Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV Representations of Masculinity and Femininity at the End of the World

Abstract

A major explosion hits the middle of an American city. Afterwards, a survivor, a white man in a suit (Jack Coleman), wakes up amid the rubble and wanders around dazedly. As he does so, we hear snatches of radio or television broadcasts commenting on the incident, most recommending violent retaliation against the perpetrators: 'We have got to go and attack the enemy' , 'tyrant and terrorist with strength not weakness' , ' A serious threat to our way of life' , 'We will hunt down and punish those responsible' , 'Kill them, kill them all' ('Brave New World' , 1.1). Later, a video appears in which the apparent leader of a group of 'terrorists' , as the media calls them, a non-Western man (Sendhil Ramamurthy), claims responsibility for the attack, which he says was a suicide bombing carried out by his 'brothers and sisters' ('June 13th-Part Two' , 1.8).The scenes I have just described are from Heroes Reborn, a 2015 miniseries sequel to the NBC series Heroes (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010). Although I began the research for this book in 2011, and it focuses on programmes that debuted between 2002 and 2012 -including the original Heroes -Heroes Reborn shows that American television has not yet entirely got over its preoccupation with the horrific events of September the 11th, 2001. This preoccupation forms part of a wider interest in catastrophic destruction or apocalypse that has been manifest since roughly the turn of the millennium. While world destruction and the annihilation of the human race have habitually existed as threats in the science fiction and fantasy genres, on television as well as in other media, in the past they typically remained as such: threats, posed by villains whose plans would be thwarted by the heroes at the end of the episode or season. In the early twenty-first-century wave of American apocalyptic programmes, however, the threat is far more concrete. In many the apocalypse actually occurs, often in the first episode