Ramzi Fawaz
Biographic Data
| ID | 765026 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ramzi Fawaz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ramzi |
| FAMILY NAME | Fawaz |
| SIGNATURE | FAWAZ R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Madison Group (United States) |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
“I Have Friends Everywhere”
This essay places Disney’s Studios’ acclaimed Star Wars television series Andor within the history of contemporary revolutionary media, most notably as a modern-day descendant of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). In placing Andor within a tradition of revolutionary media, the article aims to illuminate how the show accomplishes something far more important than parroting liberal democratic platitudes, popularizing iconic rebel hero…
Defying Tyranny
This essay argues that the popularity of the recent blockbuster film adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked lies in the film’s sustained investigation of people’s painful and self-destructive need to seek approval from false sources of authority. By placing the psycho-social rivalry of two talented but flawed young aspiring sorceresses at its center, the movie argues that genuinely solidarity between them is fundamentally undermined by thei…
“More Than We Were Programmed to Be”
This article argues that The Wild Robot offers an updated version of the Indigenous creation story “Skywoman Falling,” a foundational story of interspecies reciprocity and care that functioned for millennia as a blueprint for Native peoples’ relationships with Mother Earth. In the story, a lone woman falls from the heavens toward a water-bound planet, the first human to arrive as a cosmic immigrant to our natural world. In The Wild Robot, this st…
Webbed Attachments: Psychedelic Lessons from the Multiverse
This essay explores how the fundamental qualities of the psychedelic experience—including heightened affective intensity, the disorganization of the ego, and a sense of cosmic interconnectedness with the universe—offers a hopeful alternative to contemporary left-wing identitarianism. This is a widely popular political logic that associates the pursuit of social justice with the passionate defense of seemingly coherent, bounded marginalized subjec…
For the Sake of Appearing
Tripping on Mushrooms with Edward Said: The Case for Literary Studies as Holistic Medicine
This piece introduces the special issue of SAQ "Psychedelic Imaginaries," which collates fresh and theoretically sophisticated humanist perspectives on the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. Recent interdisciplinary research into psychoactive substances like LSD (or "acid"), psilocybin (or "magic mushrooms"), and MDMA (or "ecstasy") has repeatedly shown that the therapeutically beneficial aspects of psychedelic medicines-their ability to posit…
Civil War ’s Unsentimental Imagination
Alex Garland’s Civil War imagines an America in which political differences have augmented into warring factions, split across varying ideological lines. Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith, a renowned photojournalist whom FQ columnist Ramzi Fawaz places in a lineage of white women intellectuals, from Hannah Arendt to Joan Didion, whose reportage documented the social and political atrocities of 20th century. Their observational style is described by l…
No Bad Parts
This essay argues that Inside Out 2’s critical success lies in its canny translation of three contemporary mental health discourses including Tibetan Buddhist mindfulness, holistic medicine, and the internal family systems model of the psyche. By presenting human emotions as a series of autonomous but interconnected parts struggling against being repressed and compartmentalized, the film models for viewers what a healthy relationship to one’s aff…
“ You’re my people”
In The Last of Us Part II, the second installment in the hit video game series, players are made to reckon with the moral consequences of its protagonist Joel’s disastrous actions in the previous game. For his inaugural column, Ramzi Fawaz argues that the sequel “is one of contemporary popular culture’s most explicit statements of what political theorist Hannah Arendt calls ‘representative thinking.’” The video game as a medium makes representati…
Feminism Is forBeginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism
This essay argues for the importance of cisgender straight male perspectives to contemporary feminist theory and practice. I identify four lessons to be learned from what I call male affirmative feminist theory written by people of all genders, defined as any feminist thought that considers cis men critical interlocutors to feminism and legitimate subjects of gender and sexual freedom projects. These lessons include the value of androgynous think…
Against Murderous Passivity, or Reading Hannah Arendt under Lockdown
Just weeks into the coronavirus crisis, the lieutenant governor of Texas claimed on national television that U.S. Americans over seventy would gladly sacrifice their lives to COVID-19 so the rest of us could go back to business as usual. The response to this kind of murderous thinking should have been mass protest, if not revolution. Ten months later, we now know that the seemingly aberrant and barbaric idea of mass death by willful self-annihila…
“An Open Mesh of Possibilities”: The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times
The Shape of Desire
David Getsy's magisterial book Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender begins with a seemingly straightforward argument: in the 1960s, American sculptors turned to a range of nontraditional materials, and abstract or nonrepresentational sculptural forms, to reimagine the human body outside binary constructions of gender. These artists took up materials such as scrap metal, aluminum sheeting, crushed car parts, worn leat…
Introduction: Queer about Comics
There’s something queer about comics. Whether one looks to the alternative mutant kinships of superhero stories (the epitome of queer world making), the ironic and socially negative narratives of independent comics (the epitome of queer antinormativity), or the social stigma that makes the medium marginal, juvenile, and outcast from “proper” art (the epitome of queer identity), comics are rife with the social and aesthetic cues commonly attached …
Queers Read This
This essay calls for a reinvestment in queer readings of queer literary objects by invoking the Queer Nation polemic, Queers Read This! Tracing the importance and variety of queer reading as a modality of living, an intellectual specialty, and form of sociality, "Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now" takes seriously how, why, and what queers read. Looking to both Eve Sedgwick's foundational 1996 special issue of Studies in the Novel, as well as…
Legions of Superheroes
This article explores how the speculative worlds of contemporary US superhero comics have addressed the problem of difference and human diversity through stories about the catastrophic threat of genocide. It focuses on a classic DC Comics storyline—the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Legion Lost from 2000–2001—that depicts a diverse team of teenage superheroes collectively struggling against the genocidal actions of a former friend and colleague. The aut…
Discovering Paradise Islands: The Politics and Pleasures of Feminist Utopias, a Conversation
Locked Eyes
Discussion| October 01 2016 Locked Eyes Ramzi Fawaz Ramzi Fawaz Ramzi Fawaz is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016). His work appears in numerous publications including the academic journals American Literature, GLQ, Callaloo and Anthropological Quarterly. His new book, Queer Formalism: Shaping Gay a…
How to Make a Queer Scene, or Notes toward a Practice of Affective Curation
Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 757 Ramzi Fawaz How to Make a Queer Scene, or Notes toward a Practice of Affective Curation Let me begin with two stories. In spring of 2013 I organized a semester -long, undergraduate film series at George Washington University titled “Acting Up: Queer Film and Video in the Time of AIDS.” At semester ’s end, after participants had watched nine films about the AIDS epidemic —among them …
I Cherish My Bile Duct as Much as Any Other Organ
This essay explores the use of viscerally charged language around digestive dysfunction in AIDS cultural productions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I coin the phrase "the digestive politics and poetics of AIDS" to describe the use of metaphors that linked the digestive dysfunctions associated with HIV/AIDS to a political aversion, or disgust, for the state of American politics at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Specifically, I develop a clos…
Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes Race in American Science Fiction
Book Review| March 01 2013 Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes Race in American Science Fiction Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. By Nama, Adilifu. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 2011. i, 180 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $24.95.Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. By Saunders, Ben. New York: Continuum. 2011. iii, 178 pp…
Space, that Bottomless Pit: Planetary Exile and Metaphors of Belonging in American Afrofuturist Cinema
Space, that Bottomless Pit: Planetary Exile and Metaphors of Belonging in American Afrofuturist Cinema Ramzi Fawaz (bio) Outer space is not based upon highness. Space is not only high, it’s low. It’s the bottomless pit. There’s no end to it. —Sun Ra, Space is the Place Where are you from? You look like you might be from the South—no way I’m going back there . . . Sometimes I feel I have been taken for a slave up here, you know they have ‘em. Whit…
Settling Scores: Claiming Ground for Native and Indigenous Critique in the Americas
Settling Scores: Claiming Ground for Native and Indigenous Critique in the Americas Ramzi Fawaz Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 320 pp. The 1989 independent film Powwow Highway stands out as a unique contribution to the American road movie. The film tells the story of two Cheyenne tribesmen—the portly and naïve Philbert, a whimsical dreamer committed to the s…
"Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!" Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America
Dismissed for decades as juvenile entertainment, comic books had by the early 1970s come of age as America's "native art": taught on Ivy League campuses, studied by European scholars and filmmakers, and taken up as a new generation's cultural critique of American society. The cultural regeneration of the comic book was made possible by the revamping of a key American fantasy figure, the superhero, from a transparent champion of the national inter…
Queers Read This
This essay calls for a reinvestment in queer readings of queer literary objects by invoking the Queer Nation polemic, Queers Read This! Tracing the importance and variety of queer reading as a modality of living, an intellectual specialty, and form of sociality, "Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now" takes seriously how, why, and what queers read. Looking to both Eve Sedgwick's foundational 1996 special issue of Studies in the Novel, as well as…
Introduction: Queer about Comics
There’s something queer about comics. Whether one looks to the alternative mutant kinships of superhero stories (the epitome of queer world making), the ironic and socially negative narratives of independent comics (the epitome of queer antinormativity), or the social stigma that makes the medium marginal, juvenile, and outcast from “proper” art (the epitome of queer identity), comics are rife with the social and aesthetic cues commonly attached …
Discovering Paradise Islands: The Politics and Pleasures of Feminist Utopias, a Conversation
Feminism Is forBeginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism
This essay argues for the importance of cisgender straight male perspectives to contemporary feminist theory and practice. I identify four lessons to be learned from what I call male affirmative feminist theory written by people of all genders, defined as any feminist thought that considers cis men critical interlocutors to feminism and legitimate subjects of gender and sexual freedom projects. These lessons include the value of androgynous think…
Legions of Superheroes
This article explores how the speculative worlds of contemporary US superhero comics have addressed the problem of difference and human diversity through stories about the catastrophic threat of genocide. It focuses on a classic DC Comics storyline—the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Legion Lost from 2000–2001—that depicts a diverse team of teenage superheroes collectively struggling against the genocidal actions of a former friend and colleague. The aut…
Settling Scores: Claiming Ground for Native and Indigenous Critique in the Americas
Settling Scores: Claiming Ground for Native and Indigenous Critique in the Americas Ramzi Fawaz Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 320 pp. The 1989 independent film Powwow Highway stands out as a unique contribution to the American road movie. The film tells the story of two Cheyenne tribesmen—the portly and naïve Philbert, a whimsical dreamer committed to the s…
"Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!" Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America
Dismissed for decades as juvenile entertainment, comic books had by the early 1970s come of age as America's "native art": taught on Ivy League campuses, studied by European scholars and filmmakers, and taken up as a new generation's cultural critique of American society. The cultural regeneration of the comic book was made possible by the revamping of a key American fantasy figure, the superhero, from a transparent champion of the national inter…
"Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!" Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America
Dismissed for decades as juvenile entertainment, comic books had by the early 1970s come of age as America's "native art": taught on Ivy League campuses, studied by European scholars and filmmakers, and taken up as a new generation's cultural critique of American society. The cultural regeneration of the comic book was made possible by the revamping of a key American fantasy figure, the superhero, from a transparent champion of the national inter…
Space, that Bottomless Pit: Planetary Exile and Metaphors of Belonging in American Afrofuturist Cinema
Space, that Bottomless Pit: Planetary Exile and Metaphors of Belonging in American Afrofuturist Cinema Ramzi Fawaz (bio) Outer space is not based upon highness. Space is not only high, it’s low. It’s the bottomless pit. There’s no end to it. —Sun Ra, Space is the Place Where are you from? You look like you might be from the South—no way I’m going back there . . . Sometimes I feel I have been taken for a slave up here, you know they have ‘em. Whit…
Settling Scores: Claiming Ground for Native and Indigenous Critique in the Americas
Settling Scores: Claiming Ground for Native and Indigenous Critique in the Americas Ramzi Fawaz Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 320 pp. The 1989 independent film Powwow Highway stands out as a unique contribution to the American road movie. The film tells the story of two Cheyenne tribesmen—the portly and naïve Philbert, a whimsical dreamer committed to the s…
Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes Race in American Science Fiction
Book Review| March 01 2013 Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes Race in American Science Fiction Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. By Nama, Adilifu. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 2011. i, 180 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $24.95.Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. By Saunders, Ben. New York: Continuum. 2011. iii, 178 pp…
I Cherish My Bile Duct as Much as Any Other Organ
This essay explores the use of viscerally charged language around digestive dysfunction in AIDS cultural productions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I coin the phrase "the digestive politics and poetics of AIDS" to describe the use of metaphors that linked the digestive dysfunctions associated with HIV/AIDS to a political aversion, or disgust, for the state of American politics at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Specifically, I develop a clos…
Locked Eyes
Discussion| October 01 2016 Locked Eyes Ramzi Fawaz Ramzi Fawaz Ramzi Fawaz is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016). His work appears in numerous publications including the academic journals American Literature, GLQ, Callaloo and Anthropological Quarterly. His new book, Queer Formalism: Shaping Gay a…
How to Make a Queer Scene, or Notes toward a Practice of Affective Curation
Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 757 Ramzi Fawaz How to Make a Queer Scene, or Notes toward a Practice of Affective Curation Let me begin with two stories. In spring of 2013 I organized a semester -long, undergraduate film series at George Washington University titled “Acting Up: Queer Film and Video in the Time of AIDS.” At semester ’s end, after participants had watched nine films about the AIDS epidemic —among them …
Discovering Paradise Islands: The Politics and Pleasures of Feminist Utopias, a Conversation
The Shape of Desire
David Getsy's magisterial book Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender begins with a seemingly straightforward argument: in the 1960s, American sculptors turned to a range of nontraditional materials, and abstract or nonrepresentational sculptural forms, to reimagine the human body outside binary constructions of gender. These artists took up materials such as scrap metal, aluminum sheeting, crushed car parts, worn leat…
Introduction: Queer about Comics
There’s something queer about comics. Whether one looks to the alternative mutant kinships of superhero stories (the epitome of queer world making), the ironic and socially negative narratives of independent comics (the epitome of queer antinormativity), or the social stigma that makes the medium marginal, juvenile, and outcast from “proper” art (the epitome of queer identity), comics are rife with the social and aesthetic cues commonly attached …
Queers Read This
This essay calls for a reinvestment in queer readings of queer literary objects by invoking the Queer Nation polemic, Queers Read This! Tracing the importance and variety of queer reading as a modality of living, an intellectual specialty, and form of sociality, "Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now" takes seriously how, why, and what queers read. Looking to both Eve Sedgwick's foundational 1996 special issue of Studies in the Novel, as well as…
Legions of Superheroes
This article explores how the speculative worlds of contemporary US superhero comics have addressed the problem of difference and human diversity through stories about the catastrophic threat of genocide. It focuses on a classic DC Comics storyline—the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Legion Lost from 2000–2001—that depicts a diverse team of teenage superheroes collectively struggling against the genocidal actions of a former friend and colleague. The aut…
“An Open Mesh of Possibilities”: The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times
Against Murderous Passivity, or Reading Hannah Arendt under Lockdown
Just weeks into the coronavirus crisis, the lieutenant governor of Texas claimed on national television that U.S. Americans over seventy would gladly sacrifice their lives to COVID-19 so the rest of us could go back to business as usual. The response to this kind of murderous thinking should have been mass protest, if not revolution. Ten months later, we now know that the seemingly aberrant and barbaric idea of mass death by willful self-annihila…
Feminism Is forBeginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism
This essay argues for the importance of cisgender straight male perspectives to contemporary feminist theory and practice. I identify four lessons to be learned from what I call male affirmative feminist theory written by people of all genders, defined as any feminist thought that considers cis men critical interlocutors to feminism and legitimate subjects of gender and sexual freedom projects. These lessons include the value of androgynous think…
Civil War ’s Unsentimental Imagination
Alex Garland’s Civil War imagines an America in which political differences have augmented into warring factions, split across varying ideological lines. Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith, a renowned photojournalist whom FQ columnist Ramzi Fawaz places in a lineage of white women intellectuals, from Hannah Arendt to Joan Didion, whose reportage documented the social and political atrocities of 20th century. Their observational style is described by l…
No Bad Parts
This essay argues that Inside Out 2’s critical success lies in its canny translation of three contemporary mental health discourses including Tibetan Buddhist mindfulness, holistic medicine, and the internal family systems model of the psyche. By presenting human emotions as a series of autonomous but interconnected parts struggling against being repressed and compartmentalized, the film models for viewers what a healthy relationship to one’s aff…
“ You’re my people”
In The Last of Us Part II, the second installment in the hit video game series, players are made to reckon with the moral consequences of its protagonist Joel’s disastrous actions in the previous game. For his inaugural column, Ramzi Fawaz argues that the sequel “is one of contemporary popular culture’s most explicit statements of what political theorist Hannah Arendt calls ‘representative thinking.’” The video game as a medium makes representati…
“I Have Friends Everywhere”
This essay places Disney’s Studios’ acclaimed Star Wars television series Andor within the history of contemporary revolutionary media, most notably as a modern-day descendant of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). In placing Andor within a tradition of revolutionary media, the article aims to illuminate how the show accomplishes something far more important than parroting liberal democratic platitudes, popularizing iconic rebel hero…
Defying Tyranny
This essay argues that the popularity of the recent blockbuster film adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked lies in the film’s sustained investigation of people’s painful and self-destructive need to seek approval from false sources of authority. By placing the psycho-social rivalry of two talented but flawed young aspiring sorceresses at its center, the movie argues that genuinely solidarity between them is fundamentally undermined by thei…
“More Than We Were Programmed to Be”
This article argues that The Wild Robot offers an updated version of the Indigenous creation story “Skywoman Falling,” a foundational story of interspecies reciprocity and care that functioned for millennia as a blueprint for Native peoples’ relationships with Mother Earth. In the story, a lone woman falls from the heavens toward a water-bound planet, the first human to arrive as a cosmic immigrant to our natural world. In The Wild Robot, this st…
Webbed Attachments: Psychedelic Lessons from the Multiverse
This essay explores how the fundamental qualities of the psychedelic experience—including heightened affective intensity, the disorganization of the ego, and a sense of cosmic interconnectedness with the universe—offers a hopeful alternative to contemporary left-wing identitarianism. This is a widely popular political logic that associates the pursuit of social justice with the passionate defense of seemingly coherent, bounded marginalized subjec…
For the Sake of Appearing
Tripping on Mushrooms with Edward Said: The Case for Literary Studies as Holistic Medicine
This piece introduces the special issue of SAQ "Psychedelic Imaginaries," which collates fresh and theoretically sophisticated humanist perspectives on the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. Recent interdisciplinary research into psychoactive substances like LSD (or "acid"), psilocybin (or "magic mushrooms"), and MDMA (or "ecstasy") has repeatedly shown that the therapeutically beneficial aspects of psychedelic medicines-their ability to posit…
Art (15 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Comics and Graphic Narratives (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (6 works)