City Research Online

Abstract

This thesis explores how portrayals of New York City in Spider-Man comics, movies, and video games have developed through the neoliberal period, from the 1960s to the present. It demonstrates how the Spider-Man franchise has reproduced – and occasionally contested – the white spatial imaginary of New York, which has itself shifted with the city's uneven development and regeneration throughout this period.

To achieve this, the thesis approaches Spider-Man through an abolitionist prism that departs from current trends in graphic justice criticism and related writing on comics, the city, and the police. Through rigorous application and interpolation of prison abolitionist theory and practice, this thesis emphasises the dynamic relationship between discipline, justice, policing, and the law in the analysis of comics. By bringing Marxist theories of racial capitalism and abolition geographies to bear on the field of graphic justice, the thesis moves beyond rhetorical positions about law and society in comics to the material fabric of urban life, asking how the social and material conditions of the street are depicted in comics and produced by or through comics. Throughout this thesis, abolitionist reading emerges as a new literary method that de-emphasises an abstracted view of the philosophical ideas of justice and legality to prioritise instead the materiality of racialised spatial imaginaries in its chosen texts.

Through abolitionist reading, this thesis shows how Spider-Man resolves white anxieties around the racialised city by reproducing carceral narratives of safety and autonomy, while also seeking out moments from across Spider-Man universes where different conceptions of justice, power, and responsibility are articulated.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information:	Some figures have been removed from the thesis due to copyright restrictions.
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity > Department of Media, Culture & Creative Industries School of Communication & Creativity > School of Communication & Creativity Doctoral Theses Doctoral Theses

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