ABSTRACT
Killgrave, The Purple Man, is a supervillain whose powers give him the ability to command extreme obedience to his will. With particular focus on his appearance in the Jessica Jones comics and television series—both of which give slightly different versions of his characterisation—this chapter examines the issues of violence and masculinity expressed through The Purple Man from the perspective of Michel Foucault, and others, on biopolitics, power and control.
While he never lived long enough to give his thoughts on biopolitics a formal written expression, Foucault’s lectures on this topic and its relations to and differences from his earlier notions of state violence mediated through bodily discipline, provide an insight into more contemporary technologies of control that have been taken further, most notably, by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben. On the surface, it appears that Killgrave’s powers are a purely personal, sadistic delivery of a quiet violence: one mediated through thought (or pheromones depending on when we read about him) and is manifest only in the performance of his willed acts on those surrounding him. Yet Killgrave’s abilities, emanating as so often from a military-techno-scientific accident, align him with a system of biopolitical power that exceeds his person. In this chapter we focus on how Killgrave’s singular, sadistic illustration of his power associates both with biopolitics and masculinity.
