COMMENTARY: Why ‘The Woman King’ Is Revolutionary

By Dr. Stephane Dunn and Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftal, Chicago Defender

Back in a 1974 review of the Bond-like Cleopatra Jones movie starring Tamara Dobson,
Feminist and former Ms. Magazine editor Margaret Sloan spoke volumes about Black female
spectatorial desire. Damn, that felt good she wrote. After viewing The Woman King, we know
exactly what she meant.
Cleopatra, a beautiful, kick-ass Black woman empowered by the U.S. government but grounded
in her commitment to the Black community, was a Black Power era fantasy character. Over 40
years later, Marvel’s Afrofuturist Black Panther teased us with the cinematic possibilities of
Wakanda’s supporting characters, a squad of royal Black women soldiers. The Woman King
brings such women to the center and importantly marks both the evolution and realization of this
on-screen representation of Black women and the cinematic evolution of its director, Gina
Prince-Bythewood.
Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood with screenwriter Dana Stevens, The Woman King is
inspired by the real-life Dahomey female warriors, the Agojie, who were formed in the 1700s
and became legendary fighters. Viola Davis, who plays the fictional character General Nanisca
– arguably a composite nod to various African warriors like Nzinga and Yaa Asantewaa, and an
emerging young Agojie, Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), lead an extraordinary cast including, Lashana
Lynch as the enthralling Izogie and John Boyega as young King Ghezo.
The Woman King is not a biography or intended to be a neat history lesson on African women
warriors and as such takes full creative license to reimagine the Agojie, threading together the
historical realities of slavery, racial, gender, and class violence to fashion a world in which
women have not only a female-centered, controlled safe space to live but literal physical and
socio-political choice, voice, and visibility within the patriarchal structure of their immediate
community and beyond.
Women characters becoming sword slashing or shotgun-toting badasses (i.e., Kill Bill and Foxy
Brown) or rebels against their prescribed roles (i.e. Thelma & Louise) have often still registered
as objects of the traditional gaze, rendered more exotic or erotic because they take on expected
tropes of masculine toughness or step out of their domestic roles and temporarily seize the day.
Women wielding weapons as well as or better than men can too easily be deemed as radical
representations of women with little attention to context or the problematic association of violent
toughness with heroic maleness on screen.
The Woman King has a copious amount of violence and blood; brutal warring between different
African nations and between the Africans and Europeans involved in turbulent at turns
reciprocal slave trafficking is one of the unfortunate realistic historical threads exploited in the
film’s unapologetic anti-Atlantic slave trade and African involvement sentiment.
However, the spectacle of physical violence is in service to the dominant and most important
critical representation in the film – women whose reaffirming collective sisterhood is a
formidable force against patriarchal oppression and to an extent racial and class oppression.
The women the Agojie rescue or take captive after the battle are given the power to choose a
rare life and identity for themselves whereas men do not generally dictate their daily movements
or can willfully them to be subservient wives, daughters, or servants that they can rape and beat
at will.

To become Agojie is to fight for their male king and Dahomey, but as they remind each other,
they fight for themselves and each other in service to their own double-edged quest for freedom
and power as women and Dahomey people. This is not pretty work, women soldiering in battle
with and against men. This is why the rare movie depiction of Black women in the community
within the Agojie compound registers so magnificently.
Here neither men’s gaze nor presence is allowed. Here women dance, train, and braid each
other’s hair, tend tenderly to one another’s wounds, strategize, debate respectfully, learn to
transcend ethnic differences, and grow their sense of individual and collective empowerment.
The French slavers call them “Amazons” but this dismissive historical tag holds no weight in The
Woman King. The women in the film hold the controlling narrative point of view and declare
themselves, “Agojie” and “sisters” and there is the possibility of a ‘Woman King’.
Gina Price-Bythewood’s Black romantic classic, Love and Basketball (2000) marked the debut
of its promising director. Two Black leads (portrayed by Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps) come to
bond over their passion for playing basketball and later fall in love. We loved Prince-
Bythewood’s exploration of a Black woman’s uneasy navigation of her professional ambition and
the social gender expectations as her traditional mother’s daughter and boyfriend’s girl. And yet,
it settled uneasily. Her passion and ambition for basketball rises, falls and rises again with the
twists and turns of her romantic relationship until she’s happily settled in domestic life and in the
WNBA.
Later, in Price-Bythewood’s under-rated Beyond the Lights (2014), the exploration of women’s
difficulties choosing and defining their paths and self-identity continues with a young pop singer
(Gugu Mbatha-raw) struggling to navigate the expectations of her manager mother and pop
stardom; a romance with a regular good guy (Nate Parker) helps her to ultimately step into the
music and self-representation she truly desires.
In real life, the Agojie were devastated by Dahomey’s ongoing conflicts – wars with other African
nations and participation in and against the slave trade with the Europeans – becoming an
exhibition for the Western gaze and historical record.
But The Woman King, thank you very much, is a movie. Gina Prince-Bythewood directs her
fullest, most satisfying representation of Black women’s quest for autonomy and actualization.
The Woman King boldly unsettles the traditional spectacle of patriarchy and not because the
women fight with such dazzling physical might and skill with their bodies or rope and machete in
hand, but because the most radical thing is that the love, intimacy, and sisterhood between
women, the collective power of this, sits boldly at the center of The Woman King. In American
popular film, this is revolutionary.