Critical Race and Intersectional Feminist Critique of Transhumanism in Superhero Movie

Fiona Blaikie; Giang LE; Sophia Strachan

Fiona Blaikie Brock University
Giang LE Brock University
Sophia Strachan

Abstract

Transhumanism, race, gender, and cultural identity in early 21^st century popular culture movies: Black Panther; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Wonder Woman is the focus of this essay. Transhumanism refers to a super-powered human, able to transcend conventional human capabilities and accomplish physical, psychic, intellectual, and emotional feats of strength and perseverance such as extra sensory perception and the ability to fly. Three authors examine how their positionality impacted their experiences of the movies’ narratives, characterizations, and significance. Each author considers their own enculturated, racialized, and gendered backgrounds to contemplate the personal impact of the films as empowering and inspirational.

Author Biographies

Fiona Blaikie, Brock University

Fiona Blaikie is professor of art education at B University. An art educator, Fiona’s scholarship has evolved into looking at visual and cultural identity constructs encompassing social theory on the body, clothing, affect, new materialism, Kathleen Stewart’s (2019) worlding, and feminism’s key concept of situated conditions. Fiona teaches in the graduate program in the Department of Educational Studies at B University, and she is supervising both Sophia Strachan and Giang Le.

Giang LE, Brock University

Giang Le is a gay Asian adult male from Vietnam. He is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education at B University working on his dissertation, which is an autoethnography about growing up as a gay boy in a traditional and homophobic society, framed by his early childhood and youth in which the family and wider society follow the conventions of Confucianism and Buddhism. Hence, he is eager to bring his experiences and understandings of Asian cultures and ideologies and gender discourses into this work on interpretation of transhumanism through perspectives of race, gender, and culture in the Asian context.

Sophia Strachan

Sophia Strachan has a BFA degree from Canada and is a practicing artist. Currently, she is an international M.Ed. thesis student in the Faculty of Education at a university in Canada.