Daredevil as Legal Emblem
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University of the Sunshine Coast
Australia
Abstract
This article draws together two trajectories of legal scholarship: the turn to the visual in legal studies and the emergence of the subfield of law and comics, or ‘graphic justice’. It does this via an analysis of superhero comics as fitting within a particular genealogy of the ius imaginum, or law of images. This is not to argue simply that superhero comics are dominated by narratives of law, justice and legality—they are—but rather that the very theatrical figure of the superhero and its encompassing of a dual persona is a presentation of a particular political theology of the image. The article analyses the way in which this political theology is rendered visible in Charles Soule’s Daredevil: Back in Black, highlighting the image of the superhero and its connection to both sovereignty and the biopolitics of personhood.
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Author Biography
Dr Timothy D Peters is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast, an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Law Futures Centre, Griffith University and President of the Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia. His research has two major focuses. The first explores the intersections of legal theory, theology and popular culture, which is the topic of the forthcoming monograph with Edinburgh University Press, A Theological Jurisprudence of Speculative Cinema: Superheroes, Science Fictions and Fantasies of Modern Law. The second examines critical theories of the corporation and corporate law from the perspective of political and economic theologies. Dr Peters is currently the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award examining ‘New Approaches to Corporate Legality: Beyond Neoliberal Governance’.
