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ABSTRACT
This article investigates racial-sexual violence, and conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity as they are situated in the cinematic Black political imagination. Through a Black feminist analysis of Get Out (2017), the author argues that the film and its articulation of race in the post-Obama US fails to account for gender and sexuality by tangentially engaging Black women in its dissection of race and racism. The author contends that Black women are the absent presence in the film and utilizes theories of temporal, spatial, and material racial-sexual violence and the coupled subject invisibilities to dissect the (in)visible Black women in film.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgement
This essay is derived from the author’s thesis, Whither the Gender of Get Out: A Critique of the Cinematic (Im) Possibilities of the Black Political Imagination.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 11.
2 Sharpe, In the Wake, 17.
3 Robin R. Means Coleman, Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2023), 317.
4 Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele. Los Angeles, CA: Blumhouse Productions, Monkeypaw Productions, 2016.
5 “Get Out” (2017), Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=blumhouse2.htm (accessed July 28, 2022). To date the film has grossed $255, 407, 969 worldwide. It was shot in just 23 days with a $4.5 million budget. The film’s net profit of $124.3 million made it the tenth-most profitable film of 2017.
6 Saidiya Hartman uses this term in Lose Your Mother (2007) to articulate the persistence of slavery and its attendant racial calculus in the Black lives. It is “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” in so many words, 6.
7 Sarah Juliet Lauro, “Get Out: From Atlantic Slavery to Black Lives Matter.” In The Aesthetics of Necropolitics, ed. Natasha Lushetich (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 37.
8 Daelena Tinnin, “Whither the Gender of Get Out: A Critique of the Cinematic (Im) Possibilities of the Black Political Imagination” (master’s thesis, University of Denver, 2018), Electronic Theses and Dissertations, https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1423. I began my research on Get Out and Black feminisms during my MA program. The basis of this article, Black women as the absent presence of the film, is also the main argument in my thesis.
9 Coleman, Horror Noire, 2.
10 Coleman, Horror Noire, 8.
11 Coleman, Horror Noire, 8–9.
12 Coleman, Horror Noire, 9.
13 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxv.
14 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 133.
15 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 134.
16 Kinitra Brooks, Alexis McGee, and Stephanie Schoellman, “Speculative Sankofarration: Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction,” Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora 42, no. 1–2 (2016).
17 Brooks, McGee, Schoellman, “Speculative Sankofarration,” 238.
18 Brooks, McGee, Schoellman, “Speculative Sankofarration,” 238.
19 Brooks, McGee, Schoellman, “Speculative Sankofarration,” 238.
20 Kinitra Brooks, Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2018).
21 Brooks, Searching for Sycorax, 11.
22 Brooks, Searching for Sycorax, 11.
23 Herman Gray, “Race, Media and the Cultivation of Concern,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 2–3 (2013): 255.
24 Gray, “Race, Media,” 254.
25 Gray, “Race, Media,” 254.
26 Janell Hobson, “Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. ½ (2002): 48.
27 Hobson, “Viewing in the Dark,” 54.
28 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 69.
29 Jordan Peele, (@JordanPeele), “‘Get Out’ is a documentary.,” X, Nov. 15, 2017, 8:56 am,, https://twitter.com/jordanpeele/status/930796561302540288.
30 Bernadette Calafell, “Monstrous Erasure: Quare Femme (In) visibility in Get Out,” in Routledge International Handbook on Communication and Gender, ed. Marnell Niles Goins, Joan Faber McAllister, and Bryant K. Alexander (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 191–92.
31 Brandon Harris, “The Giant Leap Forward of Jordan Peele’s “ Get Out’,” The New Yorker, March 4, 2017, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/review-the-giant-leap-forward-of-jordan-peeles-get-out.html.
32 Anderson, Victoria, “Get Out: Why Racism Really is Terrifying,” The Independent, March 26, 2017, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/get-out-why-racism-really-is-terrifying-a7645296.html.
33 Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 138.
34 Calafell, “Monstrous Erasure,” 192.
35 Calafell, “Monstrous Erasure,” 195.
36 Harris, “The Giant Leap Forward of Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’”
37 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 33.
38 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 35
39 E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly, 21, no. 1 (2001):1.
40 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies,” 3.
41 Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies,” 3.
42 Calafell, “Monstrous Erasure,” 198.
43 Calafell, “Monstrous Erasure,” 199; Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 137.
44 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, (New York: New York University Press, 2015): 10.
45 Jackson, Becoming Human, 11.
46 Shoniqua Roach, “Black Sex in the Quiet,” Differences (Bloomington, Ind) 30, no. 1 (2019): 127.
47 Roach, “Black Sex in the Quiet,” 127.
48 Roach, “Black Sex in the Quiet,” 127.
49 Tiffany Lethabo King, “The Labor of (Re) reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible (ly),” Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1025.
50 King, “The Labor of (Re) reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible (ly),” 1025.
51 Hobson, “Viewing in the Dark,” 53.
52 Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Drama of Small Worlds,” in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 155.