The
third film in my analysis of the
films of Celine Sciamma is the complicatedly intersectional
film, Girlhood. The confluence of race, class, gender and sexuality are
palpable in Sciamma’s final coming-of-age story that rounds out her
disconnected trilogy. Yet, throughout the film, Sciamma seems to disingenuously
vacillate between vigorously engaging in these ideas, to only finding interest
in them as a performative aesthetic garnish. This brief paper engages in Sciamma’s
attempt, success, and failure to engage with these sociological concepts both
at a distance and at half measure, culminating in a story that attempts to subvert
racially gendered classist and sexual stereotypes while simultaneously relying
upon them.
PLOT
In
a poor Parisian suburb, Marieme (Karidja Touré) is told that high school is no
longer an option for her and seeks solace in the local gang led by the
illustrious “Lady” (Assa Sylla). With this new crew, Marieme finds sorority,
solidarity, and sisterhood. But when the realities of home and her surrounding
community increase their pressure, Marieme must decide to fall into the
stereotypical path that lays before her, or forge a new one, breaking the bonds
that social institutions, family members, and community expectations have efforted
to restrain her.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
To
understand Celine Sciamma’s decision to write and direct a film centering
around the lives of Black girls, a contextual foundation of racial politics in
the 2010’s needs to be laid. This then will serve as a backdrop for a
discussion of the film’s production.
Since
the French Revolution of 1789[1], France has never had a
significant identifier around race, only the State and “man” (intended to mean
humans, ala, mankind, but also cisgender men). This leads to a lack of
recognition of racial and ethnic minorities, which in turn leans towards the
validation of whiteness through its association with capitalism and patriarchy.
Because there is a lack of visibility and validation of ethnic and racial
minorities, whiteness becomes the default, the norm. The appeal to human
rights, or broad unspecified inclusion, has been a tactic of oppressive systems
to obfuscate their domination. This is the discrimination of omission. Broad
inclusivity without specification assumes that both the experiences and needs
of all people are the same; each with the same level of access to opportunities
and resources. It’s framing equality without an understanding of equity. This
causes non-white people to be judged by white standards and minimizes the scope
of institutional barriers, reducing perceived inequality and injustice; to be
viewed only through the lens of individual choice and personal responsibility. This
keeps an understanding of the complexities of race relations perpetually
elusive to both the French Government, and its citizens.
This
country wide ignorance of the importance of race continues to obscure the
normalization of whiteness even among its people. In the context of this film,
this can possibly account for Celine Sciamma’s hypocritical statements during
the Press tour for Girlhood.
In an
interview for The Independent in April of 2015
Sciamma states that:
“…she
intentionally cast Black actresses because of her concern over a lack of
opportunities for Black women in France saying that she was shocked how Black
people are never on screen [In France] and how there are no Black actresses famous
in France.”
Incongruently, in an
interview with The Observer that
same year, fielding a question about being a white woman crafting and telling a
story about Black girls, she states:
” I’ve always lived on the outskirts,
[But] I wasn’t making a film about Black women, I was making it with them.
It’s not the same. I’m not telling you what it’s like to be Black in France
today. I just want to give face to the French youth I am looking at.”
Additionally,
in an interview with Indiewire,
Sciamma stated that the film was not from a ‘White Feminist Gaze’ as the
interviewer prompted, but from the vantage point of “…what it’s like just being
a girl…it’s not about race or racism.” Yet, later in the interview she sates:
“With
few [Black] representations [in film] [Girlhood] takes on a new
responsibility…It’s a lot on my shoulders. But I knew that going into it. But,
I mean, I didn’t know how messy it could get…I can tell this story and Black
Female directors cannot.”
There is a lot to unpack here.
Firstly,
by doing a simple internet search anyone can easily find any number of famous
Black French female actors that existed either before or
contemporaneously with the actors in Girlhood; as well as a long
rich history of Black
French female actors and directors creating art since the
1950’s. Sciamma’s comments illustrates her obliviousness to the history of French
Black Cinema and the centering of whiteness in French film culture.
A
Variety article in 2021 corroborates this
normalization of whiteness and ignorance of white feminism to the plight of
Black creatives, recounting the backlash experienced by Aïssa Maïga after she counted
aloud the few Black People in the audience at that years Ceaser Awards. The
article goes on to discuss that of the few known Black directors at the time,
their success was hard fought; and while several studios, under renewed
pressure from the Black Lives Matter Movement, installed inclusion riders and
greater diversity quotas, it hasn’t taken hold in part because of France’s
reluctance to count race as an indicator. This skews the data and allows the
industry to engage in Color-blind Racism in the film industry.
In this context, Sciamma’s hypocritic confluent commentary on race and racism during the press tour for Girlhood is understood as a symptom of the imbedded structural racism of Color-blindness in France. Unfortunately, this also frames her ignorance of Black cinema and willingness to tell Black stories (as a white woman) to be a gross invocation and specter of the history of French Colonialism in areas like Senegal and Haiti.
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
Sciamma has stated that
the inspiration for this film came from the girls that she would regularly see
hang out in the Paris area or in shopping centers and train stations. This
limited sample, and the original title “Girl Gang”, both points to her voyeuristic
fascination with the culture of Black women without attempting to interrogate the
failure of institutional mechanisms like the economy, education and the
criminal justice system that shape those lives. Instead, she seems more
interested in how girls adapt to these ever-constricting pressures and whether
they recreate stereotypes, or rage against them.
Race, Class, and
Education
The triptych of the demographic
intersections with the clearest overlap is between race, class and education. Since
the historic moral failure of the transnational slave trade, Black bodies have
been given economic value in their ownership and exploitation. After
emancipation (April 2nd, 1848, in France Jan 1st 1863 in
the US), there was a period of sharecropping that was designed to return Black
people to as close to the status of slavery as possible. This was the first in
a long line of practices seeking to disempower Black people. Outside of the
historic overt violence used to economically subjugate Black people at the turn
of the 20th century in the US (Tulsa Massacre) there have been
efforts by various government agencies to eliminate the ability for Black
people to accrue generational wealth. This lack of generational wealth
translates to an inability to afford substantive education. The lack of
education forces Black people to be reliant on low wage and often service
industry jobs.
According to Kendall (2020) this confluence of
problems between race, class and education often gets ignored by a majority of
social and political movements, even those that are well meaning. Consistently,
there are social issues that exclusively affect Black people that are largely
ignored or antagonized by the institutions of any cross-national society[2]. There is a lack of
support that these issues receive when Black people are the focus, and a lack
of understanding as to their amalgamated impact. Sin the US, since most K-12 schools
are primarily funded by the property taxes of the surrounding neighborhoods, lower
income area schools have less funding than those more affluent. Considering the
history of systemic housing discrimination against Black people from
emancipation forward, most of the poorly funded schools are the ones Black kids
attend (Rothstein 2017, Kendall 2020). Meanwhile, many of the houses in these
areas are “unfit for human habitation, (because they are zoned for commercial
in addition to residential use) but Black residents have no other option” (Rothstein
2017 Kendall 2020:207). This negatively impacts the functioning of schools and
the student’s ability to learn. Desmond (2023) reminds us that poverty can be
both the cause and the result of institutional failures like education. This cycle
of collapse is additionally obfuscated by the structure of an individualist
society and the deflection of “personal responsibility” that gets unfairly
leveed at Black people, particularly Black women, while framing it as a
strength of character (Kendall 2020).
“The Strong Black Woman”
has been a trope in the media since Black women began gracing screens. Along
with other racist and sexist stereotypes like the “Mammy” and the “Jezebel”, “The
Strong Black Woman” has been created as an archetype for Black women to be
judged by the white supremacist patriarchy. Yet, unlike the other tropes, “The Strong
Black Woman” is consistently internalized by Black women themselves, further
obscuring the need for systemic solutions and minimizing the acknowledgement of
systemic racism altogether.
According to Jones Harris
and Reynolds (2020): “The Strong Black Woman” has been characterized by
three components: emotional restraint, independence, and caretaking. In
this trope, Black girls and women must hold back their emotions to avoid
appearing weak, portraying themselves as strong and independent while being
responsible for the problems of others. They are supposed to have a
psychological resistance to the oppression within society; therefore, under this
framing, Black women aren’t supposed to get tired or ask for help.
Kendall (2020) reinforces
the dangers of this trope:
“Being strong or being fierce or
whatever appellation is usually applied to the ones who get brutalized, who
sue, who wind up on the ground with those she leaves behind begging the world
to #sayhername, sounds great, but the labels are cold comfort if we don’t do
more to solve the problems they are fighting… This becomes “a millstone around
the neck [of Black Women], dragging them down and endangering their chances at
survival.” (Kendall 2020:133-134)
The trope of “the Strong Black Woman”, a racist caricature
built from the roots of cataclysmic injustices that forced Black women to “do
it themselves”, has now been weaponized against them in the media that they
consume, especially those pieces of content that are said to be about them.
In Girlhood, Sciamma
leans into the stereotypes associated with the interlocking mechanisms of race,
class and education, while exalting “The Strong Black Woman” trope in the most
whitely feminist way possible. When we first meet Marieme, she is playing
football for her school and embraced by a sorority of her fellow teammates and
students. As they all walk back to their respective houses (various apartment
complex high-rises), each of the girls taper off in different directions toward
their dwellings. Finally, Marieme is left alone and when she gets back home, we
see that she is mostly responsible for the care of her two younger sisters
because their mom is constantly working. Immediately, this is invoking flavors
of the “Strong Black Woman” trope in the way that Marieme finds ways to feed
and bring money into the home to supplement her mother’s income. Later, in a conversation
with the school counselor, we learn that even though she is 15, Marieme is
still in “middle school” looking to finally make it to “high school” despite
already being held back to repeat the grade. This is regardless of the clear
fact that her poor grades are not a symptom of ignorance or laziness, but
because of her mounting family obligations, and living within a generally
racist and sexist system. The counselor denies her another chance to improve
her grades or take the grade a third time, and instead, suggest vocational
schools[3]. This systemic failure is the
catalyst for her finding solace in the gang. Throughout the rest of the film,
at every barrier, Marieme triumphs, when she experiences a setback, she does
not fall to the dangers of vice all around her. On the contrary, she perseveres
and charts her own path.
In this depiction, Sciamma is clearly valuing the bootstrap pulling ruggedness of “The Strong Black Woman” trope and framing it as individualistically feminist, messaging to the audience that “empowered women can do anything despite the economic and social realities that they face” (Kendall 2020:131). As Kendall (2020) rightly assesses: what about the people who can’t? From the images that Sciamma gives us in Girlhood, those are stories that are not worth telling. Additionally, when tropes like these are reproduced by self-described feminist filmmakers, it continues the unnecessary internalization of these ideas in their audience. White women see this film and they accept the trope as truth. Concurrently, Black women feel even more compelled to follow these assumptions making them more likely to reject various forms of self-care and accept support lest they be criticized and socially sanctioned for not being superhuman. In this regard, Sciamma is the typical “Karen” who believes they can tell Black girls and women how they should exist. Never falter, never succumb, or surrender. Yet, what makes this seemingly empowering message racist when applied to Black girls and women is that it assumes equal access to resources, thereby judging Black women by white feminist standards. Sciamma, however, goes a step further and presents a racially transcendent feminism which posits that regardless of the social conditions and a variety of systemic barriers, “girls will [still] get it done”. This is a white feminist’s racist benevolent sexism that focuses on the messaging of empowerment without an interrogation of the harm these distorted images could cause.
Gang Subcultures
One
of the basic concepts of Sociology, peer groups, are an endearing and necessary
part of the process of social learning called socialization. They are unique
out of the other “agents” of socialization that shepherd individuals through
various life-course “rites of passage” in that they are the individuals that
help understand and shape reality by going through it with us contemporaneously.
An understanding within the same social, historical and political context is a
rare and precious resource. Unfortunately, this also means that individuals are
judged by following a menial trajectory of the life-course as determined by the
average. Anyone who doesn’t reproduce the same narrative arc is in danger of
being sanctioned. Marieme invites this sanctioning when she is unable to follow
her cohort into “high school”. The loss of this peer group creates a void which
Marieme fills with the gang she sees outside of school.
Gangs, in the
sociological sense, operate as a counterculture in most societies, often with a
hint of religious flair mixed in. A
Sociological “subculture” is a microcosmic group within a dominant social group
that holds their own ideals, values, beliefs and norms along with their own
hierarchy structure, competitions, and clothing. Typically, a “subculture’s
authority is superseded by the dominant culture’s authority when applicable
(regardless of your subcultural status). A counterculture is a specific type of
subculture that is characterized by the challenging of the dominant culture’s
authority by simply existing against the norm, or actively seeking the
supplication and removal of the dominant culture’s structural supremacy,
replacing it with their own ideals and values. This is commonly referred to as
benign and malignant countercultures.[4] Commonly, both subcultures
and countercultures express some attitudes and behaviors that are reminiscent
of religions. Both gangs and religions ritualize becoming members, have their
own sacred text and special garments that distinguish them as being different
than other groups.
In order to be a part of
the gang, Marieme has to slowly break herself of the norms of general
socialization to adopt the goals and ideals of the group through the incremental
but escalating breaking of social and cultural rules as well as established
laws. Through these behaviors (intimidation, stealing, and violence) a sense of
solidaric camaraderie is formed. By participating in these ritualized behaviors
Marieme becomes a gang member, and a lasting sisterhood is created.
The romanticized version
of gangs depicted in Girlhood is a part of the legacy of cinema
constantly depicting disreputable denizens duplicitously doing despicable deeds;
reframing these deplorables into the anti-hero because protagonists are humanized,
and the audience often doesn’t want to follow “a bad guy” without redeeming
qualities. Yet, Marieme, Lady, and the rest of the gang never fall into this
trope laden trap; they always skirt the surface of something darker, rightfully
not getting in too deep.
This gang glorification
in Girlhood also carries within it an element of racialization. Racialization
is the process by which nonwhite groups are consistently discriminated against
for different purposes throughout history. From the annihilation of native
people and slavery, to separating children at the border, flying migrants to
Martha’s Vineyard and removing Black Studies as a discipline on college campuses,
every nonwhite group has been racialized and systemically discriminated against
for a variety of purposes; whether that be for: property[5], profit, politics, or
popularity. This exercise in power has been an aspect of race and foreign
relations since its inception. The media representation of nonwhite races has
been a valuable tool in this process given its penchant for leaning into racist
stereotypes and depictions that allow certain groups to be racialized and then discriminated
against. To that point, Celine Sciamma’s use of Black girls to tell a story
about criminality and poverty adds to the racialization of the criminally poor
as being exclusively Black. This criticism is compounded by her use of an
all-Black cast, expressing, intentionally or not, that crime and poverty in
France is an entirely Black problem. Thus, through the narrative, we are
supposed to revel in the way that Marieme avoids the pitfalls of her peers, or
works a situation to her advantage, which further removes her situation from
being properly perceived as a systemic social problem. Instead, Sciamma wants
us to marvel at the perseverance of her protagonist without contemplating its
contribution to the larger context of the racialization of Black girls and
women.
Gendered Restrictions
There
is a consistent consolidation of the feminist movement around a white ideology.
This normalization of whiteness is diffused in such a way that the desires and
needs of white women became ubiquitously synonymous with feminism itself. This solidification
assumes that the needs and struggles of Black women are the same as white women.
This myth echoes the central tension that threatened to break up the solidarity
of Black and white feminist during the second wave feminist movement. This
tension still exists today as we continue to establish a unifying
emulsification of feminisms that represent every demographic. Hubbard (2022) mentions
that even Black feminist have a difficulty accepting all demographic groups
into the fold, specifically those of the LGBTQAI community[6]. Because of these
deficiencies in acceptance, there needs to be focus on restorative justice
frameworks. As a part of this restorative justice, there needs to be a harm
repairing stage between all demographics, but especially between white and
Black women for the isolation and appropriation of the feminist identity into whiteness.
During this stage, there needs to be sincere apologies, the taking of
responsibilities, and reparational support for Black women’s struggles by white
women (Hubbard 2022, Kendall 2020). Once there is restoration of what is
“broken”, only then can there be a reintegration of feminisms into a cohesive
movement that is all inclusive.
Sciamma’s
portrayal of the intersections of race gender and sexuality in Girlhood are
still coming from a colonialist framework; painting the experiences of Black
teens from the standard white feminist perspective (with a dash of the white
savior complex mixed in). She only hints at Mariene’s burgeoning sexual
expressions for Lady and her experimentation with gender nonconformity (through
binding) as mechanisms to propel the plot or relationships forward rather than
fully explore them as aspects of Mariene’s character. Because of this, the
audience is left to infer intention through brief montages and single lines of
dialogue that Mariene’s sexuality might be more complex than originally
thought. While some might look upon this misguided attempt as genuine inclusion,
the lack of interrogation of these ideas on the part of the writer/ director not
only reinforces the otherness of gay and trans representation of Black girls, but
by using it as a simple narrative device, it demonstrates a lack of
compassionate creativity by the filmmaker.
CONCLUSION
Girlhood
is
a faux-feminist film that consolidates the Black feminist ideology down into a
reproduction of the individually focused “Strong Black Woman” trope. This sadly
continues the long history of judging Black women by the appropriative white
colonialist standards without contemplating what makes the Black experience
different. At the same time, Sciamma praises herself for helping to elevate
Black voices, even though Black female directors have been doing the same
thing, with little recognition, for over a generation prior. This is yet
another example of a white woman co-opting Black women’s experiences in order to
be praised as an ally, rather than a racially exploitive opportunist.
REFERENCES
Desmond,
Mathew 2023. Poverty, By America New York: Crown Publishing
Kendall,
Mikki 2020. Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women that A Movement Forgot.
New York: Viking Press
Hubbard,
Shanita 2022. Ride or Die: A Feminist Manifesto for the Well-being of Black
Women New York Legacy Lit Publishing
Jones,
Martinique K., Keoshia J Harris, and Akilah A. Reynolds 2020. "In Their
Own Words: The Meaning of the Strong Black Woman Schema among Black U.S College
Women". Sex Roles. 84 (5–6): 347–359. doi:10.1007/s11199-020-01170-w
Rothstein,
Richard 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How the Government
Segregated America New York: Liveright Publishing
[1] A
water shed moment for the development of Sociology as a discipline. It is often
cited as one of the rapid social changes that August Comte used to determine
that there needed to be a new type of science that studied society and its
social changes.
[2]
Kendall exclusively looks at the Feminist movement in the United States and the
way it has left Black women behind. This paper and its author see value in
extrapolating Kendall’s point to a broader focus
[3] Vocational
schools are often the two tier systemic split that helps to minimize
institutional racism
[4] In
is important to note that regardless of the cancerous analogy, the use of the
adjectives refers only to the desire for a change to the dominant cultural and
structural system, and should not be implied that Benin is benevolent and
malignant is infernal.
[5] Of
which it is either about or adjacent to
[6]
Looking for a great film about Queer black Teens? I recommend Dee Rees’ Pariah
