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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
This talk interrogates the difference race makes for television’s female antiheroes in the genre we call “Shame TV.” The past decade has seen the rise of a new protagonist in prestige comedies, a figure who represents a fundamental shift away from the pro-social role usually prescribed for women on television. Selfish, self-sabotaging and anti-aspirational, her popularity in shows like Girls and Fleabag constitutes a revolt against expectations for financial solvency and familial success placed on women in the post-recessionary twenty-first century. Yet this revolt depends upon both her class privilege and her whiteness, which shields her from the social censure that would fall upon a non-white protagonist who engaged in similar mutiny against the social contract.
To illustrate this dynamic, we examine two antihero comedies, Broad City and Insecure. Broad City celebrates female aimlessness but without the angst and humiliation that accompanies other “Shame TV” fare. The show’s commitment to consequence-free female outrageousness is deeply dependent on racial dynamics, since protagonists Abbi and Ilana adopt the markers of blackness in signaling their distance from propriety. In contrast, Issa Rae’s Insecure interrogates the respectability mandate that other “Shame TV” sitcoms blithely ignore. Issa and best friend Molly Carter, while confused and prone to bad decision-making, are not nearly as anti-aspirational as their white counterparts. Structural racism curtails their forays into excess, forcing these characters to choose accountability over the rebellion that white millennial antiheroes assume as their birthright.
The Racial Politics of Comedy in Shame TV
This talk interrogates the difference race makes for television’s female antiheroes in the genre we call “Shame TV.” The past decade has seen the rise of a new protagonist in prestige comedies, a figure who represents a fundamental shift away from the pro-social role usually prescribed for women on television. Selfish, self-sabotaging and anti-aspirational, her popularity in shows like Girls and Fleabag constitutes a revolt against expectations for financial solvency and familial success placed on women in the post-recessionary twenty-first century. Yet this revolt depends upon both her class privilege and her whiteness, which shields her from the social censure that would fall upon a non-white protagonist who engaged in similar mutiny against the social contract.
To illustrate this dynamic, we examine two antihero comedies, Broad City and Insecure. Broad City celebrates female aimlessness but without the angst and humiliation that accompanies other “Shame TV” fare. The show’s commitment to consequence-free female outrageousness is deeply dependent on racial dynamics, since protagonists Abbi and Ilana adopt the markers of blackness in signaling their distance from propriety. In contrast, Issa Rae’s Insecure interrogates the respectability mandate that other “Shame TV” sitcoms blithely ignore. Issa and best friend Molly Carter, while confused and prone to bad decision-making, are not nearly as anti-aspirational as their white counterparts. Structural racism curtails their forays into excess, forcing these characters to choose accountability over the rebellion that white millennial antiheroes assume as their birthright.
Bio
Sarah Hagelin is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television (Rutgers University Press, 2013), as well as essays in Signs, Feminist Media Studies, and a variety of edited collections.
Gillian Silverman is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America (U Penn Press, 2012). Her academic scholarship has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, PMLA, Signs, and Feminist Media Studies, among other venues.
Hagelin and Silverman’s book The New Female Antihero: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First Century Television is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2022.