Carol Danvers e Kamala Khan como representações identitárias da Ms. Marvel: um estudo sobre subjetividades mercadológicas nas linguagens dos quadrinhos

Abstract

Pop culture (Lee, Moody, 2010) permeates experiences within one’s routine (Jenkins, 2009; Pennycook, 2010). Thus, one is overwhelmed by several media products, such as comic books, films, TV series and cartoons (Dovchin, Pennycook, Sultana, 2018; Pennycook, 2010). Throughout the years, the relationship between fans and such cultural artifacts (Jenkins, 2009; Pennycook, 2010) has changed in various ways. One example is the pluralization of female identities requested by consumer audience (Cocca, 2014; 2016). Such demand occurs because media products, especially superhero comic books, were often designed considering a male audience (Cocca, 2014; 2016). That is, sociopolitical contexts permeate media narratives found in pop culture. This research, situated within the interdisciplinary (Moita Lopes, 2006) and transgressive (Pennycook, 2006) Applied Linguistics, highlights the choice of two female figures, Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan, as representatives of the superheroine Ms. Marvel in two different decades. Both characters were chosen to investigate identity construction (Hall, 2019; Silva, 2000; Woodward, 2000) settled in their respective comic book narratives. Thus, the aim of this work is to analyze the constitution of identities of Kamala Khan and Carol Danvers as market-driven subjectivities within comic books language. To this end, the methodological approaches chosen were qualitative approach (Holanda, 2006), to produce rhizomatic (Jeffery, 2016) and interpretivist (Moita Lopes, 2006) for data generation and analyses production on the selected comic book stories. The concepts of text and context (Canagarajah, 2018; Zacchi, 2019), chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981), then, were used as well as the comprehension of language as a rhizomatic structure (Deleuze, Guattari, 1995) to understand context as part of the text. Such approaches allow the comprehension of sociopolitical contexts and Kamala Khan and Carol Danvers’ identity constitution as a unity for interpretivist analyses. Hence, this study led to two interpretative paths, identities constitutions and subjectivation processes. Kamala Khan’s identities (Hall, 2019) are tied to her internal conflicts and tensions caused by the development, on her narratives, of Pakistani and Muslim ancestry, resulting in a relationship between Self and Other (Woodward, 2000; Said, 2007) as two aspects that contribute to the emergence of Kamala Khan’s identities. Thus, her identities are permeated by Kamala’s race, ethnicity and religion, resulting in orientalist (Said, 2007) aspects. Meanwhile, Carol Danvers’ identities are built, during her narratives, as a representative of second-wave feminist movement (Friedan, 1963; Nicholson, 1997) agenda, materialized in the United States during the 1970s. However, such character is not associated to decentered demands for working-class or color-class women (Hooks, 2020; Oyěwùmí, 2021). So, both characters’ subjectivation practices converge to the idea on affections logic (Guattari, 1992), that operates considering neoliberal rationalities (Dardot, Laval, 2016), transforming subjectivities into market artifacts (Lazzarato, 2014) represented in comic books languages.