Breaking the logic of neoliberal victimhood: Vulnerability, interdependence and memory in Captain Marvel (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2019)

Abstract

The contemporary visibility of women’s accomplishments and popular outcry in the face of injustice and/or violence might suggest that women have achieved their aim of putting long-fought feminist principles in the spotlight and have finally earned equality. However, let us not forget that, in the face of violence, the hegemonic matrix of intelligibility has also historically defined women victims by their ‘injurability’, so, intrinsically vulnerable, thus justifying the need of the system to assist them. It is not surprising, then, that, as a response to vulnerability, empowerment is celebrated. In this context, one would think that a blockbuster, such as Captain Marvel (2019), would reproduce the hegemonic economy of recognition where the subjects of violence are either treated as devoid of agency or offered empowerment through a neoliberal individualizing logic. However, the controversy that the film and its female protagonist raised (for adopting explicit feminist language to challenge patriarchy), along with the outcry of white angry men (symptomatized in male film critics) and the Internet nerd-culture (members of which considered themselves aggrieved by the film), provide a fruitful ground to look into the communicative logic of victimhood. Captain Marvel can help us to explore not only the chiaroscuros and phallacy of the victim versus empowered subject script but also the implicit logic that obscures the divisions that this logic perpetuates. In this respect, we are interested in analyzing how the movie stages:

1. The assignation and construction of female vulnerability in a hegemonic shared cultural narrative that privileges the construction of the empowered subject obscuring the politics of emotions;

2. The possibilities of empowerment before such a narrative and in relation to reclaiming historical and personal memories;

3. The sharing of the condition of vulnerability across gender and geographical boundaries and its relation with the criminalization of other vulnerable others such as aliens.