Between Blackness and Monstrosity: Gendered Blackness in the Cyborg Comics

Abstract

This essay gives a racial and gendered analysis of the Cyborg comics, which depict the life of Vic Stone, African American superhero cyborg. The essay’s entry into Victor Stone’s Black cyborg positionality seeks to do four things: first, articulate, with the help of Richard Iton’s notion of the Black fantastic, the unsettling and destabilizing nature of Blackness and cyborg- ness; second, provide a gendered analysis of the Black (male) cyborg that, in part, questions the destabilizing potential of yet another male superhero; third, put Stone’s Blackness and cyborg- ness, which I alternatively describe as a transhumanness, in conversation with historical derogations and contemporary reappropriations of the notion of monstrosity; and four, highlight the salvific discourse surrounding Stone and speak to the temporal implications of being a Black cyborg.