Time’s Up for a Change of Political Focus: Katniss Everdeen’s Ecofeminist Leadership in The Hunger Games Film Series

Abstract

This article explores Katniss Everdeen’s ecofeminist political agency in The Hunger Games film series (2012-2015) in the light of global social movements in the late 2010s. As a young destitute woman who defies the oppressive rules of an oligarchic and patriarchal totalitarian order, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) represents the utopian potential of intersectional politics forged across class, gender, racial and geopolitical borders. In opposition to ecocidal and patriarchal conceptions of progress, Katniss’s ecofeminist heroism is illustrative of the emergence of cosmopolitan political imaginaries that advocate sustainable, egalitarian collective futures constructed beyond the methodological frameworks of neoliberal globalisation and material dialectics. Contemporary with young activists like Greta Thunberg, one of the founders of the ecological movement Fridays for Future, Katniss can be taken as a cinematic representative of a new generation of utopian political actors for whom individual well-being is tied to ecosocial welfare and cosmopolitan inclusion.