Miettinen, Mervi

apurahatutkija, tuntiopettaja

Vastuuoppialat ja -alueet

Tutkimusprofiili Pluralissa

Yhteystiedot

sähköposti: sähköpostiosoitehaku
huone: Pinni B 5022
puhelin: 050 318 0743

Research interests

Superheroes, comics, popular culture

Ongoing research

My PhD dissertation, titled Truth, Justice, and the American Way? The Popular Geopolitics of American Identity in Contemporary Superhero Comics, examines and analyzes the way the popular geopolitics of American identity, a fictional and idealized “Americanness,” is constructed in the late 20^th and early 21^st century superhero comics. The analysis focuses on a limited corpus of key texts that rest on decades of genre history, and approaches them through the central concepts of masculinity, violence and the state of exception. The goal is to provide new and current cultural analysis of the way popular culture and especially superhero comics not only reflect but actively take part in the ongoing formation and development of popular geopolitics and national identity construction within America. The key research questions this dissertation aims to answer include the following:

• How do superhero comics take part in creating and contesting the popular geopolitical identity of America? In what ways does the superhero embody the idealized American national identity?
• How do superhero comics address questions of masculinity, and how does the hegemonic masculinity of superhero comics affect America’s popular geopolitics?
• How is violence justified in superhero comics, and what does it signify in the wider geopolitical context?
• What is the superhero’s relationship with the state and its power?
• What is the geopolitical relevance of the superhero in a post-9/11 US?

These questions addressing the superhero in terms of masculinity, violence, the state of exception, and 9/11 will be approached in the wider context of popular geopolitics, allowing for a multifaceted and comprehensive analysis of the superhero comic from the last three decades. The overall aim is to provide new and current cultural analysis of the way superhero comics not only reflect but in fact actively take part in the ongoing formation and development of popular geopolitics and national identity construction within the United States of America.

Publications

• “Past as multiple choice – Textual Anarchy and the Problems of Continuity in Batman: The Killing Joke.” The Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art. Vol. 1. No. 1 (2012). 3-25.

• “’Do you understand how I have loved you?’ Terrible Loves and Divine Visions in From Hell”. Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore. Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels. Ed. Joseph Sommers and Todd Comer. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. 88-99.

• “Representing the State of Exception: Power, utopia, visuality and narrative in superhero comics.” Images in Use: Towards the critical analysis of visual communication. Ed. Matteo Stocchetti and Karin Kukkonen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. 269-290.

• “En hotfull symmetri. Ord och bild i Alan Moores Watchmen”. Med bilden i tiden. Analys och tolkning av multimodala budskap. Tampere Studies in Language, Translation and Culture. Ed. Johanna Koivisto and Kristina Nikula. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2009. 103-124.