“After You’re Done Crying”: Regulating Feelings, Gender, and Race in Medieval Literature and Contemporary Comics, addresses questions related to how one decides, in split-second judgements, who deserves empathy and how empathy may be constructed through narratives and images. While empathy may appear to be a natural human impulse, my dissertation examines it as a structure of social control. Most importantly, I address how this structure contributes to the development of categories such as race and gender—what Sylvia Wynter calls “genres of the human.” I focus on how empathy is built on the stories we tell now and those we have told for centuries in the West as well as a social calculus which includes feeling as a key overlooked factor in Western oppressive networks grounded in identity factors such as race, gender, and class. Beginning with Middle English portrayals of Christ’s passion and its afterlives in superhero comics, I identify Christ’s body as key in broader Western applications of empathy. This early social calculus relies on making Christ “look like” the white, masculine European body, in turn suggesting that he “feels like” those existing in such bodies, illuminating how and why comics creators continue to use images of the passion as a shorthand to empathy in modern superhero comics. I then demonstrate how violent, forced stripping of non-masculine bodies precedes their removal from their established positions as knights and superheroes, marking gender as a feelings-based form of social regulation. Race, in turn, functions similarly, with emphasis on early assumptions linking heroism and whiteness and that non-white masculine bodies will similarly face removal from “heroic” positions. Ultimately, I argue that social regulations of feeling explain, to a degree, why certain identities are repeatedly closed off from the empathized heroic ideal of Anglophone storytelling.