Awkward Black girls and post-feminist possibilities: Representing millennial Black women on television in Chewing Gum and Insecure

Abstract

Focusing on television depictions of ‘millennial’ Black women, this article explores how such on-screen identities are crafted through entwined issues concerning race, gender, sexuality and feminism. Theorising post-feminism in this contemporary context necessitates discussion of post-feminism’s (dis)connection to and from Black feminism and the politics of intersectionality. Thus, this article examines how Black feminist and post-feminist media sentiments push against each other in ways that may indicate a form of Black post-feminist television. It considers how ‘millennial’ Black women are depicted in Chewing Gum (2015–2017) and Insecure (2016–present) and analyses how feminist media discourse is implicated in these representations.

Keywords

Black women digital feminism gender intersectionality race

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Banet-Weiser

(2018) Postfeminism and popular feminism. Feminist Media Histories 4(2): 152–156.

Bobo

(1995) Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bobo

(ed) (2001) Black Feminist Cultural Criticism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Boylorn

(2008) As seen on TV: an autoethnographic reflection on race and reality television. Critical Studies in Media Communication 25(4): 413–433.

Bratby-Rudd

(2017) Intersectional feminism in prime time. Ms. Magazine, 26 September. Available at: www.msmagazine.com/blog/2017/09/26/intersectional-feminism-prime-time (accessed 30 November 2017).

Butler

(2013) For white girls only?: Postfeminism and the politics of inclusion. Feminist Foundations 25(1): 35–58.

Chewing Gum (2015–2017) E4. Retort/FreemantleMedia.

Christian

(2018a) Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television. New York: New York University Press.

Christian

(2018b) Repealing net neutrality will kill the TV revolution – opinion. IndieWire, 28 February. Available at: www.indiewire.com/2018/02/net-neutrality-independent-tv-issa-rae-broad-city-high-maintenance-1201933831/ (accessed 3 March 2018).

10.

Collins

(2016) Black feminist thought as oppositional knowledge. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5(3): 133–44.

11.

Combahee River Collective (1986) The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties. Albany: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

12.

Cooper

(2018) Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower. New York: St Martin’s Press.

13.

Crenshaw

(2017) On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New York: The New Press.

14.

Dash

(2016) Nina, reverse colourism & lazy casting. Danielle Dash, 2 March. Available at: www.danielledash.com/a-quick-read/2016/3/2/nina-reverse-colourism-lazy-casting (accessed 20 December 2017).

15.

Davis

(1983) Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books.

16.

duCille

(2018) Technicolored: Reflections on Race in the Time of TV. Durham: Duke University Press.

17.

Emejulu

Sobande

(eds) (2019) To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe. London: Pluto Press.

18.

Freydberg

(1995) Sapphires, spitfires, sluts, and superbitches: Aframericans and Latinas in contemporary American film. In: Vaz

(ed) Black Women in America. Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 222–43.

19.

Gabriel

(2016) Blogging while black, British and female: a critical study on discursive activism. Information, Communication & Society 19(11): 1622–35.

20.

Gill

(2007) Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.

21.

Gill

(2016) Post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times. Feminist Media Studies 16(4): 610–30.

22.

Gill

(2017) The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: a postfeminist sensibility 10 years on. European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6): 606–26.

23.

Girls (2012–2017) HBO. Apatow Productions.

24.

Gone with the Wind (1939). Dir. Victor Fleming. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

25.

Hall

(1993) Encoding/decoding. In: During

(ed) The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 507–17.

26.

Hallman

(2015) Are we seeing black feminism on primetime TV? Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder Online, 26 March. Available at: www.spokesman-recorder.com/2015/03/26/seeing-Black-feminism-prime-time-tv (accessed 5 January 2018).

27.

Hamad

(2018) The one with the feminist critique: revisiting millennial postfeminism with Friends. Television & New Media 19(8): 692–707.

28.

Henderson

(2018) Issa Rae claps back at the biphobic criticism of her upcoming series. Pride, 26 June. Available at: www.pride.com/tv/2018/6/26/issa-rae-claps-back-biphobic-criticism-her-upcoming-series (accessed 5 January 2019)

29.

Insecure (2016–present) HBO. HBO Enterprises.

30.

Kai

(2016) Is Insecure preying on Black women’s insecurities. The Root, 28 September. Available at: www.theroot.com/is-insecure-preying-on-Black-women-s-insecurities-1790856984 (accessed 7 December 2017).

31.

McRobbie

(2009) The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: SAGE.

32.

Mohdin

(2017) The rise of the awkward Black girl. Quartz, 27 August. Available at: https://qz.com/1062383/issa-rae-and-michaela-coel-with-insecure-and-chewing-gum-awkward-Black-girls-are-finally-having-a-moment-on-tv (accessed 9 December 2017).

33.

Nash

Whelehan

(2017) Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls: Feminism, Postfeminism, Authenticity and Gendered Performance in Contemporary Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

34.

Negra

(2004) Quality postfeminism? Sex and the single girl on HBO. Genders 39. Available at: www.web.archive.org/web/20140813082910/http://www.genders.org/g39/g39_negra.html (accessed 5 January 2019).

35.

Newman-Bremang

(2017) Chewing Gum’s Michaela Coel: ‘we need black women to know that they are authors of their own destiny’. Elle, 21 September. Available at: www.ellecanada.com/culture/movies-and-tv/article/chewing-gum-s-michaela-coel-we-need-Black-women-to-know-that-they-are-authors-of-their-own-destiny (accessed 12 December 2017).

36.

Nsiah-Buadi

(2017) In Chewing Gum, Tracey is the quirkiest and freest character on TV. National Public Radio, 24 April. Available at: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/24/515228121/in-chewing-gum-tracy-is-the-quirkiest-and-freest-character-on-tv (accessed 15 December 2017).

37.

Opoku-Mensah

(2001) Marching on: African feminist media studies. Feminist Media Studies 1(1): 25–34.

38.

Pafford

Matusitz

(2017) ABC’s Quantico: a critical discourse analysis of female superiority and racial stereotypes. Critical Studies in Television 12(3): 273–88.

39.

Quantico (2015–2018) ABC Studios: ABC.

40.

Rich

(1980) Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Signs 5(4): 631–60.

41.

Ross

(1992) Television in Black and White: ethnic stereotypes and popular television. Research Paper in Ethnic Relations No. 19 . Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations. University of Warwick.

42.

Sandberg

(2013) Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. New York: WH Allen.

43.

Sex and the City (1998–2004) HBO. Darren Star Productions/HBO.

44.

Sobande

(2017) Watching me watching you: Black women in Britain on YouTube. European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(6): 655–71.

45.

Sobande

(2018) Praising, erasing, replacing and race-ing girls: intersectional online critiques and the ascent of Insecure. In: McCollum

Monteverde

(eds) HBO’s New Original Voices: Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality and Power. London: Routledge, pp. 99–114.

46.

Sobande

Fearfull

Brownlie

(2019) Resisting media marginalisation: Black women’s digital content and collectivity. Consumption, Markets and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/10253866.2019.1571491.

47.

Tasker

Negra

(eds) (2007) Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. London: Duke University Press.

48.

Thompson

(2015) Nothing suits me like a suit: performing masculinity in How I Met Your Mother. Critical Studies in Television 10(2): 21–36.

49.

Tinubu

(2017) Issa Rae’s Insecure puts the narrative of Black women back in our hands (premieres this weekend). Shadow and Act, 20 April. Available at: www.shadowandact.com/issa-raes-insecure-is-a-love-letter-to-Black-women-premieres-this-weekend (accessed 10 February 2018).

50.

Toby

(2016) Who run the world? Black women showrunners, of course. Essence, 23 December. Available at: www.uk.news.yahoo.com/run-world-black-women-showrunners-215121368.html (accessed 13 May 2019).

51.

Walser

(2015) The color of postfeminism: representations of black and white women in popular music videos. Dissenting Voices 4(1): 13–28.

52.

Warner

(2015) The Cultural Politics of Colorblind Casting. New York: Routledge.

53.

Warner

(2016) [Home] girls: Insecure and HBO’s risky racial politics. Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 October. Available at: www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/home-girls-insecure-and-hbos-risky-racial-politics (accessed 3 February 2018).

54.

Williams

Gonlin

(2017) I got all my sisters with me (on Black Twitter): second screening of How to Get Away with Murder as a discourse on Black womanhood. Information, Communication & Society 20(7): 984–1004.

55.

Woods

(2015) Girl talk: authorship and authenticity in the reception of Lena Dunham’s girls. Critical Studies in Television 10(2): 37–54.