X-Men and Civil Rights

[lisaquestions]

So I was thinking, earlier:

The X-Men comic book series started in 1963, featuring Professor Xavier and his five students, trying to show the world that mutants were just like everyone else by training them to be superheroes so they could fight other mutants. Specifically, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, led by Erik Magnus Lensherr, aka Magneto (although I don't think he got a real name until much later). When humans spotted mutants, as seen in the first issue, they'd almost immediately form a mob and start attacking the mutant with whatever came to hand. I can only imagine how many times Stan Lee imagined that scene playing out and ending with a dead mutant, since most mutants at the time weren't really all that powerful - and most only had one or two powers, otherwise being fairly normal people.

The X-Men debuted the same year that Martin Luther King led a peaceful protest against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, where he wrote the famous letter from a Birmingham Jail. The next year, three black civil rights workers were murdered by Klansmen in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

So this is the political environment that the X-Men are born in - the black civil rights movement and violence directed at it. As they mature, the gay rights movement and second wave feminism get started.

So: Why, during all this actual activism, do mutants spend so much of their time kicking each other's asses? Why does the militant, violent faction call itself the "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?" Why does Professor Xavier feel that the best way to win acceptance for mutants is to train them to fight other mutants? Why don't mutants have a Stonewall?

This isn't really intended to be a criticism - comic books weren't really all that great at social relevance at the time. It's more, "what social forces would drive mutants in the midst of being massively persecuted to turn on each other and not take any cues from the civil rights struggles going on around them?"

Yes, I am a geek. I wear that label with pride.

Edit to clarify: I'm not criticizing the comic books or asserting they should have been written differently. I'm just asking: "Look at the history of civil rights. What would it look like to put the X-Men into that context on a political level?"

Also, read this page for an article highly relevant to this post.

Comments

[kiya]

Not comics but sort of comics-universe-like, have you ever read any of the Wild Cards series? The parallelism of the mutant civil rights stuff there with the real-world civil rights movement is Not Subtle, but it was interesting to me when I read it.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I have! There's some good stuff in there, especially early on. It gets out of hand in later books, though.

I've heard the new stuff is pretty good, and the comic (at least what I've read so far) is good.

[foibey.livejournal.com]

Bleh. If people worry too much about expressing potentially unoriginal but cool thoughts then cool ideas will never propagate through society.

And it's always cool reading several different takes on the same agreeable opinion.

And I didn't mean to come across as trying to trump your geekery with my superior geekery. In any case, my knowledge of comics is pretty limited (some Grant Morrison, some Alan Moore, some Peter Milligan, a quick skim through Sandman and that's about it). It was more of a yay geek pride thing.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I don't worry about expressing potentially unoriginal but cool thoughts, really. :)

And I didn't feel trumped, you just made me think about why I haven't looked at comics politically - or rather, mainstream superhero comics. And I had no conclusion, and just said something semi-random on the topic.

It's hard to read Watchmen, V, Transmetropolitan, Powers, etc without seeing the politics. The X-Men, too, but the politics were never very deep.

[foibey.livejournal.com]

Stuff happens elsewhere though... The Joker's Asylum Two-Face issue recently made me squee in terms of it featuring Two-Face being proud of his disfigured self torturing a (facially disfigured) peer counsellor sent to Arkham to try and encourage him to "deal" with his "self esteem issues" more "positively".

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

True, there's a lot more stuff happening recently, which is great. Except for Civil War, which sucked.

And I like that bit with Two-Face. It kind of reminds me of the way some people seem to assume I deal with being trans...

[ibnfirnas.livejournal.com]

Sort of. House of M brought us 'if Magneto won without having been opposed in the first place.' As much as he's a distraction for the Xavier crew, they're a distraction for him, and we see that left to his own devices, while he's set up a society where non-mutants are second-class, it's largely a peaceful society and he functions as a generally nonviolent quasi-dictator who by and large leaves nations sovereign-but-heavily-influenced, like satrapies rather than colonies or subject states.
Age of Apocalypse posits the war happening anyway, and Magneto being opposed by those who're worse, but House of M basically posits that the war ended without firing a shot.

I was just reminded of the Exiles arc with Uberdictator Tony Stark...

[syphilis-jane.livejournal.com]

You seem to be made of awesome, so I'm going to friend you, if you don't mind. :)

[askesis.livejournal.com]

I don't know comics, but isn't that pretty much exactly what feminism did to itself in the 80s?

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Didn't mind. :) Thanks!

I just need to write more stuff like this.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I think there was definitely schisming going on from the 80s until the present day, although I haven't researched enough of the history to say more than that - I primarily have anecdotes from friends who were directly involved.

I do know that there was a definite push in lesbian feminism to define and control lesbian sexuality, to push away from the varieties of lesbian sexuality and into some kind of nebulous "egalitarian sex" that would reject butches and femmes, or BDSM. That fight happened throughout the lesbian community and there was even the question as to whether leatherdykes should be allowed into MichFest.

[askesis.livejournal.com]

I was there, albeit on the periphery. It wasn't just a split over sexual orientation, though that was a big one; the whole movement fractured over (largely academic) identity politics, lost momentum as a relatively cohesive whole, and vanished into the universities. It was an enormous tragedy.

It's nice to see a younger generation seeing feminism as relevant again - in my cohort, it was common for progressive women to disavow the label.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I didn't know much of that, although I am aware of how much feminism is academic now, and lots of splintery thought as to what's feminist and what's not.

Right now, there's still serious issues with regards to women of color, women with disabilities, and trans women that makes it difficult to continue to identify with feminism, but I think that social justice is important, and even aside from gains still to be made, the right wing is constantly trying to push us back into refighting battles we already won (such as choice). Not that you need to be a feminist to do that.

I hope my comments at stoneself's regarding the history of sexual orientation/queer relations in feminism were accurate. I was having trouble finding supporting links with more detail - like the meeting the Lavender Menace took over (and I just remembered that name now).

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine is fond of saying "magneto was right." She's a pretty quotable woman but that's definitely the winner as quotes from her go.

Further amusingly, my nickname in high school was "Rogue." Mostly because i had really long hair with the streak in it and all, but also because of that whole don't-touch-the-autisitic-girl mess.

That said people kept calling me that after i shaved my head so it stuck. Sometimes even today when i'm back home i hear someone call me that, and usually it takes a moment or two of ignoring them to get them to call me what they should.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I'm so going to do a followup post, trying to map out what mutants would be like if Professor X were really like Martin Luther King (that is, not assimilationist, but peaceful), and Magneto were really like Malcolm X (that is, among many many other things, not Professor X's enemy).

Also: I wanted Rogue's hair so badly when I was 18. Not the mullety hair that she often had back then, but the white streak.

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

amusingly i had a prof in college who made that comparison, so i kind of want to see how you structure it.

i had the white streak. not a mullet, thankfully. i get a mullet pretty easily (i have some hairline-in-back weirdness due to some genetic weirdness) so i have to be careful. it was getting mullety not long ago and i had a couple of friends pull MULLET INTERVENTION. i was all "i don't have a mullet" and they're all "uh no you have a mullet. a fucking purple mullet."

and i was all "gerp."

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I believe the intent all along was to have them represent each, but like I tried to get at in my post, and what Morpheus wrote better in his article, was how mutants were pitted against each other rather than truly working toward their own liberation.

There's other comparisons I want to play with, too - like how feminism and the gay rights movement both expelled/excluded more radical/visible elements to appear more normal, and looking at Professor X and the X-Men from the assimilationist (Mattachine) point of view, and Magneto and his Brotherhood from the radical/separatist/visible (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) point of view.

Although homo_impetus suggested fanfic, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do that. Worldbuilding seems more interesting.

And you have good friends, to save you from the mullet fate!

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

when minorities mutants fight against one another it's so much easier to keep the status quo going, though!

my love-hate-speak-truth-to relationship with the "feminist movement" as we know it (and to every girl with her own stuff and bank accounts who tells me she's not a feminist...) is pretty "special". i think the amusing part is that i always took it on the chin for being "one of those feminist bitches" when i was younger and now i've supposedly turned on it for calling out the racism/classism/transphobia/homophobia that seems to be all too well tolerated whenever it's convenient for the right people.

and yes, i am happy i got mullet-intervened.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Yes, on the fighting. I think that's part of what clicked for me to write the post. "Why are mutants fighting each other all the time? and who does this benefit?"

Any time I'm talking in a space that's not really feminist (like, there's any men at all), I end up being a feminazi. But from inside feminism, I feel like all I do is call out those things - mostly transphobia and ableism and racism...wait, all of those things.

I've lost count of the number of times a radical feminist (the trans-hating variety) has asked me why I'm wasting time criticizing them when I should be taken on the menz...except they don't stop trying to take me on and saying screwed up things about race, disability, and class.

That icon is sublime.

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

oh i feel you, do i ever feel you.

i tend to respond with "Because you're just seconding the patriarchy with your inherent need to be the gender police. In other words, you're just hurting us all."

(and then they ask me why i defend "them" and i just sit there and try to make the speaker quantify "them." by the end of their exclusionfest it's a bunch of white able-bodied cisgendered middle-class women (sometimes with caveats about sexual orientation) and Ubaka Hill. so in other words, it's fucking Michfest.)

(feel free to steal icon, it's everywhere, even if it is awesome.)

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I'm almost full up atm and I like most of my icons. :) Plus, I like to use representations of people. :)

If I ever make good points, they start complaining that I link to Renegade Evolution and Jill Brenneman, because anyone who supports sex worker rights must necessarily be anti-woman.

[heinousbitca.livejournal.com]

oh lord there's nothing classist about hating on sex workers, really. totally. also if you take shots for one internet porno site you can totally claim sex worker status but only when you need to...if you're a hooker, on the other hand, you're just gonna get discarded in this debate as a whore.

i made my peace with being a whore a long, long time ago.

i have a whore paid account so i get a mess of icons. this lets me have weirdly esoteric ones, humorous ones, and, of course, one that forms a license plate that the Department of Licensing (what the DMV is called in Washington State) should really let me have but won't.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. Check this post out (http://hexpletive.blogspot.com/2008/09/hearts-thread-so-thats-where-line-is.html) for some anti-sex worker crap. Not Hexy, Hexy's just quoting and responding with anger and power. But wow.

[aredridel.livejournal.com]

Huh! Interesting point!

Thoughts, I Have Plenty pt. 1

[neo-prodigy.livejournal.com]

OMG!!!!! I love this.

First of all, thank you for writing this post. Secondly, thank you for linking to the other article. Both were very thought-provoking.

I tackled this issue late last year with some surprising results:

http://neo-prodigy.livejournal.com/738404.html

To reply to some of the points both you and the other author made, and to be clear, I'm in complete agreement with you both, here are some of my thoughts while reading.

While X-Men is an allegory to the Civil Rights struggle, there is a massive difference in terms of power dynamics. Even though mutants weren't as powerful back then, mutants were still far more powerful than black militants at their worst. Magneto alone could single-handedly crush a city and humans would be powerless. This opens up a new dynamic because marginalized people typically don't have resources much less the power to strike back at their oppressors on that type of level.

If blacks, women, LGBTQs had the power to topple buildings or conjure cyclones, I think we would be dealing with a whole new ballgame in terms of dealing with institutional oppression: possibly better, possibly worse.

From a narrative standpoint, I can understand (though I still agree with you and the other author) why most of the stories revolve around mutant vs. mutant. Simply put, humans aren't a threat in terms of knock down drag out fights. The only thing they have going for them are the Sentinels and how many times have those robots been crushed. Now if those Sentinels were like say the Borg or the Cylons, then we would have some interesting stories going on.

Sadly the mutant vs. mutant fights are always more exciting and more epic. Again, not disputing your points, because I think they still stand, but just an explanation.