'Nubian Queen Rise': The Black Queer Action Heroine, Sisterhood and the Closet in Captain Marvel and The Harder They Fall.

Abstract

Black queer action heroes and heroines remain marginal figures in the Hollywood action genre. This paper considers two such queer/ queer-coded characters, Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) in Captain Marvel (Boden and Fleck, 2019), and Cuffee (Danielle Deadwyler) in The Harder They Fall (Samuel, 2021), and the way that they are either granted, or deprived, of ‘sisterhood’. I explore how their primary relationships (with women) for Rambeau with Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and for Cuffee with Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz), are productively complicated on screen, by what Eve Sedgwick calls the ‘glass closet’, meaning queerness, structured in narrative, as a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t ‘open secret’ (Sedgwick 2008: 164). I argue that these two action heroines are constructed by intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989) mobilisations of cinematic Blackness and queerness, through the sisterly bonds scripted between them and their whiter/lighter-skinned, cis-gendered/femme, friends and lovers. To do so, I make use of three theoretical understandings of ‘sisterhood’: bell hooks’ Black feminist definition of sisterhood as ‘political solidarity’ (1986); Adrienne Rich’s sisterhood as existing on a ‘lesbian continuum’ (1980: 651); and Amber Musser’s ‘brown jouissance’, as ‘womanist embodied relationality’ (Musser, 2018: 13).