History Talk | Flame On! Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules and the Queer History of The Fantastic

Released to popular acclaim in 1961, The Fantastic Four (Marvel Comics) tells the story of anti-Communist space adventurers who gain extraordinary powers when cosmic rays alter their physiology. In this talk, Ramzi Fawaz explores the surprising evolution of the comic-book series, which used the mutated bodies of its heroes to depict the transformation of the bread-winning father, doting wife and bickering male siblings of the 1950s nuclear family into icons of 1960s radicalism: the left-wing intellectual, the liberal feminist, the political activist, and the potential queer. Ramzi Fawaz is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; his research and teaching focus on American literary and cultural studies, queer theory, and visual-culture studies. His current book project, "The New Mutants: Comic Book Superheroes and Popular Fantasy in Postwar America" will be published by NYU Press in 2015. He is one of the cofounders of the Sexual Politics/Sexual Poetics Collective, a new national queer theory working group. Admission: $5.00 (general); $3.00 (California students); free for GLBT Historical Society members.