The 'Super' man itself was invented by a physically weak scholar whose father died early & left him in a family of women. The Overman invented by Nietzsche was an elaborate fantasy figure -- a mental virtuoso, a psychologically invulnerable male, insusceptible to tenderness or empathy or pity, which Nietzsche thought of as decadent. The figure of the Super-man became a feature of high colonialism -- and for the creators of the comic books who borrowed the name & figure in Superman, and super-men, pretty blatantly one embodying the superior physical and intellectual prowess of the anglo-saxon type against all the twisted & corrupt foreigners.
It wasn't until the '60s, in the wake of the Beats and the Beatniks -- themselves celebrators of machismo sexuality -- that the underdog antihero made it into the comic book pages. I remember the first explicitly feminist comic I ever read, the issue of the Avengers in which a heroine named the Valkyrie persuaded the Scarlet Witch, the Wasp, Medusa, and some others into becoming a super-team opposed to the male chauvinist Avengers . . . of course the silly women had been conned by the evil Enchantress.
The problem is that being super involves Superiority -- Buffy has a superiority complex, and has an inferiority complex about it, as Holden told her in CWDP. However bad the various super-men may feel about their failures or their faults, actually being the presumed Alpha is not in itself a transgression (and here Alpha peeps around the corridor of the Dollhouse . . . ) The genre of the Superior Human itself can be bent or troped to function differently -- but its basic DNA is completely alien to any sort of real equalitarian or feminist vision.
no subject
It wasn't until the '60s, in the wake of the Beats and the Beatniks -- themselves celebrators of machismo sexuality -- that the underdog antihero made it into the comic book pages. I remember the first explicitly feminist comic I ever read, the issue of the Avengers in which a heroine named the Valkyrie persuaded the Scarlet Witch, the Wasp, Medusa, and some others into becoming a super-team opposed to the male chauvinist Avengers . . . of course the silly women had been conned by the evil Enchantress.
The problem is that being super involves Superiority -- Buffy has a superiority complex, and has an inferiority complex about it, as Holden told her in CWDP. However bad the various super-men may feel about their failures or their faults, actually being the presumed Alpha is not in itself a transgression (and here Alpha peeps around the corridor of the Dollhouse . . . ) The genre of the Superior Human itself can be bent or troped to function differently -- but its basic DNA is completely alien to any sort of real equalitarian or feminist vision.