‘You don’t feel anything?’ The Cold War, family affect and reproductive politics in Black Widow

Abstract

This article explains how Marvel’s Black Widow film constructs both political liberation and personal satisfaction as dependent on a striving towards the heteronormative family. The family is, to use Sara Ahmed’s framework, the ultimate ‘happy object’: a relationship that promises social harmony as well as happiness and fulfilment, and the characters strive towards and ultimately agree upon the family as the good for which they fight. The film simultaneously enacts a Cold War politic by coding the enemy – the Red Room – as a communist Other whose cruelty manifests by perverting the model of the American nuclear family in favour of an extreme patriarchal model that foregoes normative reproductive. Consequently, the establishment of justice resides in defeating this communist Other and reinstituting the nuclear family, a narrative imported nearly wholesale from the Cold War era.