Zendaya is Not Your Mama’s Mary Jane

The Black leading ladies of superhero media haven’t always gotten the best deals. But like much of the comic book–inspired world, one change could shape the mythos for decades to come.

This is Superhero Girlfriends Anonymous, a column by Ravynn K. Stringfield about comic books’ greatest weapon: the superhero girlfriend.

I was freshly graduated from college and maybe a week out from walking into the first class of my PhD program when I read that Zendaya—the young Black actress that got her start on the Disney Channel and was primed to star in the HBO drama Euphoria—would be cast as Mary Jane “MJ” Watson in Marvel’s new Spider-Man film. I immediately had strong, and mixed, feelings about the casting.

Mary Jane was never a top-five character for me, which in retrospect could mostly be attributed to my questionable commitment to DC comics. However, Marvel was promising to combine two of my favorite things in Spider-Man: Homecoming: superhero girlfriends and Black girls. Even though she wasn’t my favorite, the idea of a Black girl being so loved she would always be the hero’s choice when it came down to it mixed with the superhero girlfriend’s characteristic independence and strength convinced me to reconsider. But I couldn’t allow myself to get my hopes up; I didn’t trust Marvel to treat this casting spin with care.

The mid-2010s was an era of growing pains for comics media across the board. It seemed as though massive media companies were attempting to consistently diversify their film and TV slates, but the shift was most present to me in the Black women suddenly peppering the landscape of DC’s and Marvel’s on-screen narratives—Candice Patton as Iris West-Allen in The Flash and Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok, for example. At best, it seemed like virtue signaling, at worst, a blatant form of tokenization—a physical and symbolic gesture that signaled they could keep up with the times.

Colorism running rampant in Hollywood made me raise an eyebrow too. More often than not, casting decisions prioritize a certain type of Black girl: multiracial or light skinned, and thin with curls closer to waves than coils. The absence of big, dark-skinned, queer, and disabled Black girls in these narratives reminds us that Hollywood would rather we remain unseen. Representation alone was insufficient for me. And the prospect of a Black Mary Jane Watson, particularly this Mary Jane Watson, was not enough to allay my worries.

Five years and two MCU Spider-Man movies later, Zendaya’s MJ remains a source of niggling curiosity. When Spider-Man: Homecoming premiered in 2017, viewers were introduced not to Mary Jane Watson, but to Michelle Jones. Unlike the MJs that had come before her, Zendaya’s MJ was not the main love interest of the movie. In fact, she was barely a supporting character and a long shot from the petite, spunky, and redheaded Mary Janes I was used to. Zendaya’s MJ was quirky—a suspicious, bookish loner in Peter’s class, who a viewer might be poised to look past and around, if not for her iconic initials.

MJ was a title to hold . . . rather than a singular person to be.

As Zendaya herself has said, the choice to remake MJ as Michelle Jones was an opportunity for Michelle to become her own character. This was a different move than simply casting a Black actress in a role traditionally reserved for white women—it was a chance to expand the mythos through remixing and renaming. In the same ways heroes are allowed to reinvent themselves, pass on their mantles, and build out their legacies beyond themselves, this renaming offered an iconic superhero girlfriend a similar opportunity as her counterpart. MJ became like the Spider-Man moniker itself; MJ was a title to hold, an identifying persona into which anyone could step, rather than a singular person to be.

Afro-Latino Spider-Man Miles Morales said it best: “Anyone can wear the mask.”

*

I interrogated the concept of naming long before I knew how to intellectualize it. My name didn’t always suit me, but I wasn’t sure what did. Growing up, I tried on nicknames as if they were clothes in a department store fitting room, tossing aside the ones whose letters did not flow the way I wanted when I wrote them down and wrinkling my nose at the ill-fitting nickname my mother’s family called me. Stage names and pseudonyms delighted me, and I spent as much time scrambling the letters of my name in pursuit of something unique as I did practicing piano. The idea that a legacy, a mythos, much bigger than myself could be conveyed in a single name had a chokehold on me—and I resolved to find that name for myself.

My mild obsession flared up again around the start of graduate school, when publications became a new and exciting necessity of my chosen career path. Not only would I have the opportunity to publish my writing and enter into lively conversations with other scholars by citing and engaging their theories and research, but I also discovered that I had options for the name under which I would publish. After a lifetime of rotely printing and typing my first and last name as it appeared on my birth certificate in the upper right-hand corner of my assignments, the request to give my name as I “would like it to appear in print” for my first academic piece shocked me. I was not asked to give my legal name; I had been asked for my preference, the name that would be attributed to my scholarship.

When presented with a choice, I was pleasantly surprised that I now felt like the name I had been given. My family name was sacred; as my paternal grandparents’ only grandchild, I was the last of my name. Both had passed on only a couple of years prior, but I could carry them with me. The one name could spark the synapses of folks within a thirty-mile radius of Wakefield, Virginia, and within an instant of recognition, I could be placed within a web of relationships. I belonged to something bigger than myself; I relished it being both mine and ours.

I began to wear the family name that I had considered shortening, adapting, or losing altogether like a priceless heirloom. This was how I would tell the world to which legends I belonged.

A name, I discovered, is not just something that you are; it is something you can grow into as you make meaning of it for yourself.

*

The next Spider-Man movie, Far from Home, ups the ante on Michelle Jones’s potential. After the love interest of Homecoming, Liz, moves away, Zendaya’s MJ moves into the spotlight. While Peter and his classmates are on a European class trip, he tries to balance battling Mysterio, who causes trouble at every step of the journey, with spending quality time with MJ. Throughout the film—violent fight scenes, epic saves, and all—Peter tries desperately to keep a glass necklace in the shape of a black dahlia intact to give her as a gift.

Far from Home is, in essence, a young adult superhero romantic comedy. The film prioritizes Peter’s coming-of-age and the tension between his settling into his identity as a hero and his growing into his own as a teenager. But it also centers MJ’s own self-making as distinct from and in the tradition of Mary Jane Watson in a way that we don’t always get in favor of Peter’s narratives. It allows her to be in process—discovering herself and learning to fall in love. It’s messy, but she deserves to have a coming-of-age in which mistakes are made and forgiven, experiments reign, and the path forward isn’t crystal clear.

Despite her observant nature and deductive skills, MJ hasn’t imagined what would happen if she is correct in her suspicion that Peter is moonlighting as Spider-Man. When she finally confronts Peter, she admits she wasn’t 100 percent sure she was right, and, moments later, MJ stumbles over herself to hide the fact that her suspicions about Peter’s superhero identity weren’t the only reason she had been observing him. There is space both for MJ to doubt herself and for logic and reason as well.

My favorite superhero girlfriends have an admirable tendency to charge headfirst into danger with little regard for potential repercussions, led by a fiery passion for the truth. This MJ is driven by cool logic and evidence, but with persuasion, she can be taught to have faith. By the film’s end, she learns to trust her gut, and her gut tells her that Peter can be trusted.

Far from Home highlights tensions younger heroes face that older superheroes may have already figured out. There is less suspense when readers and viewers know the superhero girlfriend is a trusted partner. This MJ suspects Peter might be Spider-Man, but she has no proof; Peter wants to protect MJ by keeping his superhero persona a secret, all while the two navigate the true agony of a high school crush you don’t know is reciprocated. The stakes are high; MJ has no idea what kind of whirlwind she could be voluntarily entering.

But the viewer knows the outcome. Michelle Jones—MJ—has stepped into the role once held by Mary Jane Watson. We know what the relationship is between Spider-Man and MJ; we know it when we see Peter web-slinging with MJ in tow after the credits of Far from Home. But because we don’t yet know Michelle Jones, we don’t yet know how we’ll get there, and I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to see how she would refresh the journey and update the story, allowing for twists and turns that only Michelle Jones could make. With her dry humor, serious presence, and shrewd eye, MJ is much less boisterous than other iterations of the iconic Superhero Girlfriend. But it makes her all the more unique as a part of the mythos—one and part of the many.

This was how I would tell the world to which legends I belonged.

While this is rich with potential, there are evident pitfalls. In some ways, reimagining Mary Jane Watson as Michelle Jones is not an intentional, generative, mythos-building decision, but rather a protective and strategic one to prevent fans from rebelling over a non-white Mary Jane Watson. It enables Marvel as a company to stay in their white fans’ good graces while also staying ahead of the curve.

The expectation that a singular Black MJ could be all things to all people is fruitless, but I do hold out hope that we can lean into the potential for a remixed MJ—not a Black Mary Jane Watson, but a skeptical and awkward Black girl who could wear the mask and expand the myth, helping us reimagine how we tell a timeless story.

The Black leading ladies of superhero media haven’t always gotten the best deals. But like much of the comic book–inspired world, one change could shape the mythos for decades to come.

*

Making a name for myself was as much about my individuality as it was about my being able to locate myself in relationship to others. The more I wrote and worked and researched in the early years of grad school, the less I wondered about how I could stand out, and instead, I thought more about what I could add. I found conversations about Black girls in fantasy I wanted to enter into and contribute to and a lively and kind group of Black scholars studying digital culture to whose work I wanted to contribute.

I returned often to Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison and June Jordan, all of whom taught me about what it meant to name oneself, to be accountable to people and to not question the strength of your name. I scribbled “I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name/My name is my own my own my own” in the margins of my journals in class and looked to my wrists for tattooed reminders that I was deliberate and unafraid.

I was Ravynn because I belonged to people who made it so, and because I wanted to be—one guided by and a part of many.