Released to popular acclaim in 1961, Marvel Comics’ "Fantastic Four" told the story of four anticommunist space adventurers who gain extraordinary powers when cosmic rays alter their physiology, granting them, respectively, control over living flame, invisibility, impenetrable rock-like skin, and physical pliability. The monstrous transformations of "The Fantastic Four" placed its heroes outside the bounds of Cold War gender and sexual norms: their bodies had mutated in ways that destabilized their assumed gender and sexual identities.

In this talk, Ramzi Fawaz explores the surprisingly queer evolution of the series, which used the mutated bodies of its heroes to depict the transformation of the bread-winning father, doting wife, and bickering male siblings of the 1950s nuclear family into icons of 1960s radicalism: the left-wing intellectual, the liberal feminist, the political activist, and the potential queer.