Overview
White feminism: a form of feminism that focuses primarily on the struggles of white women while ignoring the struggles of women of colour and/or women who do not have the same privileges as straight, able-bodied white women. Defining empowerment in terms of western ideals, especially those which empower white women, as opposed to minority women all over the world. The class that Lena Dunham teaches in her spare time.
Not white feminism: feminism practiced by a person who is Caucasian.
Ah, white feminism, the plague of minority women everywhere.
Susan B. Anthony was a pioneer in women’s suffrage, and a leading abolitionist. She was also a white feminist.
White feminism has been the phrase on everyone’s tongue for a couple of years, manifesting in discussions of everything from Emma Watson to pink pussy hats. However, while the rise of social media has made it appear more prominent, it’s not a new concept. White feminism has been a thing since Susan B. Anthony refused to campaign for Black, Asian, and Native American women to get the vote alongside white women. But it isn’t limited to race. White feminism is also about sexuality, class, physical and mental disabilities, religion, and wealth. White feminism has been working against minority women for centuries. And it is killing the Arrowverse.
The Arrowverse’s problems with writing women have been well-documented, but once you study the minority women, it becomes all the more troubling. Even though it prides itself on its diversity, the Arrowverse, enjoyable as it is, is suffering from white feminism, which can be broken down into three categories:
- Type I – Who Run the World? Not All the Girls – minority women aren’t cast, are ignored when they are, or they’re whitewashed/changed.
- Type II – R.E.S.P.E.C.T., Find Out How to Write For Me – minority women and stories that involve them are grossly disrespected.
- Type III – White Knights For White Girls – white women are coddled while women of colour are not.
This article will go through Supergirl, Arrow, and The Flash, breaking down how their writing choices
Each of the shows discussed have their own problems with white feminism.
fail minority women, before talking about why and how the Arrowverse should seek treatment for this problem.
N.B – while Legends of Tomorrow has problems of their own, the treatment of their minority women is not in the same category as the other three. And frankly, it was hard enough getting these three in with a word count that wouldn’t make my editor want to cry.
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You know I adore this.
Not like I adore you <3
<3 I'd say we'll have to fight it out later over whose adoration is greater, but why do that?
But seriously I want to live in your conclusion, it's so good. So good. Like, it's not just what it states, but how. You tie it all up so well, and make it look so easy, when it's really, really not.
Also THANK YOU for gifting us all with all your hard work. I've learned so much from you, and keep trying to cite things I've learned to people irl who have no clue what the Arrowverse is and then get very confused. My friend wants to put together this list of resources for parenting intersectional feminist, anti-racist kids, and wants us all to add to it the articles/books/everything we've read that help us, and I am very tempted to put your articles on the list. Maybe some of the other parents would be familiar with dctv and get the references, and honestly many of your sections that go into the background info don't require dctv familiarity at all, they're just that quality.
And here you see Angela, in her natural habitat of “fabulous” and reiterating once more that I do not deserve her.
Why is my immediate instinct whenever someone compliments me like this to be like, NO YOU’RE THE FABULOUS ONE, LET’S FIGHT ABOUT IT.
I’m short, it must be some kind of Napoleonic complex.
Great article!
Thank you!
As I only watch The Flash out of the Arrowverse shows I connect with your portion about it the most. I wholeheartedly concur with the frustration of Caitlin continuously being shielded from blame and responsibility ‘for some reason’ when even the show’s protagonist gets called out and made to look like an asshole since season 1. Its becoming so problematic that my sister and I just roll our eyes and say ‘of course’ whenever the narrative excuses her selfish behavior.
I have to say that I partially agree that Caitlin being babied and treated like a special snowflake is mostly due to the writers following the status quo of putting white women on a pedestal. I doubt they even notice what they’re doing it.
However season 4 felt different somehow. It felt like they were deliberately trying to use the narrative to assuage Caitlin’s fans and say ‘Yeah, she didn’t get Barry but she’s still special too!’ As you mentioned in the mid-season finale she got so many peptalks and ego boosts.Which is rare even for her character. Where exactly was this energy in previous seasons where I even felt they sorta bypassed her feelings to go to a new story. She really could’ve used one of those in season 2 after ‘Jay Garrick’s death’ and the narrative didn’t try to make it seem like she was missed while kidnapped by Zoom. They just replaced her with Jessie. My point is there did seem to be points where the narrative was patting Caitlin’s fans on the head with a ‘There, there Snowbarry won’t ever be a thing but hey we still kinda care about your fave’ by having Amulet be her personal cheerleader throughout the season. I do think having Iris mammy her is just them falling back on an old trope though. So it’s probably a bit of both.
Anyway, bravo on another excellent article!
I think if you binged the show, and then took a shot for every time Caitlin did something that would have gotten another character reamed but she gets a hug, you’d get alcohol poisoning. It’s to the point where I almost don’t care what she does because it’s not like it’s going to have any major effect on the show.
I don’t think they notice they’re doing it either, which is one of the things that makes it so annoying.
Caitlin in season 4 has been a study in how to completely fail at writing a character but still be determined to keep her around. It’s almost like they were trying to convince the audience that she was special by continually have characters state it, to hide the fact that her character doesn’t go beyond “woman who doctors” and Killer Frost silliness, which they didn’t nail down until like two episodes until the end. Like, look, everyone loves Caitlin! They all need her! She’s not redundant at all! It’s very frustrating.
Thank you for reading!
Super late but totally agree with this! The Flash in general has never been very kind to its ladies, especially in earlier season when Caitlin was not written that well, despite what her fans want to claim. And as you said, in season two they just disappeared her from the plot for a few episodes and the show didn’t miss a beat. It really showed how unnecessary she was.
And yet, season four happens and every other episode is the Coddle Caitlin Hour. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to the Ladies With Gumption podcast, but they talk about this exact phenomenon. How white characters in supporting roles are essentially compensated narratively for not being the lead if the lead is a character of color. They specifically called out an episode in season four where every other character not named Barry was reassuring Caitlin that she was as important as Killer Frost for some reason, while Iris was being forced to make a tough decision between saving Barry’s life vs. Caitlin’s life and no one supported her or encouraged her, but instead told her to essentially suck it up and do her job. In the end only Barry is the one to tell Iris she made the right choice and he’s proud of her. So basically because Iris gets Barry and his love and support, every other character has to swarm in to support Caitlin to compensate for it.
Obviously this is not a courtesy supporting characters of color ever get, because the assumption is that something is being taken away from Caitlin, and white women in general, that needs to be given back somehow, whereas supporting characters of color are just in their rightful place in the background. And it’s become so obvious because it doesn’t seem like the writers particularly like Caitlin or her story, considering how nonsensical it is and how many times they’ve rewritten and retconned it. But they’re still determined for some reason to show that she is important, even if she’s not that important to Barry, and maybe especially because she isn’t. The fact that that coincides with Barry and Iris becoming canon is not a coincidence.
It gets worse by Seasons 5-7 where Killer Frost undergoes a pointless story of self-discovery, gets sick for no reason and becomes an actual person who doesn’t get any screentime anymore, and neither does Caitlin.
i love how in depth and accurate this article is. it shows a pattern that can’t be ignored. i will mention one other thing tho. in the flash, linda park, a korean woman, played by malese jow, a chinese and cherokee woman, was iris’s coworker and friend… until she was in danger so they shipped her off never to be seen again. they told her they would let her know when it was safe. they either realized her dangerous doppleganger dead didn’t make it safe enough for an asian woman on their show or they just didn’t find her important. i won’t mention age because idk the canon arrowverse ages, but in the comics she was with wally. they missed an opportunity to show a healthy interracial relationship between two poc to have wally heartbroken over some white girl. nuff said.
Linda Park will be one of the greatest injustices this show has ever committed, especially when random characters like Julian can show up to chase after Caitlin for no reason and characters like Ralph can ruin a whole season but we can’t have Linda back.
Hi Ivy,
Do you have an opinion on the latest retcon of the Killer Frost story in S5? More than having an origin story that makes sense, I was hoping for a real redemption arc, starting with acknowledgment of wrongdoing and onscreen apologies to the people Cait and KF hurt.
However, the writers seem to have zero interest in redeeming these two awful people. We don’t know why KF is evil or Cait did evil things, too, but we’re just supposed to believe all the evil is over and never mention it again. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Even E2 Laurel recently apologized to Dinah for murdering Dinah’s boyfriend on “Arrow”. That’s the bare minimum for a redemption to occur, but for “some reason” the WOC on “The Flash” don’t deserve an apology (nor do the men either).
LISTEN GIRL. LISTEN.
I still want the 42 minutes of my life I wasted on that nonsense last week. It’s like they heard us complain that Killer Frost makes sense and they went “hold my beer”.
I hate it, is my opinion. It doesn’t even make logical sense. Like, they have broken up with the concept of making sense, and the Killer Frost storyline is the result. It’s bizarre, because as much time as they spend on Caitlin, they clearly hate her character. Whenever a superhero show has been finished for a while all the comic book sites come out with these lists that are like “10 characters who were actually the worst”, and Caitlin is that character.
Whenever Caitlin comes onscreen to be the star I just stop paying attention. Her actions have no bearing on anything because everyone forgives her, her plot isn’t important to the main plot, the acting isn’t good, and this is all she has going for her. It’s kind of incredible how apathetic I am, and I wouldn’t care except I still have to watch week after week.
Caitlin is allergic to accountability. Y’all should know that by now.
The shows are terrible, so who cares about their crappy agenda?
Also:
1) The Al-Ghuls are not Middle Eastern or Brown in the comics; they are drawn as Caucasian for some reason
2) The actor for Maggie and her father are both of Spaniard descent, just like many people from Latin America so it makes no difference that they were not actually from Latin America; people seem to think Latino is a race, but white people can be latino too
3) Imra isn’t Southeast Asian in the comics
This entire comment is so stupid, my God.
This article is wonderful! Thank you so much for putting so succinctly what’s wrong with CW’s DC. Also, The Flash also does whitewashing: Singh is played by a white actor, and Savitar, a Vedic Hindu god is stripped of his cultural context and appropriated by a white man.
Thank you! Singh isn’t played by a white actor, though, and Savitar is a man, so he wasn’t really relevant here. Additionally, he was named after the Hindu god of motion, which means that the whitewashing is accurate to the comics. Ironically.
Singh wasn’t played by a Punjabi actor though. Hollywood perpetuates the idea that all brown people are the same. Guess what? They’re not.
They overload Arrow with feminism
Hello Ivy,
I honestly regret not discovering your articles before, it really changed my perspective on things like this and answered so many questions. Now, excuse my long rant because I really need to get this out of my head.
To be honest, I gave up watching a lot of TV because of this. It was increasingly frustrating to see whitewashed characters, minority characters as villains or side characters that get dumped a while after their debut etc. There were way to many unfortunate implications that it felt not unfortunate, almost intentionally unintentional. (Or unintentionally intentional?)
I’m not a big fan of Iris but yeah, you’re right. It’s ridiculous how much stuff she’s gone through and not a lot of people apart from Barry and Joe ask about her and how she’s doing. There was also this lingering question in the back of my head why Iris/Joe was never really involved in crossovers. For Joe, the writers had an excuse with him at his job (sort of but they really could’ve used him instead of having someone sub in with his skills out of nowhere) but it never really made sense why Barry wouldn’t want to be with Iris if there was so much at stake. Crisis on Earth X was the first crossover where Iris had any real relevance to the plot. 4 years into the show and finally, they let the female lead of the show be plot-relevant in a crossover. Wow.
The problem with Caitlin has been prevalent since the first season and I’m surprised they still haven’t managed to fix it. Just a simple, sincere apology would fix a lot of stuff. Instead, they keep trying to explore her backstory, add new plot details that contradict etc, which doesn’t help her character at all, even making it worse.
In Arrow, I feel like Diggle doesn’t really have a lot of meaningful character development relative to other characters even though he’s with the show since the beginning/only voices his opinions even if he doesn’t agree if it’s relevant to the plot. I also think he’s a bit… mistreated by the writers(for the lack of a better word), in season 6. I hated the drug storyline and I think it falls into a negative stereotype of black people. There was also the issue of the “civil war” thing where OG Team Arrow was pit against the new recruits. Which basically amounted to white people plus Diggle against POC. While (unintentionally intentionally) portraying the new recruits as the antagonists. I had a huge issue with that, not just because of the crappy storyline. Season 7 was the first season where the writers let a woman have a meaningful relationship with another woman, when a new female showrunner replaced the old ones. One season before its cancellation. Yay. It was also weird how they chose Superman and Lois over a trio of women as the lead of a show, taking into consideration the amount of attention the backdoor pilot has gotten.
Supergirl has always praised themselves for the diversity of the cast but it’s always white women/whitewashed characters in the main cast, with rare POCs. Especially with what you mentioned in your article. They sort-of corrected this in season 5 where they cast actual POC as Andrea Rojas and William Dey and I do like Andrea Rojas but WILLIAM DEY WAS JUST THE WORST. (Bear with me) Seriously. I don’t want to continue on this point (I could write a thousand words on this) but his portrayal and plot twist just didn’t really click. And the implications of a POC chasing a white woman and more stuff like that… And to think that he took up screen time from a transgender superhero working her dream job… dang.
I don’t watch Legends of Tomorrow/Batwoman so no comment on there.
Crisis on Infinite Earths… I hated that crossover (seriously, I did). I’m just going to get to the racial issue I have about it here. Out of all the Paragons + Spectre, only TWO of the characters are POCs. No WOCs out of them. Yay. It’s like the writers telling us only white people plus one or two token minorities can be the saviours of the world, the world-class heroes etc. It’s just… asinine. (ref intended if you get it, congrats) (Also, another related issue I have is that basically everyone is from the US but whatever) I mean, yeah, they did include Black Lightning, Iris (thank goodness), Nia, Dinah etc. but they’re either relegated to side characters or small roles or even just cameos.
I’ve given up trying to watch Arrowverse shows right now and now that Supergirl is ending to make way for Superman and Lois, I’ve given up even trying to catch up on the plot outside of watching it.
In conclusion, this is a crappy rant put together by a frustrated (former) fan because she’s hungry.