Fear of a Black City: Gender and Postracial Sovereignty in Death Wish (2018)

Abstract

This essay reads the 2018 remake of the vigilante film Death Wish (directed by Eli Roth). Situating the film within the ideological context of postracialism and the proximate context of the Movement for Black Lives, #MeToo, anti-gun activism, and the Trump presidency, I suggest that the film figures Chicago as a racial threat to white, feminized, suburban life. Mostly dispensing with conventional racial markers, Roth’s film paints Chicago as a space of immiseration and death to generate a racialized threat of sexual assault, conjuring an uncanny scene of sexual violence followed by a lynching. The film models postracial sovereignty, a model of authority constantly producing death to ward off the threat of Blackness and preserve the white and masculine prerogatives of political liberalism. The film illustrates how political liberalism wields the threat of death to attempt the suppression of antiracist, feminist rebellions offering understandings of life that diverge from liberalism’s white masculinity.

Keywords:

• Gender
• rape
• anti-Blackness
• urban space
• postracialism
• feminized whiteness
• metonymy

Acknowledgments

Portions of this essay were presented at both the 2018 Southern Communication Association annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, and other sections were presented at the 2018 meeting of the National Communication Association in Salt Lake City, Utah. I would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback of Terrell Taylor, J. Alexander McVey, Caitlin Bruce, E. Chebrolu, Corinne Sugino, Peter Odell Campbell, Amber Kelsie, and Joseph Packer on this work, along with the comments of the anonymous reviewers and Claire Sisco King.

Notes

1 Considering the city as imagined to be a place of Black, masculine violence helps make sense of the militarized response to the antiracist protests in a number of US cities in the summer of 2020. The militarized response was a show of force attempting to both abject cities and repress egalitarian politics.