Why is Shuri, the little sister of T’Challa in the Black Panther movie not perceived as a ‘new’ tech geek? That was one of the things discussed at a research seminar at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, where Eva Silfver recently presented data from our geek research project. In this blog Eva reports from the seminar.
The seminar presentation focused on interview excerpts from group interviews with upper secondary students talking about different kinds of geeks and their own contingent geek identities. I told the seminar that the interviews included discussion of clips from four films, and I showed two of these at the seminar: one from The Social Network, and one from Black Panther. The latter clip is in focus for this post. In it, Shuri who is the sister of T’Challa – or Black Panther – is in her advanced AI lab where she demonstrates a new hi-tech suit that she has invented for him to use in the coming battles.
‘Is Shuri a geek?’ was one of the questions that we posed in the group interviews with students. Some did see Shuri as a geek, but others rather associated her with various things that made it difficult for them to call her a geek. For instance, they pointed out that she is too beautiful and too well-dressed to be a geek. Also, they saw Shuri as having too much energy and too much humour to be seen as a geek.
Moreover, instead of positioning Shuri as a tech person some of the students argued that they would rather say she’s smart and intellectual. Some positioned her as a salesperson, only doing her job, or as a researcher, or a scientist, but not a tech geek.
Asking the students why they did not see Shuri as a geek, one of them said that he didn’t know why she isn’t a geek: ‘It’s just a feeling in the body’, he told. Others said they had a hard time associating Shuri with being a tech geek because she is ‘the opposite’, she is ‘breaking norms’; she is ‘a woman and she is black’, and she is also only a figure in a science fiction movie, that is, she isn’t real.
After the presentation at the seminar, we went on discussing Shuri and people made me think about not only how Shuri is an outsider in terms of gender and race, but also how age might intersect with how she was/or is subjected. After all, Shuri is presented as ‘the little sister’. What would have happened if Shuri was an older female? Would it then be more likely for people to see her as a tech person? Another thing that came up was the discourse of ‘the loud black girl’. Did students see Shuri as ‘too much’ to be ‘true’ or realistic?