Mutants, Androids, and Aliens

On Being Human in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

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by James A. Tyner

Type: Studies
Subject: Genre > Fantasy
Keywords: fantasy, Marvel, philosophy
Publishing date: 2025 (June 16, 2025) (Upcoming)
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 208 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4968-5739-2

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Book Presentation:
In both literature and film, mutants, androids, and aliens have long functioned as humanity’s Other―nonhuman bodies serving as surrogates to explore humanity’s prejudice, bigotry, and hatred. Scholars working in fields of feminism, ethnic studies, queer studies, and disability studies, among others, have deconstructed representations of the Othered body and the ways these fictional depictions provide insight into the contested terrains of identity, subjectivity, and personhood. In science fiction more broadly and the superhero genre in particular, the fictional Other―often a superhero or a villain―is juxtaposed against the normal human, and such Others have long been the subject of academic investigation.

Author James A. Tyner shifts this scholarly focus to consider the ordinary humans who ally with or oppose Othered superheroes. Law enforcement officers, military officials, politicians, and the countless, nameless civilians are all examples of humans who try to make sense of a rapidly changing more-than-human and other-than-human universe. The resulting volume, Mutants, Androids, and Aliens: On Being Human in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, provides a critical posthumanist reading of being human in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Centering the MCU’s secondary human characters, including Matthew Ellis, Ellen Nadeer, Rosalind Price, as well as Jimmy Woo, Sadie Deever, Holden Radcliffe, and others, Tyner considers how these characters attempt to monitor, incarcerate, or exterminate those beings considered "unnatural" and thus threatening. Placing into conversation posthumanism, environmental ethics, and myriad philosophical and biological ontologies of life and death, Tyner maintains that the superhero genre reflects the current complexities of meaningful life―and of what happens in society when "the human" is no longer the unquestioned normative standard.

About the Author:
James A. Tyner is professor of geography atKent State University. He is author of several books, including Famine in Cambodia: Geopolitics, Biopolitics, Necropolitics; The Alienated Subject: On the Capacity to Hurt; and Red Harvests: Agrarian Capitalism and Genocide in Democratic Kampuchea.

Press Reviews:
This book is a thoughtful and well-researched study of the burgeoning subfield of philosophy focusing on popular culture, which is in many ways the dominant global form of contemporary mythmaking. Drawing on sources ranging from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Darwin to Foucault, Braidotti, and Bauman, the author takes the reader on a boisterous ride through the MCU, focusing on the question of what makes us human, and how our constant tendency towards inhumanity towards those different from us manifests in big screen treatments of superheroes and their antagonists, whether they be mutants, androids, or aliens. -- Robert A. Saunders, Distinguished Professor of Geopolitics and International Relations, The State University of New York

See the publisher website: University Press of Mississippi

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