Sites of similarity, sites of difference: constructing Canada in the graphic narrative

• Main Author: Leadbetter, Shandi
• Other Authors: McClarty, Lianne
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: graphic novels; group identity > Canada; national characteristics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/3332

Canadian superhero comic books represent a politically significant opportunity to study popular conceptions of national politics, cultures, and identities. Canadian superheroes are 'others' in the shadow their American neighbours, but embrace this 'Not-American otherness' as a central factor defining Canadian national identity. The diversity of Canadian multiculturalism collapses into a monolithic white/male/Anglophone identity produced in the tensions created by the binary relmionship between 'self-as-other' and 'American' articulated by the texts, creating one universalised and naturalised "Canadian" identity. This thesis seeks to politicise existing surveys that ignore the political implications of the comic book texts, and to critique other problematic methodologies in the comics discourse: tendencies towards canon-building, and resistance to interdisciplinary methodologies. I forward a social/cultural/political analysis that draws equally on my multiple backgrounds and subject positions as a university-educated art historian, a popular culture critic, a Canadian, and a (feminist) reader and fan of superhero comic books. === Graduate