Can You See Her? The Absent Presence of Black Female Subjectivity in Get Out (2017)

Abstract

This article investigates racial-sexual violence, and conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity as they are situated in the cinematic Black political imagination. Through a Black feminist analysis of Get Out (2017), the author argues that the film and its articulation of race in the post-Obama US fails to account for gender and sexuality by tangentially engaging Black women in its dissection of race and racism. The author contends that Black women are the absent presence in the film and utilizes theories of temporal, spatial, and material racial-sexual violence and the coupled subject invisibilities to dissect the (in)visible Black women in film.