La question intersectionnelle à travers trois exemples du cinéma anglophone contemporain. Entre invisibilisation, revendication et discours contradictoires

Abstract

By studying three examples of contemporary Anglo-Saxon cinema aimed at the “general public” and released at the end of the 2010s, this article aims to show different political readings and problems posed by the complexity of the concept of intersectionality in cinema. The article starts from the phenomenon of feminism-washing, which is recurrent in the Hollywood industry and waters down feminist issues. First, the concept of intersectionality would thus serve to go beyond the question of gender to decrypt cinematographic representations in a more complete way, by analyzing the gender-class-race triptych in fiction. In a second step, beyond intersectionality as an analytical tool, the concept can be solicited on the side of the production or on the side of the audience in the reception, operating different discourses on a film: Antebellum bases its script and promotion on an intersectional discourse, striving to examine the intersection of different discriminations through the lens of the Black Horror genre, while Suffragettes makes the choice to invisibilize the parameter of race oppression in favor of class. In the case of Joker, the ambivalence of the film's discourse leads to a “double speak” (for the press and the public), where the hero is interpreted as a representative of class struggle sharing the oppression of black women, while also being read as an incel, a symbolic figure of misogyny and the white American far right. Between recuperation, vindication, invisibilization and contradictory discourses, the three films studied exemplify different discourses on intersectionality (or that have been attributed to them), to the point of including certain limits.

Keywords

• reception
• intersectionality
• gender study
• invisibilization
• double speak