There’s going to be a new superheroine in the Marvel universe, and she is ready for action. Kamala Khan is a 16-year-old girl living in New Jersey who, when she discovers she is a shapeshifter, must balance high school and saving the world.
Villains aren’t all Kamala is battling. As a Muslim woman, she is fighting both the cultural and gender boundaries that exist in the United States. It’s always nice to see a girl star as the main character of a comic book series, but what’s even better is that this leading lady is the first female Muslim superhero (and this is the first time a Muslim character has headlined a Marvel series).
The creators of Kamala hope that her story will impact the way Americans view Muslim women in a post-9/11 world. Overall, the media seems to represent this group of people in the same way again and again, with depictions are usually inaccurate and harmful in some way. Marvel has promised that Kamala will not be portrayed as a stereotype of the group; rather, she will be a regular American girl who is trying to form her own identity. With her conservative brother, worried mother, and academic-focused father constantly in the back of her mind, she has to decide how she fits into her family. Amidst being bombarded with harmful stereotypes of her religion, she struggles to feel comfortable in her home country. Kamala sets out to prove that religion does not define a person, but that people are complex and defy labels.
In a general sense, the series will be about the problems that labels pose to individuals. No matter what those labels are—whether they pertain to religion, gender, sexuality, culture, or anything else—they simplify an entire group of people and make them one-dimensional. My hope for Kamala’s story is that Marvel will resist falling into the stereotyping trap as the media so often does. Marvel does have a history of creating complex characters in attempt to prove that stereotypes are much more destructive than constructive, so I am optimistically looking forward to this series. There is no doubt that Marvel is committed to battling the forces of evil.
Kamala’s story will begin in February of 2014, when she takes over the Ms. Marvel comic book series.
[Photo Credits: Working Girl Chronicles,The Huffington Post, Tumblr]