A Superhero Date with Kylie Cheung

Kylie Cheung is a feminist journalist and the author of several books on gender and politics, including Survivor Injustice: State-Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence, and the Fight for Bodily Autonomy, Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans, and Playing the Victim: How The Powerful Deny and Attack Survivors of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Genocide.

My Boyfriend, the Superhero is her first novel. She is based in Brooklyn. Read more about her work at kyliewrites.net.

Q: Fun question first: How did you go about designing the superheroes and their appearances? (E.g. Kendall is a Superman type, but also has a sleek black suit and “metallic gauntlets”). Were there any old favorites you drew from?

A: God, I wish I had better or less embarrassing answers. Honestly, during the 2020 lockdown, I got really into Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. I really loved the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) and had this horrible breakup and got this puppy on Craigslist, which I’m not proud of, and named him Bucky after the Winter Soldier.

So to answer your question, I’m not proud of it, but I’ve watched pretty much every MCU movie and quite a few DCU movies, and that probably inspired my vision. I wanted the super-beings to have this really stereotypical, caricature-like, superhero aesthetic while also, obviously, being terrifying, and being a stand-in for the police state — kind of similar to my understanding of The Boys, though I’ve never seen that show.

Q: You were an avid fan of superhero media, and obviously have used this book to explore the darker implications and cultural themes of those works. Was there a first “huh” moment that you had as a fan and consumer, that gave you pause or made you question why creators were making certain choices?

A: I mean, I’ve honestly always found superhero movies dumb while still loving them. I don’t know that there was a specific “moment” per se that I made the connections — the metaphor of superheroes as police is sort of just right there, though I took that and tried to go much deeper in this book, of course.

I do unironically think Captain America: The Winter Soldier does a strong job at presenting, more or less, how the algorithmic predictive police state operates, which was definitely surprising coming from an MCU movie.

Q: My Boyfriend, the Superhero centers around Elisabeth, a criminology activist who challenges the impunity of superheroes but also finds herself drawn to Kendall, the leader of the group. It echoes a lot of contemporary discourse about progressive women who’ve dated or had flings with conservative/capitalist men.

Why do you think women on the left can be drawn to these relationships?

A: That’s really interesting, because that’s not necessarily a comparison I was drawing while writing this. I still remember being, like, 18 years old and having a libertarian boyfriend, and every time he said anything, I was like, “Wow, it’s really interesting how terrible that is.” I don’t think I’ve been with anyone who wasn’t a leftist since, but I honestly don’t know much about a lot of men I’ve been with, and sort of just trust my vagina to intuit and detect someone’s politics and reject right-wing freaks at this point.

It’s always interesting to see how this sort of cognitive dissonance can sometimes unfold among some people, of separating your private proclivities or interpersonal things from your politics. I wasn’t actively thinking about that while writing this book, but that’s a sharp observation. I guess part of what this book gets at is: You can be drawn to things that you know are wrong or even dangerous and self-sabotaging.

Q: What resonated with me is that, in the midst of their romance, the otherwise gentle Kendall will suddenly do or say something spine-chilling. (He’ll laugh when Elisabeth says something earnest, and his first sexual gesture is to touch her throat.)

I think lots of women, including myself, have been in Elisabeth’s shoes, having to confront these signs. How did you decide what those moments should be and how to pepper them throughout the courtship?

A: Again, I think the cognitive dissonance that you can watch unfold in your own mind can be so, so interesting and really alarming sometimes. Sometimes it’s hard to fully process certain signs or signals for what they are in the moment, and you can only do so afterward.

As for those specific moments with each scene, I had a rough idea of what I wanted to happen, and a very clear grip on the dynamic of their relationship, and about where boundaries can be blurred from the erotic to the disturbing, and that guided my writing.

Q: A great sub-theme of the book is the fascination that fan culture has towards violent men, particularly celebrities and superheroes. Some of the superheroes have fandoms on Tumblr, and Kendall does late-night reading on Hades and Persephone, a very romanticized fandom favorite.

Ah, that’s another really sharp observation! I think the references to Tumblr, when I write in passing about how some of the super-beings have online fandoms, was just this really fun aside, and sort of helped ground the book in, like, a sense of time and setting. To your point, the psychology of fandom and the ways that awful, abusive, violent men so often have these massive stan armies is incredibly fascinating and disturbing, and I thought it fit naturally into the book in that way.

Q: Elisabeth’s theory is that “There’s a cop living in all of us…We should all strive to kill that cop.” It’s really provocative; how did you come up with that memorable line?

I’ve read a lot of abolitionist theory and that’s kind of one of the grounding principles: examining and interrogating your own thoughts and instincts that desire to punish or control someone else. And this book, obviously, is very much about policing.

Q: There’s a lot of really specific references to a certain kind of Brooklyn life. How did you decide what the narrator Elisabeth’s life should look like: “ivy coat[ing] brick” streets, poodles, the farmer’s market, etc?

A: While I was writing this book in the summer and fall of 2023, I’d actually just moved to New York a few months ago. So, I was more or less just describing the neighborhoods I was getting used to seeing and walking around.

I remember [that] when I first started working with Sanina (the AK Press/Black Dawn editor), they raised that one of the train lines I reference didn’t go to where I said she was going, so we had to fix that. But it stemmed from how I was really just getting to know the city when I first wrote this.

Q: Was there any music (1-3 songs) that you think would make a good mini-setlist for your book? Songs that may have been on your mind whilst writing, or ones that give readers a good idea of the themes?

That’s such a good question because I really don’t know! I would love to see what, like, Grimes could do if I just gave her the book and ask her to make music inspired by it.

Q: Last but not least – do you have a take on Zack Snyder?

I can’t pretend to be that familiar or an acolyte or anything. As a very, very wordy person, I love the idea of a director’s cut where you get to keep everything you want and nothing gets edited out. That is kind of a fantasy of mine.