The Burden of Expectation: Where are the women in Steve McQueen's Small Axe films?

Francis, Patricia

Abstract

Prime time Sunday evening viewing across five weeks of Steve McQueen's penology offered the opportunity to give volume to the silenced, to offer an alternative social historical account of the plurality of the Black British experience, to represent and re-present. He did not. the voices of Black British women were silenced.

Nurse, mother, wayward teenage girls, educationalists, and lesbians are present in these films. The Black female trope of carer, nurturer and sexual being is reinforced as the Black male protagonist is centred both as victim and victor. In these five films the voices of Black women are not offered a space from which they are able to speak and to be heard as women unshackled form gendered and racist perceptions and stereotypes.
In this essay I describe a social and political marginalisation that women encounter, where there is an absence of their equal presence within a social, political, and economic sphere, and where still the authority of patriarchy subsequently and successfully continues to undermine them.

• Publication Date: Oct 31, 2023
• Deposit Date: May 1, 2024
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Pages: 1-226
• Series Title: ReFocus
• Book Title: ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen
• Chapter Number: 12
• ISBN: 9781399510936
• Keywords: Race, Film, Documentary, Feminism, Gender
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11971493
• Publisher URL: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-refocus-the-films-of-steve-mcqueen.html