Batman and the Joker, Chris Richardson
Batman and the Joker, Chris Richardson
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Batman and the Joker
Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture

Author: Chris Richardson

Narrator: George Newbern

Unabridged: 4 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/02/2021


Synopsis

This cultural analysis of visual and narrative elements within Batman comics provides an important exploration of the ways readers and creators negotiate gender, identity, and sexuality in popular culture.

Thematic chapters investigate how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations by focusing on one of the most popular and heated fictional rivalries ever inked: that of Batman and the Joker. The monograph provides critical insights into ways queer reading practices can open new forms of understanding that have generally remained implicit and unexplored in mainstream comics studies.

This accessible and interdisciplinary approach to the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime engages diverse fields of scholarship such as comics studies, critical theory, cultural studies, gender studies, literature, psychoanalysis, media studies, and queer theory.

About Chris Richardson

Chris Richardson is associate professor and chair of communication studies at Young Harris College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. He is also program director of the popular culture minor and curator of the Andy Rowe Comics Collection there. His publications include Covering Canadian Crime: What Journalists Should Know and the Public Should Question, coedited with Romayne Smith Fullerton, and Habitus of the Hood, coedited with Hans Skott-Myhre. He also hosts This Is Not A Pipe Podcast, where he interviews authors of new books in critical theory, cultural studies, and philosophy.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Luc on February 21, 2024

A really refreshing take on Batman and the Joker's relationship, with good scholarship and a great awareness of the universe's lore. Out of date in places (since this was published, we've had Tim Drake confirmed as bisexual, which obviously hadn't happened when the author was writing). My one compla......more

Goodreads review by Gillian on April 11, 2022

My only wish is that it was longer!......more