Archetypal Images and Media Imaginary: potential and limitations of superheroic Great Mothers.

This article contributes to cultural studies on media narratives by introducing an original and still underexplored analytical perspective. Cultural studies have traditionally examined how the media imaginary is shaped by hegemonic discourses that reproduce inequalities and render marginalized subjects and claims invisible. Within this framework, feminist cultural studies have analysed representations of female agency across media genres, highlighting their increasing entanglement with postfeminist and neoliberal rhetorics. The Author proposes to integrate the perspective of the archetype into the critical analysis of media narratives, arguing that it offers a valuable tool for assessing their symbolic efficacy—that is, their capacity to symbolically nourish audience experience. Archetypal images function as powerful symbols insofar as they articulate the affective link between embodied and “lived” experience and its representation within the collective imaginary. The study is based on a textual analysis of female superhero figures that may be understood as contemporary actualisations of archetypal images of the Great Mother within a transmedia corpus of North American superhero comics and films. The research examines both the potentials and the limitations of these representations of female power and agency. The analysis first shows how the superhero universe ambiguously reconfigures female power, which is simultaneously acknowledged and continuously constrained within contemporary narratives. It then demonstrates that even a particularly challenging figure such as Dark Phoenix fails to generate a genuinely alternative imaginary of female power, thereby revealing the persistence of symbolic containment strategies even within media representations commonly regarded as progressive.