Abstract
What does the superhero—an icon of the American imaginary—communicate about the politics of violence? Responding to nationwide protests of police brutality in 2020, law enforcement officers adopted the skull logo of The Punisher, an exceptionally violent fictional vigilante. That adoption signals what I call theprivilege of violence: the force individuals may deploy based on normative expectations concerning gender and race. Comparing Marvel-Netflix productions includingThe Punisherseries, I identify three modes of violence in operation: theunrestrictedrage of a white male vigilante, thevulnerabilityof a feminist heroine, and thesacrificialcontrol of a Black male hero. The article demonstrates the gendered and racialized conditions under which heroic violence is rendered legitimate to American audiences. As I conclude, Punisher’s unrestricted violence valorizes white male grievance, and this is precisely what appeals to armed agents of the American state.
Highlights
On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was chased down and fatally shot by three white men, one of whom was a former officer with the Glynn County Police Department (Rojas, Fausset, and Kovaleski 2020)
In the midst of sustained protests organized in response to the killings of Arbery, Taylor, and Floyd, some law enforcement officers and even entire police departments began displaying the skull logo of Marvel’s Punisher—a fictional vigilante known for his extreme violence (Cronin 2020)
In 2017, The Punisher skull was decaled onto the official vehicles of a Kentucky police department along with the slogan “Blue Lives Matter” (Campbell 2017)
Summary
Note: Screenshot by Author, available at https://www.facebook.com/stlouispolice.officersassociation/photos/a.337137539825055/ 1026869934185142. As defined here, privileged violence identifies who can use violence and how they can do so in ways that will be recognized as legitimate. The forms of agency generated through privileged violence are unique because the legitimate use of force is traditionally understood to be under the purview of the state. Nowhere is that clearer than in the narratives of superheroes, figures whose agency as heroes is defined by their powers and by their enactments of violence, often as surrogates for a weak or ineffective state (Burke, Gordon, and Ndalianis 2019). For state agents like those noted above, drawing on the outlaw symbolism of The Punisher signals a defense of the privilege of violence they assume in excess of what they are formally authorized to use. That symbolic defense is mobilized precisely in those moments when unequal deployments of force are exposed or challenged
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