I Couldn’t Get Any Anger out of Her”

Bibliographic Data

ID15310566
AuthorsBeth Capper (corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume34
Issue2
Pages315-355
Publication date2025-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueQui Parle (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1041-8385 • E-ISSN: 1938-8020
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/10418385-11996933
OpenAlexW7139915724
LanguageEN
References cited14

In a recent interview, filmmaker Fronza Woods reflected on early audience reactions to her 1983 short Fannie’s Film, a portrait of a Black cleaning woman, recalling that this audience “didn’t want to see a Black cleaning woman . . . who was happy with her life.” This essay takes Fannie’s Film’s proposition of a “Black cleaning woman who was happy with her life” as a point of departure to argue that Woods’s film offers a critical commentary on the expectations that shape the appearance of the Black reproductive worker in counterhegemonic cinema. Reading Fannie’s Film in relation to a broader archive of largely Black feminist cinema from the 1970s and 1980s that center on the (Black) reproductive worker’s affect and interiority, the article shows how Fannie’s Film interrogates the misalignment between its protagonist’s “happiness” and prominent approaches to apprehending the Black reproductive worker as a political subject

Affect (linguistics · Anger · Black women · Film director · Movie theater · Portrait · Proposition · Reading (process · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Race, History, and American Society

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