Phillips Nickie D, Strobl Staci
Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA.
Department of Sociology, Criminology, and Criminal Justice, Shenandoah University, 1460 University Dr., Winchester, VA 22601 USA.
Crit Criminol. 2022;30(4):821-842. doi: 10.1007/s10612-022-09618-z. Epub 2022 Jun 21.
The past few decades have witnessed unprecedented global economic catastrophes that exacerbated pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities. Although many scholars have attributed the resulting social harms to the failures of neoliberal capitalism-and recognize it as criminogenic-the logics upholding the economic order continue to hold sway among the public. Given that these logics are commonly reinforced through media and popular culture narratives, in this paper we explore how economic inequalities are portrayed in American comic books. We employ a thematic analysis of comic book depictions of mass economic destruction and economic inequality from the financial crisis of 2008 through the Occupy Wall Street movement to the more recent characterization of a post-capitalist existence under the throes of a global plutocracy. In doing so we recognize the potential for re-imagining alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, taking a critical criminological lens to the comic books. We then place , a culmination of portrayals of economic inequality and related violence, in the context of more mainstream comic book depictions and discuss how this particular work exemplifies a rising theme in comics-a purported trade-off between global capitalism and human life, a discussion point that explicitly entered American public discourse during the coronavirus pandemic.
在过去几十年里，全球经历了前所未有的经济灾难，这些灾难加剧了原有的社会经济不平等。尽管许多学者将由此产生的社会危害归咎于新自由主义资本主义的失败，并认为其具有犯罪ogenic性，但支撑经济秩序的逻辑在公众中仍然占据主导地位。鉴于这些逻辑通常通过媒体和流行文化叙事得到强化，在本文中，我们探讨美国漫画书中是如何描绘经济不平等的。我们对2008年金融危机到占领华尔街运动，再到最近对全球富豪统治下后资本主义存在的描绘等漫画书中大规模经济破坏和经济不平等的描绘进行了主题分析。在此过程中，我们认识到通过批判性犯罪学视角审视漫画书，重新构想新自由主义资本主义替代方案的可能性。然后，我们将《[具体作品名称未给出]》（一部经济不平等及相关暴力描绘的集大成之作）置于更主流的漫画书描绘背景下，并讨论这部特定作品如何体现了漫画中一个日益凸显的主题——全球资本主义与人类生命之间所谓的权衡，这一讨论点在新冠疫情期间明确进入了美国公众话语。
