Captain America, Genderqueer Socialist

As a practice of literalizing narrative desire, fan fiction can be a rich source of utopian imagination. Participants in fandom and academic spaces alike discuss the capacity for fan fiction’s content to live up to the utopian potential of its form and distribution: how might a cultural formation based on the fantasy fulfillment of desire hold space for the complex and contradictory relationships between pleasure and power? To unpack some contradictions and possibilities inherent in fan fiction’s queer utopian work, this article develops a case study of Known Associates (thingswithwings, 2016), a long, complex, and influential work of fan fiction. The story reimagines the Marvel Comics Universe character Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America—who is transported from World War II to the present––as a queer femme socialist sympathetic to Black social movements of the early twentieth century. Known Associates develops an eroticized articulation of American feminist, queer, trans, and left social movement history. To the queerly utopian fantasy that Captain America might have always been a radical, queer, gender-nonconforming figure, Known Associates grafts a longing for the possibility that the national institutions of the U.S., founded on slavery and settler colonialism though they are, might be imagined and lived otherwise

Art · Art history · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Law