Video, Past Event, Arts & Culture
Superheroes On The Couch
It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It’s a superhero!
Who has never had a favourite superhero? Our fascination with them is undeniable. What is so gripping about superheroes? What aesthetic, social, cultural, and even political elements do they conjure? Perhaps it is their often-tragic stories, or maybe their ethical commitment to act on behalf of a certain Good. Or, maybe it is their supernatural resilience to endure unspeakable ordeals or the way life compensates them with their phallic powers. But maybe, just maybe, it is because we are symbolically castrated, that is to say, fallible and flawed mere mortals that incites us to re-create our own desires and fantasies through the surpluses of heroism. Drawing on psychoanalysis and critical theory, this lecture explored some aspects of the human fascination with superheroes. From the traditional to the unconventional, as well as from the stars to the sidekicks, this panel placed some superheroes on the couch to freely speak about how society uses and produces superheroism.
• Walter White and Superman walk into a bar…. Bryan Cranston, the actor who gives life to Walter White, Breaking Bad’s now-notorious high-school-teacher-turned-gangster, is set to play Superman’s archenemy Lex Luthor in the next Man of Steel film. Walter White avec Clark Kent: Dan Adleman probed what this unlikely conjuncture has to teach us about the fabrication of cosmic heroism in the digital 21st century.
• Hilda Fernandez focused on Batgirl, one of Batman’s sidekicks, and analyzed this gender representation comparing it with other traditional superheroines (Batwoman and Wonderwoman). Deploying the concepts of phallus, fantasy, desire and jouissance, she asked how the depiction of super-powerful women has changed in modern pop culture, such as what we see in the Twilight Saga, XMen or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
• Larry Green explored how ordinary men displaying symptoms of dissociation and detachment that characterize a phase of PTSD become –absurdly- superheroic in the dystopian worlds of Sin City or Die Hard.
• Paul Kingsbury discussed the Hulk’s anger management issues. How does the Hulk deal with the unconscious, that is, a place of unknown knowledge? What is the status of his desire in relation to jouissance, that is, the painful pleasure of his drives? And to what extent can the Hulk find redemption in love-sublimation?
Speaker Bios
Dan Adleman is a UBC English PhD candidate and the associate director of the Vancouver Institute for Social Research, a graduate-level critical theory free school in downtown Vancouver.
Hilda Fernandez is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and co-founder of the Lacan Salon. She currently works as a psychoanalyst in private practice and as a therapist for Vancouver Coastal Health. She is an Associate of the SFU Institute for the Humanities.
Larry Green is a existential oriented psychotherapist with over 40 years experience. He also teaches counselling/psychotherapy theories at City University of Seattle. His current interest is the relationship between individual transformative processes (including but not restricted to psychotherapy) and a culture in radical transition. If both processes could be termed liminal how might we have to re-conceptualize the therapeutic endeavour?"
Paul Kingsbury is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. Specializing in social and cultural geography, his research draws on the theories of Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche to examine multiculturalism, consumption, power, and aesthetics. He is a co-founder member of the Lacan Salon.
Co-Presented by
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and Lacan Salon
