Us, the Uncanny, and the Threat of Black Femininity

Abstract

This chapter focuses on figures of Black women and girls as they circulate through Us, Jordan Peele's 2019 film. The uncanniness that Peele invokes by mobilizing the horror of the doppelgänger enables a closer examination of Black women's fraught and multiple relations to desire, home, and agency. However, the fungibility and illegibility (which Musser here calls noise) that emanate from the Black girl in Peele's mirror offer possibilities for sensing alternate frameworks and ways of being. Theorizing the Black girl anchors the present book in autobiographical reflexivity to make an argument for a critical deployment of the uncanny in order to sense what lies beneath representation and to highlight what attachments—personal and critical—emerge through this sensual expansiveness.