Super-Queeros: Transformations of Queer Feminist Representation in the DC Pride Comics Run 2021-2025

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the narrative and visual strategies used in DC Comics’ DC Pride anthology series from 2021 to 2025, examining how these texts construct and evolve a “model Super-Queero” across this time period. Drawing on visual rhetoric, semiotics, narratology, and queer and feminist theory, this project argues that the DC Pride run does not simply represent queer identity, but actively produces a shifting model of acceptable queerness that reflects broader sociopolitical conditions in the United States (USA). Across the five-year run, I argue that the anthology moves from an emphasis on visibility, celebration, and reader identification toward increasing normalization, containment, and disidentification. Early issues position queer characters as sites of pride, and community, using visual and narrative techniques that invite readers, particularly queer readers, into processes of identification. However, as the series progresses, these same formal elements are reoriented to privilege legibility, safety, and social acceptance, encouraging distance from more disruptive or visibly queer expressions of identity. Through close analysis of recurring formal patterns and focused case studies of the DC Pride issues covers, opening stories, and the #Harlivy stories in the issues, this thesis demonstrates how mainstream comic media negotiates the boundaries of queer representation. While these characters have the potential to expand dominant models of queerness, their depiction within the DC Pride run often reinscribes normative expectations through stylistic containment and narrative framing. Overall, I argue that the model Super-Queero constructed across the anthologies reflects a broader cultural shift toward regulating queer visibility, highlighting the role of popular media in shaping not only how queerness is represented, but how it is understood, performed, and then made (un)acceptable within contemporary culture.