‘Bitch Flicks’ presents Vintage Viewing – a monthly feature for viewing and discussing the films of cinema’s female pioneers. Where better to start than history’s first film director, Alice Guy?

“I’ve been in the passenger seat for decades. It’s time for me to get behind the wheel.”

Asian women are often fetishized, objectified, eroticized, and/or infantilized in pop culture. “China doll” stereotypes that represent Asian women as compliant, doll-like sexual objects are still prevalent. Western attitudes are influenced by a history of exploitation and colonization of Eastern culture. This deep desire to possess seems to manifest in an eroticization of all things Asian, especially Asian Women.

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Thank goodness for well-placed billboards in Hollywood. I was driving through West Hollywood and saw a spectacular billboard of the Algerian-born actress Sofia Boutella, who plays Jackson’s villainous side-kick, Gazelle. She was leaping in the air, her two bladed prosthetic legs in mid-splits. Now I was curious. A fellow cinefile suggested we go check it out. “But the trailer was so boring,” I whined. “The young hero looks like a snarky dudebro brat with a cockney accent.” I thought about that Sofia Boutella billboard again. She looked so… badass.

Check out all of the posts for our Unlikable Women Theme Week here.

Umbridge works as Undersecretary to Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge. Through her position in the patriarchal wizarding government, Umbridge enables job discrimination, segregation, incarceration and harsh sentencing, and physical violence and genocide against marginalized people. She not only politically supports these efforts, but personally enacts violence against marginalized people and their allies, including children.

Hollywood has produced some of the most memorable bad girls and wicked women on-screen—from silent era’s infamous vamps to film noir’s femme fatales—but bad women do more than just entertain, particularly if we’re talking about the sweepingly emotional and excessively dramatic world of woman’s melodrama.

When I searched my mental rolodex for Black female characters in film or television who are unlikable my mind continued to circle. I was lost.

Is Chandler going somewhere, just minding his own business? Chances are that Janice is just around the corner. As Janice once put it, “You seek me out. Something deep in your soul calls out to me like a foghorn. Jaaa-nice. Jaaa-nice.”

And if you’re anything like me, every reader of this site wants the same thing: to see more portrayals of women on film, televisions, and beyond that reflect their complexities, strengths and weakness alike. We want a greater range of body types, a greater representation of lifestyle choices, a broader world of occupations and skill sets and backstories and destinies.

As people, no matter what gender, it is seemingly second nature to want others to like us and to portray our best selves to them. Just look at the ritual of the date or the job interview. That Cristina defied this action (though we have seen her star-struck when meeting surgeons like Tom Evans and Preston Burke) made her not just a feminist character, but a truly human(ist) one.