The Hunger Games: Performing Not-performing to Authenticate Femininity and Whiteness

Abstract

Released in March 2012, The Hunger Games had the third-highest grossing opening weekend in U.S. history. The story of a televised game to the death, with participants under 24 hour surveillance, calls to mind reality TV (RTV) shows where surveillance works to verify the authenticity of participants (as consistent in their behavior). Using scholarship on RTV, this article argues that the fictional context of surveillance (being under the purview of a camera that films one's every move) centers surveillance as a potent mechanism for verifying limiting notions of authentic whiteness and femininity. This piece develops the idea of performing not-performing, central to the racialized and gendered construction of the main character: Katniss's performance of not-performing situates her as authentic and true (not willful or guileful), positioning her as the film's hero. The value of not-performing and behaving in a natural-seeming manner is transposed onto the body: altered bodies (marked as surgically altered or adorned with makeup and ornate clothing) are constructed as deviant, in opposition to Katniss's natural, unaltered white femininity, instantiating notions of naturalized embodied feminine whiteness. The film produces a new ethic of whiteness and femininity, privileging the seemingly unconscious production of observable trustworthiness and earnestness of character.

Keywords:

• Hunger Games
• Whiteness
• Surveillance
• Gender
• Authenticity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kent A. Ono for his wonderful insights at several crucial moments, Debby Dubrofsky for her invaluable editing skills, Chaim Noy for feedback on an early draft of the work, as well as the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their comments.

Notes

[1] Only one other scene in the film features a dark-skinned Black man, shown violently bashing the head of an Asian male with a brick in a clip from a past game that is screened on Flickerman's show. The scene is so disturbing Katniss immediately turns off the TV.