Aching to Pupate

Femme, feisty, feminist, finding it harder to alliterate than I expected. Twenty-something, vegan, queer, sex- and body-positive, book-loving, Jewish, kinky almost-college graduate. My feminism is intersectional or it isn't worth shit. Directing my life marginally better than a butterfly in a hurricane.

I'm kinda in love with my best friend.

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"The book The Hunger Games describes Katniss as having black hair, olive skin and gray eyes–and her coloring holds significance. As blogger Alexiel argues, “The entire metaphor that runs through the book about oppression, hunger, and excess is meaningless if none of the main characters are people of color.”
The novel is set in a bleak dystopian future with extreme economic and political inequality. The wealthy Capitol’s reliance on its exploited “districts” easily reads as a metaphor for many real-world splits: between the 1% and the 99%, between the Global North and the Global South. In Katniss’s world, just as in our own, these schisms fall along racial lines. Katniss’s home of District 12 is divided by race, with the merchant class having “light hair and blue eyes” and the working class having “olive skin.”
Noting this “multi-racial culture” of the book, director Gary Ross promised, “The film will reflect that.” Yet the casting, which problematically only called for Caucasian actors to audition for the role of Katniss, suffered from whitewashing throughout. Not only are most of the main characters played by white actors, so is most of the entire cast, extras and all. A student of mine says she counted a total of 23 people of color in the entire film."  - Natalie Wilson, “A Whitewashed Hunger Games”