Domesticity, Homosociality, and Male Power in Superhero Comics of the 1950s

Abstract

In any examination of comics of the 1950s, Fredric Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent will inevitably come up, and any discussion of the superhero genre at the time, and its representation of masculinity, must mention Wertham’s most infamous and oft-quoted assertion that Batman and Robin represent a homosexual fantasy. Wertham did correctly identify the possibility of a queer reading of the superhero, albeit as an example of what was wrong with the comics. His attitude indicates the important function of homosexuality in the fifties discourse of heterosexual mascu­ linity to negatively define “normative” masculinity: the mature, responsible, white, heterosexual middle-class professional so strongly associated with the decade. While hardly a true or universal norm, this image of American manhood served as a locus for the popular expression both of “proper” American masculinity and of anxieties that arose from the dominant domestic ideology of the 1950s and its assigned roles of female homemaker, wife, and mother and male breadwinner, hus­ band, and father. Among his examples of signs of homosexuality in Batman and Robin comics, Wertham describes one quality that is less a sign and more an impression of a shared attitude: “The feeling is conveyed that we men must stick together because there are so many villainous creatures who have to be exterminated” (190). FocusMark Best is a Visiting Lecturer in English at the University of Pittsburgh, teaching courses on film and popular culture. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana Univer­ sity in 2002, and is currently revising his dissertation, on masculinity and the superhero genre in the post-war era, for publication, as well as working on other projects related to comics and popular culture.