Of Men and Superman

Abstract

This chapter discusses gender. It starts with how Lois Lane, the comics’ main female character, is figured in relation to New Deal political culture and Jewish American assimilationism. An overly willful, behaviorally “nonwhite” woman, she needs to be disciplined into proper bourgeois, “white” femininity. Second, it discusses Superman’s hypermasculinity, arguing that it was rooted both in personal, intertextual, and Jewish American understandings of desirable characteristics in a man. Finally, Superman’s dual masculinities are discussed. Superman is here read in tune with a reconfigured Jewish American masculinity and with pop culture and ethnic humor. Aside from being a practical joke on bullies, tormentors, and perhaps anti-Semites, the Superman–Clark Kent duality, it is argued, might have been a way to cast nonideological difference as illusory, or at least inconsequential.