About

#BoycottWomanKing is a trending hashtag and social movement surrounding the 2022 movie The Woman King, starring Viola Davis. The film, which follows the exploits of the Agojie (a female warrior unit that was part of the Kingdom of Dahomey), with the particular time period being the 1820s. Calls to boycott the film by many online emerged leading up to its release on September 16th, 2022, primarily by those who rallied against the historical context of the Dahomey, who were one of the key figures and perpetrators of the Atlantic Slave Trade at the time of the film's setting.

Origin

The first known example of the hashtag "#BoycottWomanKing" being used online comes from a September 5th, 2022, reply to a trailer for the movie from The Woman King official Twitter account by user @ibebeing, which received just one retweet.^[5] Over the following weeks, the hashtag and movement against the film continued to grow leading up to the film's release.

As the boycott slowly grew online in early September 2022, the hashtag also came under scrutiny by some, with several people tweeting their support of the movie and pushing back on the boycott campaign, with a large part of the defense coming from the racial undertones of the movie. This sentiment was then echoed by the lead Viola Davis in an interview on September 9th. At the red carpet premiere for the movie, Davis was quoted saying that people who "don't come see it, then, you're sending a message that Black woman can't lead a box office globally, and that you are supporting that narrative," which was uploaded to YouTube by the Etalk^[2] channel (shown below).

Spread

On September 16th, 2022, the YouTuber ToneTalks^[1] tweeted part of a livestream he did about the movie to Twitter talking about the history of perpetuating the slave trade that the Dahomey were part of and asked for a boycott to take place (shown below). The tweet accumulated over 300 likes in three days as word of the growing backlash spread online.

Time to Boycott the Woman King movie. The film is about the Dahomey & Benin that traded slaves into the transatlantic. #BoycottWomanKing -- Click Here: https://t.co/lzsubGvs5W -- This may be the most offensive film to Black Americans in 40-50 years. pic.twitter.com/PwKmLQCTPP

— Antonio Moore (@tonetalks) September 16, 2022

The earlier sentiment from Viola Davis and others online continued to be seen in the tweets supporting the film and pushing back against the boycott, with a notable example tweeted on September 16th, 2022, by Twitter user @ChristaTRomance,^[3] who tweeted that she "didn't trust hashtags that try to get Black women movies to fail" and that Viola would "get her movie dollars," before calling out "bots and ops," earning more than 5,500 likes in one day (shown below).

On the other side, a narrative that began to be pushed in support of the boycott had to do with the writing credits in the movie. Amid this sentiment, many detractors of the film argued that for being a movie about a Black female warrior group, the writers being comprised of two non-Black females (which created its own amount of controversy online with people pointing to that as a reason to not go see the movie) was perceived by some as hero worship of African slave traders being sold to Blacks while being made by Whites. For example, on September 16th, this sentiment was tweeted by Twitter user @EqualityEd,^[4] receiving over 1,800 likes and 440 retweets in three days (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References