Interview by Hannah Maitland
Can you tell me a little bit more about what characters and works that you research? Are you looking at comic books and movie adaptations?
Some of my newer work has analyzed Muslim superheroes on TV, like the Ms. Marvel TV series on Disney+. However, my dissertation focused on comic books and audience reactions to specific Muslim superheroines. Now that I’m starting my book, my editor and I discussed not only focusing on comic books but expanding into TV and film. The most famous Muslim superhero, and this is one of the superheroines that I looked at in-depth, is Kamala Khan. She's a Pakistani American Muslim superheroine. She's one of the most famous superheroes in American comic books overall, right now. She's been featured in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) for the last two years in her own mini-TV series on Disney Plus, and she was also in the recent sequel to Captain Marvel, which is, by the way, very good. I was disappointed that it didn't do well at the box office. I think press coverage was eager to make it look as though it did poorly because it centered diversity and women and girl superheroes. However, I personally think it didn’t do well because Marvel's previous films for the past year or more, which starred mostly white male superheroes, were actually pretty bad.
I know that there's a lot of really vitriolic fan culture around superhero movies, so I was curious about what the fan reception of Kamala Khan has been like. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to how these characters have been perceived over time.
Like I said, there was a lot of positive fan engagement with Ms. Marvel when she was first launched in 2014 (she technically debuted at the end of the Captain Marvel comic book series in 2013). The press in particular was really fascinated by Kamala. And then eventually fans of any background really liked her and related to her. The first couple of volumes of her comic books are New York Times bestsellers – like the first six or seven. And her first issue became Marvel's best-selling digital comic of all time.
There are other Muslim superheroes that I cover as well in my dissertation, and they varied. Sooraya Qadir, or Dust, was a very Orientalist representation. She wore the face veil and an abaya, but she would turn into nude sand particles that would flay her opponents alive whenever she transformed into superhero form. I would say that some writers haven’t adapted to the times that we live in since the representation was tone-deaf. Some of my participants found her to be an offensive representation. Others, on the other hand, were like, “She's a good superhero!” so it was quite interesting to see how fans related to her.
Another one that I analyzed, and I found this to be rather interesting, was Simon Baz. He's a Lebanese-American Muslim superhero, and he’s in the Green Lantern series which is a famous superhero series. He was tokenized, but I really liked him. His debut comic highlighted some of the problematic post-9/11 issues for Muslims. For instance, he was framed as a terrorist and was shipped to an offshore penal colony to be tortured. However, in the story it was revealed that a white male was the actual terrorist. This storyline challenged negative representations of Muslims. I found that it was very interesting how immediate post-9/11 superhero comics decided to cover male Muslim superheroes versus female Muslim superheroes. When it came to a female superhero like Dust, there was a white saviour element, whereas with a male superhero like Simon Baz, it was more about challenging negative stereotypes of Muslim men.
"The press was eager to make it look as though The Marvels did poorly because it centered diversity; I think it didn’t do well because Marvel's previous films that year—which starred mostly white male superheroes—were actually pretty bad."
Safiyya Hosein
Speaking of audience reaction, in your dissertation, was there anything in particular you found fans were really looking for in these representations?
I found it really interesting that participants were looking for who they could relate to. Relatability, obviously, was something that wasn't monolithic. So, for instance, some of them related to Ms. Marvel because they were South Asian, and she was South Asian. But also, Black Muslim participants related to her as well, because they were just like “she's in the middle.” She's engaged in her Muslim community, but at the end of the day she also fits into this culture. They basically were saying that they related to her because she straddled a life between her ancestral culture and her American culture. They specifically related to her immigrant identity.
I'm not sure if you’ve looked into this, but what about the authors of the comics? Is it a lot of women writing? Men writing?
It depends – the first writer for Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan was a white American convert, G. Willow Wilson. Her editor was a Pakistani-American Muslim, Sana Amanat, who some people think Kamala is based on, but we can't say for sure.
There’s a white male writer, Mark Waid, who included Kamala in a new series called Champions. I’ve critiqued his construction of Kamala. I think at first, people couldn’t see it when I said that Kamala could be used in a problematic way. And certainly, in Champions, she was a less nuanced representation. In Champions, the superhero team flies to a country representative of Afghanistan where women are oppressed. There were these fundamentalist male antagonists who were trying to hurt girls in a school, and Kamala intervenes to protect them and fights these men off – which is fine. But ultimately, it's a comic book that ends up romanticizing the Afghan invasion, which had devastating effects on Afghan civilians. That invasion exacerbated conditions such as not having proper access to good health care, as well as other conditions like destitution, and starvation. So, it was a little bit much to actually romanticize the Afghan invasion when these were the outcomes. A lot of fans have criticized the comic for that.
Her work is published in peer-reviewed journals, including Popular Culture Studies Journal, Global Media Journal Canadian edition, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. Her public scholarship can be found in The Conversation, the CBC, Spice Radio, the National Post, and in many international media outlets. As a comics writer, her work appears in The Nib and several comics anthologies. In 2017, she was selected by Vice Media Motherboard for their “Humans of the Year” series.
She can be found on X (the social media site formerly known as Twitter) as @safibelle30.
Thinking of that critique, what do you think is, or could be, the role of comics and literature in that struggle for accurate representation?
There are people who would dismiss popular culture at large, but the truth is that popular culture actually informs a lot of people. Not everybody watches or listens to the news, but one way of being informed about different things or different parts of the world, or politics, is through pop culture. In the US, 1% of the population is Muslim. Over here in Canada, it's 4.9%. So, a lot of people don't actually interact with Muslims. If they're seeing pop cultural representations that reinforce negative stereotypes of Muslims, they're going to have that negative point of view.
I was interviewed on a podcast about the Ms. Marvel series when it was released on Disney+. One of the interviewers mentioned that comics are really cool because they can trick you into a history lesson without you even realizing it. In the Ms. Marvel TV series, the Indo-Pak partition was represented – a historical event that many Americans and Canadians were previously unaware of. However, they now have some knowledge of it because they watched Ms. Marvel. So, I think pop culture's role in all of this is that it could be a very useful tool for challenging negative stereotypes of marginalized groups and representing politics in a nuanced way.
Illustrated by Fahmida Azim
And you make comics yourself, right? Can you tell me a little bit more about what your comics are like and what they explore?
The few that I've actually written have tried to represent Muslims in a more nuanced way, or challenge negative representations of Muslim women. There's a zine I participated in called Called into Being, which was about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There's a character in there, Safie, who's actually represented in an Orientalist way. She's almost infantilized, and there are some themes of white saviourism in there, so I wrote an illustrative essay about that.
I did write a comic for The Nib on the Christchurch shooting as well. It’s about me and the comic artist Fahmida Azim who illustrated the comic. She went on to win a Pulitzer, so I'm super proud of her. At the time, we connected over our shared fear following the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand. We created that comic as a way to honour the victims and express our grief for them.
On that note about your writing, can you tell me about your upcoming book?
My upcoming book is focusing more on my thesis of how Muslim superheroes have at times consolidated the imperial project in a post-9/11 world. So I'm looking at newer comics, but I'm also including pre-9/11 Muslim superheroes as well to give more context. I'm focused right now on the first Muslim superhero, Kismet, who came out in World War II, and I'm looking at the representation of Muslim masculinities in his construction around that time. I'm also looking at a tokenized pre-9/11 Muslim superheroine, The Veil, who debuted during the first Gulf War. But of course, naturally, my main focus will be on post-9/11 Muslim superheroes.
I'm really interested in writing about Zarina Zahari. She's, as far as I've seen, the first Black American Muslim superheroine. It's really exciting, because I'm going to be conducting research on Black Muslim superheroes soon to explore how their representation created the conditions of possibility that paved the way for Zarina to come into being.
My book is about creating that genealogy, but it also takes a more in-depth look at how Muslim superheroes have been represented in the post-9/11 era and examines who these constructions were really intended for. Were they for Muslim audiences? Were they not? We already know they weren’t, but I will be conducting a more in-depth analysis of their storylines to explore how they either challenge or reinforce negative representations of Muslims.
"There are people who dismiss popular culture, but the truth is that it actually informs a lot of people. Not everybody watches or listens to the news, but one way of being informed about different parts of the world or politics is through pop culture."
Safiyya Hosein
What is your relationship to these characters? What is stuff that you relate to or enjoy, or maybe recurring things that you've noticed?
I’m a critical scholar, so I can step away and examine how they sometimes advance ideas of American exceptionalism. At times, they promote ideas of Muslims as backward and oppressed because the language of Islamophobia is embedded in the language of racism. But that doesn't mean that I don't like them. I actually like quite a few of them. I like Kamala Khan in her own series. She's a very nuanced, fleshed-out character there, and I find her relatable as well.
One of my essays is an autoethnography where I connect the Indo-Pak partition and its representation in the Ms. Marvel TV series to my own family history. I'm Indo-Trinidadian, so we had a different traumatic experience with colonialism compared to mainland South Asia because of Indian indentureship. I talk about my family's history with Indian indentureship and relate it to the representation of the Indo-Pak partition in the Ms .Marvel TV series. I also talk about my perception of Kamala Khan in the series too, which I found to be really awesome, personally. She was very much grounded in a South Asian Muslim representation. For instance, Urdu was in the comic book series, but also in the TV series as well. It was really fascinating to see that representation on TV because we don't see much of it.
Thinking back to your book, what are you really hoping readers get out of it? What are you most looking forward to putting out in the world and having people learn from your book?
It definitely reads against the grain of a lot of scholarship on Muslim superheroes. Most academic scholarship on Muslim superheroes is less critical. They have a tendency to just see Kamala Khan as the only Muslim superhero and as only positive. On the other hand, I look at the benefits of representing Muslim women and girls as superheroes, but I also look at their darker implications. By focusing on some of those implications, it'll definitely add to the scholarship on Muslim superheroes, but in a different way. I'm excited because even other scholarship about Muslim superheroes is very interesting, and there is a lot to take away from it. I hope that people take away the nuance behind this new and very exciting typology.
You’re a visiting scholar at the CFR, so I was wondering if there are any other things you're getting to do through the CFR or other things that you're working on? Are you hoping to bring together some comics scholars while you’re here?
There's a lot of great feminist comic scholarship that have recently come out. One book that was just released, Searching for Feminist Superheroes by Sam Langsdale, looks awesome. There is another one by Esra Mirze Santesso called Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing. There is a lot of fascinating work on marginalized representations in comic scholarship. It would be interesting to collaborate with other feminist scholars or those who analyze Muslim representation in comics.
Hannah Maitland lives and works on Treaty 13 territory in Tkaronto, where she is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies Department at York University. Hannah is a feminist researcher whose dissertation project studies girl activists, their politics, and their relationships with their mothers and mother figures. Her other research areas include sex education controversies and pregnant Barbie dolls. Beyond her research, Hannah co-founded the Ontario Digital Literacy and Access Network (ODLAN). She currently serves as the Recording Secretary for the Sexuality Studies Association. You can find some of her writing in Sex Education, Shameless Magazine, Atlantis, and The Conversation. Hannah is a member of the Critical Femininities Research Cluster and the Girls Studies Research Network.