globalization, and Identity Politics

Leonor Acosta Bustamante — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The economic and cultural impact of the four films forming the saga of The Avengers from 2012 to 2019 stands for the impressive accumulation of superhero fiction in the 21st century, with a remarkable resituation of the topic of war conflict into the popular imagination quite affected by the traumatic beginning of the era in the New York scenario on 9/11. This article intends to analyze the different plot elements in The Avengers (2012), The Avengers. Age of Ultron (2015), The Avengers. Infinity War (2018), and The Avengers. Endgame (2019) to find clues to explain how the Marvel Cinematic Universe accomplishes a complex exploration of the nature of war, and how the films offer new ways of deconstructing simplistic Manichean polarization between good vs. evil. With this objective in mind, the study pays attention to how this deconstruction also needs to concentrate on the decomposition of stereotypes related to identity politics.

Feminist Quest Heroine: Female Superheroines and Deconstruction of Male Heroism

Thanong Aupitak — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Hero's narratives have long been significantly shaped by male heroism to construct a certain perception towards gender by imposing hegemonic masculinity onto a male hero and hegemonic femininity on a female in order to establish a perpetual linkage between masculinity and superiority, simultaneously marginalizing female characters and their values by limiting their roles into being damsels in distress waiting to be rescued by a male hero and later becoming a reward of his success. Nevertheless, it has become prominent that various materials, especially movies, in the twenty-first century American popular culture have adopted a different model to portray a narrative of heroism by infusing it with the concept of Feminist Quest Heroine, a theory foregrounded by Svenja Hohenstein that highlights the re-modification of male-dominated narrative of heroism into a feminist one. The narrative no longer cherishes the superiority of masculinity but now addresses the feminine aspects instead. In order to rework the narrative, the concept points out to four different but inter-related approaches: the empowerment of femininity, reworking gendered bodies, power of connections, and a critique of patriarchal power. The adoption of the approaches result in a more empowering heroine who is able to subvert traditional aspects embedded with a conventional narrative of heroism.

V For Vendetta (2005) and the Sociopolitical Impact of a Shakespearean Dystopian Avenger

Xelo Forés Rossell — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The use of science and technology as tools for political domination is a recurrent topic in dystopian films. James McTeigue and the Wachowski sisters´ film adaptation (2005) of Alan Moore and David Lloyd´s cult graphic novel V for Vendetta (1982-89) is a unique example of this kind, as the film has enhanced its impact on a wider audience and has spread its influence over the sociopolitical arena. After 18 years since its release, the film´s criticism is still in force and it may be applied to analyze recent political events in the United States. Far from being a work circumscribed to a specific time, nowadays the film highlight issues that are still relevant and problematic, such as resettlement camps, pandemics, manipulated information and massive surveillance. The film adaptation has become a global hit and V´s mask has been claimed and reproduced in all kind of protests. Therefore, this masked avenger—inspired by Guy Fawkes and created forty years ago—has succeeded to become a tragic hero in the fashion of revenge tragedy characters, combining Shakespearean references with radical political ideas. Thus, people have identified with V through the years, bringing his mask to the streets in social and political struggles such as Anonymous or Occupy Wall Street.