The Superhero and the Beta Male: Making the Masculine Muslim Body with Kumail Nanjiani

The Pakistani American comedian Kumail Nanjiani stands among the most prominent Muslim storytellers in the U.S. television and film industries today. Through his training in standup, Nanjiani is aware that this body communicates something to be addressed and redressed for audiences immediately – what Jasbir Puar calls the “queer perversity of terrorist bodies.” His comedy routines, shows, and film all articulate and platform Pakistan as a very "Muslim" place; a mythical homogenous home to inequality and suffering, particularly for Muslim women but also for the men who cannot overcome Islam's determinism. Nanjiani names and enacts that deficiency through the seemingly woeful masculinity of a "beta male" body. His 2019 transformation for the Marvel Cinematic Universe reveals the fraught nature of Muslim masculinities that can only temporarily approximate the ideal white masculine form before suspicion and cruel assessments turn, once more, against those bodies from which Islam cannot be extracted.