The topic of black femininity and women in science fiction films has become pertinent again with the recent Hunger Games (2012) controversy. Some fans of the young adult book series objected to having ‘some black girl’ cast as 12-year-old character Rue (Amandla Stenberg), despite the fact that the character is explicitly described as a person of color (‘dark brown skin and eyes’) in the book (Collins 2008, 45). According to these fans the black Rue was less ‘innocent’ than the ‘blond girl you had pictured’ and thus her death in the narrative was ‘less sad’ (qtd. in Stewart 2012). Ironically, the emplotment of racially hybrid characters into the series's class-stratified dystopia clearly allegorizes the United States's history of institutionalized racial oppression. The prevalence of readers's confusion about Rue's ethno-racial background shows how audiences actively or selectively read media texts in light of their own cultural knowledge and positionalities within a network of class, race, gender, and sexuality social relations.

The Hunger Games fan backlash also exemplifies the endurance of negative assumptions about black characters, and/or the character of blacks. If it strains suspension of disbelief even in a speculative genre such as science-fiction to imagine a black child as ‘innocent’ or that her murder could inspire a white protagonist to action, then that is a powerful statement about how black femininity and black women are circumscribed in the ‘Western’ cultural imaginary. Historically, black female characters are precluded from expressing certain qualities aligned with idealized white femininity, particularly spiritual purity, delicacy, and guilelessness (Mitchell 2011, 126). Since the discursive production of black femininity as oppositional and/or non-normative is ‘at the nexus of America's sex and race mythology’ (White 2007, 125) depictions of gendered racial stereotypes, because of their pervasiveness and (apparent) transhistorical fixity, may actually reinforce the perception of a film's cultural verisimilitude. Further, the persistence of a limited range of roles for black women in films such as Bringing Down the House (2003), Precious (2009), and The Help (2011) perpetuates the intertextual pattern of representation historically associating ‘metaphysical stasis’ with blackness (Snead 1994, 1).

Yet, what of the black female characters who do perform as narrative protagonists, agents of change, and s/heroes?