Black Horrific Bites: Intro to Feminine Rage
If you like seeing Moo Deng as a symbol of feminine rage, keep reading!
As a very rageful person myself, I love talking about feminine anger, and I love talking about Black and Brown women’s anger most of all. But we’re not usually given the space or the grace to be authentically angry out loud, either in real life or in horror fiction. I’m sure all of us have a thousand stories about how we bit our tongues to stay in school or keep a job or not rock the boat or just survive. Being a person of the global majority is often an exercise in suppression when we’re around white people, especially white women.
White women are having an anger renaissance in fiction, including horror — from books like Maeve Fly and Gone Girl to films like Promising Young Woman. But it’s such a privilege to be able to be an angry woman without people dismissing or suppressing your feelings because of your skin color. Black feminine people specifically are reduced to the “angry Black woman” trope or the Sapphire caricature.
In the United States, Black and Indigenous women in particular face the highest rates of intimate partner violence (1) and sexual violence (2), experiences that with racial and ethnic identities. And anger is a very reasonable response, but our anger often has to take a backseat to white people’s feelings and white women’s anxieties.
So if you feel comfortable doing so, comment here or email me and tell me how rage shows up for you as a Black or Brown feminine person.
I love the conversations we’ve been having on social media about breaking generational cycles of anger and pain, and I want more of us to redirect our valid, necessary anger toward the people who most deserve it. I want more of us to be angry out loud but with intention: avoiding lashing out at people close to us who are just there, for example, and focusing our power in healthy, constructive ways.
I think that Black and Brown horror fiction, film, and art is an incredibly powerful tool for change. For changing our own attitudes toward and fears of anger — something I’ve learned in therapy is that anger can be a way of our minds and bodies communicating with us — and for effecting social, community, and systemic change. In horror, we are free to transform our darkest, most fundamental fears and angers into something that helps us and others. There’s nothing wrong with being angry and in our horrific art, we are free to rage.
Sources:
(1) The Women of Color Network, “Domestic Violence in Communities of Color,” https://jbws.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Domestic-Violence-in-Communities-of-Color-compressed.pdf.
(2) End Rape on Campus, “Survivors of Color — Prevalence Rates,” https://endrapeoncampus.org/centering-margins/survivors-of-color/survivors-of-color-prevalence-rates/.
