Heroes & Heroines

Superheroes play an important part in men's lives. They grow up watching superhero movies and read comic books while pretending to be them. This article examines the negative effects of superheroes on men's body image. Screen reader users, click here to load entire article This page uses JavaScript to progressively load the article content as a user scrolls. Screen reader users, click the load entire article button to bypass dynamically loaded article content.

A young boy sits in a psychologist's office, playing with action figures in a sand tray. There's an epic battle on the horizon, one that crosses traditional DC/Marvel lines. On one side there's Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman. On the other, there's an unpredictable fire-breathing dragon, with big eyes and sharp teeth.

This article touches on the fact that the superhero characters are related to people within a child's life. Wonder Woman represents his mother, the fire-breathing dragon represents the troubles the child is facing, ect.

This article is an example of Authority Theory. It is talking about how kids can use comic books and superhero movies as therapy. Since the article has a lot of quotes and examples from doctors about how it helps kids overcome their fear of monsters. They turned to superheroes to overcome those fears.

This article was interesting to me because it touched base on escapism. It shows how easy it is to lose yourself in a movie or a heroes story.

This article is about how superheroes have surrounded us in pop culture. One lunchboxes, clothing, posters, etc., they are all around.

This is a great article to establish a basis for the effect superheroes have on society. Some of the ideas here-- like, "Probably every person that has ever seen or read about a superhero has imagined himself or herself in that role," are a great way to introduce some of the data we found, or even a research question related back to the idea.

To say the comic book industry has a slight gender skew is like saying Superman is kind of strong. Comic books - much like the film industry they now fuel - vastly under-represent women. The people who write comic books, particularly for major publishers, are overwhelmingly men.

This article focuses on comic books as a male dominated industry. The problem that fighting for equality and more women in lead roles is that the industry will not change unless they all change. Meaning that why would they change from a male lead to a female lead, if they can make more money with the male superhero. The sad truth is that this will always be a problem within the superhero world. And this article talks exactly about that.

Inherent vs. Gifted Powers The way the superheroes' sexuality is promoted is evident even unto the powers that they wield, and how they gained said powers. The different kinds of powers and the way in which they are used are strictly divided between the male and female heroes.

A very interesting article on civilian casualties in superhero movies. Has some interesting statistical type information and can be a good article to cite if your research paper has to do with a superhero interacting with the civilian population.

(2007). Equally Super?: Gender-Role Stereotyping of Superheroes in Children's Animated Programs. Mass Communication and Society: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 25-41. doi: 10.1080/15205430709337003

This article explains a study done on female and male superheroes in children's cartoons. Specifically, this study investigated whether or not animated superheroes were portrayed in gender-role stereotypical ways. I think this is a good article for anyone focusing on gender or stereotyping.

Really good article about gender stereotypes in superhero cartoons for children. Looks at how genders are stereotyped and its possible effect on children.

Do you think a movie would still be successful if there wasn't hardship for the hero? What if there was no challenge? What if they were not tested? Would we love them as much? I think you have to watch them struggle before you can be happy for their success.

I liked this article because it reminds us the importance of the sequences we see in the movies. Watching a character overcome a hardship is much more captivating when you respect the character. To catch the watchers attention, tragedy is included from the beginning. It helps you better connect and understand the character, so I agree in that tragedy is necessary to create a good superhero movie.

I believe that no matter what genre a movie is the audience always roots for the underdog. Therefore I think it is important to show a hardship for the hero and how the hero overcomes it. I think overcoming the obstacle in their life makes them a hero in a sense.

This is an excellent article on diversity amongst superheroes. It is fairly detailed and scholarly, as well as credible.

But I think that that is the reason that we are drawn to these types of movies. If the superhero was not super attractive I don't think that we would enjoy the movies as much. That is really bad for me to say, because it plays along with stereotype and overall impressions of this genre. But anymore, I think that for every genre this is what is happening. You are always looking for the hot star at the time.

Great article! it helped me a lot! Its interesting to see how many people have such strong feelings about the dominant white male character in super hero movies