Queering the American (Super)Hero in Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters Novels

Abstract

This article presents Alec Lightwood in Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters Young Adult urban fantasy novels as a character that questions and subverts the tenets underpinning the association between exceptionalism and heroicity in American culture, thus fostering a reworking of the myth of the superhero in the nation’s twenty-first-century imagination. In his trajectory from closeted gay boy to hero of several wars and leader of the Shadowhunters, Alec queers the hegemonic American heroic ideal by subverting the paradigm of heteronormative masculinity conventionally associated with it and promotes a model of heroism that champions cooperation, empathy, and personal feelings. After clarifying how Shadowhunter traditions mirror American national core values and introducing the Nephilim as a particular kind of (super)heroes that expose the way those values can lead to corruption and destruction if deployed to supremacist ends, I describe Alec’s atypical heroism, grounded in the inseparability of the private and the public and encouraging a rethinking of what makes the America strong and good. I also explore the unusual importance given in Clare’s novels to a hero’s romantic and family life as a means for exploring – through Alec’s queerness – the contribution of the instrumentalization of love and family to the preservation of hegemonic ideals and its negative impact on the imagined future of the nation.