“Why is your body a different shape?” fatness and masculinity in the superhero film

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, American superhero films, and with them often very traditional constructs of masculinity, have become omnipresent in cinemas worldwide. This article examines a specific type of male representation, male fatness, in two examples of the genre, Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). The author argues that in both films the fat male character is depicted as demasculinized, thereby standing in a tradition of male fatness stereotyped as outside of normative masculinity. In the superhero genre the body plays a particularly relevant role in signifying a hegemonic masculinity, which is highlighted by the way the two films position the characters’ fatness, or also behaviors associated with fatness, in contrast to the expectations of superhero masculinity.

KEYWORDS:

• Superheroes
• masculinity
• fatness
• cinema
• Marvel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The focus of this paper is the American mainstream superhero film genre. While superhero films exist outside of this context, e.g. in Indian or Chinese cinema, my analysis addresses examples of the American mainstream and therefore those international contexts are outside the scope of this essay. For an overview of the topic of superhero cinema outside the USA, see “The Global Contemporary Superhero Film” in The Contemporary Superhero Film: Projections of Power and Identity (2020) by Terence McSweeney.

2. I capitalize “White” and “Western” in order to highlight the fact that these terms aren’t simple adjectives but describe artificial, cultural constructs.

3. An example of a widely voiced critique would be that it took the Marvel Cinematic Universe 18 films until it managed to release Black Panther (Ryan Coogler 2018) and thereby a film that didn’t have a White male lead. It took 21 films until Captain Marvel (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck 2019), the first with a (White) female lead, was released.

4. Although Spider-Verse is also based on Marvel comics, it is not part of the MCU.

5. Kent here references Moon’s analysis of fatness as “spoiled identity” (Moon and Kosofsky Sedgwick 1990, 23) and also points out that before Moon the influential fat liberation anthology Shadow on a Tightrope (Schoenfielder and Wieser 1983) used the term to describe fat identity. On the use of the concept of “spoiled identity” within fat studies see also 2017.

6. The Marvel character Thor is to some extent based on the figure of the same name from Norse mythology. In the MCU he is a God and also an Alien, who became King of the Asgardians in Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi 2017) in which his father Odin was killed, Asgard was destroyed and its citizens had to flee. Endgame first shows their new settlement “New Asgard,” a fishing village in Norway.

7. Cheese Whiz is an American brand of processed cheese sauce that is often used for snacks or fast food such as corn chips or hot dogs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Plotz

Barbara Plotz teaches film studies, media and communication, and digital humanities at King’s College London and the University of Winchester. Her research is situated at the intersection of film and cultural studies, with a focus on representation, gender, the body, and genre cinema. She has published a monograph with Bloomsbury Academic, entitled Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (2020).