“I Couldn’t Get Any Anger out of Her”

In a recent interview, filmmaker Fronza Woods reflected on early audience reactions to her 1983 short Fannie’s Film, a portrait of a Black cleaning woman, recalling that this audience “didn’t want to see a Black cleaning woman . . . who was happy with her life.” This essay takes Fannie’s Film’s proposition of a “Black cleaning woman who was happy with her life” as a point of departure to argue that Woods’s film offers a critical commentary on the expectations that shape the appearance of the Black reproductive worker in counterhegemonic cinema. Reading Fannie’s Film in relation to a broader archive of largely Black feminist cinema from the 1970s and 1980s that center on the (Black) reproductive worker’s affect and interiority, the article shows how Fannie’s Film interrogates the misalignment between its protagonist’s “happiness” and prominent approaches to apprehending the Black reproductive worker as a political subject.