Batman and the Joker Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture

This cultural analysis of visual and narrative elements within Batman comics provides an important exploration of the ways readers and creators negotiate gender, identity, and sexuality in popular culture. Thematic chapters investigate how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations by focusing on one of the most popular and heated fictional rivalries ever inked: that of Batman and the Joker. The monograph provides critical insights into ways queer reading practices can open new forms of understanding that have generally remained implicit and unexplored in mainstream comics studies. This accessible and interdisciplinary approach to the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime engages diverse fields of scholarship such as Comics Studies, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Literature, Psychoanalysis, Media Studies, and Queer Theory.

Introduction Reading the Dark Knight Queering the Caped Crusader Investigating the World’s Greatest Detective Chapter One: Dragged into Desire: Bruce Wayne’s Woman Problem Traces of Batman Desire and the Dark Knight The Bat and the Cat Chapter Two: Lavender Lapels and Poison Pansies: The Joker as Queer Trickster The Man Who Laughs Straight and Narrow The Fraternity of Saps Death of the Family Chapter Three: With the Lights Out: The Then and There of Gotham City Of Other Spaces Profound Silences No Man’s Land List of Comics

Chris Richardson is Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Young Harris College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. He is also Program Director of the Popular Culture Minor and Curator of the Andy Rowe Comics Collection there. His previous publications include Covering Canadian Crime: What Journalists Should Know and the Public Should Question (2016), co-edited with Romayne Smith Fullerton, and Habitus of the Hood (2012), co-edited with Hans Skott-Myhre. He also hosts This Is Not A Pipe Podcast (tinapp.org), where he interviews authors of new books in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, and Philosophy.