American queeroes: coming-out narratives in the Captain America fandom

ABSTRACT This article examines three Captain America fanfictions that imagine the eponymous hero’s cinematic representation as queer in an effort to gauge the impact of a queer Captain America on U.S. society and culture. At the same time, these texts scrutinise the public perception of heroes as agents of heteronormativity, as heterosexual subjects, and objects of a heterosexual gaze, through the incorporation of (social) media responses in their fictional microcosms. Moving beyond the reductive equation of heroic masculinity and heterosexuality, the analysed texts open up more inclusive discourses of desire, disclosure, and dissent by following the coming-out stories of their heroes. The virtual spaces of fandom are put into conversation with the closet, which renders private, and possibly queer, identities invisible, and coming out as an act of publicly (re)gaining agency and self-determinacy. The article offers a queer reading of one of Marvel’s most beloved characters by reassessing the Captain America films and laying bare the constructedness of hetero-heroism that structures and motivates the films’ narratives. American queeroes in fanfiction are thus not just fantasies – they constitute reactions to and efforts against the oppressive framework of heteronormativity which obscures and limits the potential queerness of characters in mass media representations.