The Carceral Geography Working Group is delighted to announce the winner of our 2023 Postgraduate Paper Prize:

Reed Puc (University of London): Chapter title: “Spider-Sensibilities: Seeing the City Through Spider-Man’s Spatial Imagination”. Thesis Title: “Whose Streets?: Urban Spatial Imaginaries in Superhero Narratives”.

Congratulations Reed!

Abstract

Populated with characters that readers and viewers invest care for and identify with, superhero narratives encourage fans to vicariously learn to navigate the city through these characters’ trajectories across the streets and skyscrapers. Within this dissertation, Spider-Man emerges as one such figure. By traversing the city alongside Marvel’s original Spider-Man, Peter Parker, I interrogate how certain carceral spatial practices are produced within the cultural imagination. 

Though Spider-Man moves through a fictionalized version of New York, as one of Marvel’s most successful and popular characters, stories about Spider-Man are one of the primary sites where “[Forms of mass media] enact pedagogy about who belongs where” (Lipsitz 13). Spider-Man—and other vigilante superheroes—address feelings and anxieties about safety, control, and autonomy within the urban landscape, all of which are consciously and unconsciously mediated by racialised spatial politics and practices. Given that “The urban landscape is organised according to a spatial politics of safety,” research focused on such characters and their spatial imaginaries can call into question whose safety the urban landscape is organised for (Wang 270).  Here, I analyse how Spider-Man’s ‘Spidey-sense’ is particularly relevant to this research. The chapter emphasizes how physical alertness to danger creates a city which is always threatening to the (white) individual, whose safety must therefore be ensured by policing. Within this section, I highlight the militarisation of Spider-Man’s surveillance in the most recent film series and videogame. By reading the Spidey-sense biopolitically and through Foucault’s definition of the panoptic, the chapter suggests the Spidey-sense is more than a superpower. It emerges as a sensibility, a way of viewing and navigating the city that is grounded in a carceral neoliberal political relationality.