This essay examines the appearance of non-normative bodies in three films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe; The Avengers (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), in an attempt to find qualities that might suggest queer, non-binary or gender disruptive attributes, in addition to looking at how the movies handle them. Using a combination of feminist film theory, queer theory and discourse analysis, the Otherness of these bodies are put into contrast with the normative and hegemonic gender expressions employed by the protagonists, the heroes of the films. While the study finds several indications of transgressive bodies and 'gender ambiguity' among the creatures and beings who play the part of inhuman threat, as well as the presence of discourses that paint them as threatening partly because of these qualities, they remain blurred and ill-defined, their queerness inferred rather than overt. The preferred reading, the analysis suggests, offers little in the way of identification, but all the more with regard to oppression. The way these bodies are treated in all three films implies that the tolerance for bodily deviance is virtually non-existent, and that a defining quality of masculine leadership is the ability to banish them from existence.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-25607 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Larsson, Vix |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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