Christopher Michael Roman

Queering Wolverine in Comics and Fanfiction: A Fastball Special interrogates the ways in which the Marvel Comics character Wolverine is a queer hero and examines his representation as an open, vulnerable, and kinship-oriented queer hero in both comics and fanfiction. Despite claims that Wolverine embodies Reagan-era conservatism or hegemonic hypermasculinity, Wolverine does not conform to gender or sex norms, not only because of his mutant status, but also because his character, throughout his publication history, resists normalization, making him a site for a queer-heroic futurity. Rather than focusing on overt queer representations that have appeared in some comic forms, this book explores the queer representations that have preceded Wolverine’s bisexual and gay characterizations and in particular focuses on his porous and vulnerable body. Through important, but not overly analyzed storylines, representations of his open body that is always in process (both visually and narratively), his creation of queer kinships with his fellow mutants, and his eroticized same-sex relationships as depicted in fanfiction, this book traces a queer genealogy of Wolverine. This book is ideal reading for students and scholars of comics studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, and literature.

A Fastball Special

Queering Wolverine in Comics and Fanfiction

Will Rogers

This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.

Christopher Michael Roman

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