If you think about the last few feminist movies you’ve watched, you’ll likely notice that the approach is quite formulaic: one woman, or a group of them, encounter a challenge (which is more often than not based upon the choices or demands of a man) that serves as a larger metaphor for women’s rights and gender justice in the entire Western hemisphere. For the purposes of this symbolism, the women or female-identifying characters are also written as bland as possible so they become blank canvases the viewership can project themselves onto. Oh, and they are always, if not exclusively white, highlighting an appalling lack of diversity in contemporary women-centric narratives.
As an avid gender scholar, I could probably write a whole dissertation trying to settle on a firm definition of feminist cinema. For the purposes of this analysis, however, I’m just going to define feminist cinema as any movie that aims to explore and critique gender dynamics.
So now that that’s settled, let’s start things off with a little exercise: I want you to take out your phone and type the phrase “feminist movie” into your search engine to see what pops out.
For me, the first few film examples that appeared were: On the Basis of Sex (A biopic of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life), Promising Young Woman (a feminist revenge tale), Women Talking (The story of women of an isolated religious colony who experience sexual violence), Netflix’s Moxie (which FYI was heavily critiqued for its white saviour narrative), and the sports drama Battle of the Sexes.
View this post on Instagram
Then, as I continued to scroll, I happened upon some more well-known films that don’t really need an introduction: Clueless, Legally Blonde, Barbie, Thelma and Louise, countless remakes of Little Women, Kill Bill, the all-blonde Bombshell, Lady Macbeth, 20th Century Women, Suffragette, the beloved horror classic Jennifer’s Body, Florence Pugh’s Don’t Worry Darling, Lady Bird, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Persuasion, Poor Things, and of course, It Ends With Us. Oh, and special mention goes to ultra-disturbing body horror The Substance which is currently dominating my FYP. These are only a few, of course. The list of white, straight, cis-gendered leads in feminist cinema goes on and on and on and on…You get the gist.
Naturally, there are a few exceptions to what seems to be an established rule. Notable mentions include Bend It Like Beckham, Hustlers, the enigmatic and underappreciated Joyride, Frida, the Mulan and A Little Mermaid live-action remakes, as well as The Woman King. And more recently Bottoms and Blink Twice. Nevertheless, the majority of these productions either ignored the race of the main character or offered oversimplified depictions of marginalised communities, probably for mainstream society’s uncomplicated consumption. This blatant oversight arguably kept a majority of these films from foregrounding the complexities of being a woman of colour in their storytelling, thus falling short of constructing a truly thought-provoking and intersectional piece of feminist movie.
The absence of women of colour in feminist productions is inherently indicative of larger disparities within the film industry. There aren’t a lot of movies about this demographic to begin with.
Women have historically been excluded from the film industry, a sector which is still largely under white, male control and contains many barriers to entry, infamously a staggering amount of nepotism. Likewise, many BIPOC actors face a harder time getting the exposure and accolades necessary to star in big studio productions.
This has resulted in the erasure of women of colour, both in front of and behind the camera. So, on the rare occasion that women are granted access to the grand halls of mainstream cinema, what we still continue to see is a parade of straight, cis, and white industry insiders.
In 2022, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism published the results of a research project which examined the gender and race/ethnicity of lead and co-lead actors in top-grossing films from 2007 to 2021.
The researchers found that only 11 of the 100 films in 2021 featured a woman of colour as lead or co-lead. Back in 2007, only one film managed that feat: Dreamgirls, which starred Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé and Anika Noni Rose as leads.
Older women (those 45 and up) were also less likely to star in a movie than their male counterparts: seven movies versus 27. Although seven older men of colour were leads or co-leads in 2021, not a single non-white woman over 45 was tapped for such a part last year or the year before.
Then there is also an ideological dimension to the prevalence of white women in cinematic narratives. The concept of white women as the ‘default’ or ‘everywoman’ traces back centuries to the colonial era and early modernism. White, heterosexual, middle-class women were established as the standard, while women of colour were relegated to subordinate positions, diverging from this norm. This ideology is still very pervasive today. Mainstream feminism often reflects white feminism, an expression of feminism that solely centres on the experiences of white women. This is very evident in the Barbie movie, where the white, blonde and thin stereotypical Barbie represents this image of idealised femininity, whereas the other Barbies are presented as variations of her, somehow diverging from her norm.
“White feminists are ‘everything’. We speak of other groups rather than letting them speak for themselves. (…) We think of mutual love and happiness with no acknowledgement of our role in the violence of racial capitalism and white supremacy (…) We see our views as objective, and think our experiences represent those of everyone else,” gender scholar Alison Phipps noted.
At this point, I should probably clarify that I do like most feminist movies that were released throughout the last decade, regardless of the lead’s race. Race or ethnicity is definitely not a measure I use to judge the substance, or depth of a film. Some experiences on the road to womanhood are universal and can thus be explored by any woman-identifying character.
I am just tired of only seeing one type of feminist cinema and watching everyone else’s voices and insights being marginalised. I am also quite exhausted of seeing many women’s experiences being treated as subaltern or alternatives rather than equally normative and valuable in their own right. Overall, I am really tired of cinema reflecting and reinforcing oppressive patterns, with no real interest in challenging them.
Where are fresh, new and dangerous narratives? They’re definitely not going to be written or produced by the dinosaurs who have always been around. Where are the novel characters with some bite? Give me something good to watch, for god’s sake!