Super Heroism As Cultural Capital

Since the 21 st century, superhero movie, as a new type of movie, has been popular among the audience for its gorgeous frames and exciting plots. This type of movie earns huge profits for the movie producers and distributors. Marvel has won its important place in the Hollywood for producing such superhero movies as Iron Man, Captain America, The Avengers. The key point why superhero movies make a hit is that the values expressed in movies, such as individualistic heroism, salvationism and patriotism, are accordant with American core values. Furthermore, the three values mentioned above are coincidentally the essence of the super heroism. So the superhero movies’ popularity during the 21 st century means super heroism has sprung up around the United States.Pierre Bourdieu is a famous French sociologist, who specializes in many fields like literature, language, culture. Above all, his theory of cultural sociology has provided a new perspective for the cultural study. Taking Bourdieu’s cultural sociology as theoretical foundation and Marvel superhero movies as breakthrough point, the thesis explores the connotations of super heroism, the inheritance of American core values in Marvel superhero, the symbolic violence, and the field of superhero movie.This thesis consists of three parts, the introduction, the main body and the conclusion. The first part states the purpose, the significance and the main contents of this thesis. The second part is the main body which includes five chapters. Chapter 2 does an explanation in details of the main concepts of Bourdieu’s cultural sociology. Chapter 3 concludes the connotations of the American super heroism. Chapter 4 mainly discusses the relationship between American habitus and super heroism. Chapter 5 uses Bourdieu’s cultural sociology to point out that when they are enjoying the Marvel superhero movies, the audience accept the information expressed in the movies, which embodies that the symbolic violence function of cultural capital has been achieved. Chapter 6 tries to construct a field, expecting to get a more indepth and systematic understanding in the operation of the super heroism. The last part is the conclusion. This part provides supervising method for the transformation from resource to capital with studying the super heroism through Bourdieu’s cultural sociology. Besides, symbolic violence occurs in the process of transformation of cultural capital, therefore, it is necessary for people to adopt a dialectical and critical attitude towards the values expressed in the cultural products, especially the movies, rather than indiscriminately accept them totally.