"Boys Will Be Men: Boys' Superhero Comics" / 112

Whereas bell hooks examines contemporary and historical stereotypes of women, among other questions, Peter Middleton investigates "How does a boy become a man?" (http://www.soton.ac.uk/~english/middleto.htm). Middleton teaches modern fiction, American poetry, critical theory, and creative writing at the University of Southhampton in England. Some of his recent work demonstrates how investigating the role of gender in society can manifest itself in different ways, with titles like "Imagined Readerships and Poetic Innovation in U.K. Poetry," "The Masculinity Behind the Ghosts of Modernism in Eliot's Four Quartets," "Getting Some Distance on the News: Simon Armitage, Douglas Oliver and the WTO," and Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing (2001). In this piece he uses action comic strips to illustrate "high and low culture" connections between boyhood and manhood.

"Boys Will Be Men: Boys' Superhero Comics" is a self-reflective essay from The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (1992), analyzing masculinity and femininity with respect to childhood roles and subjective, cultural identity. For Middleton, "childhood is both a condition and a history" (119). He provides a way of looking at growth in self-knowledge through reading and conflict-solving strategies. Out of curiosity, have you ever critically analyzed Dr. Seuss books?

Other readings that might be of interest include the chapters "Strategy, Identity, Writing" and "The Problem of Cultural Self-representation" from Gayatri Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999). Naomi Littlebear's poem "Dreams of Violence," Gloria Anzaldua's "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers," Garrett Hongo's "Kubota," and Nellie Wong's "In Search of the Self as Hero: A Confetti of Voices on New Year's Night" are also very good.

If you're at all interested in comics, you'll find the companion critical readings particularly interesting too.