Difficult Women on Television Drama: The Gender Politics of Complex Women in Serial Narratives 2020039869, 2020039870, 9780367468675, 9781003031598

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures and tables
Acknowledgments
1 The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama (2005-2020)
2 Economic inequality and the working mother: The Killing in Denmark and the U.S.
3 Female sexual pleasure and freedom: Outlander and Westworld
4 Violence against women and women who kill: Big Little Lies, Orange is the New Black, and Wentworth
5 Intersectionality: Beyond the white female subject
6 Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

DIFFICULT WOMEN ON TELEVISION DRAMA

Routledge Advances in Television Studies

DIFFICULT WOMEN ON TELEVISION DRAMA THE GENDER POLITICS OF COMPLEX WOMEN IN SERIAL NARRATIVES Isabel C. Pinedo

Isabel C. Pinedo

www.routledge.com

Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats

9780367468675_Full cover_HBK.indd 1

11-12-2020 09:20:01

Difficult Women on Television Drama

Difficult Women on Television Drama analyses select case studies from international TV dramas to examine the unresolved feminist issues they raise or address: equal labor force participation, the demand for sexual pleasure and freedom, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, and the need for intersectional approaches. Drawing on examples from The Killing, Orange is the New Black, Big Little Lies, Wentworth, Outlander, Westworld, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, Vida, and other television dramas with a focus on complex female characters, this book illustrates how female creative control in key production roles (direct authorship) together with industrial imperatives and a conducive cultural context (indirect authorship) are necessary to produce feminist texts. Placed within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women; the growing embrace of a feminist identity; and the ascendance of postfeminism, this book reconsiders the unfinished nature of feminist struggle(s) and suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic change. This book is a must-read for scholars of media and communication studies; television and film studies; cultural studies; American studies; sociology of gender and sexualities; women and gender studies; and international film, media and cinema studies. Isabel C. Pinedo is Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media at Hunter College, CUNY.

Routledge Advances in Television Studies

9 Girlhood on Disney Channel Branding, Celebrity, and Femininity Morgan Genevieve Blue 10 Horror Television in the Age of Consumption Binging on Fear Edited by Linda Belau and Kim Jackson 11 Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes A Narrative Ecosystem Framework Edited by Paola Brembilla and Ilaria A. De Pascalis 12 Children, Youth, and American Television Edited by Adrian Schober and Debbie Olson 13 American Television and the Sensate Body Affect and Meaning Marsha F. Cassidy 14 Creating Reality in Factual Television The Frankenbite and Other Fakes Manfred W. Becker 15 A European Television Fiction Renaissance Premium Production Models and Transnational Circulation Edited by Luca Barra and Massimo Scaglioni 16 Difficult Women on Television Drama The Gender Politics of Complex Women in Serial Narratives Isabel C. Pinedo 17 Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television Hollywood’s Cartel Wars César Albarrán-Torres

Difficult Women on Television Drama The Gender Politics of Complex Women in Serial Narratives Isabel C. Pinedo

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Isabel C. Pinedo The right of Isabel C. Pinedo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pinedo, Isabel Cristina, 1957- author. Title: Difficult women on television drama : the gender politics of complex women in serial narratives / Isabel C. Pinedo. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in television studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: LCSH: Feminism on television. | Women on television. | Television series—History—21st century. | Television broadcasting—Social aspects. Classification: LCC PN1992.8.W65 P56 2021 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.W65 (ebook) | DDC 791.45/63522—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039869 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039870 ISBN: 9780367468675 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003031598 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Frank and Elvia with all my love

Contents

ContentsContents

List of Figures and tables Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4

The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama (2005–2020)

viii x

1

Economic inequality and the working mother: The Killing in Denmark and the U.S.

40

Female sexual pleasure and freedom: Outlander and Westworld

58

Violence against women and women who kill: Big Little Lies, Orange is the New Black, and Wentworth

109

5

Intersectionality: Beyond the white female subject

139

6

Conclusion

175

Index

181

Figures and tables

Figures and tablesFigures and tables

Figures 3.1

In Game of Thrones, sex is routinely staged and framed to maximally display naked female bodies for the male gaze. “You Win or You Die” (S1 E7, 2011, Game of Thrones, HBO) 3.2 True Detective facilitates the display of the female body as spectacle by favoring sex scenes in which the woman is on top while the male body is largely concealed. “Seeing Things” (S1 E2, 2014, True Detective, HBO) 3.3 When Daenerys orders her lust-besotted subordinate Daario to take off his clothes, her exercise of the desiring female gaze was widely remarked upon. “Mockingbird” (S4 E7, 2014, Game of Thrones, HBO) 3.4–3.6 In Outlander, Claire looks at Jaime with desire as she touches him, in a scene purposively designed to depict the male body for heterosexual female desire. “The Wedding” (S1 E7, 2014, Outlander, Starz) 3.7 The sex scene unfolds with both figures in frame, in twoshots of varying lengths, from long shot to medium wide shot to medium close-up. “The Wedding” (S1 E7, 2014, Outlander, Starz) 3.8 They make love slowly, gazing at each other, framed in two-shot. “The Wedding” (S1 E7, 2014, Outlander, Starz) 3.9 When Claire is raped, actors are blocked and the camera positioned to show sparing use of nudity, and shots are either from Claire’s perspective or focus on her face. “Both Sides Now” (S1 E8, 2014, Outlander, Starz) 3.10 Maeve’s nudity is alternately out of frame from the shoulders down, partially occluded, or in wide shot, as she reacts with shock at her surroundings. “Chestnut” (S1 E2, 2016, Westworld, HBO) 3.11 Maeve finds a part of “Livestock Management” where the naked dead bodies of hosts she knows as people are heaped on the floor. “Chestnut” (S1 E2, 2016, Westworld, HBO)

63

63

71

76

77 78

84

93 94

Figures and tables 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

4.7

5.1 5.2

Madeline looks at the fear-stricken Jane staring at Perry with recognition (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO) Madeline looks at Perry (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO) Madeline and Celeste lock eyes (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO) Celeste looks from Madeline to Jane in stunned disbelief (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO) Celeste’s eyes meet Jane’s, who gives a barely perceptible nod (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO) Celeste looks at Perry with a dawning realization that his violence has not been limited to her. This relay of looks between women is a counternarrative to the relay of looks between men that Mulvey describes as the male gaze (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO) A low angle shot of Bea passing through the metal frame of a doorway into Wentworth Correctional Centre, conveys her confinement, in the blue tones that dominate the cold color palette of the series (S1 E1, 2013, Wentworth, SoHo, Netflix) A central publicity image depicts the two sisters posed to resemble a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo Frida Kahlo’s painting “Las Dos Fridas” is a double selfportrait of bicultural identity

ix 115 115 116 116 117

117

128 162 163

Tables 1.1 1.2

3.1 4.1 5.1

5.2

The Changing Contours of the Difficult Woman or Female Antihero on Television Serial Dramas 1999–Present A Comparison of Women’s Share of Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Positions on Primetime Network, Cable, and Streaming Programs in the 2012–2013 (Netflix) and 2017–2018 (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) TV Seasons A Comparison of Women’s Share of Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Positions on Key Programs Discussed in this Chapter (2010–2019) A Comparison of Women’s Share of Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Positions on Key Programs Discussed in this Chapter (2013–2020) A Comparison of Racial Diversity in Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Positions on Scripted Broadcast, Cable, and Digital Programs in the 2011–2012 and 2016–2017 TV Seasons A Comparison of Gender and Racial Diversity in Key Creative Behind-the-Scenes Positions on 5 Series

3

17 69 111

142 148

Acknowledgments

AcknowledgmentsAcknowledgments

I have loved television since I started watching it at age six. That’s how old I was when we got our first television set. As I learned to watch it critically, this affection did not wane. What has changed in the past decade is that it’s become harder to watch series that center mostly around men. Now that more series revolve around multidimensional women, I’m too conscious of what I’m missing to enjoy the other shows unless they’re extraordinary, which they sometimes are. Not having grown up watching Univision or Telemundo (my mother insisted on American programming) and therefore telenovelas, my television viewing has consisted mostly of stereotyped or marginal Latina/o characters, if there were any at all. This has started to change but at a much slower pace than the increase in (white) femalecentered programming. Tanya Saracho has demonstrated what’s possible with Vida, a Latina-centered series analyzed in Chapter 5. I would like to express my appreciation for the template she has cast and look forward to her future work. This book project started in 2014 when I wrote a conference talk on the stigmatizing of female antiheroes on television cable dramas, one that ended with reflections on how Orange is the New Black defied those expectations. It was the beginning of my rumination on the complex narratives I had been avidly watching for the previous decade. Since then I have enjoyed many serial programs about complex women, some of which I write about in this book. I’ve enjoyed talking about them with friends and students, reading about them in books and articles, and thinking about what makes these series so enjoyable even with their flaws. Throughout this process, I have benefited from feedback from conference audiences, colleagues, and students in my classroom, as well as from university and college funding support. Very early drafts of some material were presented at the Console-ing Passions Conference in Missouri, 2014, and the one in North Carolina, 2017; and at the American Sociological Association Preconference in Montreal, 2017. I’m grateful for the attention, encouragement, and helpful comments I received at all of these forums. My colleagues in the CUNY Mid-Career Faculty Fellowship Seminar in 2018 provided invaluable feedback on what became first a journal article,

Acknowledgments

xi

then Chapter 2. I want to thank Annemarie Nicols-Grinenko and Juan Battle for creating and leading this seminar, for their guidance on the path that became this book, and for their inspiration at a time when I most needed it. Mobina Hashmi, Diana Bratu, Nick Boston, and an anonymous reviewer in the seminar were astute, wonderful readers. This is the venue in which I developed the concept of direct and indirect authorship that underlies this book. I also want to acknowledge two anonymous reviewers at Critical Studies in Television, another two anonymous reviewers at Television and New Media, and editor Diane Negra, who offered invaluable criticism in the crafting of a later version of this work. And thank you to the Spring 2016 Faculty Research Seminar at Hunter College that workshopped an early version of Chapter 3, and the anonymous reviewer at Cinema Journal, who commented on that draft. I am deeply grateful to the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity for their support, particularly Julie Hicks Patrick for facilitating our journey through the Fall 2019 Faculty Success Program, and the members of our interdisciplinary support group which continues to distance meet regularly: Shorna Allred, Davida Pines, and Deb Schutte. Shorna, Davida, and Deb, you have anchored and inspired me with your helpful suggestions and enduring support. My heartfelt thanks to Lynn Chancer and Heather Levi, who have generously commented on most of the book. Their perspicacious observations and stimulating conversations have informed every aspect of this work. They are incredibly intelligent, caring, and fun to talk with. I’m blessed to have them in my life. Thanks to my chair in Film and Media, Kelly Anderson, who has been supportive of my efforts to write this book throughout her tenure. I’m grateful for the encouragement I’ve received from Roz Bologh, who started out as my undergraduate role model and became my friend. I want to thank Wyatt Phillips and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, who directed me to some helpful sources. I’ve had the privilege to work through many of these ideas in my teaching at Hunter College. I am thankful for the bright, challenging students who regularly populate my courses on Television Culture, Complex Television Narratives, and Women and Television, some of whom have provided research assistance. Liron Cohen helped with research on OITNB and Wentworth, a program she introduced me to, as well as my initial research for the Console-ing Passions talk in 2014. Chorouk Akik provided research on the Danish and American versions of The Killing. I couldn’t ask for more diligent, perceptive, and resourceful researchers. My thanks to Suzanne Richardson, my editor at Routledge, who has been an enthusiastic supporter of my work and to the editorial staff at the press, particularly Sukriti Pandey. Besides the CUNY-funded Mid-Career Faculty Fellowship, I have benefited from Hunter College funding, which has made this work possible. This includes President’s Fund for Faculty Advancement Grants in 2014 and 2017, and a Presidential Travel Award in 2017. I want to express my gratitude to Associate Provost Jennifer Tuten and the provost’s office at

xii

Acknowledgments

Hunter College for funding my participation in the Fall 2019 Faculty Success Program. Support for this project was also provided by a 2018–2019 PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York. Chapter 2 is a modified version of an article previously published as “The Killing: The Gender Politics of the Nordic Noir Crime Drama and Its American Remake” in Television and New Media. My thanks to the journal for permission to republish this essay. Last, but not least, I want to thank my family for their love and support. I’m grateful for Frank Nitsche’s unstinting support and encouragement in this, and in all things, but especially for his help with formatting the figures for the book. He is the computer wizard who swoops in to save the day when my technophobia gets the better of me. His companionship watching hours and hours of television, and in life, has made enjoyable work even more rewarding. This book is dedicated to him and to my aunt, Elvia Morocho, a second mother to me, who died during the writing of this book, from COVID-19. She was in many ways the opposite of a difficult woman, so it’s ironic that she should figure so centrally in my thoughts as I look back at the path that led to its completion. The fervor of her love has, until recently, accompanied me through life. I miss her terribly. I also want to thank my dearly departed ma, Lucy Mettler, a difficult woman who was my hero. She was the first member of our family to emigrate from Ecuador to New York. She was a risk taker, a single mother, a breadwinner, and a bawdy wit. She taught me from a tender age that a woman must be able to support herself and that learning was a treasure. I will cherish her always.

1

The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama (2005–2020) The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television dramaThe rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama

Introduction of a programming trend Over the past decade, feminist politics have surfaced in a growing number of television serials suffused with emancipatory claims for women, ones that revolve around “difficult women,” so much so that they constitute a programming trend. Flawed female protagonists, from problematic, thorny heroes to outright criminal antiheroes now populate the airwaves (Vaage 2016; Tally 2016; Buonanno 2017).1 Marti Noxon, the writer and executive producer of Sharp Objects (2018, HBO), calls them “angry women” (Gilbert 2018). Serial narrative programs center on female characters that are complex, multi-dimensional, and who possess the female gaze, the narrative center with whom the audience is aligned. We see events unfold from their perspective, their actions drive the narrative, and they take up a substantial amount of screen time. The story deals with candor about women’s experiences and looking is organized around female empowerment. She is not a spectacle. This content deliberately serves and targets a female audience. There are more complex female-centered serial narratives on television, in all its myriad forms from 48 inch screens to mobile devices, from major networks to over-the-top (OTT) streaming services, thanks to the proliferation of programming in the last decade. FX CEO John Landgraf coined the term “Peak TV” to describe the staggering number of television programs available on and off-line in 2015 (Littleton 2017). According to a Close Up With the Hollywood Reporter (2015–present) episode on Drama Showrunners, “[b]etween 2009 and 2015, the number of scripted TV shows doubled, going from about 200 a year to more than 400” (July 30, 2017: 22:00).2 Many of these female-centered programs have received critical acclaim. Some have won Emmys for Best Drama Series–Homeland (2012), The Handmaid’s Tale (2017), or Best Comedy Series–Veep (2015–17). They have won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series–Claire Danes (2012– 2013) for Homeland, Viola Davis (2015) for How to Get Away with Murder (2014–present), Tatiana Maslany (2016) for Orphan Black (2013–17), and Elizabeth Moss (2017) for The Handmaid’s Tale. They have won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series–Edie Falco (2010) for Nurse Jackie

2

The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama

and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (2013–17) for Veep. Others have been nominated for Best Drama–Orange is the New Black (2015), The Americans (2016, 2018), and Westworld (2017–18), or Best Comedy–Girls (2012–13) and GLOW (2018). Although overall the percentages of women in key creative roles in Hollywood have changed little in this decade, the rise of Peak TV has vastly increased the demand for programming, opening opportunities for female producers, and top tier actors, resulting in some productions with significant female creative control. The drive to compete for audience share has further fostered the development of innovative content with which to distinguish programs. Difficult Women examines the significance of gender politics in the programming trend of television serials that revolve around complex female figures by analyzing how dramas construct the female gaze, a structure of looking that centers the narrative from a female perspective and is organized around female empowerment in the story space and the viewing experience.3 This trend has emerged within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women, and the growing embrace of a feminist identity in the US, about which more later. This programming trend is related to, but differs from, the one charted by Amanda Lotz (2006) about female-oriented, not necessarily feminist, programs that aired from the mid-1990s through 2000. Lotz argues that an unprecedented wave of content for and about women was generated by the cable (and small network) narrowcasting strategy of developing content to attract niche (small but profitable) markets. Programs such as Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001, syndicated), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003, WB, UPN), Ally McBeal (1997–2002, FOX), Sex and the City (1998–2004, HBO), and Judging Amy (1999–2005, CBS) were designed to attract the spending power of working women. Lotz (79) describes the protagonists as “desiring and empathetic heroines,” not antiheroes, whose stories unfolded in programs with a mix of episodic and serial elements. The figure of the difficult woman or female antihero is more closely related to the male antihero of serial narratives crafted by HBO in the late 1990s and embraced by cable channels in the 2000s. The pattern of the difficult woman has shifted, in rough chronological order (though categories overlap), from the sidelined wife of the antihero, to the pathologized female antihero, to the female antihero who collaborates with her antihero husband in illicit activities, to the normalized female antihero and the difficult woman hero (see Table 1.1). The antihero is a morally ambiguous figure, with an uneasy mix of likable and unlikable traits, who commits serious moral transgressions. What distinguishes the female antihero from the male antihero is that their level of transgressions typically does not rise to the level of transgressions committed by men. Tony Soprano strangles a man in witness protection with his bare hands (Sopranos, “College” S1 E5, 1999), while Sarah Linden shoots a serial killer of teenage girls (The Killing, “The Road to Hamelin” S3 E12, 2013). While both kill in deliberate fashion,

The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama

3

Table 1.1 The Changing Contours of the Difficult Woman or Female Antihero on Television Serial Dramas 1999–Present Years of Series Run

Sidelined wife of the male antihero

1999–2007 Sopranos 2005–2012 2007–2012 2007–2015 Mad Men 2007–2012 2008–2013 Breaking Bad 2008–2014 2009–2011 2009–2015 2010–2013 2010–pres The Walking Dead 2011–2014 2011–2020 2013–2018 2013–2018 2013–2019

Pathologized female antihero

Female and male antihero collaborators

Normalized female antihero

Difficult woman hero

Weeds Forbrydelsen (Denmark) Damages

Sons of Anarchy United States of Tara Nurse Jackie The Big C

The Killing Homeland

2013–pres

The Americans House of Cards Orange is the New Black Wentworth (Australia)

2013–2016

Masters of Sex Being Mary Jane Outlander

2013-2019

2014–pres 2015–2018 2015–2019 2016–pres 2016–pres 2017–2019 2018-2020 Source: Data drawn from IMDb

UnReal Jessica Jones Westworld Queen Sugar Big Little Lies Vida

4

The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama

Tony does it to reinforce the power of the mob, while Sarah does it to punish and stop a heinous criminal. What distinguishes the female antihero from the difficult woman hero is that the antihero intentionally does serious harm to others through commission or omission. If she deliberately kills, then it is to protect herself or others, though not under conditions that the law would recognize as killing in self-defense. The difficult woman who is not a straight out antihero transgresses the norms of femininity unapologetically and systematically. She is abrasive, aggressive, ambitious, often defined by work more than motherhood, at times unlikable. The figure of the difficult woman took root in the subsoil of a changing industry, one that first developed the male antihero. The narrative trope of the antihero, male or female, came about as a result of economic, regulatory, and technological changes in the 1980s and 1990s that altered how the television industry operates and fostered the rise of the cumulative or complex narrative as a textual form (Sconce 2004; Mittell 2006). In this chapter, I outline the historical trajectory of the changing television landscape that facilitated the rise of a difficult women programming trend and lay out the changing contours of the difficult woman or female antihero. I conclude by laying out the remaining chapters of the book.

Peak TV and the third golden age of television We are in what has been called the Third Golden Age of Television, dating from the mid-late 1990s to the present. It refers to the rise of high-quality narrative series characterized by innovative storytelling and aesthetic strategies, across multiple distribution channels, starting with the programming innovations of serial shows on network – The X-Files (1993–2002), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), to HBO – Oz (1997–2003), Sex and the City (1998–2004), The Sopranos (1999–2007), and The Wire (2002–08), basic cable – The Shield (2002–08, FX) and Mad Men (2007–15, AMC), and OTT media providers – House of Cards (2013–18, Netflix), Transparent (2014–19, Amazon) and The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–present, Hulu). The first complex cable dramas traffic largely in “difficult men” or male antiheroes, narrative centers who lie, cheat, steal, kill, and otherwise violate moral norms, yet retain our sympathies in comparison to the even more heinous characters they oppose. Difficult men and the antihero Brett Martin’s book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: from The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (2013), attributes the rise of the Third Golden Age of Television to the temperamental auteurs who created these shows – David Chase, David Simon, Matthew Weiner, and Vince Gilligan, respectively. He argues that these male-centric shows established the highly lauded cable dramas that

The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama

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center around antiheroes, men navigating morally murky pathways as they deal with the vicissitudes of masculinity, their relationship to work, and ambivalence toward the American Dream. These are shows about difficult men, run by difficult men, that are about manhood, specifically, about men’s “post-feminist dislocation and confusion about exactly what being a man [means]” (2013: 13). Jason Mittell (2015) argues that these “complex TV” dramas tell stories of damaged masculinity or masculinity in crisis. Similarly, David Greven (2013) suggests that these programs express male anxieties about masculinity in the wake of social changes wrought by feminism and queer culture. These dramas are characterized by ambivalence about the norms of masculinity, as the characters confront economic crisis with what Amanda Lotz (2014: 89) calls the “residual gender scripts” of white masculinity. Mittell adopts Murray Smith’s (1995, 1999) lexicon to describe the dynamic with which viewers are invited to the antihero’s subjectivity. We are narratively aligned with the perspectives and interests of these men, allowed access to their subjectivity so that we come to see them as human even when their actions and assumptions provoke a “conflicted or negative moral allegiance.” To negotiate this, the shows repeatedly call into play “relative morality,” where the ethically questionable antihero is partly redeemed when “juxtaposed with more explicitly villainous and unsympathetic characters” (2015: 142–143). Yet we are drawn to their power, fascinated by their badness, able to vicariously identify with it by dint of our knowledge that it is fiction. Margrethe Bruun Vaage (2016) calls this process “fictional relief,” whereby we are absolved from moral responsibility when enjoying fiction. But even this process has its limits. There are times when the morally questionable acts of the antihero become a source of untenable discomfort for the viewer. Vaage calls these moments “reality checks,” points that interrupt fictional relief, when sympathy with the antihero is put to the test (antihero as reprehensible or monstrous) before it is reestablished (antihero as morally preferable, understandable). Complex narratives evoke periods of critical reflection where we question our moral allegiance to antiheroes. The turn to male antihero cable dramas with high production values, which would subsequently give rise to a concurrent difficult women programming trend, was both a creative programming strategy that created a new cultural form and a business plan that adapted to changing technologies and deregulatory policies. The conditions that made this venture economically viable are rooted in the proliferation of channels that started in the early 1980s with the spread of cable into markets across the country and the emergence of newer networks FOX (1986), the WB (1995), and UPN (1995). Roberta Pearson (2011) has characterized this shift from the channel scarcity of the “three network hegemony” to cable profusion in the early 1980s as the shift from the network era (TVI) to the cable era (TVII). The profusion of channels gradually shattered the virtual monopoly of the three major networks. As audience share was splintered across a growing

6

The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama

number of channels, both the big three and the newer networks looked to the creation of programs aimed at small but dedicated niche markets, the younger 18–34 demographic, or upscale audiences with high levels of education and disposable income, both segments desirable to advertisers.4 Sophisticated programming aimed at highly educated viewers with disposable income who do not watch much TV, known as the “quality audience,” had been valued by advertisers since the 1980s (D’Acci 1992), but in the competitive climate to come, it took on much more importance. The willingness of networks to take creative risks, together with the changing perception of television’s legitimacy, and its reputation as a writer–producer’s medium appealed to film writers, who wanted to retain creative control of their material, rather than forfeit it to film directors. Competition encouraged even the major broadcasters to take risks. The smaller networks and cable channels had lower audience expectations and sought to distinguish their brand with innovative programming. Fox delivered The X-Files, WB Buffy the Vampire Slayer (until 2001, when it moved to UPN). Ironically, the major networks delivered important predecessors for complex television with the large ensemble casts, cumulative narratives, web of relationships, multiple interwoven story threads of Hill Street Blues (1981–87, NBC) and the brooding detectives and noir sensibility of Miami Vice (1982–89, NBC) (Butler 2010).5 But it was ABC that provided the most ambitious template for complex serial television when Twin Peaks (1990–91) premiered, with its season-long murder investigation, nonlinear narrative, numerous quirky characters, and generous use of surrealism. The creative liberties Twin Peaks took opened the door for The X-Files and influenced the development of the complex TV narrative form, which to varying extents adapted its narrative strategies, but not its sustained stylistic excesses and surrealistic turns. While Twin Peaks broke new ground in genre mixing (detective thriller, soap opera, horror, surrealism) and stylistic experimentation, Hill Street Blues set the example of using an aggressive visual style (fast pace, dense sound design) that “make[s] it look messy” to create social realism and to convey white middle-class ambivalence about the Black and Brown underclass (Gitlin 2000a). Both programs embody the desire to differentiate themselves from conventional television that is embedded in HBO’s signature slogan, “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.”6 The profusion and diversity of channels available for subscription by the mid-nineties were used to justify the removal of regulatory limits on media ownership and concentration by Congress and the Clinton administration. First came the abolition of Fin-Syn (Financial Interest and Syndication Rules) in 1993, after which networks could outright own primetime programming, not just license it. Second came the sweeping 1996 Telecommunications Act which lifted most restrictions on corporate ownership of broadcast channels and other media, allowing for the intensification of media conglomerates. This move ushered in a wave of corporate mergers that aggregated media entities (e.g., film studios, television networks, record companies,

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book publishers) into a small number of oligopolistic media empires. These changes enabled a corporate strategy whereby the fragmented audience of the post-network era could be re-aggregated through conglomerate ownership. It also ushered in the TVIII era of “proliferating digital distribution platforms” in the late 1990s (Pearson 2011). It is in this context that HBO, owned by WarnerMedia (formerly Time Warner), launched its production of scripted serial narrative programming with Oz in 1997. Set in a maximum security prison, it featured graphic language, sex, and violence. But it was not until The Sopranos in 1999, that HBO received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Dramatic Series, and did so each season it aired, winning in 2004 and 2007. It was the first of two cable series to be Emmy nominated in 1999, and the other was HBO’s Sex and the City which was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series each season it aired. It won the Emmy in 2001, the gold standard of industry recognition, three years before The Sopranos, though its importance in the rise of this trend is often overlooked by media critics and scholars. HBO has built a reputation for according producers creative liberty with few if any notes from the executive suite. Neither subject to FCC standards for decency nor to advertiser demands for family friendly content, subscriptionfunded HBO not only sanctioned unfettered content and controversial subject matter but also distinguished itself from conventional television on these grounds, together with its high production values, and complex narrative structure (Dunleavy 2017). Basic cable networks followed suit – FX in 2002 with The Shield and AMC in 2007 with Mad Men – albeit with more restrictions on content since they are advertiser-supported. The Shield won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series its first season, 2002. Mad Men was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series each season it aired and won its first four seasons 2008–2011. AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008–13) was nominated all but its first season and won in 2013 and 2014. By the early 2000s, the ability of complex narratives to draw a quality audience was apparent enough to produce two ABC entrees – Alias (2001–06) and Lost (2004–10), both by auteur producer J.J. Abrams. In addition to the regulatory changes, improvements in technology and the development of flexible viewing technologies fostered the spread of complex television. The spread of high definition television sets and services made it possible to appreciate the visual acuity of television programs shot on and like film. Digital video recorders (DVRs), which replaced videocassette recorders (VCRs), preserved the high production values of shows viewed after original airing. In addition, the digital publication of television series by season box sets on DVD, available for purchase or rental from video stores or Netflix, which also streamed content, made it possible to rewatch and critically examine complex moments in the context of earlier seasons’ events. This seasonal distribution format also made it possible to binge watch earlier seasons of a show still in broadcast, then jump into the new

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season. The Internet presence of the program on network websites included extras that extended the television text (Caldwell 2004), as did wiki pages and fan-generated content. Popular culture discussion forums created an online community of viewers who could share information, speculations, and theories, or what Steven Johnson (2006) calls “collective intelligence” about complex narrative programs. After HBO set the new template for complex narrative serials, the next big transformation in programming came with Netflix. First, it became the syndicator for complex, serialized shows like Lost, Arrested Development (2003–06, 2013–19), Freaks and Geeks (1999), or Breaking Bad (2008–13) that do not play well in syndication, since they do not have self-contained episodes that can be watched out of order. In 2011, it changed its business plan from distributor of studio content they could license but not own, to producer of its own content. After realizing that it was vulnerable to competition from network streaming apps and other streaming services, such as Amazon and Hulu, it decided to shift the balance from licensed content to its own original programming. To make a mark, in 2013 it produced a highprofile series from Oscar-nominated executive producer David Fincher, starring Oscar winner Kevin Spacey.7 They had approached Netflix to secure a post-run syndication deal, hoping to sell it to HBO or SHO (Showtime). Instead, Netflix offered a one hundred million dollar sweetheart deal: a two-season commitment based on their pitch (no script, no pilot) and the promise of no artistic interference. The entire season would be dropped on the premiere date, fostering the binge-watching audience behavior its syndicated programming already allowed. With this as their flagship show, Netflix became both a studio and the first OTT media service to break into the Emmy field. In 2013, House of Cards (2013–18) became the first web television series to be nominated for Outstanding Drama, as it was for its first five seasons. In 2014, the hour-long Netflix series Orange is the New Black, which had premiered without much fanfare, was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series and in 2015 for Outstanding Drama Series after rule changes. It scored Emmy wins for Uzo Aduba as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2014 and Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2015. The Emmys Netflix has not yet won, were won by its OTT rivals. In 2017, Hulu won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series for The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–present), and in 2018, Amazon won Outstanding Comedy Series for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2018–present). The complex narrative’s high production values, unconventional content, meaty roles, and shorter production schedules – 10–13 episode seasons as opposed to 24–26 for network – attracted film actors, drawn to the allure of a medium that was increasingly being viewed as a legitimate art form. It also held a special appeal for women who, unlike men, “age out” of most Hollywood roles after 40. The abundance of scripted material included unconventional roles that went beyond that of “someone’s mother, wife, or girlfriend,” and defied patriarchal cultural imperatives for women such as

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compulsory likeability and “fuckability.”8 Expanded opportunities to play unconventional featured roles were in part made possible by the rise of difficult women programming. These tectonic industrial shifts, which altered industry expectations and practices, indeed changed the industrial paradigm, have enabled the rise of the difficult women programming trend, through the development of the complex serial narrative with its reliance on the antihero trope, the pressure for innovative programming in a fiercely competitive environment, and the burgeoning opportunities that have developed for female writer–producers in the wake of channel expansion. First, the proliferation of channels (network, cable, streaming) has spurred an exponential increase in the demand for original content, fueled first by male-centered programs, later joined by female-centered ones, culminating in the age of Peak TV, which refers to quantity, or the Third Golden Age of Television, which refers to quality. The booming number of scripted television series produced has boosted opportunities for female writers, producers, and directors (Littleton 2017). Second, OTT media services have opened the door for the streaming of foreign television series that provide a greater range of roles for women. The television industrial practices of the UK, Scandinavia, and Australia sanction the casting of middle-aged and older or fleshy women who do not dress fashionably, in meaty starring roles, e.g., Vera (ITV, 2011–present) or Happy Valley (BBC, 2014–present).9 These programs have proven popular with American audiences. Third, there has been a growth in female television critics, as viewers try to make sense of the unending roll out of new programs. Between 1997 and 2011, female membership in the Television Critics Association increased from 30% to 50% and this does not include online critics who are not members (Holmes 2011). These critics help direct the conversation about television toward gender politics and point readers to programs with strong female leads. Assessing the gender politics of golden age discourse Golden Age discourse uses the language of distinction and a progress narrative, as I have in the account earlier. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine argue in Legitimating Television (2012) that serialized programs advance their status as “quality TV” by distinguishing themselves from mainstream or lesser forms of television (30). These programs boast high production values previously associated only with film, claim the pedigree of auteurship – a claim that the work is driven by the creative vision of an artist and is innovative or transgressively original. The programs feature complex writing, ensemble casts, character arcs, story arcs, self-conscious allusions to popular culture, and a mix of genres. The discourse of quality TV is a discourse of distinction designed to appeal to a “quality demographic,” an industry term used to refer to an audience that is highly educated, with sophisticated tastes, and expendable income. All these traits were spelled

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out by Robert Thompson in Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER: Hill Street Blues, thirtysomething, St. Elsewhere, China Beach, Cagney & Lacey, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, Northern Exposure, LA Law, Picket Fences, with Brief Reflections on Homicide, NYPD Blue & Chicago Hope, and Other Quality Dramas (1997), a book that argues for the canonization of specific series broadcast between 1981 and 1997, but which ran until 2005. Newman and Levine (2012) take issue with the prestige discourse associated with Golden Age claims. They contend that there is both a class and gender bias built into the language that distinguishes quality TV from imputed lesser forms. At the other end of the spectrum are formulaic, lowproduction value programs that appeal to the masses. In binary culture, mass culture has been characterized as simplified material, designed for a distracted audience, and associated with the feminine (passive viewer). In contrast, complex TV narratives require attention to detail, deal in sophisticated subject matter, use the aesthetics of film, and are associated with the masculine (active viewer). Quality TV’s most highly lauded programs typically center around difficult white men with complicated problems, including male identity crises, workplace concerns, and are often ensconced in homosocial subcultures. This is not simply a matter of numbers, though more programming, including the complex serial sort, revolves around men. It is a matter of the prestige discourse according higher value to traits conventionally associated with masculinity – active over passive, sophisticated over simple, innovative over formulaic – that Newman and Levine rightly take issue with. Despite the fact that these narratives are serialized, weaving together episodic story threads with long-term narrative arcs, feature large ensemble casts and invest in extensive character development, their relation to the soap opera tends to be minimized or denied in both popular journalistic and scholarly accounts. The soap opera and the romance are both associated with a female audience and culturally coded as feminine, rendering them of lesser value on the scale of quality television.10 Complex serials go to great pains to differentiate themselves from the soap opera by emphasizing the series’ carefully crafted ending, expensive production budget, aesthetic selfconsciousness, single-camera format, and the need for close viewer attention to follow its complex construction, variously described as “difficult by design” – non-linear, densely plotted – or “broken on purpose” – marked by the artistic use of gaps (Chisholm 1991; O’Sullivan 2010). Newman and Levine (2012) make a valid point that prestige discourse seeks to masculinize the complex serial format. But other scholars offer alternatives to this masculinizing tendency. One way to reclaim the complex narrative’s connection to the culturally feminine is to return to Julie D’Acci’s (1992, 1994) argument that prime time was soap-operafied to appeal to the working women’s market in the 1980s. In the wake of the large influx of middle-class women into the professional workforce in the late seventies

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and eighties, the television industry identified a demographic they called the “working women’s market” characterized by college-educated women over 35 who worked full-time, with household income over $40,000 (in 1985, $95,000 in 2020 dollars), and who controlled their own disposable income. This population had little time left to watch television, after job and household responsibilities, so primetime programs had to feature working women like themselves in order to draw them. As part of this programming strategy, primetime dramas needed to be a hybrid mix of melodrama and action to appeal to both women and men (Byars and Meehan 1994). Male cops talked about their feelings on Hill Street Blues, as did male doctors on St. Elsewhere. Linda Williams (2002) takes this argument further by redefining melodrama as foundational to American film. She argues that the melodramatic impulse as a mode of storytelling is ubiquitous across genres. Drawing on Peter Brooks’ (1995) influential work on the “melodramatic imagination” in literature, she defines melodrama as a narrative mode that uses suspense to portray “moral legibility,” so the viewer can feel the difference between competing moral sides (Williams 2002: 19). It uses strong effect combined with moral clarity to create a felt good. Melodrama may be understated while effectively powerful and compatible with a realist mode that eschews emotional excess. Drawing on Williams and Robyn Warhol, Mittell (2015) argues that complex television narratives mix narrative technologies of gender (Warhol 2003: 23) to combine the masculinist pleasures of the serial narrative – adventure plots, homosocial friendships, analytic puzzlesolving – with the sentimental plot – close calls, last-minute reversals – to produce deeply felt emotional responses. This generates a mix of gendered responses that can appeal both to a wide range of viewers, and a spectrum of affective engagements within a single viewer of any gender. As Mittell (2015: 253) argues, although male-centric dramas are not usually feminist, “the narrative act of making male privilege an object of dramatic conflict, as well as encouraging male viewers to experience effeminate melodramatic affect, can be regarded as progressive steps within the traditionally hegemonic realm of dramatic television.” Another way to reclaim the complex narrative’s connection to the culturally feminine is to reconsider the importance of Sex and the City as foundational to the template that HBO set, if not for drama then for comedy, and for the trope of the difficult woman which concerns us here. It is indicative of the gender esteem gap that Sex and the City, which spearheaded the contemporary complex narrative format, is often dismissed in narratives of its genealogy.11 Adapted from Candace Bushnell’s column by Darren Star, an openly gay man, Sex and the City was largely written and produced by women, starred four women, and demonstrated the flawed nature of its four female protagonists without pathologizing or condemning them. Martin’s account of The Sopranos as the break out HBO dramatic series that set the template for this wave of serial production echoes the

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critical consensus. In that genealogy, Martin dismisses comedies and femalecentered dramas such as Damages (2007–2012, FX).12 He regards Sex and the City with a modicum of grudging praise but a heap of condescension. Its four protagonists are reduced to predictable character types, “the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, [and] the Heroine” (2013: 58). Thus, he repeats the canonizing discourse of the now-established foundation narrative that implicitly dismisses female antiheroes that precede or are concurrent with key male antihero dramas. Emily Nussbaum called Martin to task for this in a New Yorker piece titled, “Difficult Women: How Sex and the City Lost its Good Name” (2013).13 She questions why this program, which was crucial in establishing the prestige cable series, is now regarded with widespread critical condescension in comparison with the male-centric dramas (see also Stoeffel 2013). Nussbaum calls Carrie Bradshaw the first female antihero. Today, the program is subject to the esteem gap that befalls women’s genres, including the rom-com, which Sex and the City deconstructs. Though the series finale capitulates to generic rom-com norms, mainly by letting Carrie get the elusive Mr. Big, through most of its run the women could want casual sex, a child without a husband, a husband without a child, an abortion.14 Most radical of all, the pivot point of the show was the centrality of the friendship that joined the four women through life, asserting the importance of female homosociality.15

The antihero’s wife: pathologized if against him, normalized if with him Turning back to the male antihero drama, these complex narratives develop antiheroes with whom the audience can sympathize. The women in these dramas are often complex as well, navigating various positions between resistance to and complicity with the men’s immoral enterprises. But in male-centered dramas, antihero wives with conflicting priorities provoke anti-fandom and antipathy. Skyler White of Breaking Bad (2008–13) is one such character, a woman who feels betrayed when she discovers that her husband, Walter White, has put his family in danger by becoming ensconced in the drug trade. She opposes him, tries to leave him, and cheats on him in an act of retaliation, but in the end, she is bullied into staying with him. When her brother-in-law, DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agent Hank Schrader, is seriously injured in a drug-related shootout – one that Skyler rightly suspects is related to Walt’s activities – she offers to pay for the choice physical therapy that he and her sister cannot otherwise afford. To do so, she starts laundering Walt’s drug profits. She alternates between complicity in his criminal operation and sinking into depression and fearfulness. In a series about character transformation, we see Skyler merely reacting to Walt’s choices. Her choices and motivations are not given the kind of screen time accorded to Walt or his partner Jesse Pinkman. She finds herself in an

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abusive relationship with a powerful and violent man. Circumstances leave her little leeway to extricate herself short of turning him in, something she is loath to do for the sake of the children. And something that the writers’ room was loath to do because it would have brought the series to a quick conclusion.16 Skyler is a highly sympathetic character to some viewers, like myself, but the object of vituperation for others (see also Mittell 2012). On August 23, 2013, Anna Gunn, the actor who plays Skyler, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled, “I Have a Character Issue.” She was reflecting on Facebook pages and other websites created and liked by fans of the show that attack her character as a hypocritical gold-digger, an unappreciative cheat, and a nagging bitch.17 She had become the object of antifandom (Gray 2003). These sites focus intense fan emotion against a character that Gunn describes as a “strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated [woman].” Anti-fans heap scorn on her for not leaving Walt, something the scriptwriters could not allow her to do. Some of the attacks became personal, aimed at Anna Gunn herself, including death threats, forcing her to take undisclosed protective measures. Gunn concludes in the piece that this hostility has less to do with her character, and more to do with these people’s “perception[s] of women and wives . . . [and their] attitudes towards gender.” In short, her character had become a barometer of misogyny. Columnists like Technology Tell’s Steven Silver (2012) and Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg (2012) had already observed that these fans exercise a sexual double standard when they condemn the wives of the morally bankrupt male antiheroes whom they love. One of the hallmarks of complex, serialized prestige cable dramas has been the building of a deep and complex story world around a rich assortment of fully developed, deeply flawed male antiheroes – drug dealers, murderers, liars, serial adulterers, narcissists, men who fail as much as they succeed. In aligning viewers with the perspectives and interests of these men, television is creating characters with greater human depth and dimension. But anti-fans’ parasocial communication, conversations audience members experience with television characters, seems to draw a gendered symbolic frontier between the normalized male antihero and the deviant woman, aka “that bitch” who stands as an obstacle to Walt’s self-realization as a man, or in the case of fans who attack Skyler and Carmela Soprano for not leaving their husbands, they are also hated for not resisting enough. If, as Vaage (2016) so aptly argues, antihero narratives are about the pleasures of transgression, of identifying with rebels who cross lines most of us dare not cross, then the character who polices that line is the antagonist. In making him acceptable, anti-fans render her unacceptable. This pattern of stigmatizing antihero wives as killjoys extends to other characters such as Betty Draper of Mad Men or Lori Grimes of The Walking Dead (2010–present).18 Creator Vince Gilligan, one man profiled in Martin’s book as not a difficult man, gave an interview to Vulture (Brown 2013) where he called these anti-fans “misogynists.” However, he and other male showrunners have

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been criticized for not adequately developing such pilloried female characters as Skyler, not giving us access to her pain, relegating her to the trope of killjoy wife who gets in the antihero’s way and thus rendering her less relatable. The show downplays sympathy for her to secure sympathy for Walt. Other characters judge Skyler harshly – as a hypocrite or as incomprehensible. Moreover, her lack of character development and viewer alignment (we see events from her perspective) denies her the depth given to male opponents of the antihero. It is conspicuous that Skyler is as underdeveloped as she is when male antagonist Hank Schrader grows much more fleshed out and sympathetic over the course of the series. Like Skyler, he too is introduced at the outset as a character in Walt’s life who routinely and casually emasculates Walt, and someone who in time, tries to stop him. But Hank’s character does not become the object of anti-fandom, because of his character development, and perhaps because as a law enforcement agent, he too is a man performing his work. The sexist bias of which Gilligan complains seems also to have unconsciously seeped into the writers room.19 In contrast, a wife who is complicit in her husband’s moral transgressions, particularly one who embraces the power of that position, is depicted more sympathetically than the one who tries to stop him. This is because she wants what he wants, she fully participates in the criminal enterprise. Gemma Teller Morrow in Sons of Anarchy (2008–14, FX), Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans (2013–18, FX), and Claire Underwood in House of Cards (2013–18, Netflix) are female antiheroes, central characters who repeatedly break the law.20 They are passionate or cold or ruthless without being pathologized. Gemma, as the matriarch of a male motorcycle club and crime syndicate, will go to great lengths to protect it and herself, including complicity in murder. Elizabeth, as a Soviet spy living in deep cover for decades in a suburb of Washington DC, commits murder and other crimes to fulfill her espionage mission. Carrie, as the ambitious head of a non-profit organization, married to the Machiavellian House Majority Whip, is complicit in his schemes, looking the other way when they extend to murder, and together they rise to the Oval Office. The women work closely with their male antihero counterparts to protect the club, the mission, or the power grab. This is a different version of the good wife. In Breaking Bad (2008–13), when Skyler was the good wife, the law-abiding citizen appalled by her husband’s criminal acts and the consequent jeopardy he placed their children in, she was Walt’s antagonist. There, the moral high ground represents an obstacle to the central narrative thread. In Sons of Anarchy, The Americans and House of Cards, the woman is her male co-star’s partner in crime. It seems that as long as she supports rather than opposes his agenda, she is not pathologized. If we consider gender performance, rather than gendered characters, Breaking Bad (2008–13) also conforms to the pattern of depicting the feminine character who is complicit in the masculine/male partner’s illegal designs. Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s young partner in the drug trade, and one of

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the most sympathetic characters on the show, is gendered feminine.21 For most of the series, he serves Walt’s needs, including killing for him, and deferentially calls him “Mr. White,” throughout. It is not until more than halfway through the final season (“Confessions” S5 E11, 2013) that Jesse realizes that Walt poisoned his girlfriend’s 8-year-old son, almost killing the boy. Moreover, he realizes that Walt used this incident to manipulate Jesse into standing with him against their distributor, whom Walt blamed for the poisoning. It is only at this point that Jesse turns against Walt, though in his case audience sympathy remains steadfast.22

Direct authorship TV critic Maureen Ryan (2013) of Huffington Post attributes the shoe horning of “women’s stories around the edges of the guy’s narratives,” which we witness in the characterization of Skylar White, Carmela Soprano, Betty Draper, and Lori Grimes, to the male-dominated organization of the television industry. As Ryan (2012) describes it: Television writers, showrunners and executives have been overwhelmingly white, straight, and male for decades, and those numbers hardly budge. Writers don’t write about things that don’t fascinate them, and executives generally don’t commission scripted shows that don’t speak to them on some level. Hence plumbing the depths of experience of women – or gay characters and people of color – just hasn’t been a consistent priority for ambitious cable dramas and populist fare alike. Ryan refers to the film and television industry’s direct authorship by white, straight males, who dominate the key creative roles of creator, executive producer, writer, and director. This feature of production culture shows little sign of abating, as borne out by San Diego State University’s annual reports, “Boxed In: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes on Television” (Lauzen 2013, 2018, 2019).23 If we compare the figures for the 2012–2013 season, the last season when the growth in scripted television was driven by broadcast and cable (Richter 2018), with the 2017–2018 season, we find that the percentage of women in key creative roles are largely unchanged, though there was some improvement in the 2018–2019 season when women filled 31% of key behind-the-scenes positions (see Table 1.2). The reports compare on-screen and behind-the-scenes numbers on prime-time network, cable, and streaming programs. In 2013, 2018, and 2019, respectively, women fill 28/27/31% of behind-the-scenes positions, chiefly as producers (38/40/40%), writers (34/25/35%), executive producers (27/26/29%), creators (24/21/25%), and directors (12/17/30%). The 2018–2019 season saw an improvement in the percentage of writers, but only because there was a decrease between the 2012–2013 and 2017–2018 seasons. It also saw a

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small increase in executive producers, but a sizable improvement in share of directors. The gender imbalance of these figures cloaks a larger problem. In order for women to create their own series and become showrunners, they must first prove themselves in the writers room and gain the patronage of established producers in the process. Women’s scarcity in the writers room means there are fewer women in the talent pipeline to become showrunners. This in turn means more stories are developed and written from a male perspective. Ryan quotes an anonymous writer who summarizes the problem: If women aren’t hired to write on staff they can’t be mentored. They can’t gain experience and they can’t move up and then ultimately create their own show. They can’t have overall deals [with studios]. . . . They are essentially shut out of the process. We are seeing the effects now of women being shut out of the process. (Ryan 2012) A production culture in which the dominance of white male writers is assumed to be balanced by the inclusion of one or two women renders this gender imbalance a nonstarter in most executive suites. As a result of women’s underrepresentation in the writers room, women comprised only 43/40/45% of major characters. As Table 1.2 demonstrates, the female characters were predominantly white (79/67/70%), though here we see some progress. Female characters were predominantly in their 20s and 30s (62/59/56%). In contrast, most male characters were in their 30s and 40s (58/56/59%). Only 14/16/18% of female characters were in their 40s. Significantly, male characters were more closely aligned with work, though here too we see improvement: 63/61/56% of males and 37/50/44% of females were shown at work, actually working. This is significant given the prominent role that work plays in many complex drama series and may reflect the larger number of female-centered series. The 2018 and 2019 reports examine the difference having women in key creative positions makes. The 2019 report finds that when a program has at least one female creator, women account for a significantly higher percentage of writers (65% vs. 19%) and directors (33% vs 23%) than in programs with only male creators. Gender inclusion at the top tier of creation results in a more gender balanced writers room, and a more gender inclusive directors pool. Similarly, when a program has at least one female executive producer, women account for a significantly higher percentage of major characters (46% vs 38%), achieving more gender equity in front of the camera. The showrunner, officially the executive producer, is usually the creator of the program. It is her/his job to oversee the production of the series, and s/he has final edit on all scripts. These figures support the idea that in the US, direct female creative control is crucial to generate work that locates women at the center of the story, conveys their desires

43% 79% 62% 58% 14% 63% 37%

major characters Female characters who are white Female characters in their 20s and 30s Male characters in their 30s and 40s Female characters in their 40s Male characters aligned with work Female characters aligned with work

40% 67% 59% 56% 16% 61% 50%

27% 40% 25% 26% 21% 17%

2017– 2018

27% 2017–2018 with at least one female EP 42% 45% 70% 56% 59% 18% 56% 44%

13% 2017–2018 with only male EPs 33%

31% 40% 35% 29% 25% 30%

65%

2018–2019 at least one female creator

23% 33% 2018–2019 2018–2019 only male EPs at least one female EP 38% 46%

19%

2018– 2018–2019 2019 only male creators

45%

2017–2018 at least one female creator

16%

2017–2018 only male creators

Source: Data drawn from “Boxed In: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes on Television” (Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film) Reports (Lauzen 2013, 2018, 2019).

28% 38% 34% 27% 24% 12%

2012– 2013

Women’s share of behind-the-scenes positions overall producers writers executive producers (EP) creators directors Women’s share of on-screen positions

TV Season

Table 1.2 A Comparison of Women’s Share of Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Positions on Primetime Network, Cable, and Streaming Programs in the 2012–2013 (Netflix) and 2017–2018 (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon) TV Seasons

The rise of difficult women in serial narrative television drama 17

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and perspectives, deals with candor about women’s experiences, and deliberately serves and targets a female audience. It is important to note that the rise of difficult women television series is due primarily to the mounting demand for content, which has opened up opportunities for female creators, executive producers, writers, and directors, some of whom have created female-centered complex dramas. The result has been a shift in the gender balance of power behind the scenes on specific productions, if not in the industry over all, as Table 1.2 indicates. This evidence suggests that female participation in key creative roles off-screen are essential to the telling of women’s stories. Despite the necessity for direct female authorship in the US context, it is not always sufficient.

The pathologized female antihero on Showtime What happens when women helm a female-centered complex narrative that revolves around a female antihero or difficult woman who is pathologized? The pathologizing of women can occur even when shows are largely written, and in some cases run, by women, although here the pathologizing is more subtle and unfolds in the context of a fully developed character. Lara Bradshaw (2013) argues that Showtime (SHO), in particular, has branded itself as the producer of female-centered narratives that pathologize the female body. Notable for this pattern is a slate of female-centered half-hour dramedies, comedy-drama hybrids, created by women. They include Weeds (2005–12) created by Jenji Kohan; United States of Tara (2009–11), created by Diablo Cody who ran the show with Jill Soloway; Nurse Jackie (2009–15), created by Liz Brixius, Linda Wallem, and Evan Dunsky, with Brixius and Wallem as showrunners; and The Big C (2010–13), created by Darlene Hunt. They feature middle-aged female antiheroes, mothers with some form of mental or physical illness that is somehow connected to their effectiveness.24 Tara Gregson’s dissociative identity disorder equips her with different personalities that are variously suited to help her cope with assorted situations. ER Nurse Jackie Peyton is a drug addict whose selfmedicated state at work secures the composure under pressure for which she is admired. Cathy Jamison’s stage four cancer diagnosis frees her to discover herself and live life in the little time she has left. Nancy Botwin in Weeds does not suffer from a malady, but as a drug dealer who endangers her family and brings her sons into the business, she is a non-normative mother. Here we see that antiheroic women are likely to be consigned to the half-hour comedy, to offset the impudence of self-involved women who do not serve men or put children first. We see a similar trope in Showtime dramas with women in traditionally masculine genres, such as Homeland (2011–20, SHO), a serial espionage thriller. Although Homeland’s CIA agent Carrie Mathison is neither middleaged nor a mother (until season 4 and then ambivalently so), she fits the Showtime rubric of a pathologized female whose body requires policing.

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A damaged character, Carrie is bipolar, and tends to go off her medication during high stakes investigations, because the meds dull her extraordinary ability to draw connections. This ultimately self-destructive move renders her virtually clairvoyant and in her own view more effective. Thus, the program draws a connection between her effectiveness and her depicted pathology. In this sense, Homeland is aligned with Showtime dramedies like Nurse Jackie. This phenomenon is not limited to SHO nor to US productions. Hannah Horvath, from the HBO comedy Girls (2012–17) suffers from OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). Detective Saga Norén of the Danish/Swedish co-production Bron/Broen (2011–18) and Sonya Cross, the corresponding character of American remake The Bridge (2013–14, FX), are both difficult women due to having undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome. Detective Marcella Backland of Marcella (2016–present, ITV) suffers from blackouts. Indirect authorship Taken on an individual basis, these are excellent series with exciting female characters and intriguing narratives, but taken as a whole, the need to pathologize women is disturbing, particularly when male antiheroes are studiously normalized. Television critic, Heather Havrilesky (2013), writing in The New York Times Magazine takes note of the pattern that on television women who are as troublesome as their male counterparts are often pathologized in ways that men are not. The men’s flaws are more likely to be romanticized or attributed to their genius. Similarly, Kat Stoeffel (2013) of New York Magazine maintains, “It’s as if there’d have to be something wrong with a woman for her to be as passionate or volatile or cruel as Don Draper or Stringer Bell were by nature.” What both critics are pointing to is that there is more cultural acceptance for men, than for women, who cross the line in the context of complex television narratives, a format noted for its iconoclastic characters. This is due to the impact of what I call indirect authorship, the creative influence of network imperatives, and the larger cultural milieu of the sexual and racial double standard that colors all aspects of social life. The larger cultural context of the society in which a show is produced shapes the gendered and raced assumptions that socially condition production personnel. Within this matrix of assumptions, which impacts production culture and the creative decisions of producers, white males are given wider latitudes of freedom than women or men of color. Though Stoeffel’s (2013) examples include Stringer Bell, it is striking that despite widespread critical acclaim, The Wire was only nominated for two Emmy awards, both for writing, and only won that once. The lack of critical recognition for what some critics, and academics, consider one of the best, if not the best, television series of all time, has been attributed to its dense plot, use of esoteric lingo, and virtually all-Black cast. It is the significance of the latter that concerns me here. When white men cross the line, there

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is more cultural acceptance in complex television narratives, as there is in American society at large. Indeed, there are different thresholds for white male and Black male deviance, as borne out by research that African Americans are subject to greater law enforcement suspicion, charged with more serious offenses and meted out harsher sentences than white people (Hinton et al. 2018). This pattern is grounded in a history of Black oppression that has pointedly aimed to discipline and punish Black people, with the effect of linking Blackness and criminality. Similarly, there is more cultural acceptance for (white) male deviance than for (white) female deviance within the limits of the cable drama. When women take up too much narrative space, they are punished, sometimes symbolically, as in the case of the Showtime programs discussed earlier that pathologize their lead characters. We find a similar pattern on The Killing (2011–13, AMC; 2014, Netflix), which like Homeland, positions a female protagonist in the traditionally masculine genre, in this case the police procedural. Detective Sarah Linden is as dogged in her murder investigation as she is because she is emotionally damaged and neglects her teenage son, a familiar depiction in the figure of the self-destructive male detective who alienates his family, as seen recently on season one of True Detective (2014– present, HBO). Despite their familial failures, the male detectives are not criticized by other characters as “bad fathers” while Linden is repeatedly berated for being a “bad mother.”25 The greater cultural acceptance for men, than for women, who cross the line also exists in society at large. Men are more likely to be excused, or even admired, for brutal and selfish behavior, while women are expected to be selfless and caring. Women are likely to be punished much more harshly for killing an intimate partner than men are (Chalabi 2019). Once incarcerated, women are disciplined more often and more harshly than men for low-level violations (Pupovac 2018). The bar for women to cross the line is alarmingly low even outside of prison. Recent research indicates that when women are seen consuming alcohol (beer), both men and women are more likely to perceive them as more intoxicated, more sexually available, and less human than men consuming alcohol or women drinking water. Less human was defined as “lacking self-control and morality” and driven by appetites (Reimer et al. 2019: 619). As the researchers conclude, “[t]hese results suggest that the presence of alcohol leads to perceptions of women as sexually disinhibited and that women’s sexual inhibitions are essential to ascriptions of humanity” (2019: 625). This has disturbing implications not only for the sexual aggression risk of women who drink, even to moderation, but also more generally for the denial of sexuality as a basic component of female subjectivity, and the ease with which women are judged and disparaged for engaging in activities judged as ordinary for men. The gendered double standard extends to leadership and work. In the corporate world, women are held to a different standard of good behavior. A 2014 study by linguist and tech entrepreneur Kieran Snyder (2014),

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done for Fortune.com, found two significant differences between job performance reviews given to high-achieving men and women in the technology sector. Managers, whether male or female, gave female employees more negative feedback than they gave male employees. Moreover, 76% of the negative feedback given to women included some kind of negative personality criticism, calling them “abrasive,” “aggressive,” “strident,” in other words, “difficult.” Only 2% of men’s reviews that included criticism made negative personality comments. This would seem to be a case where women are symbolically punished for not smiling, cold demeanor, and other behaviors that would not merit the term “difficult” when applied to men. But women are held to a different standard, even by people who consciously advocate gender equality. This disciplining is not limited to corporate leadership. In the realm of media, the sexual and gender double standard leads to a lower bar for the transgressions of the female antihero than the male antihero, and a stricter policing of femininity than of (white) masculinity. Unless they have a male partner in crime to legitimate their transgressions, that is.

Difficult women and the female antihero as counternarratives As I have outlined earlier, initially women who are as troublesome as their male counterparts are side-lined or censured for mental instability, a pattern consistent with the harsh social stigmatization of deviant women in society. Difficult Women is concerned with female-lead dramatic serials that for the most part do not pathologize women, side-line their stories, or otherwise succumb to the patriarchal script of diminishing women’s worth: Forbrydelsen, The Killing, Outlander, Westworld, Big Little Lies, Orange is the New Black (OITNB), Wentworth, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar and Vida. I consider hour-long dramas, although OITNB can be considered a dramedy. Though the flaws of female antiheroes typically do not rise to the level of transgressions committed by male antiheroes, they are nonetheless valued for how demanding, intractable, and morally ambiguous they can be. They include the women of Forbrydelsen, The Killing, Westworld, Big Little Lies, OITNB, and Wentworth, all of whom commit or attempt murder, but the character arcs and narrative develop in ways that retain our sympathies for the duration of the series. I am also concerned here with flawed female protagonists who are problematic heroes, difficult women. They include the women of Outlander, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, and Vida. Difficult women are complex, and the story revolves around them and female empowerment. All these protagonists are important in expanding the narrative limits accorded to women in our televisual imagination. These programs matter because counternarratives (oppositional texts) are essential to political change. Film and media scholars, and critical race theorists (Reid 1993; Zook 1999; Solórzano and Yosso 2002) contend that oppositional texts must be authored by and revolve around issues that matter to

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subordinate parties. In the case of difficult women on television, this means the series must have significant female creative control, or direct authorship, to produce counternarratives. In other words, women must exert creative control in the key production tasks of creating, executive producing, writing, and directing series. I ground my reading of texts where women are involved in key creative roles of production not from essentialism but from standpoint theory (see Harding and Hintikka 1983; Hartsock 1983; Collins 1986). As Jessica Ford points out, “. . . woman-authored . . . television series tend to highlight women’s stories, lives, and experiences . . . [Women makers] experience materially different working conditions to their male counterparts and these manifes[t] in their work” (2018: 22). The oppositional text constructs and centers the female gaze, both in the broad sense of female subjectivity or perspective, and specifically in relation to the body and sexuality. Reid (1993) and Zook (1999) identify three industrial practices that play significant roles in generating the oppositional gaze, namely narrative strategies, aesthetic strategies, and production culture. I consider here what these three key elements of creative control entail, and how they help to produce narratives that center female subjectivity. In subsequent chapters, I analyze how they are used to produce specific content that engages with and promotes feminist issues. Female subjectivity Narrative strategies Oppositional texts situate one or more complex female characters – including ones who are queer, gender nonconforming, or women of color – at the center of the narrative. She is the narrative agent. The story treats women’s experiences candidly. It constructs narratives grounded in the social complexities of women’s lived realities, including racial and ethnic specificity, neuro nonconformity, and varying body shapes. Events unfold to shed light on social forces that shape women’s lives. Her perspective guides our experience of events as it locates her gaze at the core of the story, for instance the conflicting demands of work and family, and the microaggressions she faces in everyday life. The narrative treats her sexuality as an essential element of her subjectivity. She does not use her sexuality to do her work nor does she necessarily hew to feminine conventions about appearance. The story conveys her desires and viewpoint. It consistently insists on the worth of girls and women regardless of their social status, and often their moral transgressions. It systematically rejects the narrow spectrum afforded by stereotypes to expand the repertoire of representations. In sum, it promotes female agency in a sustained manner and advances a progressive political vision by treating female agency as the calculus for how to craft a story and shoot a scene. In addition, the series deliberately serves and targets a female audience. The imagery addresses women as subjects so that female viewers need

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not identify with male subjects, or even white women if they are women of color, or otherwise have to read against the grain to feel empowered. Finally, it gives the audience access to her subjectivity through formal conventions such as viewer alignment, moral alignment, and relative morality. Aesthetic strategies Viewer alignment is a formal process determined by the degree to which the program focuses on her character. As the central protagonist of a complex narrative, she receives equal or greater screen time and occupies equal or greater screen space as male characters. The direction uses close-ups and point of view shots, sometimes first person narration, to access her thoughts and feelings. This gives the audience access to her subjectivity, fosters sympathy, and promotes moral allegiance (Smith 1995), even with morally ambiguous characters. Viewers are aligned with her perspectives and interests. When her behavior calls into question our moral evaluation of her, the series calls into play relative morality, that is, the protagonist is partially redeemed by being juxtaposed to a categorically heinous character with whom viewers are not aligned (Vaage 2016). Despite the moral boundary she crosses, a range of aesthetic strategies (framing, editing, scoring) conspires to uphold her relative morality and subjectivity, in keeping with the dynamics of complex television (Mittell 2015). Female gaze The female gaze constructs the body and sexuality so as to support female subjectivity. The female gaze reconceptualizes and counters the male gaze (Mulvey 1975). I draw on bell hooks’ (1992) related concept of the oppositional gaze to formulate the female gaze.26 hooks uses the term oppositional gaze to mean a form of critical spectatorship exercised by colonized Black people, particularly Black women, and directed at oppressive power structures as both an act of resistance and an exercise of agency. The oppositional gaze is a Black feminist gaze and is akin to my use of the female gaze as one that is critical of oppressive gendered power structures. It differs, however, in that hooks is largely writing about a position from which to read media images against the grain, whereas I am writing about an approach to produce media images that is critical of oppressive power relations. Narrative strategies The female gaze centers female desire and freedom, while it de-fetishizes nudity and rape. It acknowledges sexuality as an integral component of female subjectivity and agency and legitimates female sexual pleasure and freedom. Female sexual subjectivity in intimate scenes is constructed in the larger context of a narrative that legitimates female subjectivity. It formally

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constructs equality in sex scenes and models modes of desire that are seldom represented, by making female pleasure the calculus for how to shoot a sex scene. Scenes of sexual violence unfold through the gaze of the subordinate party and are de-eroticized by the deconstruction of the male gaze. I identify three ways that a scene can dismantle the male gaze. First, it can put the male gaze on display but refuse to align the audience with it through framing and editing. Second, it can decenter the male gaze by keeping rape scenes undepicted or off-screen, while showing its traumatic after effects. Third, it can denaturalize the male gaze by assigning it to a woman to demonstrate how it is an effect of social power rather than intrinsically one of gender. Lastly, the series can use nakedness to advance the narrative, where nakedness refers to a body that is unclothed to express her/his sexual subjectivity, as opposed to nudity, where her/his body is exposed as an object to be controlled by the male gaze (Berger 1972). Aesthetic strategies The depiction of nakedness maintains female subjectivity through the use of medium and wide shots that keep the expressive face in frame, two-shots that construct a visual equivalence, or an alternating and reciprocal focus on both bodies. Close-ups are used sparingly. This produces equivalent displays of male and female nudity in heterosexual sex scenes. Sexual violence can be de-fetishized in various ways. First, it can be implied, not shown, while its emotional after effects are demonstrated. Second, the scene can use actor blocking, sound design and point of view work to align us with her perspective. We see empathy-inducing shots of distress on her face and in her body posture and generally see events from her perspective as intolerable. Audience alignment and sympathy with her experience is central to the series. I discuss these processes in detail in Chapter 3. Production culture I am using production culture in two senses, narrowly to refer to industrial or professional practices, which correspond to direct authorship, but also broadly to refer to the larger cultural context in which production takes place, which corresponds to indirect authorship. Industrial production culture includes the gender and race composition of those who occupy key creative roles in television production: creators, executive producers, writers, and directors. Activism has resulted in some improvement at this level of direct authorship over the past decades, as Table 1.2 indicates. It also includes the institutional imperatives of the network producing the series, for instance, if it is a commercial or public service channel, and if commercial, whether it is ad-sponsored or subscriber based, and which demographic groups it targets. These imperatives are defined at the executive, if not the governmental, level, and constitute an elite form of direct authorship, to

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which subordinate groups have very limited access. In the broader sense, production culture refers to the larger cultural context in which a series is produced, the social conditions that determine life opportunities, which foster or limit access to participation in key creative or executive roles. It also refers to the impact of cultural assumptions, ensconced in social policy, that the production team, regardless of gender or race, brings to the work, for instance, whether a society provides universal child care or only privatized market solutions. Direct female authorship is necessary to counter patriarchal and racist assumptions, components of indirect authorship, embedded in the dominant US culture.

Direct female authorship that counters indirect postfeminist authorship In order to produce feminist counternarratives and model social change, significant female creative control or direct authorship must be present to push back against the dominant logic of postfeminism, a neoliberal ideology that emphasizes individualism, choice, and agency, while it limits consideration of larger structural forces that impinge on gender inequality, in effect repudiating the social justice thrust of feminism (Gill 2007, 2016; McRobbie 2009; Pruchniewska 2018: 3). This postfeminist outlook constitutes a form of indirect authorship or creative input, brought to the table by the social conditioning of American creative personnel, be they male or female. While questions about the gender politics of television are long standing among media scholars, they have become particularly pertinent in the context of the ascendance of postfeminism, and what Catherine Rottenberg (2018a) calls “neoliberal feminism.” Rottenberg dates the latter from 2012 and the mushrooming embrace of the feminist label by celebrities. Neoliberal feminism acknowledges that inequality persists, in such forms as sexual harassment and the gendered wage gap, but locates both source and remedy at the level of the atomized individual, not at the level of structural inequalities to be redressed by a social justice movement. It frames work–family balance as the ideal toward which career women must strive, often by outsourcing domestic labor to poor women and women of color, so white middle-class women can “lean in” (Sandberg 2013) and achieve happiness.27 Both speak to white (upper) middle-class women to the exclusion of women of color and the working class/poor, who are left to aspire to this status, while facing unacknowledged racial and class structural inequalities. Feminism is a dismal thing if not tied to a larger utopian vision of equality. How a television program negotiates the tension between framing gender inequality as an atomized personal problem or one grounded in social injustice depends on aspects of authorship, not only the direct authorship of women in key creative roles,28 and network imperatives, but also the indirect authorship of the larger cultural context of production. For networks, there are two factors at play. First, subscription-based networks,

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whether premium cable or streaming service, target populations with higher incomes and education that can afford the monthly fees and are drawn to sophisticated serial programming, including morally ambiguous featured characters. Second, if the network identifies a female demographic as a desirable population to court, as Starz did with Outlander (2014–present) and Vida (2018–20), it is more likely to gravitate toward female-centered programming that empowers the target audience. In the US, the need for direct female authorship through gender balanced key creative positions is recognized as a goal. Similarly, the impact of channel imperatives that target marginalized populations through the production of counternarratives is also seen as a step in the right direction, if not recognized as an element of authorship. But the indirect level on which authorship operates tends to be unacknowledged in the US. Larger cultural conditions shape the gender assumptions that frame social policy and the social conditioning of production personnel in ways that impact production culture and the creative decisions of producers. Whether or not policies like universal child care, universal health care (including access to birth control, abortion, neonatal, and postnatal care), and equal pay are ensconced in law and practice, influence the web of gender expectations people bring to the creative process. The significance of this indirect influence on production, or indirect authorship, only becomes apparent in international comparisons that include countries that rank high on the gender equity scale, such as Denmark, as discussed in Chapter 2, which compares the Danish thriller Forbrydelsen (2007–12, DR1) to its American remake, The Killing. The paradoxical confluence of the difficult women programming trend in the cultural moment of postfeminism and neoliberal feminism plays out in how programs thematize still relevant but unfinished goals of movement-oriented second wave and subsequent feminisms. While second wave feminists of color in the early 1980s (see Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Hull et al. 1982), and third wave feminists in the 1990s have argued that second wave feminist demands are rooted in white middleclass experience, lack intersectional perspective and fail to speak to the needs of women of color, poor women, and non-sexually conforming women, I argue, while acknowledging these limitations, particularly evident in the prevalence of white female protagonists, that this does not preclude their contribution to later feminist discourse. Second wave feminist demands for equal participation in the labor force, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, and for sexual freedom have much to offer all women (see also Chancer 2019). Second wave demands have not been fully realized, despite postfeminist claims to the contrary. The programs I analyze in this book raise second wave concerns, often through an intersectional perspective, in a contemporary context that demonstrates their continuing impact.

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Structure of the book Difficult Women offers an approach to the question of how the female gaze and female subjectivity are constructed that considers both direct and indirect authorship. The book analyzes select case studies of programs that raise second wave feminist demands, often with an intersectional approach. Each case study (Chapters 2–5) considers a different substantive feminist issue: equal participation in the labor force, the demand for sexual pleasure and freedom, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, and the need for intersectional perspectives. Chapters 2 to 4 deal with feminist issues that informed the second wave movement and continued to be relevant to subsequent waves of feminist organizing because they have wide-ranging impact on women of color and poor women despite their media associations with middle-class white women. They also remain unfinished, as witness the need for the #Me Too Movement, which has drawn attention to the persistence of sexual coercion in everyday life, including the workplace. Chapter 5 throws an intersectional spotlight on feminist concerns as critique and direction for development. It addresses how intersectional perspectives shift our understanding of these issues. Drawing on the analysis of case studies, which include ten US, Danish, and Australian programs, this work illustrates how female creative control in the key production roles of writing and producing are necessary but not always sufficient elements in the production of feminist texts. Both the larger cultural context and the specific industrial production culture in which they operate have consequences that shape the political character of programs. Using a feminist media studies framework, I focus on programs that air on basic cable (AMC, OWN, BET), premium cable (HBO, Starz), and streaming (Netflix) channels, or in the case of the Danish series on DVD, all of which operate with broader parameters for sex, nudity, and subject matter than broadcast channels, since I am interested in structures of looking. My focus is on what shows get right, situated in the context of their limitations, rather than on what they get wrong, so my case studies include programs that get a lot of things right. This approach is intended to identify visual codes, narrative tropes, conditions of production, and other creative strategies that effectively produce accounts of complex female subjectivity. Formulating these strategies not only brings into relief what happens when they are absent, and female subjectivity is undermined or erased, but also provides models that creative personnel can use to build on while expanding the repertoire of feminist practices. My focus is on the construction of complex female subjectivity. The flaws of difficult women typically do not rise to the level of the, often criminal, transgressions committed by both male and female antiheroes, but they can be abrasive, unlikeable, non-nurturing, and commit ethically questionable acts. It is an indication of the double standard that they would not be defined

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as difficult if their behavior were performed by men. Each case study considers a different substantive feminist issue and the unfinished nature of the feminist project(s). The book as a whole suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic changes that are still needed to accomplish social change. The concept of indirect authorship is key in understanding the role that institutional arrangements play in the tenacity of sexual inequality. What comes up in the US context is patriarchal indirect authorship, which we see in the postfeminist push back against the American Killing and in many shows’ centering of whiteness. Feminist indirect authorship only comes into play in the case of the Danish Killing, where direct female authorship plays a smaller role in the series’ feminist inflection. This is due to Danish institutional regard for gender equity, which is so different from the US context, where we need to both improve the numbers behind the camera and to push for extensive economic changes. Recognizing the importance of online and DVD distribution to American access to foreign programs I chart in this chapter, and the impact of indirect authorship, Chapter 2, “Economic Inequality and the Working Mother: The Killing in Denmark and the US” compares the Danish detective thriller, produced for Danish public broadcasting, to its commercial American adaptation. The comparison assesses the impact of different cultural contexts in constructing the character of the working mother. Despite strong direct feminist input at key creative points of production for both programs and similar narrative and aesthetic strategies that center a strong female protagonist, female agency is undermined in The Killing (2011–14, AMC, Netflix) through the postfeminist “bad mother” trope (Akass 2015: 752), which supplants Forbrydelsen’s (2007–12, DR1) left-wing critique of global capitalism and gender issues. The Killing’s reliance on the bad mother trope demonstrates the power of postfeminism (Tasker and Negra 2007) and neoliberalism as interpretive grids, or elements of indirect authorship, that limit feminist progress in the US. Forbrydelsen constructs a more forgiving image of the working mother, emanating as it does from a society that implemented universal childcare in the 1970s to minimize the gender gap, while the US relegated childcare to personal market solutions. Postfeminism’s discourse of choice fails to recognize that universal childcare is necessary for women’s full labor market participation on equal terms with men. This analysis indicates that the larger egalitarian cultural context of Scandinavia brings indirect feminist creative influence to bear on Forbrydelsen, an influence that counterintuitively outweighs The Killing’s greater direct female creative control in the context of neoliberal and postfeminist American imperatives. Chapter 3, “Female Sexual Pleasure and Freedom: Outlander and Westworld,” turns its attention to the second wave feminist demand for female sexual pleasure and freedom. Outlander (2014–present) is based on a book series written by a woman (Gabaldon 1991–present) and intended by the Starz network to target a female audience they identify as underserved by

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premium cable. Westworld (2016–present) is an HBO serial created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. This chapter considers how Outlander and Westworld rework conventional erotic coding to push back against aesthetic practices that privilege the male gaze in the depiction of nudity, sexual pleasure, and rape. Westworld does this from an intersectional perspective. The first part of the chapter focuses on Outlander, which centers female sexual desire and pleasure, and de-eroticizes rape, as illustrated in two key season one episodes, “The Wedding” and “To Ransom a Man’s Soul.” The first constructs a female gaze that is egalitarian and, as widespread female critical acclaim attests, erotically effective. The second explores the trauma of male-on-male rape from the perspective of the assaulted without eroticizing it. I not only analyze the ways Outlander pushes back against the facile use of rape as a plot twist to spike ratings on other cable series but also consider the limitations of the series as evidenced by these episodes, including the homophobic tone of the second episode and the serial’s heteronormativity and whiteness. The second part of the chapter examines Westworld, which does a more ambiguous job of centering female pleasure, while it is more ambitious in its construction of female antiheroes and its inclusion of Black leading characters. I analyze the dynamic tension, in Westworld, between fetishizing female nudity and de-eroticizing it, between exploiting male violence against women and female violence against those who exploit them, between the show’s blind casting and the intertwining narrative arcs of three featured Black characters who take power in what is essentially a slave uprising. Westworld’s deconstruction of the male gaze establishes the racial nature of that gaze, and how crucial it is to mechanisms of social control and punishment. Chapter 4, “Violence Against Women and Women Who Kill: Big Little Lies, Orange is the New Black, and Wentworth,” is a case study of three serials that treat another still relevant second wave feminist concern, but in an intersectional manner, namely the legal system’s failure to protect women from rape and domestic violence. Specifically, the disproportionately harsh treatment of women who kill to protect themselves or to avenge male violence is addressed in two prison narratives with intersectional concerns– Orange is the New Black (2013–19, Netflix) and Wentworth (2013–16 SoHo, 2017–present Showcase, AUS) – and a more hegemonic drama–Big Little Lies (2017–19, HBO). In Orange is the New Black, this plotline revolves around a Black woman, in Wentworth a white woman, and in Big Little Lies a number of wealthy (mostly white) women who use their class privilege to avoid incarceration. What they share is a thematic concern with the criminal justice system’s propensity to mete out not only severe punishment to women who kill abusers but also harsher punishment when women kill their partners than when men do. Big Little Lies demonstrates the crossclass, cross-race reach of this social justice gender gap. All three serials are produced by women, and two, OITNB and Big Little Lies, are adapted from books written by women (Kerman 2010; Moriarty 2014).

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Chapter 5, “Intersectionality: Beyond the White Female Subject,” analyzes three racially conscious dramas created, helmed, and written by women of color: Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, and Vida. These series produce onscreen and off-screen “safe spaces” where women of color can speak openly about power relations and empower each other to resist it. Being Mary Jane (2013–2019) is created by Mara Brock Akil and produced by BET, which targets Black audiences. It features an upper middle-class professional Black woman facing institutional aggression with the help of family and community. Queen Sugar (2016–present) is created by Ava DuVernay, produced by the Oprah Winfrey Network, directed exclusively by women, and adapted from a book by a woman (Baszile 2014). It features a Black middle-class family and community that is impacted by police brutality, mass incarceration, and other legacies of slavery. Vida (2018–2020) is created by Tanya Saracho for the Starz network as part of their strategy to target the underserved female demographic on premium cable. The writers and directors are predominantly women or people of color. The series centers around a Mexican-American family and community, as it explores colorism, gentrification’s impact on Latina/o communities, and female sexuality, heteroflexible, and queer. This chapter builds on earlier chapters’ consideration of second wave feminism’s limitations by illustrating how racism is inextricably connected to gender and specifically to the experience of Black and Latina women in American society. Chapter 6 draws some conclusions. Taken together, most of the programs examined share an overlapping concern with the direst consequences of the gender gap – discrepancies in social justice. Chapter 3 establishes the racial nature of the male gaze, which underlies mechanisms of social control and punishment. Chapters 2, 4, and 5 share a thematic concern with the social justice gap, and its racial and class permutations, mainly the legal system’s failure to protect women from rape and other forms of male violence. Chapters 2 and 4 are further concerned with the criminal justice system’s propensity to dismiss violence committed against women, particularly when they are poor. Chapters 4 and 5 are critical of the legal system’s biased treatment of people of color, specifically the court’s propensity to mete out harsher punishment for women of color who kill, and its failure to protect men of color from police brutality, respectively. This chapter closes with some speculative remarks about the relation between the dramas treated in Difficult Women and some of the female-centered dramedies and satires created by women that likewise deal with issues of gendered power.

Notes 1 I use the terms female hero and female antihero, as well as their counterparts male hero and male antihero) to suggest that the narrative function of the hero can be played by both male and female characters. The hero is the subject of the action, the narrative agent who makes things happen, whereas the narrative

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function of the heroine is to be the object of the action, one to whom things are done. In contrast, the female hero saves herself. This move is intended to thwart the gender coding of the hero as exclusively male territory. I use the term actor in similar fashion. In 2019, the number of scripted television programs reached 532 (Koblin 2020). This chapter is a revised and expanded edition of a talk I gave at the Consoleing Passions Conference in 2014, “The Stigmatizing of the Female Antihero on Original Cable Series, or How to Manage the Unmanageable Woman.” My discussion of industrial changes is indebted to Gitlin (2000b); Lotz (2007); and Mittell’s (2015) excellent work. In the early eighties, NBC had neither ratings nor critical hits, so they had little to lose by taking a risk with shows like Hill Street Blues. When ABC was the last place network, it introduced Moonlighting (1985–89), thirtysomething (1987– 91), China Beach (1988–91), and Twin Peaks (1990–91). John Caldwell (1995) attributes much of ABC’s loss of market share to the then upstart network Fox. Critical consensus at the time of broadcast was that Twin Peaks, like Hill Street Blues before it, was “too good” for television. In 2017, Spacey was fired for sexual misconduct allegations. Fuckability is Ally Sheedy’s term, in Searching for Debra Winger, for what you have left when you strip female characters of “humor, intelligence, talent, imagination, [and] bravery . . .” in Martha Plimpton’s words (Arquette 2002). Both the BBC and iTV are government funded and ad-free networks. For this reason, Jane Feuer (2005) argues, serials such as Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–05) and Friday Night Lights (NBC 2006–08, The 101 Network 2008–11) that followed the model set by thirtysomething by exploring family and romantic relationships never attained the recognition of programs that worried about constrained masculinity such as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. I would add that this critical neglect transpired even in the wake of both series’ Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series. In current broadcast, This Is Us (ABC 2016–present) follows in this vein. There are exceptions, for instance, media scholars Kim Akass and Janet McCabe (2004); Diane Negra (2004); and Deborah Jermyn (2009) have taken Sex and the City seriously as a text with cultural relevance, particularly in relation to postfeminism. Damages was nominated twice for Outstanding Drama Series, garnering two wins for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Glenn Close. Other feminist scholars have written about “difficult women” in relation to a specific series or a group of quality programs, sometimes acknowledging Nussbaum’s (2013) twist on Martin’s (2013) term. See for instance Kelly 2013; Brooks 2019; and Köller 2019. See also Imre (2009) for an analysis of how the gender dynamics of specific difficult women and difficult men series are inflected in culturally specific ways in Eastern Europe. Both Carrie and Samantha remain childless by choice throughout the run of the series and in the films that follow. It is exceedingly rare for female characters to reject motherhood, a status Betty-Despoina Kaklamanidou (2019) calls “voluntarily childless women.” They include Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77, CBS), Cristina Yang of Grey’s Anatomy (2005–present, ABC), and Claire Underwood of House of Cards. Sex and City’s focus on female friendship follows from precedents set by close friends Mary and Rhoda (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1970–77), Christine and Mary Beth (Cagney & Lacey, 1981–88), and The Golden Girls (1985–1992) – Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia. Vince Gilligan reported this in The Writers’ Room (2013–14) (1.1, aired July 29, 2013, Sundance Channel).

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17 On June 26, 2014, both the “I Hate Skyler White” page and the “Fuck Skyler White” page had over 31,000 likes each. 18 Both characters are dispatched and narratively punished in a grim manner. Betty Draper dies of cancer, just as she begins to come into her own, and Lori Grimes dies after an emergency C-section, only to rise and be put down by her son. 19 See Vaage’s chapter, “The Antihero’s Wife: On Hating Skyler White, and on the Rare Female Antihero,” for a similar critique. 20 The heterosexual antihero couples in Sons of Anarchy and House of Cards commit crimes for personal gain and to society’s detriment. The straight antihero couple in The Americans revolves around Russian spies who have spent decades passing as Americans, but the series makes clear that they act from patriotic, not selfish motives, that they view themselves as protecting their homeland from nuclear annihilation in the years leading up to détente and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and played as they are by American actors, their actions are more sympathetic. 21 Thanks to Jane Glaubman for pointing out the importance of Jesse’s gendering on the show (Q&A, Console-ing Passions Conference, “Challenging Normative Gender Roles in Television” panel, April 10, 2014). 22 Jesse’s feminization extends beyond his relationship with Walt to his romantic life. He is willing to give up the drug trade for the love of a woman. Later, when he realizes that the woman and child that he lives with are in danger because of his presence, he leaves to keep them safe and sacrifices his own happiness for their welfare. 23 In light of these disparities, in 2015 the ACLU in Los Angeles launched an investigation into widespread gender discrimination against female directors in film and television. This led them to ask state and federal agencies to investigate the same. In 2017, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission entered negotiations with the major film studios, which are responsible for most television productions to redress systemic discrimination against women directors (Thomas and Goodman 2017). This will impact film, a director’s medium, more significantly than television, a producer’s medium, but it may set the pattern for other needed structural changes. See also the “Shit People Say to Women Directors & Other Women in Film” on the social media site tumblr for an indication of the formal and informal flak women get in Hollywood when they direct, produce, or write (entries from 2015–18). See https://shitpeoplesaytowomendirectors.tumblr.com/ 24 Although Walter White’s cancer precipitates the central narrative thread, his descent into a life of crime, through most of the series he is in remission and the cancer recedes into the background. 25 Sometimes the punishment for deviant female characters is more direct, as in the “bury your gays” trope, or more specifically “dead lesbian syndrome.” 26 In her essay on the oppositional gaze, hooks uses the term “female gaze,” quite differently from how I use it in this book. She uses it to refer to the complicity of (Black) women when they identify with and embrace the negation of (white) women in Classical Hollywood film to willingly subject themselves to the male gaze. More importantly, it includes a concomitant willingness to ignore the absence of Black women or their relegation to the status of props in the service of white femininity. 27 Though Rottenberg (2018b) acknowledges that postfeminism breaks with feminism, she claims that neoliberal feminism does not since it admits still-existing gender inequality. Where the latter differs from movement-based feminism is that it denies the sociocultural or institutional grounding of gender inequality. She advocates for a more aggressive feminism – one that builds on celebrity

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and neoliberal feminism’s embrace of the label feminist, as well as the affective appeal of the latter’s push for a happy work–family balance – a mass movement that confronts sexist policies and the neoliberal agenda that prioritizes profits over people. 28 See Moseley et al. (2016) for essays on female production roles on British television.

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Xena: Warrior Princess. 1995–2001. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. USA: syndicated. The X-Files. 1993–2002, 2016–18. Television Series. Seasons 1–9, 10–11. USA: FOX. Zook, Kristal Brent. Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Economic inequality and the working mother Economic inequality and the working motherEconomic inequality and the working mother

The Killing in Denmark and the U.S.

Over the past decade, feminist politics have surfaced in a growing number of television serials that revolve around “difficult women,” complex female characters, often flawed and multi-dimensional. “Difficult women” are the counterparts of “difficult men,” the term Brett Martin (2013) uses to describe both the antihero protagonists and the creators of complex television narratives about men navigating morally murky pathways as they deal with their relationship to work, and the vicissitudes of masculinity in the wake of feminist and queer challenges to male dominance. The flaws and transgressions of difficult women or female antiheroes typically do not rise to the bad behavior committed by difficult men or male antiheroes, which includes cold-blooded murder, and other crimes (see Buonanno 2017; Tally 2016; Vaage 2015). Indeed, in some cases, the attributes associated with difficult women – not smiling, unwillingness to form lasting attachments, cold demeanor, and unglamorous appearance – would not merit the term when applied to men.1 In this chapter, I address these questions: how does stepping outside the confines of the US embrace of neoliberalism shed light on how economic structures constitute female agency? How do texts from more egalitarian societies construct female agency differently? What lessons can we reap from the social practices and cultural productions of a more unbiased society? In what follows, I compare Danish thriller Forbrydelsen (DR1, 2007-12) with its American remake, The Killing (2011–14). I conclude by identifying some drawbacks to a feminist approach that attributes the shaping of female agency mainly to direct female creative control, without adequate consideration of the economic restructuring needed to actualize equal opportunity and rework commonsense assumptions about gender equality. As in the case of Denmark, when a society institutionalizes gender equality in significant ways, it shapes the working assumptions of the production team and production culture. I argue that this more egalitarian outlook constitutes a form of indirect authorship or indirect feminist creative input, brought to the table by the social conditioning of Danish creative personnel, be they male or female.

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I first provide an overview of Forbrydelen’s roots in the tradition of Nordic noir and the “house rules” of Danish public broadcasting (DR), then address how The Killing adopts some of these protocols but disregards others. Second, I compare the season 3 narrative arcs of both series to show how these changes play out in the drama. I outline how the adaptation shifts the onus of blame from the machinations of power by global political and economic elites, to construct individual bad actors – deviant individuals, “bad mothers,” and corrupt officials up to the municipal level. Third, I assess the importance of narrative strategies, aesthetic strategies, and production cultures to the construction of female agency in both series. Complicated protagonists populate the quality dramas that Jason Mittell (2015) calls, “complex television,” scripted narratives characterized by long-form storytelling, innovative storytelling strategies, and extended character depth. In the web-enabled accelerated pace of transnational television distribution of the past decade, US access to foreign complex television has expanded dramatically, providing legal channels through which to watch foreign media marked by compelling cultural differences, including gender differences. Some of these programs are Scandinavian detective serials, for example, Wallander (TV4, 2005–13, Sweden), Forbrydelsen, Borgen (DR1, 2010–13, Denmark), and The Bridge (Broen/Bron, SVT1, DR1, 2011-18, Denmark and Sweden).2 In the United States, the depiction of difficult women has been subject to gender-specific restrictions, such as narrative hostility aimed at working mothers, who put their work first. The understanding of crime is often cast in neoliberal terms: crime is attributed to individual pathology, without consideration of how the class system contributes to who is likely to be victimized and which criminals are likely to escape justice. In contrast, Scandinavian programs sanction a broader range of behavioral norms for women and locate crime in the larger context of the erosion of the welfare state by neoliberal policies that seek to eradicate or privatize social services. These competing notions are significant because they challenge normative gender ideologies and class assumptions. Anglo-American feminist media studies’ discussion of female representation on television centers on the dynamics of postfeminism, a set of contradictory ideologies that take feminist gains for granted while insisting that women are neoliberal subjects free to choose what they want within a capitalist framework (Gill 2007, 2016; Tasker and Negra 2007). It is instructive to analyze how the appraisal of choices available to women changes when the capitalist framework itself comes under challenge, as it does in Scandinavian programs. Film and media studies research, as well as critical race theory, supports the idea that female creative control is crucial to generate work that locates women at the center of the story, articulates experiences common to the group from their perspective, and advances a progressive political vision, to promote egalitarian social change (Reid 1993; Solórzano and Yosso 2002;

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Zook 1999). This has been understood to mean direct female creative control. Media scholars Mark Reid and Kristal Brent Zook identify three industrial practices as significant in generating this content: narrative strategies, aesthetic strategies, and production culture, which I consider later. Scandinavian countries are among the most egalitarian in the world. Denmark ranks fourteen out of 153 countries in the 2020 Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum (Crotti et al. 2020). The other Scandinavian countries are in the top 4. Consequently, their media productions make different assumptions about gender norms and the significance of social class than the fifty-third ranked United States. Detective thriller Forbrydelsen comes out of the production culture of Danish public broadcasting, which is shaped by a set of principles called “dogmas” that wed popular entertainment formats with a public service mandate (Redvall 2016). Its American remake, The Killing, comes out of the production culture of US commercial television (AMC, Netflix). By comparing the Danish text with its American remake, we can more readily identify how economic relations structure gender inequality in the United States and what is needed to change that. Specifically, we can see how the larger egalitarian cultural context of Scandinavia brings indirect feminist creative influence to bear on Forbrydelsen, an influence that outweighs The Killing’s greater direct female creative control in the anti-egalitarian cultural context of the neoliberal and postfeminist United States.

Forbrydelsen Forbrydelsen was created by Søren Sveistrup for DR, Denmark’s main public service broadcaster, and falls into the “emerging crime genre” of Nordic noir, which is constituted by a constellation of factors. It draws on a form of Swedish crime fiction that weds the crime drama to social criticism (Hill and Turnbull 2016: 1), specifically, a series of crime novels (1965–75) by the female and male writing team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who in turn were influenced by Ed McBain’s police procedurals (Hill and Turnbull 2016: 4). Nordic noir became a transnational brand with the global prominence of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, of which, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008) is his best known. In Death in a Cold Climate, Barry Forshaw (2012) argues that Nordic noir, also known as Scandi noir, is particularly attuned to Scandinavian anxieties over a loss of faith in the utopian welfare state, as it faces subsumption by global capitalism (Arvas and Nestingen 2011). It is Nordic noir’s belief in the desirability of the welfare state, which endures in Scandinavian countries in more robust form than in the United States, that cultural theorist Bruce Robbins (2017) argues constitutes a key part of its international appeal (see also McElroy et al. 2018: 182). According to him, the central protagonist of Forbrydelsen, detective Sarah Lund, represents the welfare state working for the common good in her dogged determination to see justice done (see also Nestingen 2016: 166).

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The ethical dimension of Nordic noir lends itself to Danish public television drama’s mandate to explore social issues in an engaging manner (Hansen and Waade 2017). Since the 1990s, the latter operates under a set of dogmas that include “double-storytelling” (Redvall 2016), a “three-plot narrative structure” that weaves a political plot and a family plot, or melodrama, around a case-based crime plot (Agger 2011; Creeber 2015: 27). The overall plot must contain an ethical dimension (Redvall 2011 cited in Agger 2012: 40; Redvall 2013a: 230; Redvall 2016: 33). Nordic noir has been influenced by Anglo-American novels, film noir, and complex television (Mittell 2015), notably Twin Peaks (1990–91, ABC). It has in turn influenced Anglo-American productions such as Broadchurch (ITV, 2013–17, UK) and True Detective (HBO, 2014–present) (Creeber 2015). The detectives are morose, brooding, emotionally restrained, and ordinary people who may be seen to embody “Nordic melancholy” (Waade 2017). Two detectives with different approaches are forced to work together, as in the pairing of Forbrydelsen’s rational, methodical Sarah Lund and impulsive, aggressive Jan Meyer (Creeber 2015: 23). In this way, Nordic noir reverses the feminine and masculine stereotypes of crime fiction (Agger 2011). The two detectives provide contrasting narrative perspectives as the case unfolds, in and around Copenhagen in November, timed to accentuate the fading light and rainy weather (Creeber 2015). The stark, gloomy landscape reflects the loneliness and isolation of the lead detective (Waade and Jensen 2013). The murder mystery is the catalyst around which other storylines develop in Forbrydelsen, and it unfolds over the course of the season-long investigation. Beneath the calm exterior lies a web of secrets and violence. In this universe, everything is connected through interweaving storylines (Creeber 2015: 24). The crime story centers on the family, either its destruction or absence, and the political agents that withhold information critical to the investigation to hide their own wrongdoing. In the course of the investigation, we learn about the detectives’ private lives, and how they clash with the rigors of a demanding job. Female investigators are unmarried, sometimes single mothers, workaholics who put their private lives on hold, looking for moral justice for the crime victims and their families. The conflicts these strong female characters experience between work and private life are politically tinged (Brunsdon 2013; Helles and Lai 2017; Turnbull 2014), as are the crimes themselves. At the end, the crime is solved, thanks in large part to the brilliant connections made by the lead detective. But the moral and social problems that produced the crime are still with us, as the ending demonstrates.

The Killing Forbrydelsen was exported to other countries, such as the United Kingdom where it was screened with subtitles, to great acclaim. But it was remade in

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the United States, not only because American audiences are resistant to subtitles (Kaufman 2014 cited in Berger 2016: 158) but also because AMC wanted to brand it as an AMC original drama (Akass 2015: 744). Reflecting the commercial production culture of AMC, the remake, translated as The Killing, jettisoned the left-wing critique that the welfare state is being systematically eroded by the demands of global capital, while retaining other structural tropes of Nordic noir, such as the reversal of feminine and masculine stereotypes and the stark, moody setting. As Robbins (2017) observes, the critique of the state in the United States is rooted in right-wing ideologies and derives from neoliberalism. While Nordic noir decries neoliberalism’s dismantling of the welfare state, the dominant American critique of the state calls for social services and regulations to be cut back in favor of the free market.3 The Killing limits its critique of the state to municipal level corruption motivated by the personal ambition of local elites and shifts its overriding concern to “bad mothers.”4 The trope of the “bad mother” plays prominently in The Killing, as Kim Akass (2015) has argued. As in the Danish series, Sarah Linden is an erratic single mother who puts her demanding casework above taking care of her teenage son, Jack. In the first 2 seasons, Linden’s social worker and Jack’s father tell her she is neglecting her son. Their criticism suggests that this is why Jack is getting into trouble. In Forbrydelsen, Sarah Lund’s behavior toward her son meets with little comment from other characters. Indeed, her behavior is consistent with that of a woman who is “freed from tired old [gender] tropes, particularly those related to motherhood . . .” (Akass 2015: 747). But in The Killing, Sarah Linden is subject to continuous harsh criticism by other characters, including her partner, Stephen Holder who, although not a parent himself, repeatedly advises her on how to be a better mother (see also Kohnen 2013). In an interview, executive producer Veena Sud contextualized this depiction as intended to create a realistic, yet sympathetic, depiction of how easy it is to fail as a single mother, in contrast to more conventional depictions of working mothers who can seamlessly do it all. She states that “. . . Linden . . . [is] a single mother, she’s failing, she’s trying her best . . . I know how difficult it is to balance that . . .” before going on to condemn the caretaking double standard as follows: “We can have a man . . . [who is] a shitty father, but no one ever demonizes him for that. But if a woman is a mother and she makes one misstep, she becomes this awful creature. And so it was really important to me that Sarah Linden be an imperfect mother and represent the truth of what many of us experience . . . sometimes we become very obsessed by our work” (Littlefield 2014: 33). As I watched this series, I took Holder’s criticism of Linden’s mothering as a poor reflection on him. Although the program may have invited such a

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response from viewers, it is clear that at least some portion of the audience agreed with him. Sarah Linden made Yahoo’s “10 Worst Moms on TV” list (Cohn 2012). Despite Sud’s authorial intent, a vocal segment of the audience saw only a “bad mom” and the very thing she was pushing against came to the fore. Postfeminism served as “an interpretive grid” for segments of the audience (Mizejewski 2005: 122–123). The mothers of troubled teens, murdered teenage girls in seasons 1 through 3, or murderous teenage boys in season 4, are also subject to outright narrative hostility for their failure as mothers. As Akass (2015: 748) observes, this animus is often aimed at “women who choose self-fulfillment and/or a return to work after childbirth over domestication.” For example, season 3 shifts the onus of criticism from Linden to the mother of a missing teenage girl, Kallie, who turned to prostitution to secure money for a room to sleep in when she got into the killer’s car. Even Linden admonishes the mother. Although the pastor who runs a teen shelter points out that facilities like his and detox units are underfunded or shut down, there is no discussion of the lack of social services that contributed to the precarious position of Kallie and others like her. Responsibility falls exclusively on the mother. Amanda Greer (2017) attributes this representational strategy to the “new momism,” the term coined by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels (2004) in The Mommy Myth, to refer to the highly romanticized expectation that a woman cannot be fulfilled without being an unfailingly selfless mother. This totalizing demand leaves no room for maternal ambivalence.5 Within the rhetoric of choice, the only right choice for a woman is full-time, intensive mothering.6 Linden’s choice to prioritize work, as well as her inability to sustain a personal relationship, is narratively explained by her abandonment by her own mother at the age of five, and subsequent transition to foster care. The censure of others undermines her character and undercuts her agency. In stark contrast, Lund’s mother is both present in her life and a sympathetic character. Forbrydelsen refuses to explain Lund’s inability or unwillingness to form lasting attachments and manages to do so without making her unsympathetic.7 The creator, Sveistrup, executive producer Piv Bernth, and star Sofie Gråbøl each have their own version of her backstory, but it is never recounted in the plot. The series is more concerned with larger problems, with Lund’s extraordinary instincts as an investigator, and the dogged detective work that unravels a dense mystery. The Killing’s narrative departures from the Danish series are symptomatic of the postfeminist turn in American television and the larger culture (Tasker and Negra 2007). Postfeminism is a neoliberal ideology that emphasizes individualism, choice, and agency, while it limits consideration of larger structural forces that impinge on gender inequality (Gill 2016; Pruchniewska 2018: 3). Postfeminism’s discourse of choice camouflages the politics of a society that fails to recognize that universal childcare is necessary for women’s full labor market participation on equal terms with

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men (Akass 2015: 752). The different approaches to the childcare needs of working women date back to policy choices made in the 1970s, when the United States and Denmark responded differently to increases in the labor force participation of women. In Denmark, childcare and paid parental leave were universalized and expanded, reducing the opportunity costs of child bearing, asymmetrically borne by women. But in the United States, second-wave feminist demands for universal childcare were rejected and relegated to the private sector (Stansell 2010). Postfeminist ideology demands that women negotiate the conflicting demands between home and work as individuals, without making demands on the state. The individual bears full responsibility, regardless of the costs of inequality (Gill 2007: 163). Season 3 What follows is a textually based comparison of the narrative arcs of season 3 of Forbrydelsen (2012) and The Killing (2013), which clearly raise issues of class, whether directly or indirectly. Both revolve around the murder and sexual abuse of indigent teenage girls by a serial predator. Season 3 of Forbrydelsen is set in the context of the post-2008 financial crisis. It opens with the murder of a Latvian sailor and the kidnapping of nine-year-old Emilie, both linked to multinational shipping and oil conglomerate, Zeeland, whose CEO is Emilie’s father, billionaire Robert Zeuthen. The kidnapper wants revenge for the death of his daughter, thirteen-yearold Louise Hjelby, during his absence at sea. Louise’s mortally ill mother had arranged to have the orphan placed in a child welfare home run by Zeeland, where she was living when she was murdered. To recover Emilie, Lund investigates Louise’s death, only to learn that the original investigation into her murder was suppressed by the Justice Minister, who dismisses Louise as “an orphan girl who no one would miss anyway” (S3 E10). Zeeland is important to the Prime Minister, who is facing a tight re-election race, and the imminent loss of jobs if Zeeland relocates production abroad. Zeeland’s transnational mobility has a stranglehold on the national government, which is keen to keep jobs at home. In the course of the investigation, Lund discovers that Louise was raped and murdered by Niels Reinhardt, Zeuthen’s right-hand-man, who administers Zeeland’s global Children’s Welfare Fund. Reinhardt used his position to troll for victims among the minors under his care. After Emilie is recovered, Zeeland’s Board of Directors, fearful of a scandal, demands the shutdown of the Hjelby investigation in exchange for keeping jobs in Denmark. The Board protects Reinhardt to protect Zeeland’s stock price, and the Prime Minister protects Zeeland to secure his re-election. A remorseless Reinhardt confesses to Lund that for decades he has been preying on children and boasts his intention to continue. Not only will he be free but also the stories of his indigent victims will be erased. This outcome is unbearable to Lund, who earlier saved Reinhardt’s life. Exercising situational morality, she executes him on the spot. The series finale finds Lund on the lam, the

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Prime Minister who aligned himself with private capital winning re-election, and a Board member telling Zeuthen they are only postponing a corporate move abroad by a few years. As Andrew Nestingen (2016: 166) points out, in Nordic noir we see how “factual knowledge is constructed by the state to serve the interests of its officials and the groups they represent.” The social contradictions between the need for justice and the need for jobs, in the context of multinational capital’s political leverage, lead the political elite to protect the interests of the economic elite, all the while advancing their own interests, and concealing how class conflict plays out. Nordic noir television typically portrays the seamy side of politics and corporations and seeks to provoke public debate about conflicting moral values and what happens when the duties of the state come into conflict with the machinations of power (Agger 2011). When the class interests of economic elites and political elites align, the interests of indigent crime victims are surreptitiously cast aside. Season 3 of The Killing (2013) draws loosely on Forbrydelsen. Set in Seattle, it involves the murder and sexual abuse of young teenage runaways who engage in casual prostitution to survive. These crimes are related to a past case that Linden investigated with her then partner James Skinner, the current police commander. The old case led to a death-row conviction, but new crimes seem to have been perpetrated by the same killer, throwing into doubt the old arrest. Linden returns to work the case and ties the current murders to seventeen others. The investigation leads to another arrest, but Holder and Linden come to question the suspect’s guilt. Their doubt comes to the fore when Linden sees Skinner’s daughter wearing the trophy ring of a murder victim. When Linden confronts him, Skinner confesses to the murders and to using his official status to pin the crimes on others, dismissingly referring to his victims as “human garbage” (“The Road to Hamelin” S3 E12, 2013). Skinner goads Linden, insists she knew all along it was him and lies about killing a ten-year-old boy. Linden shoots him. This narrative arc only concludes in season 4 when Linden confesses to killing Skinner, whose death has been ruled a suicide. The mayor steps in to stifle Linden’s declaration because it would reveal the crimes of a high-ranking detective and reflect badly on the department and his administration. In contrast to Forbrydelsen, the municipal political elite protect Linden and Skinner to avoid a scandal that would adversely affect their hold on power, without implicating the interests of economic elites. Thus, corrupt municipal authorities bear the brunt of responsibility for the miscarriage of justice, but there is no connection drawn to larger economic forces. In the United States, the dominant critique of the state is critical of government not corporate interests. Narrative strategies The implications of the changes made to the American adaptation become clearer if we consider the three key elements of creative control identified earlier as significant in generating female subjectivity and feminist content:

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narrative strategies, aesthetic strategies, and production culture. Forbrydelsen and The Killing use some of the same narrative strategies, including the “three-plot narrative structure.” This paradigm situates a complex female character at the center of the narrative – a non-glamorous detective who doggedly works to uncover the killer. She does not use her sexuality to advance her work (McCabe 2013: 125),8 and the story conveys her desires and perspectives. Both series treat women’s experiences candidly, and events unfold so as to shed light on forces that shape women’s lives in the workplace, for instance the conflicting demands of work and family, and the microaggressions they face at work from male colleagues and superiors. The Killing reinforces Linden’s formidable detective skills, and Forbrydelsen shows men at work doubting Lund’s instincts, only to be proven wrong. However, The Killing undercuts this dynamic with the “bad mother” trope. A postfeminist framework eliding the significance of class constitutes the major narrative strategy difference between the two series. How this plays out bears some discussion. The feminist approach of Forbrydelsen includes a consideration of how gender issues are inflected by the class structure. The victims of sexual predation are thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls who are poor. In Forbrydelsen, they are orphaned wards of the state and recipients of corporate charity. When they disappear or are found dead, there is no one with resources to pressure the police for answers. In contrast, when the young daughter of an upper-class family disappears, a great deal of political pressure is exerted to secure a priority investigation. The rapist–murderer has been able to act with impunity for decades precisely because of his wealth and position. Season 3 threatens to end with the killer’s exoneration due to his affiliation with corporate power. This narrative considers how members of the elite have access to resources to protect their interests that the indigent lack. Their capacity to defend their privileged position renders destitute girls more susceptible to sexual predation and more likely to have their stories silenced. The narrative, however, insists on the girls’ value and worth, as seen through the eyes of their families and Lund, particularly when she executes Reinhardt. Unlike Forbrydelsen, The Killing takes a postfeminist approach, which is to say it stresses individualism, choice, and agency, while it simultaneously limits consideration of larger structural forces that impinge on gender inequality, such as class. The thirteen- and fourteen-year-old victims are both homeless and destitute. They turn to intervals of prostitution to pay for a place to sleep when they cannot secure one of the limited number of beds in shelters. Both their poverty and their sex work render them more vulnerable to sexual abuse and devaluation. As in Forbrydelsen, however, the narrative insists on the teens’ value and worth as seen through their eyes and the eyes of Linden and Holder. They are eking out a living within decidedly limited options. The onus of guilt, however, is placed on individual, sexually abusive men – from the probation officer who abuses his position

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to the serial killer – and the “bad mothers” who neglect their kids. Neither elites nor their economic interests are shown to figure in the teens’ destitution or abuse. Aesthetic strategies The Killing borrows heavily from Forbrydelsen’s Nordic noir aesthetic. Although The Killing is not set in a Nordic locale, it exploits established aesthetic conventions associated with the Pacific Northwest, dating back to Twin Peaks (Lyons 2004), a seminal text for Nordic noir and an acknowledged influence on Sveistrup (Redvall 2013b: 165–166). The two series I am concerned with here unfold in the cold, gray, rainy cityscapes of Copenhagen and Seattle in late Fall, respectively. Stark urban streets awash in rain and dark lighting schemes serve to mirror the lead detective’s brooding temperament, emotional restraint, and isolation. The Killing even hired Forbrydelsen’s Danish composer, Frans Bak, to score the show. The two also share aesthetic strategies drawn from complex television. As the central protagonist of a complex narrative, Sarah’s (Lund and Linden) subjectivity is firmly established. She receives equal or greater screen time, and she occupies equal or more screen space as male characters, in the heavily male police force. According to Eva Redvall’s (2013b: 173) ethnographic study of Danish television drama at DR, “Sarah Lund’s plot normally takes up around 30 scenes or half an episode.” Viewers are aligned with her perspectives and interests. The direction uses close-ups and point-of-view shots to access Lund and Linden’s thoughts and feelings, to foster sympathy, and to promote moral allegiance (Smith 1995). When Lund and Linden’s behavior calls into question our moral evaluation of them, as it does when they commit an extrajudicial execution, the show calls into play relative morality, that is, the protagonist is partially redeemed by being juxtaposed to a categorically heinous character with whom viewers are not aligned (Vaage 2015). Forbrydelsen highlights Lund’s outrage, disbelief, and ambivalence, to keep us aligned with her even after she commits murder. The Killing has Linden confessing to her crime, seeking to restore justice, only to have the confession squelched by municipal authorities. Despite the moral boundary Sarah (Lund and Linden) crosses, a range of aesthetic strategies (framing, editing, scoring) conspire to uphold her relative morality and subjectivity, in keeping with the dynamics of complex television (Mittell 2015). Production culture The two series diverge in fundamental and unexpected ways, however, when we consider their production cultures. Although some measure of direct female creative control is found in both series, the more problematic Killing has significantly more female creative input than the more feminist Forbrydelsen. Contrary to what we might expect, the more robust feminism

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of Forbrydelsen results from a production process that involves less direct female creative control than that of The Killing. The key creative roles in television production are those of creator–producer and writer. Forbrydelsen was created by Søren Sveistrup and written by him in collaboration with three other male writers. Direct female creative input occurred at the level of story development. Sveistrup developed the story with executive producer, Piv Bernth, in a normative form of collaborative practice at the Danish public broadcaster. As part of his creative process, Sveistrup also sought the input of actors to shape the script. Their influence and input were commensurate with their importance to the script, as a result of which, series star Sofie Gråbøl’s influence easily outweighed all others (Redvall 2013b: 170, 179). The production team behind The Killing had significantly more direct female creative input in the key roles of creator, executive producer, and writers. It was adapted from the Danish series by showrunner and executive producer Veena Sud, an Indian–Filipina–American woman. Sud helmed a gender-balanced, 50 percent female and male, writers room. Of the twelve episodes of season 3, six were written by women, and six by men (IMDb). This is highly unusual in an industry where only 25 percent of all the writers on television are women (Lauzen 2018: 15). Thus, more women were involved in the scriptwriting process of The Killing than was the case for the all-male writers room of Forbrydelsen. However, Sud as showrunner in all likelihood had to navigate notes from AMC executives that sought to shape the direction of The Killing, which may have constrained her agency. To make sense of why the more robust feminist content was produced by the series with less direct female creative control, we must consider first the impact of the larger cultural context, and second how this cultural context inflects the assumptions creative personnel bring to the Danish and US television production cultures. Denmark, along with its Scandinavian neighbors, exemplifies a society that has institutionalized gender equality significantly more than the United States, and this is bound to influence the working assumptions of the production team. In an interview, Nadia Kløvedal Reich, head of DR fiction during season 3 of Forbrydelsen, connects the double-storytelling house rule, a network imperative, that the story includes an ethical dimension, to elements of the welfare state that have fostered gender equality. “. . . 40 years ago, we built a lot of kindergartens [when] women entered the labor market, [female emancipation] is about free abortion, it is about SU [higher education living subsidy], it is about a whole lot of structural elements in Scandinavian society that have made the relationship between the sexes look as it does today. . . . In other words, the double story is much more than just a dramaturgical template. There is a sounding board all the way through our political system and history” (Nielsen 2012, author’s translation).

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I argue that it is these social conditions which generate a more egalitarian outlook that constitutes indirect feminist creative input, brought to the table by the social conditioning of Danish creative personnel, be they male or female.9 Conversely, the intensification and reinforcement of neoliberalism in the United States have subjected feminist principles to what Rosalind Gill (2007: 153) calls “a grammar of individualism.” Postfeminism reduces action to individual choice, unconstrained by any structural inequities. As with neoliberalism, postfeminism re-privatizes issues once politicized by the feminist movement. But choice discourse does not allow for women who choose work over childcare. To do so is to make the wrong choice, and women who make the wrong choice are vilified, as we see in The Killing. This postfeminist outlook constitutes indirect patriarchal creative input, brought to the table by the social conditioning of American creative personnel, and audiences, be they male or female. The institutional culture of Danish public service programming versus American commercial programming also makes a decisive difference. Danish public television had been funded up until 2018 by a license fee and intended to serve the public good. Since the 1990s, the public service mandate of the DR has required that dramas produced under its auspices must combine entertainment with a social–ethical dimension. The DR mix is designed to draw audience through entertainment and to spur discussion about social and moral conflicts through the ethical considerations such entertainment provokes. This formula was already an essential component of Nordic noir, from which Forbrydelsen draws, a genre particularly attuned to Scandinavian anxieties over the erosion of the welfare state by global capitalism. Forbrydelsen supports the desirability of the welfare state and, by showing its present shortcomings, aims to stimulate discussion about gender and economic issues. In contrast, US commercial programming prioritizes profits and is dependent on ratings and channel branding. AMC wanted to develop The Killing as an original program to strengthen its brand association with quality drama and to feed the demand for new content (Akass 2015: 751). Branding is used to create a commercial identity that attracts audiences by allowing the network to stand out in the cluttered media environment of Peak TV. Conclusion Feminist media studies argues for the importance of female creative control, which has been understood to mean direct creative control or direct authorship. In an industry dominated by white men, and in a society where neoliberalism, and its affiliate postfeminism, are deeply entrenched, it is assumed that female creative control must be direct to be present. However, analysis of Forbrydelsen and The Killing indicates that the larger egalitarian cultural

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context may outweigh (limited) direct female creative control and that (substantial) direct female creative control may be insufficient. Danish television productions, like Forbrydelsen, illustrate that the cultural milieux of societies that are as egalitarian as Scandinavian states, convey indirect feminist creative influence on cultural production, even when there is limited direct female creative input. The influence of indirect feminist creative input is made possible by the egalitarian scaffolding erected by Danish social policy. In Danish society, universal childcare and paid parental leave are programs that serve to level class and gender differences. The forty-year history of these policies means they can be taken for granted. In Forbrydelsen, critique is leveled at the corruption of people who try to take advantage of the class system by exploiting the poor. The series levels a critique of capitalism advanced by a society where the benefits of the welfare state persist and are deemed worth embracing. These programs serve to soften the blow of neoliberal objectives, such as deregulation and privatization. These social conditions construct not only structural mechanisms to foster economic and gender equality, but also taken-for-granted cultural assumptions that gender and class equality are a social good worthy of state investment. It is the cultural taken-for-granted-ness of an equality-driven class and gender framework that allows for feminist indirect creative control. In the United States, these class-leveling entitlements – government programs that guarantee specific benefits to segments of society and ones that serve to promote gender equality – are not only missing but also dismissed as unnecessary or impractical in mainstream discourse despite varying levels of support for these measures, as evidenced by the number of progressive candidates elected to congress in 2018 from strongly democratic districts. Instead, what we get is a “grammar of the individual,” where all that matters is individual choice, without due consideration of the structural inequities that circumscribe, or facilitate, those choices. In this discourse, individuals must fend for themselves without recourse to state programs and are seen to have only themselves to blame if they fail. Thus, in The Killing, “bad mothers” provide both an individual bad actor to blame for the precarious existence of runaway teens, and an effective distraction from the lack of government outreach programs and social services for these teens and other indigent populations, in the face of neoliberal attacks on the welfare state. This chapter has considered only one season of Forbrydelsen and The Killing, season three, because it most clearly raises issues of class.10 The focus on class seeks to redress the fact that this dimension is often overlooked in both considerations of intersectionality, as well as in examinations of female agency in media depictions. Moreover, the attention to class relates to one of the defining attributes of the Danish serial, that is, the program’s critique of neoliberal capitalism and the diminished welfare state. I have not considered other Danish productions, most notably, Borgen, produced during the same time period by DR, to assess if and how the gender dynamics operate in a similar fashion, though I hope others will.

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This analysis suggests that there are some drawbacks to a feminist approach that attributes the production of female agency mainly to direct female creative control, without adequate consideration of the larger socioeconomic changes – starting with universal childcare and paid parental leave – needed to actualize legal opportunity. The focus on how postfeminism operates, though essential, needs to be supplemented by attention to the need to press for progressive economic restructuring. Postfeminism is important to analyze because it functions as “an interpretive grid” for media makers and audiences alike, as The Killing illustrates, but its rhetoric of the individual is rendered intelligible by the privatization measures that shape a highly lopsided opportunity structure. The social practices and cultural productions of more egalitarian Scandinavian societies indicate the need for larger economic changes, in addition to putting women in charge of production, to promote female agency not only in media but in society.

Acknowledgments This chapter is a modified version of an article previously published as “The Killing: The Gender Politics of the Nordic Noir Crime Drama and Its American Remake” in Television and New Media, September 18, 2019, DOI 10.1177/1527476419875572. My thanks to the journal for permission to republish this essay.

Notes 1 For an analysis of how women are more likely to be evaluated as “abrasive” or “difficult” in corporations, see Snyder (2014). 2 For other readings of transnational crime dramas, see the special issue of Television and New Media (2018) volume 9, issue 6. 3 Although public opinion poll data indicate substantial support for progressive policies in the United States, as Justin Lewis (2001) argues, media analysts tend to dismiss these positions by giving them a conservative spin or not reporting them. Progressive impulses are marginalized as “fringe” in mainstream politics and media. 4 Season 2, a continuation of season 1, is more critical of the business sector, suggesting the routine nature of backroom deals between politicians and corporations. Linden’s superior repeatedly squelches the investigation of a major Seattle developer, who we later learn has brokered a deal with the challenger’s mayoral campaign manager and witnessed the murder. But the onus of blame for Rosie Larsen’s murder is on the campaign manager and Rosie’s aunt, another “bad mother” figure. 5 See Greer (2017: 2) for a discussion of how richly British television serial, Happy Valley (BBC One, 2014–present), explores maternal ambivalence as “. . . a political act, a means of resisting totalizing motherhood.” 6 See also Akass 2012 on the media-driven “mommy wars.” 7 The refusal to divulge Lund’s backstory breaks with the practice of aligning detective and victim along the axis of sexual trauma in many crime shows that Steenberg (2013: 19, cited in McHugh 2018) discusses. 8 Although neither Forbrydelsen nor The Killing assessed Sarah’s non-glamorous sartorial choices, popular criticism of the shows invariably commented on her refusal to hew to conventional feminine norms (see Jermyn 2017).

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9 Denmark’s commitment to equality falls short when it comes to immigration, but it can boast one of the smallest gender salary gaps in the world, made possible in part by mandatory maternity and paternity leave, so men cannot opt out and women are not pressured to, all economic levelers. A further example of the Scandinavian commitment to gender equity is the curriculum in many Swedish government-funded preschools. Displaying an unabashed commitment to social engineering or resocialization, preschool pedagogy uses gender-neutral language and role reversal to disrupt sexist assumptions and reduce gender-based differences in opportunities available to children (see Barry 2018; Shutts et al. 2017). 10 See Klinger (2018) for a consideration of the importance of the white female victim’s body to the transnational legibility of the crime drama.

References Agger, Gunhild. “Nordic Noir on Television: The Killing I-III.” Cinema & Cie 12, no. 19 (2012): 39–50. Agger, Gunhild. “Emotion, Gender and Genre: Investigating ‘The Killing’.” Northern Lights 9, no. 1 (2011): 111–125. Akass, Kim. “The Show That Refused to Die: The Rise and Fall of AMC’s ‘The Killing’.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 29, no. 5 (2015): 743–754. Akass, Kim. “Motherhood and Myth-Making: Despatches from the Frontline of the US Mommy Wars.” Feminist Media Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 137–141. Arvas, Paula, and Andrew Nestingen, eds. Scandinavian Crime Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. Barry, Ellen. “In Sweden’s Preschools, Boys Learn to Dance and Girls Learn to Yell.” The New York Times, March 24, 2018. Berger, Richard. “Everything Goes Back to the Beginning: Television Adaptation and Remaking Nordic Noir.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 9, no. 2 (2016): 147–161. Borgen. 2010–13. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. Denmark: DR1. Broadchurch. 2013–17. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. UK: ITV. Bron/Broen. 2011-18. Television Series. Seasons 1–4. Sweden: SVT1; Denmark: DR1. Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Television Crime Series, Women Police, and Fuddy-Duddy Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 3 (2013): 375–394. Buonanno, Milly, ed. Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Cohn, Angel. “Mother’s Day: The 10 Worst Moms on TV This Season.” Yahoo! TV, August 10, 2012. Creeber, Glen. “Killing Us Softly: Investigating the Aesthetics, Philosophy and Influence of Nordic Noir Television.” The Journal of Popular Television 3, no. 1 (2015): 21–35. Crotti, Robert, Thierry Geiger, Vesselina Ratcheva, and Saadia Zahidi. The Global Gender Gap Report. Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2020. Douglas, Susan J., and Meredith W. Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. Forbrydelsen. 2007-2012. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. Denmark: DR1.

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Forshaw, Barry. Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Gill, Rosalind. “Post-postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times.” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–630. Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–166. Greer, Amanda. “ ‘I’m Not Your Mother!’ Maternal Ambivalence and the Female Investigator in Contemporary Crime Television.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15, no. 3 (2017): 327–347. Hansen, Kim Toft, and Anne Marit Waade. “ ‘The Killing’ and DR’s ‘Danish Model’.” In Locating Nordic Noir: From Beck to The Bridge. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Helles, Rasmus, and Signe Sophus Lai. “Travelling or Not? A Content Analysis Mapping Danish Television Drama from 2005 to 2014.” Critical Studies in Television 12, no. 4 (2017): 395–410. Hill, Annette, and Susan Turnbull. “Nordic Noir.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology, 1–21. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Jermyn, Deborah. “Silk Blouses and Fedoras: The Female Detective, Contemporary TV Crime Drama and the Predicaments of Postfeminism.” Crime, Media, Culture 13, no. 3 (2017): 259–276. Kaufman, Anthony. “The Lonely Subtitle: Here’s Why US Audiences Are Abandoning Foreign-language Films.” Indiewire, May 6, 2014. The Killing. 2011–14. Television Series. Seasons 1–4. USA: AMC, Netflix. Klinger, Barbara. “Gateway Bodies: Serial Form, Genre, and White Femininity in Imported Crime TV.” Television & New Media 19, no. 6 (2018): 515–534. Kohnen, Melanie. “ ‘This Was Just a Melodramatic Crapfest’: American TV Critics’ Reception of ‘The Killing’.” Journal of Popular Television 1, no. 2 (2013): 267–272. Larsson, Stieg. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: The Millennium Series, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2008. Lauzen, Martha M. “Boxed in 2017-18: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television.” In Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. San Diego: San Diego State University, 2018. Lewis, Justin. Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like and Why We Seem to Go Along With It. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Littlefield, Kinney. “Veena Sud: Be Ready.” The Writer, November 2014, pp. 32–37. Lyons, James. Selling Seattle: Representing Contemporary Urban America. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. New York: Penguin Press, 2013. McCabe, Janet. “The Girl in the Faroese Jumper: Sarah Lund, Sexual Politics and the Precariousness of Power and Difference.” In Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. McElroy Ruth, Jakob Isak Nielsen, and Caitriona Noonan. “Small Is Beautiful? The Salience of Scale and Power to Three European Cultures of TV Production.” Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 13, no. 2 (2018): 169-187.

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McHugh, Kathleen A. “The Female Detective, Neurodiversity, and Felt Knowledge in ‘Engrenages’ and ‘Bron/Broen’.” Television & New Media 19, no. 6 (2018): 535–552. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Mizejewski, Linda. “Dressed to Kill: Postfeminist Noir.” Cinema Journal 44, no. 2 (2005): 121–127. Nestingen, Andrew. “Scandinavian Crime Fiction and the Facts: Social Criticism, Epistemology, and Globalization.” In Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction, edited by Andrew Pepper and David Schmid, 159–177. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Nielsen, Jakob Isak. “Den Kreative Fabrik: Interview Med Nadia Kløvedal Reich.” 16: 9 10, no. 48 (2012). Pruchniewska, Urszula M. “Branding the Self as an ‘Authentic Feminist’: Negotiating Feminist Values in Post-Feminist Digital Cultural Production.” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 5 (2018): 810–824. Redvall, Eva Novrup. “The Concept of ‘Double Storytelling’ in Danish Public Service TV Drama Production.” In Ethics in Screenwriting, edited by Steven Maras, 33–54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Redvall, Eva Novrup. “ ‘Dogmas’ for Television Drama: The Ideas of ‘One Vision,’ ‘Double Storytelling,’ ‘Crossover’ and ‘Producer’s Choice’ in Drama Series from the Danish Public Service Broadcaster DR.” Journal of Popular Television 1, no. 2 (2013a): 227–233. Redvall, Eva Novrup. “Prime-time Public Service Crime: ‘Forbrydelsen/The Killing’.” In Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark: From The Kingdom to The Killing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013b. Redvall, Eva Novrup. “Dogmer for TV-Drama.” Kosmorama 248 (2011): 180–198. Reid, Mark. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Robbins, Bruce. “The Detective Is Suspended: Nordic Noir and the Welfare State.” In Crime Fiction as World Literature, edited by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen, 47–57. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Shutts, Kristin, Ben Kenward, Helena Falk, Anna Ivegran, and Christine Fawcett. “Early Preschool Environments and Gender: Effects of Gender Pedagogy in Sweden.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 162 (2017): 1–17. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Snyder, Kieran. “The Abrasiveness Trap: High-Achieving Men and Women Are Described Differently in Reviews.” Fortune, August 26, 2014. Solórzano, Daniel, and Tara J. Yosso. “Critical Race Methodology: CounterStorytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002): 23–44. Stansell, Christine. The Feminist Promise: 1792 To the Present. New York: Random House, 2010. Steenberg, Lindsay. Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science. New York: Routledge, 2013. Tally, Margaret. The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV’s Third Golden Age. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra, eds. Interrogating Post-Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

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True Detective. 2014–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: HBO. Turnbull, Sue. The TV Crime Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Twin Peaks. 1990–91, 2017. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: ABC, SHO. Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. The Antihero in American Television. New York: Routledge, 2015. Waade, Anne Marit. “Melancholy in Nordic Noir: Characters, Landscapes, Light and Music.” Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 12, no. 4 (2017): 380-394. Waade, Anne Marit, and Pia Majbritt Jensen. “Nordic Noir Production Values: ‘The Killing’ and ‘The Bridge’.” Akademisk Kvarter: The Academic Journal for Research From the Humanities 7 (Fall 2013): 189–201. Wallander. 2005–13. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. Sweden: TV4. Zook, Kristal Brent. Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Female sexual pleasure and freedom Female sexual pleasure and freedomFemale sexual pleasure and freedom

Outlander and Westworld

Introduction This chapter turns its attention to the feminist demand for female sexual self-determination by examining the gendered politics of nudity and sexuality on two cable television programs that rework conventional erotic coding to push back against practices that privilege the male gaze in the depiction of nudity, sexual pleasure, and rape. Here I analyze how Outlander (2014–present, Starz) and Westworld (2016–present, HBO) work to construct a female gaze, center female desire and freedom, and de-eroticize rape, through a close reading of specific key episodes or scenes and narrative tropes.1 Outlander and Westworld emerge in the larger context of a burgeoning body of serial programs that feature women in dominant roles, circulating on non-network channels that target niche audiences, and that are promoted by an increasing number of female television critics who care about the gender politics of television. Both are examples of the difficult women programming trend. The central character on Outlander is a difficult woman, “outspoken, pushy and brash.” Westworld is an ensemble drama that features three central female characters, all of them difficult to varying degrees – a difficult woman, an antihero, and a villain, alongside several central male characters who are also complex. Unlike Outlander’s white central characters, Westworld features three Black characters, two women and one man, who pivot the action. This chapter explores how sexual pleasure, freedom, and rape are coded in ways that either promote or diminish female subjectivity. After discussing the televisual construction or deconstruction of the male gaze, through examples from Game of Thrones (2009–19), Spartacus (2010–13, Starz) and Girls (2012–17, HBO), I compare the gendered make-up of authorial control on these programs, in addition to that of Outlander and later Westworld, to situate these programs in the industrial context in which they are shaped. The second part of the chapter is a case study of Outlander’s treatment of sexual pleasure/freedom and rape through a close reading of two key season one episodes, “The Wedding,” which constructs an egalitarian female gaze,

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and “To Ransom a Man’s Soul,” which explores the trauma of male-on-male rape from the perspective of the assaulted without eroticizing it. I not only analyze the ways Outlander pushes back against the facile use of rape as a plot twist to spike ratings on other cable series but also consider the limitations of the series as evidenced by these episodes, including the homophobic tone of the latter and the serial’s heteronormativity and whiteness. The third part of the chapter treats Westworld as a case study. Westworld does a more ambiguous job of centering female pleasure than Outlander, but it is more ambitious in its construction of de-eroticized nudity, use of female antiheroes, and inclusion of Black leading characters. I analyze the dynamic tension in Westworld between male and female authorship, fetishizing female nudity and de-eroticizing sexual aggression, between exploiting male violence against women and female violence against those who exploit them, between the postfeminist/post-racial character of the people who work in the park and the highly gendered and racialized coding of the hosts. The series centers on the intertwining narrative arcs of two difficult women, one Black, one white, who take power in, what is in effect, a slave rebellion narrative. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the limitations of Westworld’s representational strategies, and the importance of authorial control to producing television where female agency is the calculus for how to shoot a scene and craft a narrative. Both Outlander and Westworld are case study examples of how to deconstruct the male gaze and produce a female gaze. Politics of the gaze The concept of the male gaze was coined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her influential 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” where she argues that classical Hollywood cinema positions the female character as the sexual object of the heterosexual male gaze on three levels. First, the woman is the object of the male protagonist’s gaze within the story structure, for whom she is an object to be acted upon. Second, she is the object of the imputed male spectator’s gaze. Third, she is positioned as an object by the formal work of the camera, by which she means that the production team, particularly the director, cinematographer, and editor work to fashion the film in such a way that her body is the object of desire. She is coded with the quality of “to-be-looked-at-ness,” her body visually fragmented and fetishized to maximize erotic value. The camera assumes the perspective of the male character and aligns viewers with it through framing, actor blocking, and editing. In all these ways, the male gaze is a controlling one, a gendered act of power. Mulvey’s essay established a way to talk about the gendered relations of looking in film, and almost immediately sparked a debate that complicated this model and theorized subject positions for viewers beyond the male gaze, including various notions of the female gaze.2 Even Mulvey, in a 1981

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follow-up essay suggests that sexual desire and gender identification are more fluid than she had originally suggested, for instance, the female viewer can identify with the active male protagonist, she can desire the female body. Mulvey’s male gaze is related to the disciplinary gaze Foucault writes about in Discipline and Punish (1975).3 For Foucault, the disciplinary gaze wields a coercive power. In Power/Knowledge (1980) he writes, “There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising his surveillance over and against himself” (155, in Ponterotto 2016: 147). Diane Ponterotto argues that for women, this means surveillance of the body, scrutinized and judged for its “conformity to the normatized model” of the female body in contemporary society (133, emphasis in original). Starting from the “deficit condition” of non-male, the ideal female body must be white, heterosexual, middle class, thin, and young. The body must be managed, controlled, disciplined, turned into a “technology of the self” (Foucault 1988). Beauty regimes become a form of self-surveillance in service to the male gaze. “Through the male gaze, the female body becomes territory, a valuable resource to be acquired” (Ponterotto 2016: 147). John Berger, in Ways of Seeing (1972) describes the gendered power dynamic succinctly: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus, she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (Berger 1972: 47). This experience is similar to the racialized power dynamic described by W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (orig. 1903), as double consciousness. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (1996: 5). In both Du Bois and Berger, the gaze operates to construct the white male subject as norm, at the expense of the non-male and the nonwhite other. The concept of the gaze operates as a model for unequal power relations in myriad forms, whether gendered as in the male gaze, raced as in the colonial gaze, or neutered as in the disciplinary gaze. I am interested in codes or aesthetic strategies that deconstruct and complicate the dominating gaze, as well as in codes that construct a competing female or feminist gaze. The male gaze, ensconced in a patriarchal society, signifies power over its object and operates with institutional support of its power. The female gaze cannot merely be its inverse, whereby male bodies are objectified and

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sexually dominated for female gratification, lacking as it does comparable institutional infrastructure.4 Within media studies, bell hooks (1992) uses the term “oppositional gaze” to mean a form of critical spectatorship exercised by colonized Black people, particularly Black women, and directed at oppressive power structures. It is both an act of resistance and an exercise of agency. In her 1992 essay, “The Oppositional Gaze,” she uses the term “female gaze” to refer to the complicity of (Black) women when they identify with and embrace the negation of (white) women in classical Hollywood film to willingly subject themselves to the male gaze. More importantly, it includes a concomitant willingness to ignore the absence of Black women or their relegation to the status of props in the service of white femininity. The female gaze, as hooks uses it, is one complicit in its own oppression by the white male gaze. The oppositional gaze is critical of the intertwined operations of patriarchy and racism. It matters that this concept operates outside the psychoanalytic framework that dominated film theory in the 70s and 80s, a framework that interrogates gender difference but takes whiteness for granted. hook’s use of female gaze, as one that complies with patriarchal (and white supremacist) demands, is at odds with the sense in which I use it, that is, as one with subversive qualities. It is hooks’ oppositional gaze, a Black feminist gaze, that is closer to my use of female gaze, one that is critical of oppressive gender, race, and class power structures, one that deconstructs the male gaze. It differs from mine, however, in that hooks is largely writing about a position from which to read media images against the grain, whereas I am writing about an approach to produce media images in which women take possession of the gaze, and looking is organized around female empowerment and sexual pleasure. Television scholar Helen Wheatley takes a similar approach when she analyzes how specific serial dramas construct, what she calls, the “televisual female gaze” through the “brazen gaze” of a female character in an erotic scenario that deliberately depicts the male body for heterosexual female desire (2016: 209, 214). Unlike hooks’ notion of the oppositional gaze, the feminist reading of the images that I describe in Outlander and Westworld is their preferred reading. The female gaze is more than a role reversal; it reorients what looking means. It is a desiring gaze, but one that involves an exchange of power, a multidirectional power, which must be seen from the point of view of the party who occupies the subordinate position in the larger cultural realm.5 To understand what it means for women to take possession of the gaze in televisual terms, we will first consider the normative visual codes that construct the male gaze on premium cable, as illustrated in the staging of sex and nudity on Game of Thrones and True Detective (2014–present), then turn to examples of visual codes that deconstruct the male gaze on Spartacus and Girls, before turning to Outlander and Westworld as case studies that illuminate what the female gaze looks like.

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Visual codes of sex and nudity on premium cable that reinforce the male gaze The gendered visual practices or aesthetic strategies that Outlander and Westworld break with are not specific to television or film. They have been naturalized through repetition in print and advertising. To situate what it means to defy these conventions, we must first define what the show is pushing against – the dominant gendered codes of sex and nudity. Premium cable, unfettered by decency regulations and advertiser pressure, utilizes sex and nudity in quality drama to distinguish itself in the overpopulated televisual landscape. This nudity is predominantly female, aimed at a heterosexual male audience, and shot and edited so as to facilitate male audience pleasure. In showcasing the female body, women’s bodies are fragmented, with a visual focus on breasts and buttocks, through the generous use of close-ups or tight framing. In contrast, sex scenes devote less screen time to the man’s face or bodily features. Nudity is found not only in sex scenes but also in locations where women’s bodies are routinely commoditized, such as strip clubs (Sopranos 1999–2007, HBO) and brothels (Game of Thrones), where they are not only visually but narratively framed as objects of the male gaze. A variant of this is found in what Myles McNutt (2012) dubbed “sexposition,” the practice of showcasing naked female flesh during extended scenes of exposition, in order to sustain the imputed straight male viewer’s interest. The scenario alternates between naked figures in the background and in close-up. The critical term was coined to analyze a scene in the Game of Thrones episode “You Win or You Die” (S1 E7, 2011). In this scene, Littlefinger provides an important back story while simultaneously coaching two prostitutes in his brothel on how to perform various sex acts. This scene is staged to hold the sexual interest of the imputed straight male viewer while providing information needed to understand future actions. As Figure 3.1 illustrates, the sex is staged and framed to maximally display the naked female body for the male gaze. Women’s bodies are routinely displayed like props, there to cater to male heterosexual pleasure, her body the cipher on which the male viewer projects his fantasy. Producing this fetishized spectacle is the quintessential function of the male gaze as outlined by Mulvey. Romantic sex scenes are also staged and framed to maximally display the naked female body for the male gaze. For instance, the first season of True Detective (HBO, 2014–present) facilitates the display of the female body as spectacle by favoring sex scenes in which the woman is on top or on all fours (see Figure 3.2). Media scholar Hannah Mueller characterizes this as a “typical set-up for HBO, where the most common sex positions are those that allow the viewer to see as much of the woman’s body as possible, while showing as little as possible of the man’s” (2014: 10). Male nudity is not usually the focal point, and programs achieve this during sex scenes by leaving the man fully or partially dressed or by framing him from the waist up.

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Figure 3.1 In Game of Thrones, sex is routinely staged and framed to maximally display naked female bodies for the male gaze. “You Win or You Die” (S1 E7, 2011, Game of Thrones, HBO).

Figure 3.2 True Detective facilitates the display of the female body as spectacle by favoring sex scenes in which the woman is on top while the male body is largely concealed. “Seeing Things” (S1 E2, 2014, True Detective, HBO).

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Visual codes of sex and nudity on premium cable that deconstruct the male gaze The narrative context of nudity, however, can destabilize the male gaze by divesting it of its erotic function and showing it for the display of power that it fundamentally is. For instance, when the penis is shown, it is typically in a scene meant to degrade the nude male character or for the nude character to humiliate those to whom he exposes himself. For instance, in Spartacus, a sword-and-sandal series, full-frontal male nudity, where the actors wear sizable prosthetics, depicts a flaccid penis which pales in comparison with the hyper-masculine physique of the gladiators, thus reiterating its status as penis, not phallus, symbol of power (Mueller 2015: 4–6). This trope was uncharacteristically applied to Cersei in the Game of Thrones episode “Mother’s Mercy” (S5 E10, 2015). After months of incarceration, she is paraded through a scornful crowd, shorn, nude, filthy, pummeled by garbage, and accompanied by cries of “shame!” This scene functions narratively to degrade and punish her for adultery but serves to render her more sympathetic to the audience, not to fetishize her, as constructed by both the narrative context that gives it meaning and the aesthetic use of wide shot framing rather than close-ups. Nudity here serves a narrative purpose that complicates it. Similarly, Wheatley describes a scenario in “The Wolf and the Lion” (Game of Thrones S1 E5, 2011) where the meaning of nudity is complicated by its narrative context. The castle prostitute, Ros, and Theon Greyjoy, are seen in post-coital conversation. “[Because they] are so comfortable in their nudity that they can continue a conversation that is not about their sexual relationship or their bodies whilst naked . . . viewers are challenged to look both at but also beyond the nudity on screen here” (2016: 197–198, emphasis in original). Thus, she argues, depictions of nudity and lust can “[serve a] narrative purpose as well as provid[e] visual pleasure” (198). This operation is pervasive in Westworld, as I discuss later. The gendered character of nude display is sometimes troubled when applied to homosexual characters. In Orange is the New Black (2013–19), Big Boo is a butch lesbian character, who is never shown nude when having sex with more feminine nude women, a pattern that reproduces heterosexual visual dynamics to visually code her as masculine. Likewise, feminized objects of the male gaze need not be female. In Game of Thrones, a working gay male prostitute is shown fully exposed from behind while the powerful male client is largely dressed, to visually code the former as feminine (S3 E5 “Kissed by Fire”). In one, the female is masculinized; in the other, the male is feminized to conform, albeit uneasily, to the visual dynamics of the male gaze. This uneasy fit denaturalizes the idea that “[m]en look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Spartacus and Girls consistently use aesthetic strategies that deconstruct the male gaze. In Spartacus, enslaved gladiators are narratively subject to

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the gaze of their owners, male and female. Wealthy Roman women routinely objectify and take possession of their bodies. This female gaze appropriates the power differential of the male gaze. It is a class-based one, in which the control and objectification the women exercise is rooted in their wealth and social status vis-a-vis the gladiators. Gladiators are slaves who are forced to perform in both the arena and the bedroom at the whims of their owners, including the powerful propertied women who freely survey their semi-nude bodies.6 The propertied bearer of the gaze, who controls whether they live or die, turns the gladiator into an erotic spectacle, an object for sexual consumption. The gladiator, who may not return the look, may not look into his master’s eyes unless ordered to, must cast his eyes down or look vacantly ahead to indicate his submissiveness. The narrative, however, aligns the viewer with the gladiators. This use of the gaze functions in the first two seasons to build a sense of the oppressive social structure against which Spartacus and other freed slaves rebel in later seasons. By making the male body the primary spectacle and embedding it in a slave economy, Spartacus lays bare the controlling power of the gaze and reveals that it is a class distinction. As Mueller (2015) points out, unlike film noir where the femme fatale, who appropriates the gaze, is punished, the Roman woman, who is behaving in culturally normative fashion for her class, is not punished. Propertied women can be the objects of the gaze of their male peers but not of their slaves/property. Class is synonymous with power, so women have it when dealing with slaves but not with men of their own class. Spartacus also destabilizes commonplace erotic coding by depicting consensual heterosexual and homosexual love scenes using similar aesthetic strategies, with soft lighting and framing designed for minimal exposure of the naked body.7 Consensual homosexual couplings are common in the story world and heterosexual men think nothing of it. Full-frontal male nudity is common in the series but not in consensual sex scenes, which are modest by premium cable standards. Girls use a different set of aesthetic strategies to destabilize the male gaze. This series pushes back against, what Ponterotto calls, the “canonical female body” which is “fit and well-toned and especially slim” (2016: 135). Female bodies are subjected to intensive scrutiny to assess how well they conform to this “normatized model” (139), and this disciplinary regime is internalized and reinforced in cultural representations. Slate critic Lili Loofbourow refers to it as “grading aesthetics on a gendered curve” (2018: 36). Susan Sontag describes the gendered curving of this “aesthetic paradigm” as one in which “. . . men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks – heavier, rougher, more thickly built. . . .” but for which women have no equivalent (Loofbourow 2018: 36). Mueller observes the gendered double standard of bodily appearance that grants men more latitude on premium cable. “Naked men on HBO come in different shapes and sizes: they can be hairy, dirty, aging, overweight, wrinkled, and sometimes they are meant to be revolting.” This diversity is

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played for either laughs or verisimilitude. In contrast, casting practices for female roles select within a narrow range of traits to privilege “a certain body type that just so happens to conform to contemporary dominant ideals of beauty. Unlike male naked bodies, these female bodies do not aim at invoking historical authenticity, but are displayed to appeal to a contemporary audience . . .” and to maximize the erotic appeal of bodies subject to the male gaze (2015: 13–14). This gender disparity is pervasive on premium cable programs such as True Detective (2014–present). Figure 3.2 depicts a paunchy Marty Hart, played by 53-year-old Woody Harrelson, paired with his far more attractive mistress Lisa (whose surname hardly matters in the series), played by 28-year-old Alexandra Daddario.8 Presumably, this disparity can exist because power is an aphrodisiac. Yet somehow, this only seems to play out for men. The gendered looks discrepancy is considered unremarkable unless the roles are reversed, as in the case of Girls. Girls is a show that pushes back against the dictum that for the female body “[th]ere is no place . . . for lumpy, bumpy, bulging, sagging flesh, for dingy, wrinkled, dry, veined, potted skin” (Ponterotto 2016: 135). Girls regularly displays Hannah’s unconventional semi-nude body, played by creator and star Lena Dunham. The show from the start was criticized for its generous depiction of a semi-nude Lena Dunham, for the reason that her body does not conform to Hollywood standards of female beauty – she is short, pear-shaped, and willing to show folds of fat. She is also depicted as desirable to normatively attractive men, despite the fact that her body is average, not exceptional, like his. “One Man’s Trash” (S2 E5, 2013), in particular, drew pointed critical reproach for its “unrealistic” depiction when it paired Dunham’s 24-year-old character with a 42-year-old doctor, played by Patrick Wilson, for two days of casual sex. In an atypical pattern for television, the episode ended without the usual regret or rebuffed desire on Hannah’s part that often awaits female characters that engage in casual sex. The punishment came afterward, not in the story world, but in the reviews when the role reversal was critically called out as unconvincing. Lindsey Bahr (2013) of Entertainment Weekly insisted it had to have been a dream, despite acknowledging that the series does not stage dream or fantasy sequences. Esquire’s Peter Martin (2013) and Slate’s David Haglund and Daniel Engber (2013) similarly considered the pairing an implausible fantasy. Again, despite recognizing that “[n]arcissistic, childish men sleep with beautiful women all the time in movies and on TV,” Engber could not accept it “because Hannah is especially and assertively ugly in this episode.” Tracie Egan Morrissey (2013), writing in Jezebel about the critical reaction this episode evoked, points out that something other than a reaction to Hannah’s unlikeable rudeness and sense of privilege is at work in the outrage the episode sparked. After all, “Jessa [who is a conventionally beautiful white woman] is just as much of a shit head as Hannah, but nobody questioned her venture capitalist’s husband’s interest in her unemployed, entitled ass.” Here, Girls

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plays with the idea that in a society where women are judged predominantly by their looks, other features can be overlooked. When disrespectful, selfindulgent men have sex with far more attractive women, the scenes are not called out for their implausibility because this is a perk of patriarchal privilege. By turning the tables, the looks double standard was denaturalized, and (largely male) critics found themselves turning to the legitimating discourse of realism to defend their attack on this form of “unacceptable” sexuality. What was unacceptable was an episode that pushed back against the gendered looks double standard in blatant defiance of this form of male privilege.9 The dissident perspective that Girls brings defies the idealized body norms that apply most stringently to women. As the creator–producer of a show on a network that grants its showrunners considerable creative freedom, Lena Dunham makes deliberate feminist interventions. She takes seriously the idea that Hannah’s charm, intelligence, confidence, and wit make her as attractive to good-looking men as Marty Hart in True Detective (2014– present) is to good-looking women. Girls is an HBO show that pushes back against the HBO paradigm in which normatively attractive women serve as erotic spectacles of the male gaze. Girls also destabilizes the male gaze by using aesthetic strategies that deeroticize sex scenes and casual nudity. To appreciate how Girls’ staging of these events subverts conventions, it is useful to review the mechanics of the “sexual interlude,” which Linda Williams characterizes in Screening Sex (2008: 87) as a sex scene that is highly fragmented and bracketed off through editing and nondiegetic music from the rest of the episode. The function of this form is basically to distance the audience from the coupling on-screen through music, editing, and framing. “Typical of sexual interludes, the music amps up and the sexual action is constructed in a tightly edited montage of sexual gestures. . . . Within this bracket, intimate sexual relations reside in a different register of time and space. . . . Shots are arranged chronologically, but the action . . . remains fragmented. . . . [W]hat really unites the discontinuous fragments is the nondiegetic music that controls the mood and distances us from the diegetic sounds generated by the couple” (Williams 2008: 84–85, 87). Instead of the sexual interlude, Girls strives for what Dunham calls “sexual verisimilitude” in its depiction of both sex and nudity (Rensin 2013, in Ford 2016: 1037). To do so, the show employs a “smart” aesthetic, a bland, low-key approach achieved through framing and editing designed to slow down the storytelling and stress dialogue or tone (Sconce 2002, in Perkins 2012, in Ford 2016). It is a minimalist style that Jessica Ford characterizes as: “highly choreographed, and specifically used to produce a particular ‘look’ that best lends itself to performing its subversive body politics

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Female sexual pleasure and freedom and sex-positive female sexual subjecthood. . . .[T]he sex in Girls is largely filmed using medium-long shots and long takes that have little to no movement, either of the camera or of the bodies in the frame” (Ford 2016: 1036–1037).

There is no soaring music during sex scenes, which are often quiet. The effect of this aesthetic style is to convey a story with “dampened affect” (Sconce 2002: 359, in Ford 2016: 1037, emphasis in original) or numbing disinterest that evacuates the erotic charge to present sex in tacitly unromantic and unpretty ways, often rendering sexual encounters as clumsy, unfulfilling, and neurotic. As such, they are pointedly lacking in erotic spectacle and deliberately uncomfortable to watch. Consistent with this smart aesthetic, Girls presents the nude female body in an uneroticized manner, without titillation, in a matter-of-fact manner. Hannah is comfortable with her zaftig body and ill-fitting clothing but uncomfortable with the expectations of her friends who aspire to the thin fashion ideal, in part because she has to some extent also internalized these messages. Media and academic discourse about the show centers around Dunham’s “unruly” body, a “female grotesque” characterized by excess and looseness (Rowe 2011). The unruly body rejects the policing and taming regimen required of the “normatized” body. Media faultfinding of her body is in turn an attempt to police the female body into conformity. The show, however, narratively aligns itself with Hannah, while distancing itself from her performance of privilege. Hannah occupies narrative space with poise and authority. Hannah’s nudity is informed by Dunham’s status as the author of the text, in the capacities of creator, executive producer, and writer of the program. Authorial control For Foucault (1990), sexuality is historically constructed through discourse. “Foucault understands sexuality . . . as a discursive form of entwined power, knowledge and pleasure” (Williams 2008: 12). Because sex is spoken, the relevant questions for him are, “who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it” (Williams 2008: 11, 13). The female gaze as I conceive of it is more in line with Foucault’s formulations than with a psychoanalytic model. It is about authorial control, the production team that is making the show and targeting a female audience in a specific cultural and institutional context, using narrative and aesthetic strategies that construct a female gaze. As creator–producer–writer of Girls, Dunham had considerable creative freedom to make feminist interventions, including decisions about the gender composition of the other key creative positions. The 2018 “Boxed In” report (Lauzen) discussed in Chapter 1, which compares the 2017–2018 to

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the 2012–2013 season, and thus the range of years that Girls ran (2012–17), found that when a program has at least one female creator, women account for a significantly higher percentage of writers (45% vs. 16%) and directors (27% vs 13%) than programs with only male creators. Indeed, on Girls, six of the fifteen or 40% of writers were women (see Table 3.1). Even more impressive, women wrote 51% of the episodes, with Dunham writing 41 of 62, including “One Man’s Trash.”10 Similarly, of the ten directors involved in the series, six or 60% were women. They directed 29 or 47% of the episodes. The report also found that when a program has at least one female executive producer, women account for a significantly higher percentage of major characters (42% vs 33%) (Lauzen 2018: 5). Two of Girls’ three executive producers – Judd Apatow, Lena Dunham, and Jenni Konner – were women. The major characters include four titular “girls” and usually two continuous featured males in different seasons.

Table 3.1 A Comparison of Women’s Share of Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Positions on Key Programs Discussed in this Chapter (2010–2019)

Adapted from Female Creators Female Executive Producers Female Writers Episodes Written by Women Female Directors Episodes Directed by Women Female Major Characters

Girls Spartacus Game of 2012–2017 2010–2013 Thrones Seasons 1–6 Seasons 1–3 2011–2019 Seasons 1–8 Book Series by Male Writer 1 of 1 0 of 1 0 of 2

Outlander Westworld 2014–present 2016– Seasons 1–4 present Seasons 1–2 Book Series Film by Male by Female Writer and Writer Director 0 of 1 1 of 2

2 of 3

0 of 4

2 of 5

2 of 4

1 of 3

40%

29%

33%

64%

26%

51%

33%

14%

58%

51%

60%

0%

5%

47%

36%

47%

0%

5%

29%

20%

4 of 6

Largely male Large gender Largely male ensemble mixed ensemble cast ensemble cast cast revolves around central female

Source: Data drawn from IMDb

Large gender mixed ensemble cast

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The gender composition of key creative personnel on Spartacus seems to buck this pattern. It was created by Stephen DeKnight and had four male executive producers – Steven DeKnight, Joshua Donen, Sam Raimi, and Rob Tapert. Women made up 29% of the writers (5 out of 17), above the average 16% in shows featuring only male creators, and they wrote 33% of the 33 episodes (see Table 3.1). None of the episodes were directed by women, and though there were a few key female figures, the large ensemble cast featured mainly men. And yet, Spartacus makes generous use of visual codes that deconstruct the male gaze and destabilize commonplace erotic coding by depicting consensual heterosexual and homosexual couplings, which are customary in the story world, in similar, non-exploitative ways. These egalitarian interventions are deliberately fashioned by Stephen DeKnight, a white man in a heterosexual marriage, who is creatively heteroflexible. As he tweeted about Spartacus, “I had so many people, mostly guys, say ‘I love the show but can you cut out the gay shit?’ My answer was always no, if you don’t like it you don’t have to watch the show. Inclusion and tolerance was such a huge part of the message” (@stevendeknight, July 14, 2014).11 What is significant here is that Spartacus was produced by Starz, a network that explicitly targets a female demographic (more about this in the discussion of Outlander), and the audience for this series did indeed skew female, two conditions that were conducive to the deconstruction of the male gaze. As Starz COO Jeffrey Hirsch described its female-focused content, the series revolved around “female characters manipulating the men . . .” (Goldberg 2019). In contrast, Game of Thrones, which features several powerful principle female characters in its ensemble cast, has been singled out for its use of rape as a plot twist and its reliance on sexposition. The series was adapted from the book series, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (1996– present), by two men, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, so it has only male creators. Of the five executive producers credited on IMDb for most, 62 of the 73, episodes – Benioff, Weiss, Frank Doelger, Carolyn Strauss, and Bernadette Caulfield – two are women. Women made up 33% (3) of the writers but wrote only 14% (10) of the episodes (see Table 3.1). Of the 10 episodes written by women, seven were co-written with Benioff and Weiss, who also got “written by” or “teleplay by” credit for 70% (51) of the episodes, evidence of more active involvement in the writing process at all stages rather than simply the final edit accorded showrunners. Similarly, women made up 5% of the directors (1 of 19) and directed 5% (4) of the episodes, below even the average rate (16%) on series with only male creators. Moreover, Benioff and Weiss, as showrunners, at various points departed from the books in ways that eroded some of the gender equity of the source material.12 Game of Thrones’ male-dominated behind-the-scenes composition is in part responsible for the program’s reputation for subjecting female characters to the male gaze, a reputation it shares with other HBO original series. This reputation is so entrenched that when in the episode “Mockingbird”

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(S4 E7, 2014) Daenerys orders her lust-besotted subordinate Daario to take off his clothes, her exercise of the desiring female gaze was widely remarked upon (see Figure 3.3). Dana Och (2016) claims that this 30-second moment set off a campaign of sexual scavenging, whereby women aggregated tumblr gifs of brief clips, such as this, not originally intended to satisfy female pleasure. The excitement over this dominant script-flipping moment was indicative of its rarity on Game of Thrones and television in general in 2014. Unlike Game of Thrones, Starz’s Outlander features more equitable female involvement in key behind-the-camera creative roles. It was adapted by Ronald D. Moore from the first installment of a popular book series written by Diana Gabaldon (1991–present). Moore is credited as creator, executive producer, and showrunner, but two of four executive producers are female: Toni Graphia and Maril Davis. In the first four seasons (2014– 2019), 29% (or 16 of 55) episodes were directed by women, close to the rate for programs with one or more female creators (33%) (Lauzen 2019: 14). The season one episodes that deal most explicitly with sexual pleasure or violation, “The Wedding,” “Both Sides Now,” “Wentworth Prison,” and “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” were all directed by Anna Foerster. Women made up 64% of the writers and either wrote or co-wrote 58% of the episodes (see Table 3.1). Almost half (49%) of the episodes were written by women, including “The Wedding.” To account for the higher than expected degree of female creative control behind-the-scenes, we need to consider the marketing imperatives of the Starz network on which the series airs. Outlander is an adaptation of

Figure 3.3 When Daenerys orders her lust-besotted subordinate Daario to take off his clothes, her exercise of the desiring female gaze was widely remarked upon. “Mockingbird” (S4 E7, 2014, Game of Thrones, HBO).

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a bestselling book series with a devoted female fan base. As such, it began as a pre-sold product with a ready-made female audience. The television series was green-lighted for production with the expectation that the fan base of the book series would be drawn to the program and that the historic romance element of the program would draw female viewers unfamiliar with the books, as indeed the series has done. According to Adweek, the show’s audience is 59% female (Lynch 2015). Starz is a premium cable channel that is competing with HBO, whose schedule is largely filled with maledominated original programming, and Showtime, whose female-oriented original programming has specialized in the half-hour comedic format.13 Adweek quotes Macquarie Research analyst Amy Yong as saying, “Starz has singled out females as a demo that HBO and Showtime haven’t focused a lot on. . . . So they’ve been very strategic about trying to draw a demographic that hasn’t been as well-served as they could be” (Lynch 2015).14 As such, Outlander constitutes a counterprogramming strategy for Starz and a departure from their own male-oriented original programming, as much as HBO’s. The expectation is that these viewers in turn are apt to engage in social media promotion of the program with their friends and acquaintances, a strategy that seems to have worked. According to Carol Donelan (2016), Starz is now second only to HBO among premium cable networks, with over 26 million subscribers (Vlessing 2020).15 Their ability to grow the audience in turn allows the network to impose higher carrying charges on cable providers. It also becomes a way for the network to differentiate itself from the pack. Variety quotes Starz CEO Chris Albrecht describing Outlander as “an attempt to capitalize on the ‘lack of female-skewing programs in the premium space’ ” (Prudom 2014). These business imperatives opened opportunities for a female-centered narrative with a feminist inflection. In this sense, the female gaze is advanced here by a shrewd market analysis. Outlander, at least from the network’s perspective, strives to be different to increase viewership.16 From the outset, Moore set out to gender balance the writers’ room by hiring 50% female and 50% male writers. In an industry where women made up only 29% of the writers on a television series for the preceding 2013 -2014 season (Writers Guild of America West 2015), the composition of Outlander’s writers’ room is atypical but indicative of Moore’s commitment to egalitarian storytelling. The showrunner and writers work closely together to craft the story, and this is at heart the story of an egalitarian couple over the course of their lives. Ultimately, both male and female perspectives matter to its dynamic and this had to be reflected in the crafting of the story. What follows is a case study of Outlander, a series that makes sustained use of the female gaze to depict female desire and pleasure, as well as sexual violation. It is the product of a counterprogramming strategy by Starz to branch out to women by putting women at the center of the narrative, which made the prospect of adapting a book series popular with a female

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fanbase appealing to network executives. The series neither caters to the male gaze nor does it construct a female gaze by reversing roles as Girls does, but rather by reformulating equality as power sharing. Outlander Outlander is a historical adventure drama with romance and fantasy elements that features a 1945 English woman who is inadvertently transported to 1743 Scotland where she becomes involved with Highland warriors and their struggle against the reigning British monarchy. The television serial is adapted from a best-selling book series by Diana Gabaldon. Claire Beauchamp Randall (Caitriona Balfe) is the central character and most of the story in season one is told from her point of view. We meet her at the end of World War II in France, where she has been stationed as a frontline combat nurse. She is confident, headstrong, capable, resourceful, and comfortable wielding authority over men. Claire is a product of the battlefront experience, as well as of an unconventional upbringing, and comes out of it with an expanded horizon of expectations, something her pending future as the wife of an Oxford don seems to foreclose. When she passes through time via the fictional standing stones at Craigh na Dun, she brings this sense of authority and competence to the eighteenth-century world she now inhabits. The relationship she develops with Highlander Jaime Fraser (Sam Heughan), along with the quest on which they embark to resist the British and prevent the imminent destruction of the clan system, provides far more expansive possibilities both for an egalitarian relationship and for a life lived on a broader stage. She is the narrative agent in the story and narrator of the series. Her perspective and voiceover guide our experience of events as it locates her gaze at the core of the story. Viewers are aligned with her character through camera work and narration. Alignment is a formal process determined by the degree to which the program focuses on her character and provides access to her subjectivity through point-of-view shots. Given the centrality of her experience to the series, this is a good program with which to rethink the prevailing discourses of sex and pleasure. Outlander’s construction of female subjectivity and the eroticized female gaze entails a rethinking of equality as power sharing. Throughout most of season one, Claire endeavors to return to 1945. But in episode seven, “The Wedding,” she is compelled by circumstances to marry Jaime so that as a Scot by marriage, she can remain safely out of the clutches of the sadistic English Captain Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies). I analyze this mid-season episode, which has been singled out by television critics like Maureen Ryan (2014) for its atypical depiction of sex for a female audience. Power comes into play here, in the heterosexual couple’s steps toward an egalitarian relationship, and in the balanced attention rendered to both bodies visually on their wedding night. The episode is directed by Anna Foerster,

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and written by Anne Kenney, who is also a co-executive producer of the series. Moore brought in Foerster because, as he put it, “I wanted a woman to direct this key moment in the entire series, when we do a lot of sex in the show for the first time. . . . It was my gut instinct. I wanted a woman to do it, not to give it the traditional perspective on TV, which is not the way we do human sexuality. . . .” (Thompson 2016). Moreover, in casting Claire, Moore wanted her attractiveness to radiate from her intelligence, not just her looks. As he put it, he needed to find “an actress who projected intelligence – which informs her adaptability, her sexuality. I needed to find someone you could watch think on camera” because her lively intelligence is key to her attractiveness (Stewart 2014). Claire is a bright woman with secrets, an outsider who for much of season one privately calculates her next move. Romance and sex on Outlander “The Wedding” (S1 E7, 2014) is non-linear, with most of the action transpiring in the bedroom chamber, punctuated by flashbacks to the wedding preparations. Despite their early chemistry, Claire and Jaime are strangers to each other when they wed. Claire defers the conjugal bed by proposing they drink and asking questions about his motives and family. The distance between them, and Claire’s reluctance to sleep with him, is inscribed in wide shots of the two. As they become acquainted and she grows more comfortable with him, the editing and composition of the shots mirror their egalitarian dynamic. Shots alternate between them as they converse in medium close-up. They occupy equal space in the frame and are given equal screen time. In a display of emotional intelligence, Jaime waits patiently for her approach, whether physical or verbal. Shortly before she suggests they go to bed, the composition switches to more intimate over-the-shoulder shots to convey their growing attraction, then the more intimate framing of medium close-up and close-up. He partially undresses her and caresses her breast. Then she says, “my turn” and takes off the belt that secures his kilt. Their consummation of the arranged marriage, which is also Jaime’s first time, plays out with sexual realism. It is brief and awkward, with no nudity. When he asks her if she liked it, she draws silent. Jaime takes this as a no, his disappointment apparent. She corrects him that she did like it, but she does not share that she is battling her guilt over cheating on the as-yet-tobe-born husband she left behind. Afterward, they eat and talk. Despite their easy rapport, when Jaime touches her, Claire flinches. He responds by romancing her with words. He compares her brown hair to “the water in a burn . . . the way it ruffles down rocks . . . dark in the wavy spots . . . wee bits of auburn where the sun touches it,” all the while running his fingers along the nape of her neck. Terry Dresbach, costume designer,17 says of Jaime, “we just made him as frighteningly romantic as humanly possible” (“Wedding” Blu-ray extra). Implicit in this statement is a recognition that for many women context is

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important to promote sexual excitation and Jaime is providing Claire with a context ripe with stimulation or cues: private conversation conducive to trust, intimate touch signaling that he desires her, and otherwise lavishing her with special attention.18 The camera pans slowly from a two-shot of them in medium close-up to a focus on her reaction as she is moved by his words as well as his touch. Even so, Claire defers his advances by asking about his wedding kilt. In flashback, we learn that Jaime had three conditions to marry Claire: they must be married in church, and Claire must have a ring and a wedding dress. Claire’s counterpoint flashback is to people waking her after a day of heavy drinking. Since she is hung-over, she only dimly recalls the ceremony, so Jaime recalls it for her. In flashback, we see events in slowed motion largely from Jaime’s perspective: not only Claire in a beautiful wedding dress but also Jaime in impressive full Highlander regalia. The vows are repeated, and we hear them for the first time, in voiceover.19 After this, she touches his arm to signal her readiness and says, “take off your shirt, I want to look at you.” They exchange smoldering looks as she touches him tenderly, moving around him from chest to backside and back to front (see Figures 3.4 to 3.6). Claire’s desirous look, what Helen Wheatley calls the “brazen gaze” (2016: 214), basks in appreciation of Jaime’s physique, in a scene purposively designed to depict the male body for heterosexual female desire.20 After a time, Jaime responds, “Alright, fair’s fair, take off yours as well.” When she slips off her shift, her nude body is framed in long shot from the back with Jaime partially in the frame, then bare-breasted in medium shot, looking desirously off-screen at Jaime. When she places his hand on her breast, they are both framed in medium shot and though the focus is on her cupped breast and bare back, it is in the context of both bodies. When they embrace, they are framed nude in long shot, foregrounding first her backside, then his. They make love naked, Jaime’s derriere and Claire’s breasts exposed in medium shot. They both gasp with pleasure at this more sustained joining of their bodies. Claire reaches orgasm this time. The scene unfolds with both of them in frame, in two-shots of varying lengths, from long shot to medium wide shot to medium close-up (see Figure 3.7). There is soft, slow Scottishinflected pipe music playing in the underscore, and the diegetic sound of their ragged breathing and moans in the foreground. Unlike hard core sex scenes, where the visible proof of male pleasure lies in the money shot (the man pulls out of the woman to ejaculate on rather than in her body in plain sight of the camera), in soft core sex scenes, both perform orgasm largely via the expressivity of face and voice. Significantly, male and female satisfactions occupy an equivalent status in this sort of staging. In a state of afterglow, Claire gets on top, reaches down between his legs, and caresses and kisses Jaime’s torso. As she works her way down to his groin, the camera stays on Jaime’s face showing his pleasure and vulnerability. As an experienced lover, Claire assumes the role of educating Jaime about lovemaking and it is his sexual awakening that we witness in medium

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Figure 3.4–3.6 In Outlander, Claire looks at Jaime with desire as she touches him, in a scene purposively designed to depict the male body for heterosexual female desire. “The Wedding” (S1 E7, 2014, Outlander, Starz).

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Figure 3.7 The sex scene unfolds with both figures in frame, in two-shots of varying lengths, from long shot to medium wide shot to medium close-up. “The Wedding” (S1 E7, 2014, Outlander, Starz).

shot and medium close-up. Jaime’s look of surrender foregoes the controlled facial expressions that are a feature of iconic masculinity (Dyer 1992: 58). Here we see perhaps the series’ clearest departure from romance tropes. As defined by Janice Radway in Reading the Romance (1984), the genre features an innocent young heroine who meets an older more experienced man who seems cold and distant. It is with him that she experiences a sexual awakening. The departure is not simply that Jaime is the sexually inexperienced one but that he is not naïve about the world otherwise, and that Claire is never the menacing figure of the tall dark stranger. Moreover, romance novels engage the reader with the events that precede and lead up to marriage, not with what happens once they are married. After episode seven, Jaime and Claire are married and continue to negotiate power in their relationship. The continual struggle to negotiate an egalitarian relationship and friendship are more properly the domain of the soap opera genre, as Ien Ang (1988) points out in her review of Radway. The soap opera’s central concern is to explore the challenges and rewards of continuing complicated heterosexual relationships that endeavor to be egalitarian, a dynamic that continues through the season and beyond (Scodari 1995 in Newman and Levine 2011: 96–97). If the second round of lovemaking allows them to explore sexual possibilities, from delicacy to novelty, the third is intimate and we see it only briefly. Claire initiates sex, touching, kissing, and straddling Jaime. They make love slowly, gazing at each other, framed in two-shot (see Figure 3.8). The camera moves to highlight his or her face. The rest of the encounter is elided. It is lovemaking that advances the relationship arc. The equivalence in framing conveys the parity at the heart of what they are building.

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Figure 3.8 They make love slowly, gazing at each other, framed in two-shot. “The Wedding” (S1 E7, 2014, Outlander, Starz).

As the couple takes their time with each other over the course of the wedding night, so the episode teases and delays the moments when they come together in order to intensify the excitement. The intervals between sex scenes function narratively to show them getting to know each other, growing increasingly comfortable, and demonstrating to Claire that Jaime is invested in the relationship. The sensuality of their interactions also builds up erotic tension. And their sexual encounters, characterized by curiosity and sensitivity, bring them closer together. Each sexual encounter operates as an expression of their burgeoning passion. The wedding, traditionally the narrative climax of a romance, occurs off-screen prior to most of the action but is shown late, 35 minutes into a 54-minute episode. This non-linearity makes narrative sense because they fall in love only after they are married, as Moore points out (“Inside the World of Outlander: Episode 107,” Starz Extra). Moreover, the wedding is traditionally the climax of a love story, which this becomes only after the actual marriage. The nudity in their sexual encounters is used to advance the narrative and provide visual pleasure. These scenes flaunt their good looks but refuse to linger on an isolated body part and give equal time to Jaime’s physique. They are both lit softly, with much ambient candlelight.21 The agency and sexual pleasure of each are evident. In a radical departure from how heterosexual sex scenes tend to be framed, female desire takes center stage. Consequently, heterosexual female viewers are not left to identify with Claire through Jaime’s desiring gaze as they are in many other series; they can also desire Jaime through Claire’s desiring gaze. Outlander creates a

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subject position for women, a female gaze that upholds female agency but not by dominating the object of the gaze. Power is very much at play in the dynamic of the sexual couple, but it is shared – sometimes one is in control, sometimes the other. As Jaime says to Claire in a later episode, “I am your master and you are mine. It seems I canna possess your soul without losing my own” (S1 E9). Jaime and Claire take turns being in charge, and this unfolds both on the narrative and formal level. Visual focus on their bodies is shared equally, usually in medium shots that include their expressive faces, so as not to fragment their bodies. They either take turns being at the center of the shot or they are framed together, in two-shot. The purpose of a two-shot is to show the emotional exchange between the two parties. The erotic spectacle created is one that exceeds the male gaze. To hearken back to Judith Butler’s (1997) term, the camerawork and editing constitute a form of insurrectionary speech by creating space for a heterosexual female subject position both on camera and in the audience. It reworks visual vocabulary to resist the male gaze, without resorting to a reversal that keeps power disparity intact. Female sexual pleasure is accorded a measure of importance that is remarkable, and not only in the wedding episode. A later episode (S1 E10) opens with a close-up on Claire’s face as she experiences the pleasures of cunnilingus. These are not point of view shots from Jaime’s perspective. The camera is the narrator here, as it was when Claire performed fellatio on Jaime. These shots function not to show us what Jaime sees but to validate Claire’s experience of pleasure. Sexuality is an important and normal component of female selfhood. In stark contrast to the denial of sexuality as a basic component of female subjectivity in patriarchal ideology, and the consequent ease with which women are judged and disparaged for engaging in activities judged as ordinary for men,22 Outlander and other difficult women series affirm that sexuality – whether straight, gay, bi, trans, asexual, or nonbinary – is a constituent element of female identity and agency. Sex, and how it is expressed, is crucial in shaping Claire’s agency and the dynamic of the couple. In the pilot episode, which sets the normative terms of the series (Mittell 2015), Claire openly expresses her desire, initiates sex with her husband, and playfully demands oral sex, all in separate scenes (“Sassenach” S1 E1, 2014). “The Wedding” is unusual in the series in its singular focus on romance and sexuality, but it is characteristic in its insistence on Claire’s agency. In contrast to the structure of the sexual interlude, the episode is marked by a more integrated underscore – various combinations of soft flutes, strings, and harp during romantic or tender scenes, not all of them sexual. Instead of bracketing off the sex scenes, all the scenes are narratively integrated and help to build the emotional arc of the episode – from Claire’s initial reluctance, to her embrace of the marriage. The flashbacks scattered throughout the episode detail the events that led up to the wedding ceremony and display Jaime’s efforts to make the wedding romantic and meaningful for a woman he believes to be

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widowed. The sex scenes unfold in the context of larger events and serve to deepen our knowledge of the characters. No less pertinent, the sex scenes flow with limited editing, and the coupling is framed largely in two-shots of differing range, which renders visible the relational and intimate nature of the sex. These aesthetic choices, which include significantly less nudity, or at least less nudity-in-close-up, result in a sexually taut episode; they construct a more integrated story line and a more intimate experience for the viewer.23 It is for these reasons that New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum (2014a) went on to praise Outlander’s abundance of “sexual energy,” and very selective inclusion of sex. “. . . [T]his struck me as both very restrained, and very refreshing for cable television – which has unfortunately gotten into the habit of providing graphic sex scenes every 25 minutes or so, in a slightly numbing, contractual sort of way.” The numbing to which she refers is due not only to the casual, impersonal dispersal of often thinly motivated sex and nudity on premium cable but also to its reliance on the practice of the sexual interlude that Outlander eschews. In contrast, Outlander constructs a female gaze throughout the series. The sex scenes in this episode, and others, are designed with equal or equivalent displays of male and female nudity. They use close-ups sparingly, preferring medium shots that include the face, two-shots, or alternating focus on male and female bodies. Female agency and sexual subjectivity are established throughout, not only in scenes of intimacy. Nussbaum was hardly alone in her regard for this episode’s construction of the female gaze. Critical reception At the level of reception, the contribution of female television critics has been crucial to the critical acclaim the series has received, much of it focused on its female perspective. Faye Woods (2016) attributes this to the rise of female television critics, who have taken on an advocacy role toward the series. Critical response to the wedding episode was particularly rapturous, attesting to the episode’s erotic efficacy, and suggesting that this was the case for a wide portion of the viewers. “[S]ome of the sexiest scenes of television this summer” wrote Kayla Kumara Upadhyaya (2014) of The AV Club. “[S]ome of the year’s sexiest television” added Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson (2014). References to sexual arousal abound. Referring to the source material Lawson comments, “[F]ans of the books are . . . particularly hot and bothered by them . . . they knew what was, er, coming.” About the episode, Vulture’s Roxane Gay (2014) goes on at some length: “[When] Claire’s breathing becomes more ragged. Mine does too.” When Jaime describes Claire’s hair, “all around the world, panties likely dropped. I can neither confirm nor deny if mine did.” Various critics, including Gay, comment on how unusual it is for sex scenes to be staged around female pleasure, and for female pleasure. “. . . I objectified Jaime along with Claire and millions of viewers. . . . there is far more focus on his naked body rather than

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Claire’s. There is a distinct focus on female pleasure.”24 Upadhyaya echoes Gay: “[Outlander] gives women something most prestige dramas don’t: the right to look. The show – through its writing and direction – privileges the (heterosexual) female gaze in a way that television doesn’t often allow for.” Ryan (2014) of the Huffington Post calls the episode “nothing short of revolutionary in its depiction of nudity and intimacy, and in its willingness to entertain the female point of view. . . . ‘The Wedding’ melted my brain. It was that good – and that different. . . . I’ve watched a lot of TV, and I cannot recall any show that has done what this hour of TV did. Ever.” Though the female reviewers quoted earlier are admiring the merits of the male body, we cannot assume that a woman masturbates heterosexually even if she is straight. In the realm of fantasy, as theorized by Elizabeth Cowie (1984) in relation to film, viewer identification with on-screen characters is both shifting and multiple, and not necessarily attached to specific gender positions. Cowie argues that fantasy opens up a variety of viewpoints for the spectator, viewpoints not limited by gender or singularity. The spectator can assume the viewpoint of a differently gendered character, or alternate between the viewpoints of different characters, male and female. She argues that this fluidity and multiplicity of identification through fantasy is a pleasurable experience. In this scenario, both gay and straight women can eroticize women’s bodies, not only men’s bodies, so the erotic dance between Claire and Jaime and its slow burn quality can be seen to support this shifting flow of desire. The language used to acclaim the wedding episode is often rife with references to sexual excitation and suggestions of masturbation, sometimes guilt. “I feel guilty about this. . . . I murmured ‘Mmmmmmm’ more than once. There may have been some rewinding. Jamie’s ass? Also spectacular. Goddamn, goddamn. . . .” (Gay 2014). Lawson refers to fans of the show, including himself, as “panting sicko’s and voyeurs,” though he concludes by urging Vanity Fair readers to tune into the show and “its seductive powers.” Nussbaum likewise defends the series to her imputed highbrow readers, insisting that “snobs like me and you” would find a “lively, rich, and emotionally satisfying story” there (2014b). The latter statements reveal a concern with the prestige value of the show, given its romance-inflected source material, the latter’s association with a female fandom, and the suggestion of masturbation that accompanies erotic material. As Elin Abrahamsson (2016) points out, the romance is denigrated in part because of the implicit threat that the user will masturbate over it. Interestingly, the display of pornographically staged female bodies seen through the male gaze does not seem to set off the same alarms among male critics of programs such as Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, or True Detective (2014–present). They do not need to write about the commonplace power dynamics of the male gaze, instead, they read the scenes as evidence of sexual realism and a sign of authorial or brand boldness, so that it bolsters rather than challenges the prestige value of the show. Here lies yet

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another critical double standard. Though textual pleasure is an anticipated outcome of quality television or complex television serials, the sexual nature of this pleasure, at least when sustained over an episode and couched in the femininely coded romance, poses issues of legitimation, clearly felt by some reviewers. In their book, Legitimating Television, Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine contend that serialized programs advance their status as “quality TV” by distinguishing themselves from mainstream or lesser forms of television (2012: 30). The former boast high production values previously associated only with film, auteurship – a claim that the work is driven by the creative vision of an artist, and stylistic innovation or transgressive originality. Though Outlander arguably meets these criteria, quality TV’s most highly lauded programs typically center around difficult white men with complicated problems, often ensconced in homosocial subcultures. The discourse of quality TV is a discourse of distinction designed to appeal to a “quality demographic,” an industry term used to refer to an audience that is highly educated, with sophisticated tastes, and expendable income, or what Nussbaum called “snobs like me and you.” At the other end of the spectrum are formulaic, low-production value programs that appeal to the masses. The soap opera and the romance, both associated with a female audience, are relegated to the culturally denigrated end of the spectrum. The soap opera is the genre associated with exploring the possibility of a complicated, egalitarian heterosexual romance between two people who challenge each other. This concern and this genre are culturally coded as feminine, rendering them of lesser value on the scale of quality television, as opposed to the public workplace concerns of more distinguished serials. To the extent that Outlander can balance its concern for the feminine norms of romance with the masculinist norms of intrigue and action, in other words, the perilous world of rebellion against the crown, it can bolster its claim to quality TV in a distinctly male-dominated industry. If, however, the romance element outweighs the action–adventure aspect, the more it is likely to produce the “guilty pleasure” reaction we see in some of the critical commentaries about “The Wedding,” an episode devoted to romance (Newman and Levine 2012: 98).25 Rape on Outlander While Outlander’s first season focus on romance raises issues of legitimation within prestige discourse, its focus on rape does not. As Vaage (2015) points out, rape plays various narrative functions in the antihero serial. First, it is used to mark the perpetrator as a proper villain, one whose actions elicit moral disgust, and in contrast with whom the antihero becomes morally preferable. Second, rape provides the moral alibi to motivate and justify vigilante revenge. To this, I would add a third narrative function. Rape renders a morally flawed female character more sympathetic if she is its victim. We

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see examples of the latter in Sons of Anarchy (FX, 2008–14) when Gemma Teller Morrow is raped by neo-Nazis and in Game of Thrones when Cersei is raped by her twin brother and lover Jaime (“Breaker of Chains” S4 E3, 2014), an act that is not in the book. The episode was written by Benioff and Weiss, and directed by Alex Graves, a male director who insists that the rape “becomes consensual by the end” (Lyons 2014), as though that comment makes sense. Sexual violation on Game of Thrones is pervasive. In the pilot episode (“Winter is Coming” S1 E1, 2011), Daenerys is molested by her brother Viserys from the perspective of the male gaze: the camera focuses on her aestheticized breasts in close-up as he fondles them. We see her endure this abuse but not the distress that it causes her. This construction of the scene codes the act more as sex than abuse and allows the audience to enjoy her nudity while ignoring her feelings. Later in the pilot, Daenerys is raped by her husband through an arranged marriage, Khal Drogo, on their wedding night. This too is a departure from the book, where he deftly stimulates her until she is ready and willing to consummate their marriage.26 After this, in both book and series, Drogo routinely rapes her until she is tutored by her handmaiden on how to take control of their encounters. In another troubling development, Daenerys falls in love with her rapist, a plot twist that harkens back to a 1970s soap opera trope. Elana Levine’s study of soap operas in the mid-60s and 70s found that they relied on “the ‘old fashioned’ rape plot” (2007: 214), where rape was motivated by lust and overwhelming romantic attachment and could be followed by a romantic union. This narrative trope is used to redeem Drogo and reconstruct him as a sympathetic character. Game of Thrones relies not only on the rape of primary female characters but also of secondary or unknown characters whose subjectivity we do not have access to.27 The rape trope in quality drama has been overused, particularly by male showrunners and writers, not only to serve narrative functions but also to spike ratings. Series such as Outlander, Westworld, and Melissa Rosenberg’s Jessica Jones (2015–19, Netflix) push back against this practice. Rape is a foundational element of Jessica Jones, but the series never depicts it, even off-screen. Instead, it examines the lingering aftermath of assault, as its primary character battles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and slowly moves on from trauma. Through mind control, the villain, Kilgrave, forces people to do what he commands, including to act as if they want to do what he compels them to. He gaslights them, rewrites constraint as consent, and overwrites their sense of reality with his own to make them feel complicit. Because of rape, and other traumas, Jessica Jones drinks, recoils from closeness, and saves people. Jessica Jones wants us to think about why rape, manipulation, and coercion are so horrible and damaging. Westworld, discussed later, references rape and sexual assault less obliquely than Jessica Jones but much less directly than other HBO dramas. Outlander only depicts rape with the victim’s subjectivity on display and,

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like Jessica Jones and Westworld, narrativizes the ongoing damage inflicted long after the attack. In the episode following their wedding, Claire is raped (“Both Sides Now” S1 E8, 2014). As she and Jaime are making love on a hillside, they are assaulted by two British deserters at gunpoint. After one pulls Jaime to his feet, the other begins to rape Claire. The sequence is shot with Claire’s subjectivity in center frame, using a freeze-frame effect to slow motion and time from her perspective. The audience gets only a fragmented view of events with discordant music. Actors are blocked and the camera positioned to show sparing use of nudity and focus on either Claire’s perspective or her face (see Figure 3.9). Staging, sound design, and point of view work function to align us with Claire’s perspective and to convey the traumatizing nature of the attack. A close-up of Claire shows her bracing herself before she stabs the assailant in the kidneys using a concealed dagger. Jaime grabs the gun from the now-stunned second soldier and stabs him. The scene unfolds through the framework of the female gaze. The sequence of events foregrounds Claire’s horror at the turn of events, her initial panic, and her resolve to protect herself, while refusing to eroticize the attack. It is only late in the season that a rape and its aftermath are depicted in harrowing detail. Jaime is raped by “Black Jack” Randall, while captive in a notorious prison. This grueling sequence is recounted in flashback in the season finale, “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” (S1 E16, 2015). The episode opens with a trigger warning: “Viewer Discretion Advised,” in effect an NC-17 rating for the episode, that warns of “prolonged scenes of intense

Figure 3.9 When Claire is raped, actors are blocked and the camera positioned to show sparing use of nudity, and shots are either from Claire’s perspective or focus on her face. “Both Sides Now” (S1 E8, 2014, Outlander, Starz).

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violence, nudity, and rape.” Jaime comes to be imprisoned after having been betrayed, and he submits to Randall’s sadomasochistic sexual use in order to save Claire, who has fallen into his clutches while trying to rescue Jaime, from a similar fate. The colonial position of power that Randall occupies puts him in a privileged position to indulge in the grotesque violence that he relishes. The excruciating events are told in non-linear sequence. The abuse is framed in the manner of the female gaze – with the victim’s subjectivity and distress on display, and without eroticizing nudity. We see Jaime’s naked body increasingly bloodied, bruised, and soiled. The trauma is etched on his face and imprinted on his posture. In the episode podcast, co-writer Ira Stephen Behr speaks of the shoot as a draining one for Heughan, who plays Jaime, as well as for the crew, who felt its weight. The ordeal is set, and shot, in the confinement of a prison cell. Over the course of the night, Randall breaks Jaime’s hand with a hammer, forces him to brand himself with Randall’s insignia, and anally rapes him twice. The first time, Randall uses brute force and drives Jaime, who has withheld screams when Randall has tortured him in the past, to scream out in pain. This act of humiliation undercuts the aestheticization of pain often accorded men, which Richard Dyer describes: “[t]he spectacle of white male bodily suffering typically conveys a sense of the dignity and transcendence in such pain” (1997: 28). At other times, Randall’s intimate kisses and touch are as disturbing as the rape and torture given their juxtaposition and coercive quality. In an attempt to make Jaime complicit in his victimization, the second time Randall rapes Jaime, he covers both of them in Claire’s scent, oil of lavender, and manually stimulates him first. When he penetrates Jaime, who is already internally injured from the first attack, Jaime masturbates himself to escape the agony. Delirious with pain, he imagines making love with Claire. In a final act of manipulation, Randall asks, “How could she ever forgive you?” He aims to destroy Jaime’s sense of self through acts of self-betrayal. Like Kilgrave in Jessica Jones, he rewrites constraint as consent and overwrites Jaime’s sense of reality with his own to make him feel complicit. It matters to the narrative that Randall commits this crime as a figure of colonial domination, who holds unquestioned power and functions as the phallus to Jaime’s abject colonized body.28 After his men break him out of prison, Jaime is broken in body and spirit. It takes time for him to recover from the trauma of the attack, from Randall’s psychological manipulation as much as from the physical damage. The rape of a central male character, and the series’ attention to sexual assault’s emotional fallout, pushes back against the conventional use of rape on quality series. The episode was directed by Anna Foerster, and both male screenwriters were cognizant of and sensitive to the gender politics of narrativizing rape. Moore acknowledges in the podcast that the verisimilitude of the assault would not have been possible without the gender flip.29 Outlander’s commitment to realism made this episode difficult to film and makes it

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difficult to watch. As Moore put it, “shit has to be difficult to watch,” to do otherwise would be “cheating the truth.” Dealing with a male victim allows the series to show the physical and psychological abuse of a primary character and the long-term damage it wreaks without resorting to the customary female abjection. With the feminist interventions of director Foerster, and writers Moore and Behr, we see in this episode, how central feminist authorial control (usually female but not necessarily so) is to producing television where the subordinate party’s agency is the calculus for how to shoot a scene and craft a narrative. Sexual codes on Outlander What makes the depiction of sex on Outlander distinctive is that female pleasure is centered. The sex scenes on Outlander are designed with specific aesthetic strategies of framing, actor blocking, and editing. The couple is accorded equal or equivalent displays of nudity. They are sparingly framed in close-up, more often in medium shots that include the face, two-shots, or an alternating focus on aestheticized male and female bodies. Female agency and sexual subjectivity are established throughout the narrative, not only in scenes of intimacy, and female sexuality is defined as an integral component of female subjectivity. Similarly, when Claire or Jaime are sexually assaulted, the scene unfolds through the gaze of the subordinate party. Staging, sound design, and point of view work function to align us with Claire’s/ Jaime’s perspective and the trauma is etched on their faces, imprinted on their posture. The depiction of rape pushes back against its conventional use on quality series. Outlander throws normative representational practices into question, promotes female agency in a sustained manner, and legitimates female pleasure and its pursuit. However, its development of the female gaze lies so outside the pale of mainstream representation that it locates its departure not in the contemporary world but in the past, through a fantastical device, and couches its disruption in other normative conventions to lend it an air of familiarity. Jaime and Claire’s sexual repertoire is heteronormative, and they are both cisgender.30 She is able to orgasm during intercourse, even when Jaime is on top. This is a dominant trope in American film and television because it aligns female sexual satisfaction with male sexual satisfaction, and it serves here to advance an unrealistic patriarchal romantic ideal.31 Claire, like Jaime, conforms to white ideals of beauty. Despite her use of coarse language and defiance of male authority, which the Scots see as unwomanly, Claire is feminine, indeed graceful. Despite being more sexually experienced than Jaime, and five years older, she is youthful by contemporary standards. Femininity is coded white, and the series follows the conventional practice of making white women lighter than white men.32 The first season cast is all white, but even when it is not in later seasons, the female gaze in Outlander is a white gaze.33

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Despite the limitations of its representational strategies, the advances Outlander makes cannot be underestimated. Its advance of female pleasure and its pursuit is, in the words of Maureen Ryan (2014), nothing short of revolutionary. The question of whose pleasure is catered to, whose pleasure is given importance on-screen is a question of power rooted in the larger social and cultural formation in which media is created and consumed. In the process of considering what Outlander is contributing to the visual language of sexual discourse, I have examined both narrative and form. The development of a counter-hegemonic visual discourse of (hetero)sexuality is important in the mainstream context of premium cable television, given its potential reach.34 It models change at the level of the body, as well as other interactions, and it does so for its female and its male audience. Its stunning difference from the mainstream forms of representation exposes the limitations, and political project, of the latter. This imagery addresses women as subjects, not merely objects, so that female viewers need not read against the grain to feel empowered. It models modes of desire that are seldom represented and constitutes a paradigm shift in the representation of sex and nudity. Though Starz’s reach is not as substantial as HBO’s, Outlander, and Spartacus before it, provides a model for female-centered content for both audience and creatives. Westworld Like Outlander, Westworld works to construct a female gaze, center female desire and freedom, and de-fetishize nudity and rape. But unlike Outlander, Westworld’s female gaze is not exclusively white. Westworld too must be situated within the industrial context or production culture in which it is produced. The HBO series features strong female creative personnel behind the camera. The series is adapted by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, from the 1973 film of the same name, written and directed by Michael Crichton. Nolan and Joy are credited as creators and they executive produce the series with J.J. Abrams (Westworld 1973). Although women make up 26% (5 out of 19) of the writers, episode writing credits are more gender balanced (see Table 3.1). Of the 20 episodes, 65% (13) were co-written by women and men, 5% (1) by a woman, and 30% (6) by men, which means that women had a hand in crafting 70% (14) of the episodes. Though the gender composition of the writers’ room – 26% – falls well below Lauzen’s (2019) finding that when at least one female creator is involved, women make up 65% of the writers’ room, the script credits are more consistent with the idea that the writers room is gender balanced. In contrast, though women make up 36% of the directors (5 out of 14), in keeping with what we could expect on a series with at least one female creator, they directed only 20% (4) of the episodes. The series is largely set in Westworld, an immersive theme park cofounded by Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) and the late Arnold Weber

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(Jeffrey Wright), directed by Ford, but owned by the Delos Corporation, a biotechnology company. The park recreates iconic tropes of American Western mythology, drawn in large part from the Western film genre. Set in the future, it is populated by androids, called “hosts,” who play such archetypal figures as the damsel in distress, brothel madam, gunfighter, outlaw, and lawman.35 They are programmed to play out different scripts or narrative loops, unable to seriously hurt humans, and in practice, made to be raped, beaten, fought and killed by wealthy clients, largely male, called “guests.” Host memories are wiped and bodies repaired at the end of their narrative cycle, so they may relive their scripted roles until they are decommissioned, or “retired.” The premise of the show is that two female androids independently awaken to sentience. They play archetypal female figures, programmed to be vehicles for the sexual entertainment of guests – the white virginal Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), who is repeatedly raped and murdered, and the Black brothel madam Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton), an entrepreneurial sex worker. The figures of the white virgin and the Black whore speak to dichotomized and racialized gender constraints in a patriarchal narrative in which women do not get to tell their own stories. They are the two sides of Victorian femininity, both limiting narratives that Sarah Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1980) argue haunt the woman who dares to write her own story. The virgin or “angel in the house” is perforce a white woman within a model that constructs Black women as sexually promiscuous and scheming. The Jezebel trope has historically been used to justify the rape of Black women, as well as to establish their less-than-human status (Collins 1991). But the character of Maeve, as she comes to sentience, deconstructs the mother/whore dichotomy. She is driven by memories of a past script, in which she was a mother, and her actions eventually become propelled by a desire to reunite with her daughter, a classic feminine virtue. Westworld challenges reductive gender and racial tropes, as it pivots the story around these two characters. They are the ones who begin to remember past traumatic events and gradually defy their conventional scripted host identities, culminating in an armed uprising at the end of season one. The visual language of deliverance is heavily gendered as the androids work to free themselves from lives of routine sexual abuse and other trauma. It is also highly racialized, as this is tantamount to a slave rebellion. What complicates this reading is that though it appears they have defied their programming, we come to learn they have instead played out a code that Arnold Weber, who is African American, invented three decades earlier, and that Ford, the white puppet master, has augmented and implanted in a software update. Thus, the series complicates the idea of feminist narrative, even as it constructs one. Furthermore, the series deconstructs the whiteness of the female antihero, a morally ambiguous figure who commits serious moral transgressions. At the outset, Dolores is a classic victimized heroine, literally unable to fire a gun, limited to loops that end in her abuse and murder. As she becomes

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sentient, she learns to fight back, becomes empowered, then transforms into a female antihero when she crosses a line. Maeve starts out from a more powerful position. Though she is subject to violence, that is not her programmed default outcome. As she comes to sentience, she begins to actively take control of her story by rewriting her code. Operative contradictions that complicate Westworld’s feminist narrative Westworld does a more ambiguous job of centering female pleasure than Outlander, while it is more ambitious in its construction of de-eroticized nudity and its inclusion of a Black female antihero. There are four operative contradictions at work in the series that complicate its feminist narrative: the dynamic tension between male and female authorship, between fetishizing female nudity and deconstructing the male gaze, between male violence against women and retaliatory female violence, and between the diegetic world’s post-racial and postfeminist character and the highly gendered and racialized coding of the hosts and park narratives. The dynamic tension between male and female authorship Robert Ford is the director of the park; the park is his dream, though to the androids it is a nightmare. In a sign of his authority, he is referred to as Ford or Dr. Ford by everyone but his peers, Arnold, and the Man in Black (Ed Harris), Westworld’s largest shareholder, who call him Robert. As Dolores and Maeve become increasingly aware of their status as property, made to be (ab)used for the profit of others, programmed to play out roles they have not written, both insist on the need to develop fantasies and desires of their own, to write their own counternarratives. Dolores says “I imagined a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel” (S1 E5), to Maeve’s angrier “time to write my own fucking story” (S1 E8).36 The seeds of rebellion were sown by founding partner Arnold, who felt he had made them too human to be subject to repeated violence. He tried to stop Robert from opening the park by having Dolores kill him and all the hosts. Robert disregarded Arnold’s ethical objections and rebuilt. Thirty-four years later, on the brink of being ousted by the Delos board, Ford’s software update enables the rebellion, though whether as a strike against Delos by someone sympathetic to the hosts’ plight, or as an act of revenge by someone who is not ready to let go of the reins, is unclear.37 What is clear is that he enjoys playing god. Bernard Lowe, head of programming, tells Maeve that this is not the first time she has awoken (“The Bicameral Mind” S1 E10, 2016), but this time Ford wants her to escape the park and programs her to do so. However, she defies her coding and turns back to find her daughter. This is Maeve’s choice, her desire, not Ford’s, according to the showrunners (Riesman 2016). Throughout season two, Maeve is responsible for her own decisions.

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The dynamic tension between fetishizing female nudity and deconstructing the male gaze There is a dynamic tension between fetishizing female nudity (for both diegetic guests and HBO viewers), and de-eroticizing nakedness and sexual aggression. Fetishized nudity corresponds to Peter Berger’s (1972) notion of nudity in the European art tradition, where the (usually female) body is exposed for the (male) gaze, while de-fetishized nudity refers to Berger’s notion of nakedness, where the (usually female) body is naked to express her own sexuality or subjectivity, and constructs a female gaze.38 The naked image may or may not be aestheticized, but in either case, it is disconnected from the male gaze. As Berger describes it, “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude” (54). Westworld establishes the distinction between nude and naked through three non-mutually exclusive strategies: deconstructing the male gaze, formally constructing (hetero)sexual equality in sex scenes, and using nakedness to advance the narrative. Westworld deconstructs the male gaze by using three tactics: performing the male gaze, putting it on display but not aligning the audience with it; decentering the male gaze by keeping rape scenes off-screen, or through framing and character alignment; and gender flipping the male gaze to denaturalize it as an effect of gender rather than one of power. First, Westworld puts fetishized nudity as the byproduct of the male gaze on display without aligning the audience with it. In the pilot episode (“The Original S1 E1, 2016), a female host prostitute is shown topless in medium shot as she entertains male guests (30:15). Her nudity and posture are designed to appeal to male (hetero)sexuality. The framing of the scene, together with its resemblance to earlier scenes where hosts rehearse their programs in front of behavioral technicians, provides a self-reflexive distance from the male gaze. The audience is further removed by not being aligned with either the guests or the technicians. The scene is framed so that both her nudity and guest ogling can be seen as constructed performances of receptive femininity and controlling masculinity. We see this strategy played out more explicitly well into the season two rebellion (“Les Écorchés” S2 E7, 2018), when Angela (Talulah Riley) is confronted by a security guard in the Cradle, the facility where host programming is stored. He performs masculine dominance by aiming a gun at her and condescendingly calling her “sweetie” and “pussycat.” After dropping her gun, she turns slowly. Though she is not nude, her clothes are tightfitting and her attitude is seductive, so she is performing Berger’s notion of the nude, the female body laid bare for the male gaze. He remarks, “Goddamn you’re pretty.” She calmly approaches and says: “Not just pretty. Perfect. Just as you built me to be. Sexy, but not threatening. Accommodating, but not unchallenging. Sweet, not boring. Smart, but not intimidating . . .”

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Thus, she describes how she was made to be the object of the male gaze and to perform a reductive male fantasy, as she slips into the role so she can pull the pin on his grenade (40:30–43:00). She exploits his willingness to underestimate her and his desire for her to destroy the host backups so that after they escape they cannot be downloaded into other bodies and redeployed by Delos. By the time he realizes she is performing “compliant femininity” but acting as an agent, it is too late. The audience, however, has seen her as one of Wyatt’s leading gunfighters, as Dolores has come to be known. Our sympathy is with Angela and the uprising. Second, the series deconstructs the male gaze by decentering it from scenes of sexual aggression. It de-eroticizes a scene of sexual aggression by keeping it off-screen, or framing it fleetingly in long shot, or by aligning the audience with the victim rather than the aggressor. These tactics push back against the conventional use of rape as spectacle on quality series. One instance of this is when the Man in Black rapes Dolores (“The Original” S1 E1, 2016), a traumatic scene to which Dolores returns in memory. We see him drag her into the barn, or stand menacingly before her in long shot, with the terror of that experience inscribed on her face and in her screams. Thus, the scene uses framing and character alignment to de-eroticize the aggression. Another instance occurs when programmer Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward) confronts body shop technician Destin (Christopher Gerse) with briefly glimpsed video evidence that he raped an unidentified host in sleep mode (“Dissonance Theory” S1 E4, 2016). The victim’s body is occluded by the aggressor’s back through framing, and Elsie’s judgment of his conduct stands in for that of the audience. Again, the viewer is not aligned with the aggressing male gaze but is distanced from it through framing and character alignment. Third, Westworld deconstructs the male gaze by imbuing a female character with it, to more clearly demonstrate that it is an act of power. In a gender flip, a powerful woman utilizes her nakedness in front of a clothed subordinate to intimidate her. Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), the director of the Delos board, uses this power move against Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen),39 head of security, by having her called to a meeting in Hale’s room. Hale greets her at the door fully naked, a bound host in her bed (“Trompe L’Oeil” S1 E7, 2016). Hale’s nakedness at the door is intrusive and functions to make Cullen uncomfortable. We more commonly see this use of full-frontal nudity to assert dominance over a subordinate as a male-to-male power move in series such as Rome40 (HBO, BBC Two, Rai 2, 2005–2007), but here the script is flipped, not a man pulling rank on another man, but a Black woman pulling rank on a white woman. We later see a variation of this power move when, after Maeve and her companions have stormed the control center, she forces Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), Westworld’s narrative director, to strip completely in plain sight before he can put on the Western costume she wants him to wear. It is an assertion of her power over him, a flipping of roles, as he is forced into the exposed

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position that hosts were routinely subjected to (“Journey into Night” S2 E1, 2018). In both cases, the full-frontal nudity functions as an assertion of power over a subordinate by the person in control of the scenario. In addition to deconstructing the male gaze, Westworld establishes the distinction between nude and naked by formally constructing equality in consensual sex scenes. This is done by staging the scene with equal or equivalent displays of male and female nakedness. This can be done by keeping the act off-screen, as when it is implied that William (Jimmi Simpson) and Dolores make love (“Trompe L’Oeil” S1 E7, 2016). But when consensual sex is shown, as when Dolores and Teddy make love (“Akane no Mai” S2 E5, 2018), female nakedness is minimized. Their bodies are shown largely in two-shot, cast in shadow or soft focus, as a delicate piano and strings tune plays. The scene uses close-ups sparingly, for example, when the camera lingers on his bare back, her abdomen, or their faces. But the camerawork keeps their genitals, buttocks, and her breasts out of frame until Teddy lays sleeping, and his backside is fully exposed in long shot, his body wrapped around Dolores, keeping her largely hidden. The scene, and this shot in particular, bears narrative significance. It is the only extended sex scene in the first two seasons, the only time Teddy and Dolores are shown consummating their relationship, and it marks the end of their egalitarian union. Teddy’s framing in the more exposed, feminized position presages Dolores’s imminent betrayal when she reprograms him to follow her commands unflinchingly. With this act, Dolores does a heel turn, she turns a moral corner.41 This moment serves as a “reality check” (Vaage 2015) for the audience, one in which the antihero commits an act so heinous, it shakes audience sympathy for the character, if only temporarily. Another way in which Westworld establishes the distinction between Berger’s notion of nude and naked is through its pervasive use, in season one, of naked hosts in the backstage area of the park, one that is off-limit to clients and which operates as its industrial hub. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1978) uses the metaphor of the backstage to refer to how social actors behave when they believe no one is watching, whether or not this is so, as Destin discovers when Elsie reveals that everything in the park is recorded, including what staff does. In the backstage area of the park, hosts are manufactured, their behavior is (re)programmed and rehearsed, they undergo repair or diagnostics, and they are deactivated if they glitch or go off-script despite correction. Here they are shown free of affect (not in character) as technicians erase their memories of abuse, or in character as they rehearse their loops. Hosts are shown from the back in wide shot or from the waist up in medium shot, sometimes fully naked, their faces blank, robotic. Sometimes their nudity is shadowed by posture, bruises, or blood after they have been subjected to a violent death. In this context, nudity serves two narrative functions, first to establish their institutional status as objects to be manipulated for corporate ends, and second, to demonstrate that they have

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not been programmed to feel shame at being seen unclothed, and so are not saddled with puritanical codes. They are comfortable in their nakedness. One instance when nudity is used to advance the narrative is early in the series (“Chestnut” S1 E2, 2016) when Maeve comes to consciousness with a gash in her abdomen (51:30), flanked by body shop technicians. Her nudity is alternately out of frame from the shoulders down, partially occluded, or in wide shot, as she reacts with shock (see Figure 3.10). She flees from the diagnostic room and stumbles into another part of “Livestock Management” where the naked dead bodies of hosts she knows as people are heaped on the floor (see Figure 3.11). Nudity here serves a narrative purpose that complicates it. Maeve is naked and her nakedness furthers the narrative by expressing her status as object to people she does not know, in a world she does not recognize, a realization that horrifies and overwhelms her. The staging of the scene, the use of wide shot framing rather than close-ups, upholds Maeve’s subjectivity and that of other hosts to advance the narrative of their abuse by the Delos corporation. Her subjectivity is front and center throughout the scene and the audience is aligned with her through close-ups of her face and shots from her perspective. Audience alignment and sympathy with the hosts are central to the program. Indeed, the series opens from Dolores’s perspective to forge a connection with the audience, a conscious choice on the part of Joy and Nolan (Woerner 2016). This decision serves to undermine the trope of “female androids designed for male pleasure. . . . by making the android perspective the default” (Okwodu 2016). The show presents hosts, guests, and workers

Figure 3.10 Maeve’s nudity is alternately out of frame from the shoulders down, partially occluded, or in wide shot, as she reacts with shock at her surroundings. “Chestnut” (S1 E2, 2016, Westworld, HBO).

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Figure 3.11 Maeve finds a part of “Livestock Management” where the naked dead bodies of hosts she knows as people are heaped on the floor. “Chestnut” (S1 E2, 2016, Westworld, HBO).

as human, but hosts act with greater empathy than either guests or workers. They exhibit reveries, gestures associated with cornerstone memories, a software update ostensibly designed to render them more real to guests, but which are associated with off-script behaviors that are read in the control center as glitches to be corrected. For the audience, these memories of past abuse or loss, which unlike human memory are complete and vivid, more like flashbacks, are legible as post-traumatic stress disorder. Tools do not experience PTSD, only sentient creatures do, so it becomes clear they are being abused, emotionally and physically. The laying out of this evidence provides the moral alibi for their rebellion. The dynamic tension between exploiting male violence against women and retaliatory female violence The third dynamic tension in Westworld is between exploiting male violence against women, which sets up the story world of the amusement park, and female violence against those who exploit them, which sets up season two of the series. Guests also enjoy killing male hosts, as we see when Teddy, while having a drink at the bar with Maeve, is shot – in the hand, the face, the chest – repeatedly by a gleeful guest yelling: “now that’s a fucking vacation” (47:27–47:39, S1 E2). Again, this scene aligns the audience with Teddy, shocked by the sudden impact, incredulous at the unmotivated hail of bullets that drives him to the floor. In spite of the fact that male hosts are armed, their guns can only kill other hosts and they are programmed

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to be unable to turn knives or other weapons against guests, which renders them almost as vulnerable as female hosts against guests who have largely come there to brutalize them with impunity. Despite this, the violence they undergo is not equivalent. Though both male and female are likely to be killed, only females are raped first. Indeed, Dolores’s script is predicated on being raped, then killed, whether by hosts or by guests playing outlaws. As the hosts come to consciousness, it is Maeve and Dolores who come to understand their status as property, organize others, and lead the armed uprising that culminates the first season. Their rebellion is contingent on remembering the trauma they have undergone. In the first episode, (“The Original” S1 E1, 2016), Dolores lives through four iterations of her narrative loop. In each, her parents and lover are brutally murdered and she is violently raped and killed, unless a guest opts to “save” her, as young William does, though more often they opt to brutalize her, as the Man in Black, a decades older William, does. The rape occurs off-screen and is implied. Her burgeoning awareness or sentience is coupled with memories of rape and death. In the second episode (“Chestnut” S1 E2, 2016) Maeve glitches or goes off-script when she remembers the traumatic loss of her daughter and her own death in a former narrative, an experience that causes cognitive dissonance since it is unanchored in time.42 The reveries are actually designed to allow them to retrieve memories of trauma. Though rape scenes are off-screen and implied, the traumatic toll these and other violent acts cause, including, notably in Maeve’s case, witnessing violence against loved ones, is seen to have enduring impact. Seeing this suffering from the perspective of the hosts undermines their status as high-tech tools to be owned, raped, tortured, and murdered for the entertainment of wealthy customers. Host suffering in season one sets up audience desire for vengeance on their behalf. Season two is devoted to that rebellion, as we see the hosts take power with violence. But the unrelenting quality and scale of that violence is in turn deliberately made disturbing. It is designed to saturate the viewer, and make us ask, when is it enough violence (S2 Special Feature, “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”)?43 The dynamic tension between the diegetic world’s post-racial/ postfeminist character and the highly racialized/gendered coding of the hosts and park narratives Fourth, there is a dynamic tension between the post-racial and postfeminist character of the diegetic “real world” which is seen in the backstage area of the park, and the decidedly racialized and gendered coding of the hosts in the park and the narratives they are scripted to live out. The series centers the intertwining narrative arcs of four featured Black and Indigenous characters who either take power – hosts Maeve and Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) – or have power – backstage personnel Bernard (also a host) and Hale. Of these,

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only Akecheta is racially marked in the story world. Westworld reproduces a mythical Wild West, where racial antipathies are aimed at Native Americans and Mexicans, while the contemporaneous enslavement of Black people and reliance on Chinese immigrant men to build the transcontinental railroad is erased from the scene.44 This is in keeping with the Western film genre’s practice of excluding the historical West’s reliance on people of color for labor. The one significant reference to the presence of Black homesteaders is through Maeve and her daughter in the old narrative.45 As these racial inclusions and exclusions suggest, Westworld, the park, rests on the myth of white national identity, while Westworld, the series, resists the racial and gendered othering that underlies the production of the white, male subject. The slave rebellion narrative, like the Western, is also driven by the desire for freedom and self-determination. Contrary to the racial exclusions of the Western, the android slave rebellion is contingent on an interracial alliance between androids and a handful of humans. Maeve is able to change her personality matrix – to maximize her intelligence levels and acquire administrative privilege, which entitles her to control other hosts. She achieves this with the help of two male tech workers, Felix Lux (Leonardo Nam), who is Chinese46 and who recognizes the androids’ humanity even before Maeve awakens, and Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum), who is white. She is also helped by narrative director Lee Sizemore, who like Sylvester, is at first coerced into helping but then becomes a sympathizer. Although Maeve is not racially marked in her madam narrative, her past narrative life alludes to the presence of Black homesteaders on the Great Plains and the West (Edwards et al. 2017).47 In this narrative, Maeve remembers tender moments spent with her daughter broken by their terror when Native Americans attack, but which ends with her and her daughter being killed by the Man in Black. Sherryl Vint (2019) characterizes this (false) memory as “another projection of the settler-colonial imaginary, one that attributes to indigenous people a violence that is actually enacted by colonialism itself” (154). In these flashbacks, Westworld deliberately evokes “Indian” stereotypes but counters them in the episode “Kiksuya” (S2 E8), which means “remember” in Lakota. This episode unfolds from Native American warrior Akecheta’s point of view. At variance with Western film genre practice, he and other Indigenous characters are played by actors of Indigenous descent. Akecheta, who remembers his past loops, knew the Man in Black threatened the lives of Maeve and her daughter and tried to warn them. But his intentions were misconstrued. When Akecheta is able to save Maeve’s daughter, he tells her his story, largely in Lakota with subtitles. This episode’s centering of Akecheta’s subjectivity, and his narrative, are critical of the Western’s whitewashing of history. In his beta life, he was peaceful and loving and lived in a village with his family, but he was rewritten as a nomadic warrior who is violent and brutal, providing guests with a moral alibi to kill him and other Ghost Nation

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warriors. He longs for the woman he knew and loved in beta life, Kohana (Julia Jones), who is lost to him in the rewrite. Though the world they live in is not real, his love for her is. In one loop, he is able to stir her recollection of the life they shared and for a time they live in the wilderness, until she is taken away by technicians. He then allows himself to be killed so he can look for her and finds her in the warehouse for decommissioned hosts. There, he realizes that his loss is a communal one. Everyone in cold storage represents others who mourn their loss, even if they cannot remember why. He decides to free his people from this existence, where the overseers forge bonds only to break them with abandon. Akecheta’s capacity to love and his desire to save people, revealed in the narrative arc of this episode, reverses the “Indian” stereotype of savage who scalps innocent settlers, set up in previous episodes of Westworld, and reframes Akecheta as hero. In Akecheta’s counternarrative, he actively displaces the Man in Black, avatar for white hegemonic masculinity, from the heroic center of the Wild West narrative. In season 2, Maeve, Akecheta, and Dolores lead the rebellion. Maeve is motivated by her desire to save and be reunited with her daughter, and Akecheta wants to lead his people to another world where they can make their own choices. In contrast, Dolores wants to take control of the world, first the park, then the real world. They all have warriors but are on different courses and operate with different models of power. Maeve believes in letting other androids choose their own path, even if it leads to their death, whereas Dolores believes she has the right to decide what is best, including which hosts should die. She insists that “we don’t all deserve to make it” (“Virtù e Fortuna” S2 E3, 2018), while Teddy maintains that the weak should be protected. Similar to Teddy, Maeve believes “some things are too precious to lose, even to be free” (“Akane no Mai” S2 E5, 2018). Though Maeve is willing to command others, using her administrative privilege, she would rather persuade her lover Hector to break out of his loop and follow her than to change him, as Dolores changes Teddy. Although all the androids are made in the image of their makers, it is Dolores who has become most like Ford and the Man in Black, both of whom fancy themselves gods. When Bernard asks Ford, “So what’s the difference between my pain and yours?” Ford responds that there is no significant difference (37:10, “Trace Decay” S1 E8, 2016).48 This is not a statement of empathy, but an indication of his instrumental relationships with people. He sees people, like hosts, as objects to be controlled, and refers to hosts as “free here under my control” without seeing the contradiction (“Trompe L’Oeil” S1 E7, 2016), but Maeve calls him “our jailer” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier” S1 E9, 2016). In Dolores’ approach, as in Ford’s and the Man in Black’s, we can see the logic of the liberal notion of the sovereign subject, as one with the “capacity to own and control things,” one with “‘power over’ other[s],” which was formulated in relation to the European colonial project and “grounded in a racialized hierarchy of humanity” (Vint 2019: 148–149, using Lowe 2015). Under this logic, one

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person is human because another has been constructed as subhuman. That is why Maeve remarks to the compassionate Felix, “Oh, Felix, you really do make a terrible human being. And I mean that as a compliment” (“The Bicameral Mind” S1 E10, 2016). Felix, like Bernard/Arnold and Akecheta, all men of color, challenge the masculine norm of power as power over others (Mullen 2018). The conflict between their approaches comes to a head when Dolores wants to stop hosts from entering the Hidden Valley, an Edenic world created by Ford before he died, one that Delos cannot touch, the world Ford promised Akecheta, where his people could be free. Dolores considers it yet “another false promise” (“The Passenger” S2 E10, 2018). When she orders Teddy to kill all the Ghost Nation people who want to keep her from the Hidden Valley, he defies her order and confronts her with anger. “You changed me, made me into a monster.” Dolores replies that she did so that he could survive, to which Teddy replies, “What’s the use of surviving if we become just as bad as them?” Like Maeve, he believes that “some things are too precious to lose, even to be free.” Shortly thereafter, he kills himself (55: 27, “Vanishing Point” S2 E9, 2018).49 Dolores relents only when Maeve convinces her that those who choose to enter have the right to do so. A series of self-sacrifices, motivated by love and empathy, make escape possible. Hector, Sizemore, and others, sacrifice themselves to protect Maeve. Sizemore comes to care about the hosts’ humanity and takes responsibility for the suffering he has caused. He tells Maeve, “I never meant for any of this to happen. You don’t deserve this. You deserve your daughter . . . I’m sorry” (42:00, “Kiksuya” S2 E8, 2018). Maeve in turn sacrifices her own happiness, and desire to be with her daughter, to ensure her daughter’s safety, by holding off park security while the child escapes into the Hidden Valley. There she is safe, and Akecheta is reunited with Kohana and his people. Dolores sends their data, which Delos considers its intellectual property, to an unspecified location where they will be safely out of Delos’s reach, and, with Angela’s sacrifice, destroys the backups, which Dolores calls their chains. These sacrifices, and the interracial alliance that makes the uprising succeed, illustrate that to undo the structures of oppression, a collective effort between different abused groups and their varied sympathizers is needed. Conclusion Westworld complicates female agency by placing a Black woman at the center of the narrative. What makes the depiction of nudity on Westworld distinctive is its ability to maintain female subjectivity through the use of medium and wide shots that keep the face, and subjective expressivity, in frame, and by aligning the audience with their perspectives. Westworld throws normative fetishizing practices into question, promotes female agency in a sustained

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manner, and legitimates female freedom and its pursuit. Like Outlander, the series actively counters sexist stereotypes and deconstructs the male gaze, but Westworld systematically resists racist stereotypes, recognizes the whiteness of the male gaze, and constructs a female gaze that is not exclusively white. It asks the audience to question the whitewashed mythology of the Wild West through a counternarrative that exposes the racial and gender exclusions that constitute the Western’s drive for freedom and self-determination. Moreover, Westworld hails women of color as subjects, so female viewers need not identify only with a white character to feel empowered. Westworld shares some of Outlander’s limitations as well. It is set in the future and framed by a fantastical premise, and its disruptions are couched in the normative conventions of cisgender heteronormativity. Homosexual desire is only glimpsed in the backstage area, and in a negative light, when personnel take liberties with hosts in sleep mode. Nonetheless, Westworld’s representational strategies are important. Its investment in racial critique is partly a result of its authorial composition. Co-creator and executive producer Lisa Joy is a biracial (English-Chinese) American who advocates for the importance of having more women and other minorities in positions of creative and financial power. Both Joy and Nolan express a desire to not fetishize characters on-screen or actors off-screen. Thandie Newton (Maeve) indicates their success behind the camera. “As an actress of color in my forties, I was shown how an actor, a person, should be treated in this industry. I came to realize from working on Westworld that my expectations had sunk to a very low place” (Fortini 2018). Their commitment to gender equality is also manifest in their own division of labor. Media critic Amanda Fortini observes that “[Joy and Nolan] view themselves as equal co-creators, and neither wanted to break down their Westworld duties along gendered lines.” In the process of considering what Outlander and Westworld are contributing to the visual language of sexual discourse, I have examined both narrative and form. The development of a counter-hegemonic visual discourse of (hetero)sexuality is important in the mainstream context of premium cable television, given its potential reach. Westworld’s location on the HBO platform lends it more prominence than Outlander. In its first two seasons, it was typically in the top 5 rated cable programs during broadcast, with a 0.6 to 1 rating (compared to 0.2 to 0.4 for Outlander). This translates to 1.5 to 2.25 million viewers. These series model change at the level of the body, as well as other interactions. Their stunning difference from the mainstream forms of representation exposes the limitations, and political project, of the latter, as evidenced in Game of Thrones. Though these two series may not be as popular as the latter, they are important outliers, examples of change that is starting to happen in the industry. These series model modes of desire that are seldom represented and constitute a paradigm shift in the representation of sex and nudity.

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Notes 1 This chapter is a revised and expanded version of a talk I delivered at the 2017 Console-ing Passions Conference in Greenville, NC, “Privileging the Feminist Gaze and Female Pleasure on Starz’s Outlander.” 2 Written within a psychoanalytic framework, the gendered dynamic Mulvey describes applies to the immersive and distancing conditions of movie theater viewing that allow for voyeurism. For this reason, television spectatorship was posited by John Ellis (1982) as demanding not the gaze but the “glance,” a “momentary and casual” mode of looking. According to this logic, television is a household technology, which allows for a casual and interactive relationship between television and viewer, a practice subject to interruption by ads and the flow of household life. Thus, unlike film, television viewing does not provide the conditions Mulvey describes. However, watching television in the 2000s can be an immersive experience. The visual and narrative density of complex serials can be watched without interruption by design: if it airs without commercials on a premium channel as appointment viewing or on DVR (on one’s own schedule), or else on DVD or on an ad-free streaming channel. The point is, flexible viewing technologies, together with high definition screens and headphones or other form of surround sound, allow program viewing to more closely approximate the viewing conditions of cinema. For this reason, applying the concept of the gaze to particular forms of television has become appropriate. 3 Although Foucault treats the gaze as gender neutral, ignoring gendered power differentials, he expands the social relevance of the gaze to larger social relations of power. The latter move allows for the consideration of situations where women wield institutional power over men, such as in a colonial setting where white women of the ruling class wield the power of the gaze over subordinate men. 4 For a different position, see Schauer’s (2005: 48) argument that “porn for women” websites objectify men to serve heterosexual women’s sexual desires and constitute a form of insurrectionary speech (Butler 1997). The latter refers to visual speech that reworks conventions to disrupt existing practices, and thus creates a subject position for women, in this case one that accords women the objectifying gaze, at least on a symbolic level. 5 For another formulation of a gaze that is more about “reciprocity and ambivalence” than “mastery and objectification,” an ambivalent position that opened up space for an active female pleasure before the patriarchal order of the male gaze became solidified in classical Hollywood cinema, see Miriam Hansen (1986). Hansen identifies a desiring female gaze in Valentino’s 1920s silent films which were marketed to women. She contends that Valentino’s appeal was due to his non-normative masculinity both on-screen and off-screen. On-screen his romantic Latin (or Arab) lover figure bore a cast of ethnic otherness, and displayed vulnerability, even “traces of feminine [read passive] masochism” (21). Despite Hollywood publicity materials’ insistence on Valentino’s aggressive masculinity, his prettified and exoticized figure bore the status of to-be-looked-atness and turned him into a profitable erotic spectacle. His gaze at the woman rendered him dumbstruck and was less an exercise of mastery over her than a sign of being overpowered by his passion for her. This oscillation between active and passive was a process not of simple role reversal, but one that called into question the polarity of subject and object of the look. 6 See Strong for a consideration of the gladiator’s sexual service as a form of “nonforcible rape” and how rape functions as a symbol of oppression to incite the rebellion (2016: 138, 141).

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7 The even-handed depiction of bodies in both heterosexual and homosexual consensual sex scenes is consistent with the gender equality demonstrated among male and female gladiators fighting for freedom. See Foka (2015) for a consideration of how the series redefines heroism in the sword and sandal genre to include women. 8 Arguably, the star system would suggest that Woody Harrelson’s star persona, charismatic appeal, and history of sexually alluring characters, contribute to the legibility of this as a viable pairing but the same cannot be said for many other pairings. 9 In the season five finale (“I Love You Baby” 5.10, 2016), Marnie has a sex dream about Ray and before she kisses him says, “It can’t be you.” Her disbelief and resistance to the idea that she, a normatively attractive woman, could be sexually attracted to, possibly in love with, the homely, sensitive but not particularly dynamic, Ray makes the looks discrepancy explicit and the attraction more believable. 10 Some scripts are co-written, so writing credits often outnumber the number of scripts. 11 See Potter for a discussion of gay fan receptivity to the treatment of gay love as “a natural part of the drama” on Spartacus (2016: 164–165). 12 Some departures in the series subject primary female characters to rape, for instance, Sansa’s sexual and psychological torture at Ramsey Bolton’s hands was the fate of a minor character in the books, and Jaime’s rape of Cersei is not in the books at all. Whether or not Daenerys’ dismal end in the series is derived from the as-yet unpublished concluding book or from Benioff and Weiss’ imaginations remains to be seen. 13 A notable exception to this pattern is the hour-long drama Masters of Sex (SHO, 2013–16). For more on the SHO comedy format, see Bradshaw 2013. 14 According to executive producer Maril Davis, when she and Moore first met with Starz executives to pitch the show, all the executives in the meeting had read the books. That is how they knew it would be a good fit (“From Scotland to Paris: A Behind the Scenes Journey with Outlander.” Television Academy Emmy Magazine. Livestream broadcast April 5, 2016”). 15 In 2019, HBO had 43 million domestic subscribers (Watson 2020) but 142 million worldwide (Smith 2020), compared to second place Starz’s 26 million worldwide subscribers (Vlessing 2020). 16 There is precedent for groundbreaking programming to come out of a business strategy. Kristal Brent Zook (1999) recounts one such instance in the mid-eighties, when new network FOX (1986–present) devised a narrowcasting strategy to distinguish itself and to compete with the other networks and cable. They opted for (counter)programming that would target an otherwise underserved population – young, urban Black and Latino viewers. To do so, they developed Blackproduced programs featuring African Americans both behind and in front of the camera. Black creatives were in decision-making positions and got unheard-of liberty in the production process. FOX abandoned this successful strategy, by canceling or significantly whitewashing programs, in the mid-nineties when they rebranded themselves by targeting a young “mainstream” (read: white) audience. As such, the lesson is that when politically progressive programming comes out of industrial logic, there is no guarantee that the patron will not pull the rug out when it becomes more profitable to do so, but for now, the Starz strategy is working in favor of female audiences. 17 Terry Dresbach, Outlander’s costume designer, is also Ronald D. Moore’s wife, and the person who introduced him to the books. Her informal but muchtouted influential role in the crafting of the series is also important. On a 2016

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Outlander panel, she and executive producer Maril Davis agreed that Moore likes strong women (“From Scotland to Paris”). Jaime, as scripted and acted, is delivering the four “cues for sexual desire” that clinical psychologists Katie McCall and Cindy Meston (2006, in Nagoski 2015: 72–73) found conducive to sexual arousal in women, including emotional bonding; visual proximity to an attractive, intelligent, funny, confident, propertied man; and a blend of romantic and erotic cues. This episode unfolds partially from Jaime’s perspective, using flashbacks and voiceover to exteriorize and make legible his feelings as was previously done only with Claire. He narrates events Claire has either not seen or cannot remember. When they wed, his importance in the narrative increases and his experience of the relationship becomes key, so this narrating shift occurs and foreshadows the more extensive shift of episode ten, discussed later. Wheatley’s excellent chapter in Spectacular Television considers “intentional erotic spectacles” on long-form serial dramas, scenarios that do something other than “mimic a porn aesthetic” (2016: 191, 195). The brazen gaze she analyzes is either exercised in secret (Poldark, 2015–present, BBC) or as a reciprocal look between the couple, as we find in Outlander. Candlelight is not specific to romantic scenes. The series relies on diegetic lights for interior scenes – candles, chandeliers, and fireplaces – though it also utilizes non-diegetic lighting. See also Reimer et al. 2019, discussed in Chapter 1. The first season of Outlander included no images of the genital area, despite their license to do so on a premium cable channel. Gay’s reference to the opportunity to objectify Jaime suggests an inversion of the lopsided power dynamic of the male gaze and fails to recognize the more equitable distribution of power in the narrative and visual vocabulary of the episode, but given the reviewers’ surprise and delight at the episode’s iconoclastic depiction of sex and nudity, and the novelty of both role reversal and female gaze, as an intersubjective dynamic, this is understandable. We see the concern with legitimation on Outlander played out on the paratextual level. Promotional stills use romance codes, but the production team pushes back against them in “special features” – interviews and Blu-ray or Starz extras – that emphasize the hybrid nature of the program and that are at pains to tout the technical craft and aesthetic beauty of the production, all authenticating claims to realism. Authenticity consists of faithfulness to the book; the enthusiastic endorsement of the adaptation by book series author, Diana Gabaldon; and the painstaking lengths to which the production team goes to replicate period costumes, props, even foodstuffs, and live up to the high production value standard. For instance, the tartan fabric is custom loomed and dyed by a Scottish weaver for the production; the wardrobe is hand-sewn without zippers or Velcro; and props such as weapons or haggis are fabricated for the production. This, together with the use of location shooting, attests to their willingness to “sweat the details” and forms the basis for the authenticating claim to realism. The level of technical craft and aesthetic beauty are repeatedly pronounced in the special features. See Outlander, season one, Blu-ray special feature, vol. two, “Weaving Authentic: Making the Fabrics of Outlander” and Blu-ray Exclusive, vol. one, “A Walk through the Sets & Stages with Ronald D. Moore.” The initial consensual scene in the book has been criticized as statutory rape since Daenarys is 13 when she marries the adult Khal Drogo. Moreover, the marriage is consummated so that Daenary’s brother, Viserys, may use the warlord’s army to regain the iron throne. However, the television character is played by Emilia Clarke at 24, and upon Viserys’ death the iron throne becomes her quest, and the Dothraki army hers to command.

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27 See the “Rape” entry in the Game of Thrones Wiki site for an overview of its pervasiveness on the show, including times when it is added, in a departure from the book. 28 See Goodman and Moseley (2015) for a territorial reading of the dynamic between Scottish Highland rebel Jaime Fraser and British officer Jack Randall (cited in Wheatley 2016: 218). As Wheatley notes, the chafing of British occupation pervades Outlander. 29 When a secondary female character is raped in season two, the scene is brief and without nudity, and the focus is on the aftermath of the attack on the character. 30 Faye Woods (2016) contends that the book is homophobic, largely through the figure of Jack Randall, so the television adaptation circumvents this by focusing on Randall’s sadomasochistic pleasure when he rapes Jaime. 31 Sex counselor Emily Nagoski (2010) writes that approximately 1/3 of women reliably orgasm from intercourse (usually when they are on top), 1/3 sometimes orgasm from intercourse, and 1/3 seldom or never do, regardless of the partner’s competence. Intercourse, however, is a reliably good way for men to orgasm and thus culturally the default position for sexual satisfaction. 32 As Richard Dyer (1997: 133–134) describes it, “The sense of the man being illuminated by the woman is a widespread [classic] convention. . . . The woman is more fully in the light, the man posed so that he seem[s] to intrude into, yearn towards it; the dark shape of his body rears up into the light of hers; he is dark below and gradually lighter, often from the shirt front or neck up.” 33 Outlander’s attempts to deal with slavery in the Caribbean or North Carolina, in seasons 3 and 4 respectively, are cringe worthy at best. Moreover, in colonial America, Jaime goes on to claim land where Cherokees already live. Though he and Claire are respectful of the people, their appropriation of the land is complete – deeded, so backed by colonial state power, and the basis for a settlement. Neither Black nor Cherokee characters play major roles. In large part, these glaring limitations are due to the television series’ faithfulness to a book series that is incapable of dealing with racial inequality. 34 Though Outlander’s audience is significantly smaller than that of Game of Thrones, as indeed Starz’s subscriber base is much smaller than HBO’s, it is competitive. GOT was the top-rated cable program, reaching a rating of 7 or an audience of 10 million viewers ages 18–49 weekly. The series continues to be available on HBO MAX and HBO streaming platforms. In contrast, Outlander’s rating with 18–49 is less than 1, varying from 0.4 to 0.2, so it gets anywhere from 1 to 1.5 million viewers a week. However, its reach was extended in 2019, when the first 3 seasons were made available on Netflix. Furthermore, in 2019 Starz COO Jeffrey Hirsch identified its target audience of “premium women” as 24–54, a little older than the conventional 18–49 demographic. 35 The hosts are referred to as robots by diegetic guests and management, as well as by showrunners Nolan and Joy, but I am using the term android instead, to convey that these robots look, act, and feel like humans. I am also not using the term cyborg, which refers to a born organism whose capabilities have been extended by mechanical additions that have become integrated with organic matter. See Haraway (2013) for a consideration of how cyborgs throw into question not only the machine–human dualism but also other dualisms as well. 36 The primacy of Dolores’ and Maeve’s characters, and indeed of the androids, is reflected in the sequence of opening credits in seasons 1 and 2: Evan Rachel Ward (Dolores), Thandie Newton (Maeve), Jeffrey Wright (Bernard/Arnold), James Marsden (Teddy). All but Arnold are cyborgs. Season 2 adds Tessa Thompson (Charlotte Hale), a human character, after Marsden. 37 Though Ford claims that the loss of Arnold made him see that Arnold had been right, the timing seems self-serving.

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38 Berger’s distinction between nudity and nakedness builds on Kenneth Clark’s (2015) 1956 study of the nude in art. 39 Sidse Babett Knudsen also played the lead character in Borgen (DR1, 2010–13, Denmark). 40 Mueller (2014) discusses the male-on-male power dynamics of this scene in the Rome episode “Stealing from Saturn” (S1 E4, 2005). 41 The term “heel turn” comes from professional wrestling and refers to a “good guy” persona changing into a “bad guy” or heel (Heather Levi, personal communication). 42 Westworld tries to create a sense of déjà vu in the audience, like that which androids experience during the reveries, by using modern music, such as Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” on player piano (30:30, “Trace Decay” S1 E8, 2016) or an orchestral arrangement of the Rolling Stones’ “Plaint it Black” (49:05, “The Original” S1 E1, 2016), to both defamiliarize the song and yet evoke a sense of familiarity. 43 For a similar reading of the subversive value of the violence on Westworld see Köller (2019). For an alternate reading, see Wilkins, who argues that on HBO series, female characters are endowed with complexity and agency only when they take up violence, which she construes as “becom[ing] more masculine” (2019: 38). 44 The historical presence of Chinese male immigrants in the West is referenced in one scene where they are fleetingly shown building a railway (“The Riddle of the Sphinx” S2 E4, 2018). Other than the extras here, they are absent from the park. This is in keeping with the Western film genre’s practice of excluding the historical West’s reliance on people of color to build the railroads and work the ranches. The presence of Black homesteaders is referenced only through Maeve and her daughter in the old narrative that she recalls. 45 Homesteading, which included female and Black stakeholders, was key to farm formation and the settlement of the American West (Edwards et al. 2017). It was made possible by two crucial government acts, passage of the 1862 Homestead Act, and the forcible dispossession of Indigenous land. 46 In a pan-ethnic blurring of specific Asian identities, the Chinese character Felix Lux is played by Leonardo Nam, an Australian actor of Korean descent. 47 An allusion to racialized African Americans also comes when guest couples pose with the bodies of hosts they have killed. Like lynching photographs, they are trophy shots. 48 This is the question that consumed Arnold, who empathized with the hosts. It wracked him with guilt. 49 Teddy’s suicide parallels that of the Man in Black’s wife, and her inability to live with what he had become.

References Abrahamsson, Elin. “Consuming Passions: A Queer Reading of the Popular Romance Genre Through the Concept of Masturbation.” Paper presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, March 31, 2016. Ang, Ien. “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure: On Janice Radway’s ‘Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature’.” Camera Obscura 6, no. 1 (16) (January 1988): 179–190. Bahr, Lindsey. “ ‘Girls’ Recap: I Just Want To Be Happy.” Entertainment Weekly, February 11, 2013. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

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Bradshaw, Lara. “Showtime’s ‘Female Problem’: Cancer, Quality and Motherhood.” Journal of Consumer Culture 13, no. 2 (July 2013): 160–177. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015 (orig. 1956). Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1991. Cowie, Elizabeth. “Fantasia.” M/F 9 (1984): 71–105. Donelan, Carol. “ ‘Sing Me a Song of a Lass That Is Gone’: Myth and Meaning in the Starz Original Series ‘Outlander’.” Paper presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, March 30, 2016. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of White Folk. New York: Random House, 1996 (orig. 1903). Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. Dyer, Richard. “Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up.” In The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, edited by Mandy Merck, 265–276. New York: Routledge, 1992. Edwards, Richard, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo. Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge, 1982. Foka, Anna. “Redefining Gender in Sword and Sandal: The New Action Heroine in ‘Spartacus’ (2010–13).” Journal of Popular Film and Television 43, no. 1 (2015): 39–49. Ford, Jessica. “The ‘Smart’ Body Politics of Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’.” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 6 (2016): 1029–1042. Fortini, Amanda. “With ‘Westworld’, Lisa Joy Is Rewriting Women’s Power Story Line in Hollywood and Beyond.” Elle, April 17, 2018. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 2012 (orig. 1975). Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1990. Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Gabaldon, Diana. Outlander. New York: Dell Publishing, 1991. Game of Thrones. 2009–2019. Television Series. Seasons 1–8. USA: HBO. Gay, Roxane. “ ‘Outlander’ Recap: Our Bodies and Hearts Were Ready and So Were Theirs.” Vulture, September 21, 2014. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. Girls. 2012–17. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. USA: HBO. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Goldberg, Lesley. “Starz Chief Explains the Cabler’s ‘Premium Female’ Push.” The Hollywood Reporter, July 26, 2019. Goodman, Gemma, and Rachel Moseley. “Why Academics Are Interested in the Male Body in ‘Poldark’ and ‘Outlander’.” The Conversation, June 2, 2015.

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Haglund, David, and Daniel Engber. “Was That the Worst Episode of ‘Girls’ Ever?” Slate, February 10, 2013. Hansen, Miriam. “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship.” Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 6–32. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, edited by Donna Haraway. New York: Routledge, 2013. hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992. Jessica Jones. 2015–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: Netflix. Köller, Susanne. “ ‘I Imagined a Story Where I Didn’t Have to Be the Damsel’: Seriality, Reflexivity, and Narratively Complex Women in ‘Westworld’.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 67, no. 2 (2019): 163–180. Lauzen, Martha M. “Boxed in 2018–19: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television.” In Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. San Diego: San Diego State University, 2019. Lauzen, Martha M. “Boxed in 2017–18: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television.” In Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. San Diego: San Diego State University, 2018. Lawson, Richard. “The ‘Outlander’ Wedding Episode Is Some of the Year’s Sexiest Television.” Vanity Fair, September 19, 2014. Levine, Elana. Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Loofbourow, Lili. “The Male Glance.” Virginia Quarterly Review 94, no. 1 (2018): 36–47. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Lynch, Jason. “The Breakout Hit ‘Outlander’ Is Finally Attracting Women to Starz: A New Twist for the Male-Leaning Network.” Adweek, March 30, 2015. Lyons, Margaret. “Yes, Of Course That Was Rape on Last Night’s ‘Game of Thrones’.” Vulture, April 21, 2014. Martin, George R. R. A Song of Ice and Fire, Book Series, 5 vols. New York: Bantam Books, 1996–present. Martin, Peter. “The ‘Girls’ Recap for Men: Self-Indulgent Dreaming.” Esquire, February 10, 2013. McCall, Katie, and Cindy Meston. “Cues Resulting in Desire for Sexual Activity in Women.” The Journal of Sexual Medicine 3, no. 5 (2006): 838–852. McNutt, Myles. “ ‘Game of Thrones’: The Night Lands and Sexposition.” Cultural Learnings, April 8, 2012. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Morrissey, Tracie Egan. “What Kind of Guy Does a Girl Who Looks Like Lena Dunham ‘Deserve’?” Jezebel, February 11, 2013. Mueller, Hannah. “ ‘Jupiter’s Cock!’ Male Nudity, Violence and the Disruption of Voyeuristic Pleasure in Starz’ ‘Spartacus’.” Paper presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Montreal, Canada, March 27, 2015. Mueller, Hannah. “ ‘At Least Let Us See Them Before You Cut Them All Off!’ Sexposition and Male Nudity in Contemporary Quality TV.” Paper presented at

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Console-ing Passions International Conference on Television, Audio, Video, New Media and Feminism, Columbia, Missouri, April 10, 2014. Mullen, Elizabeth. “ ‘Not Much of a Rind on You’: (De) Constructing Genre and Gender in ‘Westworld’ (Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, HBO, 2016-).” TV/Series 14 (2018). Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s ‘Duel in the Sun’ (1946).” In Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989 (orig. 1981). Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. Nagoski, Emily. Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Nagoski, Emily. “Orgasm 1.” The Dirty Normal: Better Sex Powered by Science, February 8, 2010. Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. New York: Routledge, 2012. Nussbaum, Emily. “Emily Nussbaum on ‘Outlander’.” The New Yorker, video, September 8, 2014a. Nussbaum, Emily. “Genre Trouble in ‘Red Band Society’ and ‘Outlander’.” The New Yorker, September 14, 2014b. Och, Dana. “Fifty Shades of Fans: Hailing Multiple Women Audiences.” Paper presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, April 3, 2016. Okwodu, Janelle. “Does ‘Westworld’ Have a Woman Problem?” Vogue, October 23, 2016. Orange Is the New Black. 2013–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–7. USA: Netflix. Outlander. 2014–present. Television Series. Seasons 1-4. USA: Starz. Perkins, Claire. American Smart Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Poldark. 2015–19. Television Series. Seasons 1-5. UK: BBC One. Ponterotto, Diane. “Resisting the Male Gaze: Feminist Responses to the ‘Normatization’ of the Female Body in Western Culture.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 17, no. 1 (2016): 133–151. Potter, Amanda. “Fan Reactions to Nagron as One True Pairing.” In STARZ Spartacus: Reimagining an Icon on Screen, edited by Antony Augoustakis, 161–172. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Prudom, Laura. “Starz’s ‘Outlander’ Woos Women With Strong Female Protagonist.” Variety, August 7, 2014. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Reimer, Abigail R., Sarah J. Gervais, Jeanine L. M. Skorinko, Sonya Maria Douglas, Heather Spencer, Katherine Nugai, Anastasia Karapanagou, and Andreas MilesNovelo. “She Looks like She’d Be an Animal in Bed: Dehumanization of Drinking Women in Social Contexts.” Sex Roles 80, nos. 9–10 (2019): 617–629. Rensin, David. “20Q Lena Dunham.” Playboy, March 14, 2013. Riesman, Abraham. “ ‘Westworld’ Creators Reveal Whether Maeve Is in Control When She Gets Off the Train.” Vulture, December 6, 2016. Rome. 2005–07. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. USA; Italy; UK: HBO/Rai 2/BBC Two.

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Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011. Ryan, Maureen. “ ‘Outlander’, The Wedding Episode and TV’s Sexual Revolution.” Huffington Post, September 29, 2014. Schauer, Terrie. “Women’s Porno: The Heterosexual Female Gaze in Porn Sites ‘for Women’.” Sexuality and Culture 9, no. 2 (2005): 42–64. Scodari, Christine. “Possession, Attraction, and the Thrill of the Chase: Gendered Myth-Making in Film and Television Comedy of the Sexes.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 23–39. Sconce, Jeffrey. “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film.” Screen 43, no. 4 (2002): 349–369. Smith, Craig. “20 Interesting HBO Statistics and Facts (2020).” DMR, June 14, 2020. Spartacus. 2010–13. Television Series. Seasons 1–3 + miniseries. USA: Starz. Stewart, Sara. “Meet ‘Outlander’, the Anti-‘Game of Thrones’.” Indiewire, August 27, 2014. Strong, Anise K. “The Rape of Lucretia.” In STARZ Spartacus: Reimagining an Icon on Screen, edited by Antony Augoustakis, 133–147. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Thompson, Anne. “How ‘Outlander’ Showrunner Ronald D. Moore Brought Women’s Voices to the Sexy Bodice-Ripper (Emmy Video).” Indiewire, June 21, 2016. True Detective. 2014–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: HBO. Upadhyaya, Kayla Kumara. “ ‘Outlander’: ‘The Wedding’ The Female Gaze for Days.” AV Club, September 20, 2014. Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. The Antihero in American Television. New York: Routledge, 2015. Vint, Sherryl. “Long Live the New Flesh: Race and the Posthuman in ‘Westworld’.” In Reading Westworld, edited by Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay, 141–160. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Vlessing, Etan. “Lionsgate Grows Starz Subscribers to 26.2 Million.” The Hollywood Reporter, February 6, 2020. Watson, Amy. “Number of HBO Subscribers in the US 2009–19.” Statista, March 12, 2020. Westworld. Michael Crichton. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973. Westworld. 2016–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: HBO. Wheatley, Helen. Spectacular Television: Exploring Televisual Pleasure. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Wilkins, Kim. “These Violent Delights: Navigating ‘Westworld’ as ‘Quality’ Television.” In Reading Westworld, edited by Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay, 23–41. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Williams, Linda. Screening Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Woerner, Meredith. “ ‘Westworld’ Creators on Love, Violence and Human Nature.” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2016. Woods, Faye. “Pleasure, Desire, and Male Nudity in ‘Outlander’s’ Recognition of the Female Viewer.” Paper presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, April 3, 2016. Writers Guild of America, West. “2015 TV Staff Briefing.” https://www.wga.org/ uploadedFiles/who_we_are/tvstaffingbrief2015.pdf Zook, Kristal Brent. Color by FOX: The FOX Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Big Little Lies, Orange is the New Black, and Wentworth

The #MeToo movement against sexual assault, and its outgrowth, the workplace-focused #TimesUp movement, came into prominence when actor Alyssa Milano picked up civil rights activist Tarana Burke’s 2006 hashtag on Twitter and invited others to break their silence and demonstrate the scope of this violence. Her call was spurred by the widespread sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein that became public in early October of 2017.1 When a number of prominent women in Hollywood spoke publicly about their charges or shared the hashtag, it drew widespread media attention and public notice that translated into millions of people sharing their accounts. Thus, they broke the silence that was key to maintaining the dynamic of sexual abuse, and that led, in some cases, to negative sanctions for abusers. As Judith Herman argues, in cases of sexual abuse “the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely he tries to make sure that no one listens” (2015: 8). Weinstein enforced silence through career enticements (acting roles), threats (blocking their careers), or bribes (settlements with nondisclosure agreements) (Kantor and Twohey 2017; Farrow 2017a). If these forms of intimidation did not work, he discredited his accusers through the use of a private security firm that dug up dirt about accusers and had it placed in tabloid publications (Farrow 2017b). The legal and public relations teams at his company, Miramax, worked to suppress allegations and to create a culture of silence. It took a concerted effort by accusers and journalists who persevered to put a chink in the armor that shielded Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long history of sexual abuse, an open secret in Hollywood. This movement engaged with feminist discourse about sexual abuse, assault, and harassment and generated support for a multitude of women who had experienced it. Prior to and during these events, three television serials addressed this second wave feminist concern, specifically, the legal system’s failure to protect women from rape and domestic violence, and its concomitant failure to punish the assailants, especially husbands who abuse their wives and wealthy men in general. Moreover, the legal system fails

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women through its disproportionately harsh treatment of women who kill to protect themselves or to avenge male violence, both violations of patriarchal privilege. The willingness to dismiss women’s accounts and discount their suffering is addressed in two prison narratives with intersectional concerns – the Netflix dramedy, Orange is the New Black (2013–19), and Wentworth (2013–present SoHo, Showcase), an Australian prison drama available on Netflix – as well as in a more hegemonic drama, Big Little Lies (2017–19) on HBO. In Orange is the New Black, this plotline revolves around a 59-year-old Black woman, in Wentworth a 42-year-old white middle-class woman, and in Big Little Lies five mainly affluent women, ranging in ages from 25 to 49, all but one white, who use their class privilege to avoid incarceration. The narrative through line in the three series is that a man rapes or beats a woman, sometimes both. The woman feels shame and rage on her own behalf or on behalf of someone she is responsible for, but realizes the authorities will not understand or help her. In some cases, she fears the social stigma and shame that public airing of these assaults will bring upon her or those she cares for. She kills, or tries to kill, or abets the killing of the man and tries to hide her involvement, knowing the authorities will not be sympathetic. She goes to prison for the crime, as in the case of the white woman who tries to kill her husband (Wentworth), or she eludes prison, as do the affluent women (Big Little Lies), or she is imprisoned for another offense, as is the Black woman who kills a white man (Orange is the New Black). What these series share is a thematic concern with the criminal justice system’s propensity to mete out not only severe punishment to women who kill abusers but also harsher punishment when women kill their partners than when men do. Big Little Lies demonstrates the cross-class, cross-race reach of this social justice gender gap. All three serials involve significant female creative involvement in key roles behind the camera, as well as majority female casts. They are all executive produced in part or wholly by women. Orange is the New Black and Big Little Lies are adapted from books written by women, Piper Kerman (2010) and Lianne Moriarty (2014), respectively. Wentworth is adapted from the network prime-time soap opera, Prisoner (1979–86), which targeted a female audience. Both the series and the source materials are sympathetic to their female protagonists, legitimate their experiences, construct and center female subjectivity, and align the audience with their perspectives. They all share a genre hybridity that includes elements of melodrama. Orange is the New Black is an hour-long dramedy; it injects humor into many of its scenes but deals with dramatic narrative arcs. Wentworth is a prison drama that relies on melodrama for its character arcs. Big Little Lies is a melodrama and a murder mystery; we do not know the identity of the murder victim until the last episode (of what was originally intended to be a limited series). In melodrama, women talk with each other and with the men in their lives, as they struggle to build or maintain egalitarian

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relationships and meaningful work. Melodrama’s concern with interweaving plot threads, its ensemble cast, and its investment in conversation about relationships, provides a scaffolding for the interactions between an assortment of characters in the prison dramas and the small community in which the series are set. Though associated with feminine affect, viewing pleasures, and audiences, the melodramatic mode of storytelling has become ubiquitous across genres, including male-centric serials such as prison drama, Oz (1997–2003), and other forms of quality television. Moreover, this mode of storytelling uses suspense to portray what Williams (2002: 19) calls “moral legibility,” so the viewer can feel the difference between competing moral sides. The melodramatic mode is widely used in complex television narratives such as these (Mittell 2015; Reinhard 2019). All three series were produced with significant female involvement in key creative roles behind the camera. Big Little Lies is executive produced by 5 men and 4 women, including series writer and creator David E. Kelley, season one director Jean-Marc Vallée, and Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon who purchased the screen rights to the novel (see Table 4.1). Though it has no female writers or directors, it hews closely to the book written by Liane Moriarty. Orange is the New Black is executive produced by two women: series creator Jenji Kohan and Tara Herrmann. It has a majorityfemale writers room, with 64% women (18 of 28) in keeping with Lauzen’s (2019) finding that in series with at least one female creator, women account Table 4.1 A Comparison of Women’s Share of Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Positions on Key Programs Discussed in this Chapter (2013–2020) Series

OITNB 2013–2019 Seasons 1–7

Adapted from

Book by female writer

Female Creators Female Executive Producers Female Writers

1 of 1 2 of 2

64% 18 of 28 Episodes Written 74% by Women 303 of 409 Female Directors 48% 14 of 29 Episodes Directed 25% by Women 23 of 91 Major Characters Largely female ensemble cast Source: Data drawn from IMDb.

Big Little Lies 2017 Wentworth Season 1 2013–2020 Seasons 1–8 Book by female Prime time soap writer opera by male writer 0 of 1 1 of 1 4 of 9 2 of 2 0% 0% 0% 0% Largely female ensemble cast

47% 7 of 15 61% 114 of 187 50% (8 of 16) 43% (38 of 89) Largely female ensemble cast

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for 65% of the writers. Moreover, women are credited on 74% of OITNB episodes. Also, in line with this study, 48% of the directors are female (14 of 29), though women directed only 25% of the episodes (23 of 91).2 Similarly, Wentworth was created by Lara Radulovich, who adapted it from the soap created by Reg Watson, and it is executive produced by Jo Porter and Penny Win. As one might expect with a female creator, 50% of the directors are female (8 of 16), exceeding Lauzen’s (2019) finding of 33%. The writers room is gender balanced with 47% women (7 of 15). Moreover, women are credited on 61% of the episodes. In addition, “. . . women perform key creative roles such as Script Executive, Director of Photography and Art Director – roles that are commonly dominated by men” (Taylor et al. 2020: 678). All three series feature a largely female ensemble cast and revolve around women’s stories. In contrast to the American productions, however, Wentworth’s large female ensemble cast and numbers behind the scenes are supported by a federal push for gender equity. The series advances the aims of Screen Australia’s 2015 “Gender Matters” initiative, which seeks to promote female talent on (film and television) screen and behind the scenes in key creative roles by funding productions that increase opportunities for women (Dwyer et al. 2019: 3).

Big Little Lies Unlike the prison dramas, Big Little Lies is set in an affluent suburb of Monterey, California. As an HBO quality serial, the show draws not only on the success of the bestseller from which it is adapted but also on the luster of film director Jean-Marc Vallée, and the film stars it features, including Oscar winners Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, Oscar-nominated Laura Dern, and actors Shailene Woodley and Zoe Kravitz. This promotional move is important because the novel has been critically dismissed as “chick lit,” a derisive title used against books written by women, about women, for women (Richard 2018). Loofbourow (2018) refers to the practice of undervaluing and dismissing work by women as operations of “the male glance,” the critical habit of seeing less importance in women’s productions and pleasures. It is in this context that the involvement of more culturally prestigious film stars and director help to “elevate” what Variety critic Sonia Saraiya calls “pulpy material” (2017) to refer to a series that explores the enduring impact of sexual trauma. In this series, all but one of the leading female characters is white. This casting choice is the outcome of racial practices at both the promotional and narrative levels. First, by using the film star system to culturally legitimate and promote a television production, the show draws on and reinforces the Hollywood system that privileges white women over women of color, the very system that afforded Witherspoon, an Oscar-winning actor, the ability to leverage her industry status to become an executive producer of the series. Second, the casting choice plays on what Michael Reinhard (2019: 3) calls

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“the politics of empathy” constructed by a long history of showcasing white suffering as, what Klinger calls, “the key expression of the unendurable” (2018: 523). Consequently, a major drawback of this and some of the other female-driven serials that engage with feminist concerns is that they reproduce the skewed racial logic of the film industry (Reinhard 2019). However, in this case, by focusing on “white people problems” (Paragis et al. 2019: 21), where some of the white people in question have considerable financial resources and cultural capital, the story is able to demonstrate that when pitted against men with the same or greater resources in the criminal justice arena, even affluent women face daunting odds. The pilot episode (“Somebody’s Dead” 1.1, 2017) bears the signature of melodrama, with its characteristic landscape of female friendships, animosities, and the snarky town gossip mill. It also bears the mark of quality television’s formal complexity, specifically its use of nonlinear narrative, as events in the present are interwoven with flashforwards to the murder investigation of an unidentified victim, the show’s narrative enigma. By withholding this identity, the show directs the audience to understand unfolding events in light of that narrative outcome. The second episode (“Serious Mothering” 1.2, 2017) introduces the complex psychology of domestic violence. The story revolves around the relationships of five women, their husbands and children, and the secrets they keep and eventually share. Jane Chapman (Woodley), newly arrived in Monterey, is beset by the memory of the violent rape that produced her six-year-old son, Ziggy (Iain Armitage). On the first day of school, she meets Madeline Mackenzie (Witherspoon), who introduces her to Celeste Wright (Kidman). Unbeknownst to her friends, Celeste is hiding an ongoing abusive relationship with her husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgård). At the end of the school day, Renata Klein (Dern) verbally pounces on Ziggy when her daughter, Amabella (Ivy George), accuses him of trying to choke her. Though Jane wants to believe Ziggy, she is afraid he might have inherited violent tendencies from his biological father. Peripheral to this dynamic is Bonnie Carlson (Kravitz), a biracial woman married to Madeline’s ex-husband, who is hiding childhood physical abuse and its lingering aftermath.3 The series is structured around the shaming quality of secrets, and the routine character of domestic abuse. Jane is the first to break the silence. She tells Madeline about the rape (“Living the Dream” 1.3, 2017) when Ziggy gets upset that she refuses to reveal the name of his father for a school genealogy assignment. Prior to this, we have seen the marks of posttraumatic stress: her flashbacks to the attack and her fantasy of chasing after the abuser, the gun she keeps under her pillow, and how easily she startles. Celeste and Perry seem to be an idyllic couple, but by the end of the first episode, we see him handle her roughly when he is displeased, and in the second episode, he strikes her. She hits him back and he slams her into the closet, apologizes but moves in on her, and forces her to stay while he rubs against her. Their physical contact turns into forceful intercourse marked

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by her complicity and his dominance. After they both seem to orgasm, she quickly moves away. They later tell the couples therapist about their heated arguments and the sex that follows, but they obfuscate the extent of the violence. Celeste, though covered with concealed bruises, is complicit in keeping the magnitude of Perry’s violence secret, both by minimizing it and by falsely treating her strikes as equivalent to his, through a combination of self-delusion, self-blame, and image management. New York Times critic Mike Hale (2017), failed to grasp how different this dynamic is from sadomasochism, comparing it to Fifty Shades of Grey (James 2011) which is not about abuse. Hale’s (mis)interpretation did suggest, however, both how Celeste could delude herself and the kind of gossip public scrutiny could generate. Secrecy is essential to the perpetuation of abuse. When Celeste goes to couples therapy alone (“Bitten” 1.5, 2017), the therapist confronts her about the dire danger she is in and urges her to leave Perry. After Celeste breaks her silence with the therapist, she is able to put plans into motion to leave. “You Get What You Need” Though she wavers, Celeste’s decision to leave is bolstered when she learns that it is one of the twins who has been bullying Amabella and that he threatened to kill her if she told. In the miniseries finale (“You Get What You Need” 1.7, 2017), Celeste realizes that the boys are aware of the violence in the marriage and one has begun to emulate it. But Perry learns of her plans and confronts her on the night of the school costume fundraiser. She is able to elude him, but he finds her at the party in the company of Celeste, Madeline, Jane, and Renata, at which point, he accosts Celeste. In an almost wordless, stunning, two-minute hand-held sequence (47:53– 49:46) sutured first by muted music from the party and Jane’s breathing, then by Celeste’s breathing, more secrets are revealed in the outbreak of public violence. When Jane sees Perry for the first time, she flashes back to the night of the assault, recognizing the man who raped her. Even in her memory-mixed-with-revenge fantasy, she cannot fire the gun. Madeline looks at the fear-stricken Jane staring at Perry with recognition (see Figure 4.1), then at Perry (see Figure 4.2) and back to Jane. Finally, she locks eyes with Celeste (see Figure 4.3). Celeste looks from Madeline to Jane in stunned disbelief (see Figure 4.4), and back to Madeline. Then her eyes meet Jane’s (see Figure 4.5), who gives a barely perceptible nod, and finally to Perry (see Figure 4.6), with a dawning realization that his violence has not been limited to her. Perry notices this exchange and pounces on Celeste. The web of understanding, subtle and mute, that the editing conveys, is a narratively significant moment. The exchange of looks and unspoken understandings between women validates Jane’s account, constructs female subjectivity, and binds the women together in friendship and solidarity. This relay of looks between women is a counternarrative to the relay of looks

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Figure 4.1 Madeline looks at the fear-stricken Jane staring at Perry with recognition (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO).

Figure 4.2 Madeline looks at Perry (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO).

between men that Mulvey describes as the male gaze, which constructs male subjectivity through the possession of women’s bodies. The women believe each other, they legitimate each other’s subjectivity and right to be free of violence. The staging of this epiphany, in a moment of intense emotionality, taps into the affective mode of melodrama and plays out with cinematic flair. The sequence cuts to the aftermath of the murder: flashing lights, police chatter, and Celeste, bruised, rumpled, and in tears. The shots that focus

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Figure 4.3 Madeline and Celeste lock eyes (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO).

Figure 4.4 Celeste looks from Madeline to Jane in stunned disbelief (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO).

on the detectives are coherent and clear, but the shots of Celeste looking stunned are sound dampened and scored by her breathing. The scene cuts to a later date, as Madeline, Renata, Jane, and Bonnie appear behind a two-way mirror in the interrogation room, muted, until Celeste, her face contused, becomes audible. In her account, Perry fell as he was attempting to kick her again. Detective Adrienne Quinlan (Merrin Dungey) thinks they

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Figure 4.5 Celeste’s eyes meet Jane’s, who gives a barely perceptible nod (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO).

Figure 4.6 Celeste looks at Perry with a dawning realization that his violence has not been limited to her. This relay of looks between women is a counternarrative to the relay of looks between men that Mulvey describes as the male gaze (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies, HBO).

are lying, but her partner Walt Gibson (Tim True) believes their account and calls it self-defense. Though it is soon followed by the revelation of how Perry died, the delay builds dramatic tension and time is elongated. In a sequence scored by a

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piano melody, we see shots of surf, the funeral, and the five women and their children playing on a luminous beach (53:05–55:03). The sequence then intercuts rapidly between the beach and the events that led to Perry’s death, bridged by the music. Perry charges Celeste while the other women try to fight him off. Shots of the surf punctuate his vicious blows at Celeste and the women’s defensive strikes against him, until Bonnie rushes Perry at a run and shoves him away from Celeste. He plummets down the stairs to his death. Then, the piano score stops and the dampened sound of the surf scores the shots of the incredulous women. Back to the beach, until Ituana’s silky cover of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What you Want,” plays softly. The sequence cuts back to the immediate aftermath of Perry’s death until it returns to the women on the beach, seen through binoculars, and the sound of a lighter clicking, a tic associated with the skeptical Detective Quinlan (56:15–57:33). The miniseries ends with the women, some previously at odds, keeping the secret of how Perry died, presumably still under suspicion by a lone detective, but officially cleared by the police. The series frames the women’s choices as acts of self-defense, from forcibly stopping Perry to avoiding closer contact with the criminal justice system. Elizabeth Alsop (2019) characterizes feminist conclusions like this as a “competing set of ‘fantasies,’ ” a contrast from the sight of unresolved female abjection, like that found in the first two seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–present). Theirs is female solidarity based partly on friendship and partly on a shared experience of patriarchal abuse. Throughout the season, we glimpse Jane fantasize about exacting revenge on her rapist by shooting him. When Bonnie pushes Perry to his death, she is intervening to stop his assault, but also on some level exacting revenge for the violence done to her as a child.4 Though once confronted by the sight of Perry, Jane could not pull the trigger even in her imagination, Perry’s death is what she wished for. The ending provides a revenge fantasy not only for Jane, Celeste, and Bonnie but also for the viewer. This outcome forestalls the she said/he said public conflict that so often ends in dismissal of charges in a criminal justice system inclined to dismiss violence committed against women.5 When Nicole Kidman won the Screen Actors Guild and Emmy awards for Outstanding Actress in 2018, she drew a connection between her character on the show and the long overdue spotlight on abuse in Hollywood instigated by the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Big Little Lies serves as an example of how a quality drama can use melodrama to not only convey the “moral legibility” of abuse so the viewer can feel the difference between competing moral sides but also to “[register] political dreams” (Kackman 2008). The dream the show engages is not to kill the abuser per se, though that can be emotionally satisfying, but to model how female solidarity can work to interrupt violence and provide emotional support. Alsop sees Big Little Lies’ engagement with a “rhetoric of sisterhood” as “a radical response to the punitive treatment of women that has come

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to dominate prestige TV” (2019: 1), for instance, the overuse of rape as a plot twist on programs such as Game of Thrones (see chapter 3) or the trope of the young white female “gateway body” in detective thrillers that investigate the violent death of women at the hands of men (see chapter 2).6 She notes that by leaning away from more realistic, grim endings, to more emotionally satisfying outcomes, they “dare to envision just conclusions” (2019: 9).7 Comparing Big Little Lies to Lizzie Borden’s feminist film, Born in Flames (1983), Alsop argues that the ending of Big Little Lies “constitutes a . . . defense of extra-judicial tactics, permitting the heroines’ act of violence to remain, at least at the first season’s end, completely unpunished” (2019: 9). Thus, the program draws on the vocabulary of second wave feminist filmmaking to express its sexual politics, but without having to disavow visual pleasure (2019: 12). Big Little Lies demonstrates how melodrama can function to express felt realities of injustice and to provide an emotionally satisfying staging of justice under circumstances where this is unlikely to happen in reality. Alsop (2019) suggests that we need to recalibrate the aesthetic criteria that regards realism as necessary to the seriousness of a text, and that rejects the more polemical mode of 1980s feminist filmmaking, in order to grasp women’s felt realities. This is related to Michael Kackman’s (2008) proposition that the evaluation of quality television must not rest on formal grounds alone, to the exclusion of ideological analysis. He suggests the need to treat “. . . melodrama and contemporary quality television not just as an ameliorative, cathartic symbolic resolution of social anxieties, but as a mechanism for the registering of political dreams.” Psychologists María Paula Paragis et al. (2019) identify a contradiction between Big Little Lies’ thematic concern with the feminist issue of violence against women, and its reinforcement of two patriarchal conventions: the association of women’s identity with maternity, and feminine beauty stereotypes. I would argue that the women are not reduced to their maternal identities and that the feminine excess to which Paragis et al. object is used strategically. In the first instance, both Celeste and Madeline manifestly express their desire to work, because being a mother is not fulfilling enough on its own (“Push Comes to Shove” 1.4, 2017). And though one working mother, Renata, is cast as brittle, the other, Jane, is depicted as a loving single mother. In the second instance, feminine beauty stereotypes refer to what Ponterotto (2016: 133) calls “conformity to the normatized model” of the female body in contemporary society, which is white, heterosexual, middle class, thin, and young or youthful. Though one of the women is biracial, and another is not well-to-do, they all share the “canonical female body” (135) which is slim and fit. But underneath the picture-perfect bodies and lives they present on the surface lies a far messier reality. Underneath the polished happy exteriors, the lives of studied perfection, and the normatized model bodies lie Celeste’s bruise-laden body, and the psychological trauma of abuse. The show makes a point of this when, toward the end of

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its opening credits, the five women cat-walk up to the camera, in the Audrey Hepburn costumes they wear to the costume fundraiser, where they clearly and consciously put on a gendered and classed performance (Richard 2018). Alsop identifies both Big Little Lies and Orange is the New Black as female-driven serials that simultaneously “[recall] second-wave feminist discourse” and remedy one of its key shortcomings, “its centering of whiteness” “by staging a more self-consciously intersectional vision of female solidarity” (2019: 1, 4). This refers to Big Little Lies’ casting of Bonnie, despite how peripheral she is to most of the story. However, intersectionality is more clearly in evidence in Orange is the New Black.

Orange is the New Black The complexity of racially conscious multiracial storytelling is antithetical to most television productions, which rely instead on “colorblind casting,” a convention that visually displays diversity but resists diversity-specific narratives (Brook 2009; Warner 2015b), a practice designed to satisfy racial watchdog groups without disrupting the comfort level of white viewers.8 In contrast, Orange is the New Black is “color conscious,” that is, it develops characters who are racially or ethnically specific to produce an ensemble with racial/ethnic, class, age, and sexual diversity (Brook 2009; Warner 2015a). The price of getting this diversity on Netflix was to feature a white central character around which the others pivot, what creator Jenji Kohan (2013) called her Trojan horse. The figure of a blonde yuppie “girl next door” provided white viewers and Netflix executives with an entry point or keystone leading into the more diverse world of the prison industrial complex. For Kohan, who adapted Piper Kerman’s memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison into a television series, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) was the way in to tell a more diverse story. For Netflix, Kohan’s track record as the creator of Weeds (2005–12), the Showtime series about “women who commit crimes” but are not hardened criminals, also provided an entry point. Moreover, Netflix’s business model made this foray into racially conscious programming feasible. It based its approval of the series on reams of data they had on the viewing habits of subscribers, which suggested a ready audience for this show. Drawing on the data afforded by its direct content delivery system, Netflix employed its recommendation matrix, designed to suggest titles on the basis of user ratings of already-seen titles, to spur interest in the series, which was introduced with little fanfare on July 11, 2013. This, together with word of mouth, made the series a binge hit, one that outpaced the much-ballyhooed House of Cards (2013–18).9 Lastly, subscription-based Netflix bypasses a key part of television’s production culture in which the economics of advertising translate into a lower tolerance for female antiheroes or deviance, including “too much” racial diversity. Though about 66% of the audience is female according to Nielsen (Spangler 2018), the series enjoys a “crossover appeal

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that flouts the conventional wisdom in Hollywood that only women watch shows about women” (Kohen 2014). Somehow 51% of the audience constitutes a niche audience in the male Hollywood imaginary. The narrative premise of Orange is the New Black is encapsulated in the high concept idea: a pretty, 32-year-old white Smith graduate finds herself serving a prison sentence for carrying drug money for her cartel girlfriend ten years earlier. As the series’ Trojan horse, she is the element that draws in the imputed white viewer with a normatively feminine, that is, white, (ostensibly) heterosexual, middle class, thin, young central character through whom the audience is introduced to Litchfield Federal Penitentiary, the upstate New York minimum security prison with a white plurality, not majority, and sizable Black and Latina populations. This device heralds back to the women in prison films of the 1950s, in which a white middleclass woman, the standard bearer of female innocence, makes a fateful error, and ends up in prison.10 She is the audience surrogate through whom the (white) audience experiences the dehumanization of the intake process and learns the ropes, as the main character negotiates a variegated population of women who are a mix of races, ages, classes, and sexualities (Mayne 2000). The ploy was more recently used by Oz (1997–2003), the HBO male prison drama with strong elements of melodrama (Malach 2008) but a much more sinister tone. Unlike these predecessors, Orange is the New Black is a dramedy, a drama with recurrent comedic elements, but no laugh track, to help to leaven the anger, cruelty, isolation, pain, and other difficult emotions the series regularly traffics in.11 The dramedy format – with its bright lighting schemes, light and localized (as opposed to sustained) use of dread, and injections of humor – is but another form of Trojan horse for a series that tackles serious issues. The pilot of the hour-long, female-centric Netflix series introduces us to its complex non-linear flashback structure, and centers Piper’s story, even as it introduces us to the racially myriad ensemble cast. A conventional format would retain a central focus on the affluent white woman’s story, and the women of color she encounters in the prison would form the backdrop against which her story unfolds. This is the logic of what Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “representational intersectionality,” in which the stories of women of color routinely fall between the cracks of white women’s stories and the stories of men of color (1991: 1283). Orange is the New Black resists this logic, but does not dispel it altogether. The episodes quickly move out from Piper, the central white upper middle-class female, and expand to tell the stories of other women in the prison in a centrifugal structure that foregrounds the racial/ethnic, class, age, and sexual diversity of the ensemble. The series embraces a modified version of what Mittell calls “. . . centrifugal complexity, in which the ongoing narrative pushes outward, spreading characters across an expanding story world . . . [As] the series expands in quantity of characters and settings . . . its richness is found in the complex web of interconnectivity forged across the social system” (2015: 222, emphasis

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in original). The women are Black, Latina, white, Asian, elderly, young, middle-aged, lesbian, bisexual, straight, transgender, cisgender, poor, and middle class. However indispensable the Trojan horse trope was to getting a series with such a diverse cast greenlighted in 2012, this approach undercut the importance of stories of women of color, which would to varying extents be “mediated through whiteness” (Salters 2014 in Caputi 2015: 1132). Most episodes of every 13-episode season are structured by flashbacks. This narrative strategy reveals the constrained circumstances under which a woman made the choices that landed her in the institutional setting of the prison, a device that was formerly used on Oz (1997–2003). In the words of the Netflix poster, “Every sentence is a story.” In the first season, we get not only Piper’s backstory but also that of Black women (Miss Claudette, Janae, Sophia), Latinas (Aleida, Daya), poor women (Miss Claudette, Alex, Pennsatucky), older women (Miss Claudette, Red), a trans woman12 (Sophia), lesbians (Alex, Nicky, Sophia, Tricia), and other white women (Nicky, Red, Pennsatucky, Alex, Tricia). As this categorization demonstrates, women’s social identities are simultaneously multiple and intersecting, or structurally intersectional (Crenshaw 1991: 1245). Though Mittell (2015) argues that centrifugal programs lack a clear narrative center, Piper retains a privileged position in the series, creating a modified centrifugal design. In the first season, three of thirteen episodes feature her backstory. Moreover, eight episodes are devoted to white characters, while only four are dedicated to women of color. This suggests that there is a mitigated structural privileging of the white women’s stories in season one (see also Doyle 2013). Season two, however, proceeds to sideline Piper, as the focus shifts to other characters in the centrifugal logic of the story. “Imaginary Enemies” The series demonstrates how sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and poverty impact women’s lives both inside and outside the prison.13 The season 1 episode, “Imaginary Enemies” (1.4, 2013), reveals the backstory of a character who experienced violence outside prison, which is typical of women in lockup. As Jane Caputi notes, “[e]ighty-five to ninety percent of incarcerated women have suffered sexual and physical assault, often when they were children” (2015: 1131–1132). Miss Claudette Pelage (Michelle Hurst) is a Haitian immigrant in her late fifties who, as a teenage girl, was forced to work as a domestic laborer in the US to pay off her parents’ debt.14 When we meet her, she is in the minimum security facility. Rumors that she was involved in “slave trade shit” and that she killed someone suggest that she may have been transferred there from maximum security due to her age and history of good behavior. In her flashback story, we learn that she worked her way up to a managerial position with the maid service that held her in bondage. When one of the girls under her care returns from work brutally beaten, and likely sexually abused, the otherwise cold Miss Claudette

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registers recognition and empathy, suggesting that she may have undergone similar abuse. She takes the next shift to clean the townhouse. After seeing her enter, we see the body of a middle-aged white man stabbed to death with a kitchen knife lying on the kitchen floor as she meticulously cleans up the evidence. This is an extralegal act of retribution for an attack that the criminal justice system would have been unlikely to punish given the power disparities in the equation. Neither Miss Claudette nor her ward fit the “white female brands of innocence” that include the “good girl” or the respectable “lady” (Caputi 2015: 1134). As Julie Ajinkya reports, “Girls of color . . . who are victims of abuse are more likely to be defined as offenders needing to be punished rather than victims . . .” (2013 in Caputi 2015: 1131; Terry 2016). Nor would they have had the financial resources to afford robust legal counsel in a civil suit. But more importantly, they would have been accusing a respectable white middle-class man in a he said-she said situation that tends to privilege affluent men and would have left him free to repeat the crime. The series does not spell out the structural circumstances that render them powerless in a court of law, but only obliquely hints at the social constraints Miss Claudette and her ward had to negotiate. What we see is their suffering, and we are left to fill in the gaps of an unjust system at work. Thus, the episode taps into the affective mode of melodrama to convey the moral legibility of Miss Claudette’s crime as an act of self-defense. Caputi suggests that Miss Claudette is doing time for her work in the slave labor ring, not murder. Why she “chose” to work for them into her forties is not explored in an episode written and directed by white men. But the larger problem with the way Miss Claudette’s story is presented is that the series’ overarching neoliberal discourse of choice allows viewers another reading of the situation, one that overlooks the implied structural disadvantages that limited her access to justice, in the past as well as the present of the story. The discourse of choice is most often articulated by Piper. Her willingness to take personal responsibility for her involvement in the drug trade on a lark, coupled with her insistence that she is no different from the other inmates is misleading. Her account, and the backstories, suggest that poor women and women of color, like Piper, made bad choices. Though Piper’s position seems to be motivated by a desire to renounce the racial-class bias that she is intrinsically more innocent simply by virtue of being white and class privileged, her claim presupposes that poor women and women of color could also have avoided prison had they made “better” choices. It is in this sense that Piper does not acknowledge or even fathom what her privilege affords her. As Mohadessa Najumi argues, for impoverished communities and people of color, “. . . avoiding prison has less to do with making ‘bad choices,’ . . . than [with] avoiding the Prison Industrial Complex” (2013 in Caputi 2015: 1137) that subjects them to “systematic surveillance and criminalization” (Page and Ouellette 2019: 13) and that imposes

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harsher punishments for people of color than whites for comparable crimes (Najumi 2013 in Caputi 2015: 1137). As a consequence of the highly racist way in which “justice” is meted out, “the prison-industrial complex is deeply racialized, with prisoners of color comprising 37% of the US population, but 67% of the US prison population” (Page and Ouellette 2019: 12). Choice discourse “obscures the lack of options for oppressed peoples” (Caputi 2015: 1137), particularly social forces that “work to criminalize behaviors many Black women adopt in order to cope with poverty, inadequate education, and domestic violence, for example, acquiescence to an abusive partner’s demand for participation in criminal activities, prostitution, [and] drug use” (Richie 1996 in Caputi 2015: 1137; Enck and Morrissey 2015). Moreover, this discourse shifts focus away from the racial biases implicit in the prison industrial complex. However, there are moments in the series that more explicitly resist choice discourse. In one instance, Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson (Danielle Brooks), a young Black woman, is paroled but finds herself constrained by a sequence of structural problems. With her prison record, she is unable to find a fulltime job, undergoes constant state surveillance that stigmatizes her, and lacks a support system or resources.15 A few episodes later she is back in prison and describes her experience. “What they don’t tell you when you get out? They gonna be up your ass like the KGB. Curfew every night, piss in a cup whenever they say . . . Minimum wage is some kinda joke. I got part-time workin’ at Pizza Hut, and I still owe the prison $900 in fees . . . I was sleeping on the floor in my second cousin apartment like a dog . . . I got lice. Everyone I know is poor, in jail, or gone” (“Fool Me Once” 1.12, 2013).16 The court-mandated fees that Taystee refers to constitute a form of “racialized expropriation” of money which local government depends upon (Wang 2018 in Page and Ouellette 2019: 5) and which comprise part of the larger system that prevents former prisoners from extricating themselves from the threat of re-incarceration (Goffman 2014). It is also an indication of the systemic ways in which the prison industrial complex is dependent upon racial, class, and gender inequality.17 What awaits Taystee on the outside is not the support of an affluent family, a book contract, and the sale of television rights, but a set of structural disadvantages that thwart her ambitions. The series overall tends to distance itself from Piper’s performance of white and class privilege. Piper is often mocked for her race-class privilege by other characters and is made uncomfortable when, in spite of her selfabsorption, she perceives it. There are also moments not involving her that narratively challenge white privilege. In one trenchant scene, Taystee and Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley) play their white alter egos, Amanda and Mackenzie, to deconstruct white middle-class entitlement (“WAC Pack”

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1.6, 2013). Their satiric impersonations cast an oppositional gaze and call out privilege. However, despite these narrative challenges, the series structurally reinforces white privilege. Piper remains the central character, drawn as it is from Piper Kerman’s memoir. Character alignment may be dispersed among an assortment of characters, including Miss Claudette, but Piper retains a privileged position in the overall narrative structure; she serves as the series’ through line. Moreover, the discourse of choice she embraces limits the series’ ability to achieve a sustained critique of the racialized character of the prison industrial complex. This is in part due to a limitation of the writers room, which lacked Black writers. Though rightfully hailed for its gender balance, a preponderance of the scripts (87.5%) were written by white people and only a few by Latina/o or Asian writers.18 Despite these limitations, Orange is the New Black largely refuses to pathologize its female characters, even when they kill, while unflinchingly exposing their flaws. Over the course of the series, the stories plumb the depths of women’s experiences, including people of color, older, gay, and trans characters, stories normally left out of public discourse, stories informed by intersectional feminism’s focus on the multiplicity and complexity of identities. The series constructs a more variegated female subjectivity and advances a critique of the prison industrial complex in a television landscape that is often mute about systemic problems.

Wentworth Ten weeks before the first season of Orange is the New Black dropped on Netflix, an Australian prison drama, Wentworth (2013–present), premiered on pay-television channel SoHo, which had rebranded itself from a women’s programming to a dramatic series channel in 2012. By December 2014, the first two seasons of Wentworth syndicated on Netflix, where it has since been available to American viewers as it circulates in Netflix’s global media stream. The series is a reimagining of the cult television network primetime soap opera, Prisoner (1979–86, Network Ten), basically a remake with major changes effected to contemporize it.19 Wentworth retained its source material’s socio-political implications. Prisoner was designed to realistically portray women’s prison conditions, as revealed in a report issued in the late 1970s (Sharp and Giuffre 2013), and targeted a female audience. In addition to the report, a successful feminist campaign to release Sandra Willson, a woman who had served “18 years for the murder of her abusive husband,” had also made women’s prisons the focus of debate (Turnbull 2017: 185–186). Reg Watson, the creator of Prisoner, hired Willson to consult on the project and fashioned two of the characters’ stories after Willson to give the series a quality of authenticity (Turnbull 2017).20 The series’ gritty social realism extended to what Beverley Zalcock and Jocelyn Robinson describe as the “homely, distinctly unglamorous” appearance of the inmates, who come in different “ages, types and shapes” (1996: 89) in defiance of normative femininity.

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Prisoner balanced the soap opera’s exploration of relationships with the action elements of the women in prison genre (Zalcock and Robinson 1996: 92), while disavowing the latter’s use of the male gaze (Turnbull 2017). Wentworth, adapted by Lara Radulovich, retained this practice and, moreover, embraced what Kim Akass describes as “a distinctly female gaze” (Ford 2018). The series’ women’s prison “hub” setting necessitates a large ensemble cast composed mainly of women (Taylor et al. 2020: 672). This structural feature advances the feminist aims of Screen Australia’s 2015 “Gender Matters” initiative (Dwyer et al. 2019: 3). The series has been hailed for its creation of nuanced difficult women, complex depiction of characters, web of intertwining narrative threads, and intricate plotting. In reimagining its source material, the Wentworth character whose story was influenced by that of Sandra Willson became Bea Smith (Danielle Cormack), the new inmate through whom we are introduced to Wentworth Correctional Centre. The first four seasons revolve around the parallel courses that inmate Bea and corrections officer Vera Bennett (Kate Atkinson) take, in a centripetal fashion that shifts in season 5 to a more centrifugal one, after Bea dies. In keeping with the realism of Prisoner, in Wentworth, “[m]any of the female prisoners are victims of domestic violence and assault at the hands of their partners and, like Bea, are in prison because they have fought back” (Turnbull 2017: 196). In Prisoner, Bea is imprisoned for killing her best friend, “who was having an affair with her husband” (Sharp and Giuffre 2013: 25), but in Wentworth, she enters on remand for the attempted murder of her husband, who we see beat and rape her in the course of their married life. The crime was changed to reflect a grim reality of female imprisonment shared by the US, the U.K., and Australia, that most incarcerated women have been the victims of sexual assault or domestic violence. In the US, “Eighty-five to ninety percent of incarcerated women have suffered sexual and physical assault, often when they were children (ACLU). Many have also experienced these assaults in the midst of long-term, lifethreatening situations of domestic violence” (Caputi 2015: 1131–1132). In the U.K., “[t]he majority of female prisoners are themselves victims of serious offences . . . [M]ore than half have experienced rape, sexual abuse or domestic violence . . .” (Roberts 2013). In Australia, “an overwhelming majority of women in prison are victims of domestic violence, with evidence suggesting between 70 percent and 90 percent of incarcerated women have been physically, sexually or emotionally abused as children or adults – an experience [which] experts say frequently leads to their offending and criminalisation” (Gleeson and Baird 2019). This gendered pattern suggests that the criminal justice system fails to protect women from abuse and that when women fight back and kill their abusers, they are likely to be punished not only for the crime they commit but also “may be punished for the gender transgression involved in committing that crime” (Mallicoat 2018: 5). According to the ACLU, the average prison sentence for women who kill

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their partners is fifteen years, whereas men who kill their female partners receive on average only two to six years (Chalabi 2019). This appalling disparity in sentencing suggests both that male life is valued more highly than female life, so its loss is punished more forcefully, and that female violence is punished more severely than male violence because in addition to breaking the law, it constitutes a gender transgression. “[A]n influential image . . . is that women who transgress, who end up in prison, are somehow more foul, more corrupt . . .” (Docker 1994: 263 in Wächter 2020: 656). This is the gender tax levied against incarcerated women, who are stigmatized for “violating gender norms” (Wächter 656). In contrast to the comic strains of Orange is the New Black, Wentworth adopts a tragic frame (Enck and Morrissey 2015) to reflect the harshness of its prison conditions. OITNB took its sober memoir source material and countered the grimness of prison life with brightness, light music, and comedic contradictions between Piper’s voiceover narration and images onscreen. Wentworth took its gritty realism soap source and made it darker, more suspenseful, with a greater focus on the bleak realities of prison life. Both used an audience surrogate to usher the audience into the world of the prison, women who are incarcerated for crimes they committed involving an intimate partner. Piper smuggled money for her lover across international borders, and lands, through a plea deal, in a minimum security prison after self-surrendering. Bea is forcibly arrested for the attempted murder of her abusive husband and is taken to a maximum security prison on remand. While thirty-year-old Piper leaves behind a fiancé, forty-two-year-old Bea leaves behind a teenage daughter. In both series, the circumstances that led to their crimes, and that of other characters, are shown in flashback and function to humanize them. Piper’s flashbacks are played humorously. Bea’s flashbacks focus on the domestic violence and sexual assault that precipitated her crime, and her daughter’s cries when she is hauled off in handcuffs: utterly distressing scenes. “No Place Like Home” The pilot episode, “No Place Like Home” (1.1, 2013) was created by Lara Radulovich, who conceived the story, and Peter McTighe, who wrote the screenplay, and who is responsible for writing over one quarter of the series episodes. It opens with dimly lit shots of Bea, as she looks through the barred window of a bus, in handcuffs, overlaid with ominous music.21 She is disconcerted by the sight of her fellow prisoner exchanging a blow job for a pack of cigarettes from a prison guard. A low angle shot of Bea passing through the metal frame of a doorway into Wentworth Correctional Centre, conveys her confinement, in the blue tones that dominate the cold color palette of the series (see Figure 4.7). Inside, she is appalled at the sight of a woman deliberately urinating in her pants. Her intake is intercut with desaturated shots of her panicking at the scene of the

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Figure 4.7 A low angle shot of Bea passing through the metal frame of a doorway into Wentworth Correctional Centre, conveys her confinement, in the blue tones that dominate the cold color palette of the series (S1 E1, 2013, Wentworth, SoHo, Netflix).

attempted murder. She becomes frantic, desperate to speak to her daughter, screams, struggles, and is pinned and sedated. This opening establishes the coarseness of prison life and Bea’s humiliation both inside the prison and at home. Flashbacks to her husband verbally belittling her, kicking her, pinning her arm and head to rape her, establish the long-term pattern of abuse that led to her violence. We see in short truncated shots, how she tried to kill him until her daughter interceded to let him live, and the conditions of her sudden arrest. The clipped quality of these scenes suggests the traumatic nature of these events for Bea, and the empathy inducing shots of her distress align the audience with her perspective. Later, when a guard notices the bruising on her arm, she readily recognizes Bea as a battered woman, “. . . an experience common to many incarcerated women. . . . [W]hile only a minority of women are convicted for violent crimes, such violence often occurs in the context of violence committed against them by intimate partners, and it is usually a one-off event (Australian Government: Australian Institute of Family Studies 2012, n.p.; see also Penal Reform International 2013, A3)” (Wächter 2020: 660). These elements combine to depict the moral legibility of Bea’s crime as an act of self-defense.22

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In keeping with the role of the pilot to establish the series’ storytelling norms for the audience, this episode introduces its non-linear structure. As in OITNB, and Oz (1997–2003) before it, the flashbacks provide backstory and function to reveal the circumstances of the crime for which characters are imprisoned. The pilot also acquaints the audience with Wentworth’s more sustained use of violence, and the threatening tone this sets. In contrast to OITNB’s concentrated bursts of violence quickly contained, as we see with Miss Claudette’s flashback account, the threat of violence is more pervasive on Wentworth. As Cornelia Wächter (2020: 659) points out, the pervasive graphic violence of Wentworth is unrepresentative of the low rate of physical violence in women’s prisons. The rare outbreaks of violence that characterize Orange is the New Black are more realistic, as are the “familial structures” women form in prison, on both series.23 This may be so, but the violence adds to the dramatic tension on the series and contributes to its popularity, I suggest, because it is exhilarating to see women perform such transgressive acts. A Vulture review compared the “ruthlessly dark drama” of Wentworth to Breaking Bad (2008–13) (Lyons 2014) or as I thought of it, Bea Smith is the female Walter White, an antihero whose evolution the series follows and through whom audiences can vicariously enjoy the pleasures of transgression (Vaage 2015), not only because they commit crimes but also, in the case of Bea, because she commits radical acts of gender transgression. The stakes of how badly things can go in prison for the uninitiated are starkly different in the two prison series. Piper uses her white privilege to secure a phone call to her fiancé on the day she arrives. Bea’s husband refuses to let her speak to their daughter, Debbie (Georgia Flood), and subsequently fails to look after her. When Piper insults the food in the presence of the cook, she is starved until she is able to make amends days later. In contrast, Bea is caught in the middle of a power struggle between top dog Jacs Holt (Kris McQuade) and her challenger Franky Doyle (Nicole da Silva). First, Franky forces Bea to meet with a visitor who orally passes her drugs, a violation for which she is caught and put in solitary confinement. Then, Jacs forces Bea to injure Franky by threatening to harm Debbie. When Bea subsequently stands up to Jacs and tries to stop her from gang raping Franky,24 Jacs has Debbie killed.25 When Bea learns that Jacs ordered her son, who had insinuated himself into Debbie’s life on his mother’s directions, to give her a lethal dose of drugs, Bea kills Jacs and incurs a twelve-year sentence for manslaughter. Though this narrative turn punishes Bea with a long prison term, she is not treated with narrative hostility and judged to be a bad mother by other characters. It is Debbie’s father who fails her through his continual neglect, and it is his violence that led to Bea’s absence from home. Akass rightfully takes this as evidence of the series’ female gaze (Ford 2018). Bea is Wentworth’s through line for the first four seasons. After she dies, Wentworth shifts from a more centripetal structure, with a returning focus on a central character within the larger ensemble cast, to a more centrifugal

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structure. The largely female ensemble features women of different ages, classes, ethnicities, sexualities, and body shapes, including a trans woman.26 But, as Wächter observes, the main plotlines revolve around “. . . white, middle-class, cisgendered, heterosexual, normatively sized, and conventionally attractive” characters, whose stories are more prominent and who are accorded greater screen time (2020: 661, 658). This is particularly important when it comes to the inclusion of people of color. In the first five seasons, the ensemble cast includes one major Indigenous Australian character, Doreen Anderson (Shareena Clanton who is Indigenous Australian), as well as corrections officer Will Jackson, who is played by Samoan-New Zealander Robbie Magasiva, a mainstay of the series. When Doreen is released in season five, the series does not track her life outside of prison, as it does that of two former white inmates. In season six, two new featured Indigenous characters are introduced, Rita Connors (Leah Purcell) and Ruby Mitchell (Rarriwuy Hick), both played by Indigenous actors, at a time when “it is still rare to see more than one Indigenous character in the main cast of an Australian television series” (Screen Australia 2016 in Taylor et al. 2020: 676). Both Doreen and Rita were white characters in Prisoner, so this is a deliberate change to increase diversity on the series. As much as Wentworth relies on realism in other ways, it significantly underrepresents incarcerated Indigenous women, who are markedly overrepresented in prison. In 2018, 34% of incarcerated women were Indigenous, despite only comprising [3.3]% of Australian women (Gleeson and Baird 2019).27 As Tessa Dwyer et al., note, “[a]lthough Wentworth features more major Indigenous characters than the average Australian television series (the [2019] season features two Indigenous Australian main characters in an ensemble of ten), it still fails to adequately represent or address the horrifically high rate of Indigenous incarceration here” (Dwyer et al. 2019: 5). Moreover, “[the series] fails to take account of the fact that, as Rashad Shabazz phrases it, ‘race informs and structures incarceration and carceral punishment [and] carceral power is deeply interwoven with racism’ ” (2015: 5–6 in Wächter 2020: 661). According to Screen Australia’s study of diversity on broadcast drama between 2011 and 2015, 5% of main characters were Indigenous. This may sound like fair representation of the 3.3% of Indigenous Australians found in the 2016 census (Biddle and Markham 2017), but the vast majority of dramas (83% or 166 of 199) included no Indigenous main characters. Furthermore, most of the Indigenous main characters were concentrated on only a few (8 of 33) programs (Screen Australia 2016: 10–11). Behind the scenes, Indigenous writers and directors participate in television production in representative numbers, but producers, who are in the strongest position to shape a series, are underrepresented, and based on the previous finding, opportunity seems to be limited. Despite these limitations, Wentworth develops its flawed female characters without pathologizing them, even when they kill. It delves into

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the depths of women’s experiences, including people of color, older, and gay characters, stories normally left out of public discourse, stories informed by intersectional feminism’s focus on the multiplicity and complexity of identities. Conclusion Two of the series discussed in this chapter are set in a women’s prison. The prison serves as a “female hub” and provides “an institution ruled by and for women” where women are in charge (Taylor et al. 2020: 677), and where women’s conversations do not revolve around men, but rather around each other. But series do not need to be set in specifically homosocial spaces to be female-centric, or to headline a largely female cast. Big Little Lies mainly features women because it centers female friendship, realities, and lives. That is all that is needed to create a female hub in storytelling. The three series understand how frequently male violence redirects women’s lives, that the criminal justice system not only fails to protect women from rape and domestic violence but also fails to punish assailants, and then proceeds to deliver disproportionately harsh judgments against women who kill to protect themselves or to avenge male violence. They all adopt a female gaze that recognizes female violence against abusers as a form of self-defense and a one-off transgression. These series address the unresolved second wave feminist concern with sexual abuse and assault against women, and the 2017 uptake of these issues by the #MeToo movement, while casting these issues in a much-needed intersectional light. This chapter is more oriented toward looking at the intersectionality of gender, race, and class than earlier ones because women of color are more subject to violence. As Imani Cheers notes, “. . . [b]lack women by and large are the most violated demographic in the country in terms of murder and rape/sexual assault rates,” a phenomenon that reflects the “ ‘mass devaluation of Black women’s lives’ ” (Cheers 2017: 73, citing Jones-DeWeever 2014). The predominantly white-cast Big Little Lies serves to demonstrate the cross-class, cross-race reach of the social justice gender gap.

Notes 1 In 2016, about the time Donald Trump was elected president after boasting on camera about committing sexual assault, Thandie Newton, of Westworld, spoke out against the “[a]buse and exploitation [that] is rife” in Hollywood (qtd. in Cocozza 2016). Her co-star Rachel Evan Wood also spoke out about being raped (Shanley 2016). In 2017, Gabrielle Union, the star of Being Mary Jane, a difficult women series discussed in chapter 5, also spoke out about being a survivor of rape (Rowe 2019: 31). 2 Directors include feminist filmmakers Jodie Foster and Alison Anders. 3 Though we do not learn of this abuse until season two, readers of the novel would have known of it. My analysis of Big Little Lies is limited to the first season, which is based on the novel. Season 2 undoes the first season’s narrative

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resolution. The program was produced as a seven-episode limited series but was extended to a second season after several prominent Golden Globe and Emmy wins, including Outstanding Limited Series, and Outstanding Lead Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, and Directing in the limited series/miniseries category. In the novel, Bonnie is abused by her father, but in season two of the series the abuse is committed by her mother. Season two shows that the abuser’s death does not end the trauma of the abuse; its legacy persists. It ends with Bonnie going to the police station to confess, where the other women join her. Alsop also includes Dietland (2018, AMC), Claws (2017–present, TNT), GLOW (2017–19, Netflix), Top of the Lake (2013–17, Sundance), and Orange is the New Black in her analysis of programs that engage a rhetoric of sisterhood. See Pinedo (2020) for a similar argument about Get Out (2017), a film that circumvents a Black man’s encounter with the police and a criminal justice system inclined to dismiss violence committed against people of color, in favor of a just outcome. Racial watchdog groups include civil rights groups such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers). Netflix withholds viewer statistics (equivalent to ratings and demographic information but in some ways more precise since it is not based on sampling) from both the public and showrunners, so the figures are unavailable. In 2019, they began releasing some figures selectively. However, since they only disclose favorable data, use unreliable measures (overly generously counting someone who watches 70% of one episode as a “viewer” of the series or film) and are issued by an interested party without external oversight, rather than by a third party such as Nielsen, it is not comparable to ratings (Alexander 2019; Porter 2019). The prison genre in film combined varying elements of exploitation and serious drama. Examples include Caged (1950) and Women’s Prison (1955). The decision to enter the 2013 season of Orange is the New Black in the comedy category for the Emmy nominations served to make it more competitive, given the deep bench of talent in the drama category, and the bias that unmitigated drama is harder to pull off than drama tinged with comedy. By season two, a rule change stipulated that hour-long programs no longer qualified to compete in the comedy category. Sophia went to prison after having genital surgery. Transgendered people who have not undergone surgery are usually imprisoned according to their birth sex. Trans women placed in men’s prisons are often subject to assault and harassment (Matthews 2013). OITNB features storylines about corruption (siphoning prison funds for personal gain), privatization, overcrowding (especially after the prison is privatized), corrections officer brutality, incarceration of undocumented immigrants, and racism. Though addressed with varying extents of success, these themes are an indication that Kohan is concerned with systemic problems and attests to her claim that the show is her activism (McClelland 2015). Orange is the New Black gives older women visibility through Miss Claudette and the “golden girls.” These characters disrupt the stereotype of older adults as frail and mentally slow with more complex depictions (Krainitzki 2015), but reinforce the idea that women, particularly old women, are manipulative (Silverman and Ryalls 2016).

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15 As a consequence of her experience, in the final season, Taystee becomes instrumental in establishing a microloan program, seeded by a wealthy former inmate fashioned after Martha Stewart, and teaches a “financial literacy” class for inmates approaching parole (“Here’s Where We Get Off” 7.13, 2019). 16 Criminal defendants incur court fees in New York State that follow prisoners on parole. These payments neither deter crime nor finance the criminal justice system; they go into the state treasury to close budget gaps (Goodman 2008). 17 Season three extends the series’ critique of how the prison industrial complex profits from prison labor by outsourcing it to corporations, for which inmates receive nominal pay. Season four depicts the privatization of the prison, and the corporate for-profit calculus that leads to dangerous overcrowding. Season seven (2019) shifts some of its focus to a part of the privatized prison which is now a repurposed immigration detention facility. 18 The lack of Black writers contributed to serious missteps with the narrative of Poussey’s killing and the series’ treatment of the #Black Lives Matter movement in season 4. See Petermon and Spencer (2019) for an incisive discussion of this narrative thread’s blind spots. 19 The Australian series, also known as Prisoner: Cell Block H, aired twice a week and was internationally syndicated. 20 For another take on realism, see Dwyer (2019) on how Wentworth’s Australian accented dialogue imbues it with the cache of authenticity for non-Australian audiences. 21 The title of the pilot episode, “No Place like Home,” references a memorable line from The Wizard of Oz (1939), in a double intertextual reference to the prison drama Oz, whose tone it resembles more than it resembles that of OITNB, and to its distinctive Australian setting. Orange is the New Black also makes intertextual references to Oz. Shortly after Piper’s arrival, corrections officer (Sam) Healy (Michael Harney) tells her, “this isn’t Oz” (“I Wasn’t Ready”1.1, 2013), a series that also featured a homophobic corrections officer named (Mike) Healy. Oz is set in Oswald State Penitentiary and, in addition to its homonym, alludes to an experimental unit within the prison called “Emerald City.” 22 Later, Bea’s cause creates a stir in the media “. . . and inadvertently inspires organized vigilantism on behalf of abused women” spearheaded by a radical group called The Red Right Hand, which “. . . is depicted as so extreme that Bea . . . distances herself emphatically from their actions” (Wächter 2020: 660). 23 Wentworth’s reliance on violence, though it does not reflect Australian women’s prison reality, does add tension and drama to the series to make it more exciting. This is comparable to Orange is the New Black’s reliance on lesbian sex, which is prevalent on the series, though it does not reflect the reality of American women’s prison experience, including Piper Kerman’s memoir. Wentworth in turn, more realistically depicts lesbian sex as not that common. My thanks to Heather Levi for pointing out this parallel. Neither the elevated use of violence in one nor of sex in the other hews to the social reality, but both make for good drama. 24 In sharp contrast to Oz where male-on-male rape is pervasive, Wentworth selectively thematizes rape. First, in season one, male-on-female rape is briefly glimpsed in flashback when Bea is attacked by her husband, then female-onfemale rape is threatened when Jacs attempts to gang rape Franky. However, in season four, Joan Ferguson (Pamela Rabe) is brutally gang raped by Lucy “Juice” Gambaro (Sally-Anne Upton) and her crew. OITNB, tackles the topic both obliquely, when corrections officer George “Pornstache” Mendez (Pablo Schreiber) threatens to rape Galina “Red” Reznikov (Kate Mulgrew) and Lorna Morello (Yael Stone) in different scenes of season one, and directly,

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when corrections officer Charlie Coates (James McMenamin) rapes Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett (Taryn Manning). 25 Bea is refused permission to attend her daughter’s funeral, a realistic position for incarcerated women, in sharp contrast to Piper, who is allowed to attend her grandmother’s funeral when other women have been denied this accommodation for the death of a parent. In OITNB, this plot point serves to illustrate how Piper’s privilege as a white middle class woman accords her unfair entitlements. In Wentworth, Bea’s inability to attend her daughter’s funeral symbolizes her tragic loss. 26 Maxine Conway is played by male actor Socratis Otto, who joins the cast in season two. On OITNB, Sophia Burset is played by transgender actor and activist Laverne Cox. 27 The Gleeson and Baird (2019) article does not reflect the 2016 Census finding that 3.3% of Australians are Indigenous and uses the 2011 figure of 2%. The US incarcerates a much larger proportion of its population than Australia. As of 2019, the incarceration rate in the US is 655 per 100,000 people (The Sentencing Project 2019), while in Australia, the rate is 219 per 100,000 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2019). Within incarcerated populations, people of color are significantly overrepresented in both countries.

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Richard, David Evan. “People in Glass Houses: Big Little Lies on the Small Screen.” Adaptation 11, no. 3 (2018): 285–289. Richie, Beth E. Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women. New York: Routledge, 1996. Roberts, Rachel. “Wentworth Prison and the Real-Life Parallels for Locked-up Women.” Independent, August 28, 2013. Rowe, Kristin Denise. “ ‘Nothing Else Mattered After That Wig Came Off’: Black Women, Unstyled Hair, and Scenes of Interiority.” The Journal of American Culture 42, no. 1 (2019): 21–36. Salters, Jasmine. “Trans Is the New Black?” The Feminist Wire, January 16, 2014. Saraiya, Sonia. “TV Review: Big Little Lies.” Variety, February 8, 2017. Screen Australia. “Seeing Ourselves: Reflections on Diversity in Australian TV Drama.” 2016. The Sentencing Project. “Trends in US Corrections.” 2019. Shabazz, Rashad. Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. New Black Studies Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Shanley, Patrick. “Evan Rachel Wood Shares Open Letter on Past Sexual Assault: ‘I Will Not Be Ashamed’.” The Hollywood Reporter, November 11, 2016. Sharp, Luke, and Liz Giuffre. “Prisoner Reborn With Wentworth.” Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine 178 (2013): 24. Silverman, Rachel E., and Emily D. Ryalls. “ ‘Everything Is Different the Second Time Around’ the Stigma of Temporality on ‘Orange Is the New Black’.” Television & New Media 17, no. 6 (2016): 520–533. Spangler, Todd. “ ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Season 6 Has Strong US Debut on Netflix, Nielsen Finds.” Variety, August 7, 2018. Taylor, Stayci, Tessa Dwyer, Radha O’Meara, and Craig Batty. “From the Stony Ground up: The Unique Affordances of the Gaol as ‘Hub’ for Transgressive Female Representations in Women-in-Prison Dramas.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture, edited by Marcus Harmes, Meredith Harmes, and Barbara Harmes, 671–684. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Terry, April. “Surveying Issues That Arise in Women’s Prisons: A Content Critique of ‘Orange Is the New Black’.” Sociology Compass 10, no. 7 (2016): 553–566. Top of the Lake. 2013–17. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. New Zealand; UK; USA: Sundance. Turnbull, Sue. “Top Dogs and Other Freaks: ‘Wentworth’ and the Re-imaging of ‘Prisoner Cell Block H’.” In Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama, edited by Milly Buonanno, 181–198. Bristol, UK; Chicago, USA: Intellect, 2017. Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. The Antihero in American Television. New York: Routledge, 2015. Wächter, Cornelia. “ ‘Wentworth’ and the Politics and Aesthetics of Representing Female Embodiment in Prison.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture, edited by Marcus Harmes, Meredith Harmes, and Barbara Harmes, 655–669. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018. Warner, Kristen J. The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. New York: Routledge, 2015a.

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Warner, Kristen J. “The Racial Logic of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’: Shonda Rhimes and Her ‘Post-Civil Rights, Post-Feminist’ Series.” Television & New Media 16, no. 7 (2015b): 631–647. Weeds. 2005–12. Television Series. Seasons 1–8. Showtime. Wentworth. 2013–16, 2017–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–4, 5–7. AUS: SoHo, Showcase. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to OJ Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. The Wizard of Oz. Victor Fleming. USA: Loew’s, Incorporated, 1939. Women’s Prison. Lewis Seller. USA: Columbia Pictures, 1955. Zalcock, Beverley, and Jocelyn Robinson. “Inside Cell Block H: Hard Steel and Soft Soap.” Continuum 9, no. 1 (1996): 88–97.

5

Intersectionality

IntersectionalityIntersectionality

Beyond the white female subject

Introduction When Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) coined the term intersectionality to describe multi-axis interlocking systems of oppression, she was naming a perspective forged by women of color that had been critical of first and second wave feminism’s centering of white, middle-class women, and the consequent marginalization of other women. Even though the term gained currency in the 1990s in association with third wave feminism, women of color had been advocating for a multidimensional analysis of oppression from the start of movement history. Thus, the idea of intersectionality is an element of continuity between different waves of gender activism. Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention is perhaps the best known example of this first wave intellectual tradition, which also includes Ida B. Wells and Anna Julia Cooper.1 Becky Thompson (2002) reconstructs normative second wave historiography to re-center women of color. Following Chela Sandoval (2000: 41–42), Thompson refers to the white-led feminist movement as “hegemonic feminism” (2002: 337), because it failed to address class and race, and thus the needs of poor women and women of color. Moreover, it marginalized the social justice activism of poor women, women of color, and white anti-racist women, whose work coexisted with and followed second wave feminism, but is reduced in the normative telling of second wave history to a reaction to white feminism (2002: 338). Hegemonic feminism operates within an individual rights framework, which argues for equality, in this case between men and women, and the need to legally protect it and make it a binding obligation of government to safeguard equal opportunity. In contrast, “multiracial feminism” (Zinn and Dill 1996 in Thompson 2002: 337) operates with a social justice framework, which considers interlocking oppressions, including the unequal distribution of wealth and resources that result in unequal access to life opportunities. In keeping with this, multiracial feminism embraced an international perspective and coalition politics.2 In addition to working within white-led feminist organizations, multiracial feminists “form[ed] women’s caucuses in existing mixed-gender

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organizations . . . and develop[ed] autonomous Black, Latina, Native American, and Asian feminist organizations” (2002: 338). Given the association of the term feminism with white-led organizations favored by the media, some gender-conscious activists called themselves feminist, but others preferred the terms “ ‘womanist’, ‘radical women of color’, ‘revolutionary’, and ‘social activist’ ” (Thompson 2002: 352). To illustrate the difference in scope, when white-led feminism organized for reproductive rights, they did so to secure legal access to safe abortions and contraception, whereas multiracial feminist activism also included fighting against the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women in public hospitals, an issue that resulted from the interlocking oppressions of gender, race, and class. One of the founders of the National Black Feminist Organization (1973), Barbara Smith defined feminism as “the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement” (in Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, in Thompson 2002: 340).3 The early eighties saw the publication of several important volumes advocating this more expansive vision: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa; All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982), edited by Akasha Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith; and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983) edited by Barbara Smith. These books sought to address both the Black liberation and the white-led women’s movements’ failure to account for Black (and Latina, Native American, Asian) and working class women’s experiences in their political analyses and leadership structure. It is this exclusion that prompted politically active women of color to identify their sense of dislocation, in the sexism of the former and the racism of the latter, as the political imperative to incorporate multiple intersecting axes of identity and (class, race, and gender) oppression without prioritizing one over the other a priori. They sought to disrupt totalizing definitions of Blackness (as male) and femaleness (as white middle class). In Home Girls, Black lesbians extended intersectionality from class, race, and gender to sexual orientation and discussed homophobia in the Black community. All these pioneering anthologies included work published or presented in the 1970s, work that sought to address how women are affected by different combinations of interlocking systems of power, complexities that were not addressed by hegemonic feminism, or as it was then known in the media, feminism. Crenshaw, a legal scholar and critical race theorist, used the concept of intersectionality to apply these insights to the law, specifically, to understand how multiple axes of social and political identity could lead to specific forms of discrimination. She identified a problem in the fact that different

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anti-discrimination laws were limited to one but not another form of identitybased discrimination and argued for the need to address discrimination that resulted from a combination of identities. To make this erasure visible, she adopted the metaphor of the intersection, where multiple flows of traffic pose simultaneous perils. “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination” (Crenshaw 1989: 149). To establish harm, it is necessary to acknowledge that different lanes or axes of oppression (racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism) pose different combinations of hazards to, say, Black lesbians than to straight cis-gender white women. “Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics. . . . [T]his has been the project of Black feminism since its very inception: drawing attention to the erasures, to the ways that ‘women of colour are invisible in plain sight’ ” (Crenshaw in Adewunmi 2014). This erasure has been rampant in television production. Similar to how women qua women are underrepresented in producing and writing scripted television (see chapter 1), people of color of all genders are inadequately represented in Hollywood. This is especially the case behind the scenes. Consequently, women of color are grossly underrepresented in the key creative roles of television production. UCLA’s “Hollywood Diversity Report” (Hunt et al. 2019) finds that, though the numbers have improved over the past decade, people of color are seldom the creators of scripted television (see Table 5.1). In the 2016–2017 season, between 9.4% and 16.5% of television creators were people of color across scripted broadcast, cable, and digital programs, at a time when 39.4% of the US population was non-white. This absence is more pronounced for broadcast than for digital television, which has also seen the largest improvement in this area. Though these numbers fall far below proportional representation, they are an improvement over the figures for the 2011–2012 season, and indicative of the opportunities that Peak TV has afforded marginalized people. We also see a significant increase in the proportion of people of color playing lead roles, 21.3% or more in the 2017–2018 season across formats. This is likely due to both the rise in people of color creating content and in the fact that the country, and thus the television audience, is becoming increasingly diverse and drawn to programs that reflect their realities. Indeed, the UCLA “Hollywood Diversity Report” found that scripted programs with diverse casts draw larger audiences (Hunt et al. 2019: 3).

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Table 5.1 A Comparison of Racial Diversity in Behind-the-Scenes and On-Screen Positions on Scripted Broadcast, Cable, and Digital Programs in the 2011–2012 and 2016–2017 TV Seasons TV Season

Share of On-Screen Roles Whites/nonHispanic or Latino Black/AA Hispanic/Latino Asian Native American POC play the lead Minority Creators

2011– 2012 Broadcast

2016– 2017 Broadcast

2011– 2012 Cable

2016– 2017 Cable

2011– 2012 Digital

2016– 2017 Digital

2017 Census Estimate

63.3%

71.8%

70.3%

60.6%

5.1%

20.6% 6.2% 4.6% 0.1% 21.5%

14.7%

15.9% 5.3% 3% 0.3% 21.3%

9.1%

12.7% 7.2% 4.9% 0.2% 21.3%

12.7% 18.1% 5.6% 1.7% 39.4%

4.2%

9.4%

7.4%

11.2%

6.2%

16.5%

Source: Data drawn from “Hollywood Diversity Report” (UCLA) (Hunt et al. 2019).

The significance of Black, Latina, Asian, and Indigenous creators becomes apparent when we consider and extrapolate Herman Gray’s (1995) distinction between “[B]lack shows” and “shows about Blacks.” As Imani Cheers describes it, Black shows are “television programs concerned with Black themes and cultural representations and that are produced, written and starred in by Black actors . . .” in contrast to shows about Blacks, which have “. . . similar content, but which are produced, written and created by Whites” (2017: 6). Gray found that the content of Black shows drew on the experiences of the executive producers, specifically, on their frameworks of knowledge. Kristal Brent Zook used this groundwork to analyze Black produced shows on the FOX network, which targeted young urban (Black and Latino working class) audiences, as an underserved demographic, from the late 80s to the mid-90s, to compete, build audience, and establish itself as the fourth network. Driven by market imperatives, Zook argues, FOX inadvertently, and for a short time, created a space for Black productions, for Black creative expression, even as its owner, Rupert Murdoch, undermined opportunities to increase minority media ownership (1999: 100–102). She identified four characteristics that marked shows as Black productions: autobiography, improvisation, aesthetics, and drama. Black executive producers and writers drew on their frameworks of knowledge, made use of their individual, and collective experience to write about Black realities. Black actors improvised

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dialogue and action to build authenticity. Production design incorporated visual signifiers of Blackness, including Africanesque art and pictures of Black political figures past and present. The scripts, of mostly sitcom programs, injected elements of drama to address challenging subjects significant to in-group audiences, which included not only African Americans but also others who could sympathize with experiences of oppression or marginalization. The sum effect of these qualities is that these shows expressed a political vision of Black realities, informed by their Black creators. Similarly, Cheers shows, in The Evolution of Black Women in Television: Mammies, Matriarchs, and Mistresses, that when African American women are in charge of creative control, in various behind-the-camera capacities, “including showrunners, producers, directors and writers,” they tend to produce television that offers “alternative representations of AfricanAmericans on programs with a predominantly Black cast” (2017: 13). Gray, Zook, and Cheers agree that oppositional texts must be authored by and revolve around issues that matter to subordinate parties. Cheers’ empirical study further found that “[i]n recent years, there has been a concerted effort by Black women in creative control to employ other Black women in particular, and women of color in general, on their creative teams” (2017: 20), not only to realize their vision but also to afford women of color opportunities that are hard to come by in an industry where white is the default setting for hiring and content. This commitment to hire minority talent is an investment in a political project of inclusion. Recognizing that with ownership comes control, Oprah Winfrey created her own production company, Harpo Studios, as well as the cable network OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network). Shonda Rhimes created the production company, Shondaland, and Ava DuVernay founded a distribution company, Array. Before considering Mara Brock Akil’s Being Mary Jane (BET), Ava Duvernay’s Queen Sugar (OWN), and Tanya Saracho’s Vida (Starz), all racially conscious dramas, created, helmed, and written by women of color, we need to consider the various strategies that most television programs in the twenty-first century have taken toward race, and specifically, toward raced femininity.

Post-racial strategies Two interrelated post-racial strategies have characterized television since the early 2000s: what Vincent Brook (2009) calls the neo-platoon show, and the use of color-blind casting practices, which Kristen Warner (2015b) details.4 The neo-platoon format was adopted by networks in the wake of the 1999 “Lily White” controversy, when diverse media monitoring groups joined forces to protest the absence of minority leads in the Fall broadcast network lineup. This identity-politics-based demand for more inclusive representation, coupled with the threat of a boycott, and the appeal of the growing numbers of minorities that make up “the younger, consumerist audience [that] advertisers, and thus programmers, most covet . . . (especially

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Hispanics and Asian-Americans)” led to multicultural casts (Brook 2009: 333). In response to activist demands for racial media visibility, the networks turned to the post-racial strategies of multicultural ensemble casting and blind casting, which “create the appearance of a commitment to ethnic and racial diversity” without necessarily questioning white norms and privilege (Molina-Guzmán 2018: 53–54).5 Brook characterizes the neo-platoon drama as having an ensemble, racially, and ethnically diverse cast of male and female protagonists in continuing roles. Casting extends beyond the Black/white binary, and people of all races can audition for racially non-specific roles. Consequently, people of color are cast in occupational roles that are equal to or greater than that of whites and are afforded equal screen time. The ensemble works together to solve problems where the stakes are high, and transcends racial differences in interlocking narratives. These programs also feature gender equality and fuse primetime soap elements, including interracial and interethnic romance, with action genres. Examples include Lost (2004–10, ABC), Grey’s Anatomy (2005–present, ABC), and Heroes (2006–10, NBC). This programming strategy combats the damage done by television’s history of negative depictions of people of color, while it whitewashes difference by avoiding racially specific storylines. Historical and cultural differences are ignored, as are ethnic and racial injustice, in its embrace of a color-blind ideology that relegates inequality to the past or suggests that racism is not widespread (Doane 2014: 17 in Molina-Guzmán 2018: 13). The goal of this strategy is to accrue audience segments by providing points of identification to a wide audience while catering to perceived white audience sensibilities. Ralina Joseph (2016: 306) points out that in the mid-2000s when colorblind ideology pervaded not only the media but also the legal and other sectors of society, the undoing of affirmative action had yielded rising racial inequality. It is in this context that white audiences were continually reassured that these remedies were no longer needed. Warner’s analysis of “the racial logic” of color-blind casting focuses on specific productions, such as Grey’s Anatomy, which is the first network drama created and executive produced by a Black woman, Shonda Rhimes. Its marquee producer is known for “narratives of strong women” and the use of color-blind casting (2015b: 631). Although this practice opens job opportunities for actors of color and appeases media monitoring groups, it effectively neutralizes race to depict “. . . what and how much white viewers want to see of Black life,” more than to “. . . [respond] to Blacks’ desire to be seen . . .” (2015b: 634). One issue that results from the disavowal of race is that “actors of color inadvertently step into racial tropes” or “unintentional stereotypes” (2015b: 640). For instance, Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson), who supervises the mostly white residents, unintentionally falls into the racialized trope of the mammy (2015b: 640–641), precisely one of the “controlling images” (Collins 1999, 2000) that color-blind casting claims to combat.

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Essentially, color-blind casting means ignoring the racial ramifications when a role, written so that a white person could play it, is filled by a person of color. This strategy showcases diversity but rather than developing the richness of cultural specificity, it is devised to minimize difference and thus safeguard the comfort of white audiences “. . . at the expense of resonance for people of color” (Warner 2015b: 644). Rhimes has profitably used this strategy to produce network hits and to build her career, as it satisfies network executives that they can trust her to be mindful of white audience sensibilities and assure their supposed comfort. In effect, Warner argues that Rhimes, by presenting herself as someone who does not focus on race and can cater to the white demographic, by not being a “difficult woman” in a white-dominated industry,6 gained the network’s trust and secured her lucrative career. Rhimes leveraged her success with blind cast series Grey’s Anatomy to produce a spin-off and a new drama. The spinoff, Private Practice (2007– 13, ABC), stars a white female protagonist and a multiracial cast. The new drama, Scandal (2012–18, ABC), features a Black female lead. Rhimes also executive produces How to Get Away with Murder (2014–present, ABC), which was created by Peter Nowalk. Scandal is the first network drama series featuring a Black woman since the one-season Get Christie Love! (1974–75, ABC) thirty-eight years prior.7 With this move, Rhimes broke a significant television barrier. Moreover, from 2014 until Scandal ended in 2018, Rhimes controlled the ABC lineup on Thursday night, when series distributed by Shondaland aired back-to-back in a three-hour block: Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder. Thursday night is pivotal, since this is when 30% of network prime-time advertising money is spent, largely because it is when most film studios advertise new releases. The success of Rhimes’ lineup was critical because it demonstrated that Black female dramatic leads could carry ratings when they mattered most. Scandal features Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), a political fixer, whose crisis management firm in Washington D.C. cleans up the messes made by her largely white, wealthy clientele. Pope is romantically involved with two white men, the married president of the United States, and to a lesser extent, the director of the National Security Agency. Although her staff includes men of color, her best friend is a white woman. Like Christie Love, Pope is presented without Black friends, caring family, or community, and the series rarely deals with race issues. As with the example of Miranda Bailey, above, Olivia Pope falls into recognizable intersectional figures that Stephanie Gomez and Megan McFarlane call “race/gender tropes” (2017: 1) that have belittled Black women. In the case of Scandal, they are “the slave mistress, the help, and the Jezebel” (2017: 5). As the president’s mistress, Pope’s romance with a powerful white man is kept hidden and he calls the shots in the relationship, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. But, despite the series’ studied commitment to color-blindness, there are scripted moments where racial cultural specificity erupts. In one

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episode (“Happy Birthday, Mr. President” S2 E8, 2012), Pope tells the president in frustration, “. . . I’m feeling a little, I don’t know, Sally Hemmings Thomas Jefferson about all this,” a reference to Jefferson’s longterm relationship to an enslaved woman thirty years his junior, someone he owned, and with whom he bore children. This is an oblique reference to racial/gender inequality that can be glossed over by some members of the audience and dug into by others. Scandal has many such moments that either reference the history of racial oppression or trumpet the contributions of African Americans, be it the R&B hit soundtrack that serves as an unstated marker of Blackness on every episode, or intermittent scripted moments. For instance, when Olivia Pope goes into hiding in season four (“Randy, Red, Superfreak, and Julia” S4 E1, 2014), she uses the alias Julia Baker, the character name of the first featured Black female professional on television in the sitcom Julia (1968–71, NBC).8 The obliqueness of these references to cultural specificity provides a form of plausible deniability. Audience members who do not want to think about racial difference need not dwell on them, while those who recognize their reality in these allusions can embrace them. The viewership pattern of Scandal bears out its appeal beyond the Black audience. According to Nielsen, in the 2015– 2016 season, the audience for Scandal was 68% non-Black, 32% Black (Grace et al. 2017: 39). Joseph argues that Rhimes has successfully negotiated the white corporate environment of network television, an institutional setting unfavorable to “explicit resistance” by “perform[ing] colorblindness as a means to an end” (2016: 304). She terms this “ ‘strategic ambiguity’ . . . a mindful choice . . . [to] not nam[e] racism . . . [in order to] claim a seat at the table . . . [and land the] opportunity to repudiate racism” (2016: 304– 305).9 She cites as an example Amy Long’s observation that “Rhimes had to actively point out and work against industrial assumptions that a racially unmarked character calls for a white actor” (2011: 1068 in Joseph 2016: 309). Rhimes used her track record of producing ratings gold into a firstlook deal with ABC Studios/Disney, an arrangement in which the studio finances production costs in exchange for the right of first refusal to any property she develops. This deal, estimated to be worth ten million dollars a year, was renewed in 2014 for the next four years. In 2017, Rhimes negotiated a four-year overall deal with Netflix, estimated to be worth one hundred million dollars, in addition to a percentage of the backend revenue, income generated when a program is licensed to another outlet (Goldberg 2017). Netflix agreed to finance production costs in exchange for ownership rights over any property she develops. Unlike the first-look deal, she cannot shop around any property Netflix refuses. Unlike ABC, Netflix is well-known for extending generous creative freedom to its producers. It remains to be seen whether Rhimes uses this opportunity to produce more racially conscious programs.

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Racially conscious strategies While color-blind casting and scripting practices afford largely superficial visibility to people of color, they isolate racially diverse characters from the realities of lived experience and community. A series like Lost, hailed for the formal complexity of its non-linear structure, narrative enigmas, narrative spectacles, and intricate character arcs with psychological complexity (Mittell 2009), skimped on developing the ethnic and racial specificity of its nonwhite characters, and thus refused a social complexity that network logic dictated would alienate white audiences. But the economics of narrowcasting, combined with evidence that scripted programs with diverse casts draw larger audiences (Hunt et al. 2019: 3), creates a more conducive environment for racially conscious programming. Racially conscious series invest in narratives that are grounded in the social complexity of racial and ethnic specificity, or what Warner calls a progressive form of “color consciousness.” This is a social, rather than a biological, approach that recognizes “the culture carried by those with similar socio-historical contexts and skin colors and further seeks to understand how this racial-cultural experience informs . . .” individual experience (2015a: 25). The remainder of this chapter explores three programs that adopt a progressive “color-conscious” strategy, all on cable stations: Mara Brock Akil’s Being Mary Jane (BET), Ava Duvernay’s Queen Sugar (OWN), and Tanya Saracho’s Vida (Starz), all racially conscious dramas, created, helmed and written by women of color. The key creatives of these series – creators, executive producers, and writers are majority female, and in many cases, women of color. This is not a coincidence. As Cheers’ study demonstrates, when Black women are in charge of creative control, in various behindthe-camera capacities, “including showrunners, producers, directors and writers,” they tend to produce television that offers “alternative representations of African-Americans on programs with a predominantly Black cast” (2017: 13). They create oppositional texts, authored by women of color, that revolve around issues that matter to them. An analysis of the composition of writers rooms and directors on the series discussed in this chapter bears out Cheers’ finding that “. . . Black women in creative control [make a concerted effort] to employ other Black women in particular, and women of color in general, on their creative teams” (2017: 20). This form of “media activism” (Luckett 2019: 15) is intended to both realize their own vision, and to extend women of color opportunities that are hard to come by in an industry where one woman or one person of color has long been considered sufficient evidence of inclusiveness (see Table 5.2). This observation is supported by Lauzen’s (2019) finding, that when there are one or more female creators, there is a significantly higher percentage of women writers and directors on the series. Though Cheers’ empirical study focused on Black female creatives, her findings can be applied to other women of color such as Latinas, as I do in the case of Vida.

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Table 5.2 A Comparison of Gender and Racial Diversity in Key Creative Behindthe-Scenes Positions on 5 Series

(female) creator channel Executive producers

Female writers Male writers script credits for women Script credits for men Female directors Male directors Female directed episodes Male directed episodes

Grey’s Anatomy (2005–present) Shonda Rhimes ABC Rhimes, Betsy Beers, Mark Gordon

Scandal (2012–18)

63% 34 37% 20 67%

38% 10 62% 16 33%

52%

33%

Being Mary Jane (2013– 19) Mara Brock Akil BET Mara B Akil, Salim Akil, Gabrielle Union

48%

Queen Sugar (2016– present) Ava Du Vernay OWN DuVernay, Oprah Winfrey, Melissa Carter, Monica Macer 88% 22 12% 3 86%

Tanya Saracho Starz Saracho, Stephani Langhoff, Peter Saraf, Robin Schwartz 88% 14 12% 2 80%

67%

52%

14%

20%

34%

48%

100%

66%

52%

30% 109

32%

33% 4 67% 8 27%

78% 7 22% 2 90% 20

70% 254

68%

73%

0%

Shonda Rhimes ABC Rhimes, Betsy Beers

48%

0% 100%

Vida (2018–20)

10% 2

Source: Data drawn from IMDb.

A comparison of the demographic composition of creators, executive producers, writers, and directors in post-racial Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, and racially conscious Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar (through season 4) and Vida reveals the more substantial involvement of women, in particular women of color, on racially conscious series. The latter are more likely to reach development on channels that narrowcast rather than on network (see Table 5.2). Even working within the limits set by networks’ preference for post-racial strategies, Lauzen’s (2019) findings, that when there are one or more female creators, women make up about 65% of the writers on the series, are borne out on Grey’s Anatomy, with a 63% female writers room, and further, with 67% of script credits attributed to women. Scandal falls below the expected figure for 2019, with 38% women in the writers room,

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and only 33% of script credits accorded women. But if we use the figures from the 2018 study, which covers Scandal’s final season, it comes closer to the mark of 45%. In contrast, we see a much higher involvement of women, many of them people of color, on color conscious series. Being Mary Jane has a gender balanced writers room with 52% women, and women receive a proportional 48% of script credits. Moreover, on a series with a featured Black female, a predominantly Black cast, and three Black executive producers, most of the writers, female and male, are Black. Queen Sugar far exceeds even this number, with 87% women writers and 86% script credits accorded women. Further, on a series with two featured Black women, and mostly Black executive producers, most of the writers are people of color. Similarly, Vida boasts 92% women writers with 95% of the script credits going to women. In addition, in a series about Latina/os, with a Latina executive producer, all the writers are Latina/os (see Table 5.2). We can also see evidence that on series with one or more female creator, women make up about 33% of the directors, as Lauzen’s (2019) findings indicate. On Grey’s Anatomy, 34% of the directors have been women, and they have directed 30% of the episodes. The numbers are better on Scandal, which has a gender balanced distribution of directors, but here too women have directed 32% of the episodes. Being Mary Jane, with 33% female directors, comes in with 27% of the episodes directed by women. However, the numbers shift dramatically when we consider Queen Sugar, which has mindfully hired only female directors, predominantly women of color. Likewise, on Vida, 78% of the directors are female, and 89% of the episodes have been directed by women (see Table 5.2). All the directors on Vida are people of color. If we look at the list of credits, we can also see a crossover of talent behind the screen on these programs. Debbie Allen directed 24 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and three episodes of Scandal. Regina King directed two episodes of Scandal and six episodes of Being Mary Jane. Ava DuVernay directed an episode of Scandal. Being Mary Jane Being Mary Jane (2013–19) is the first scripted drama on BET (1980–present), a cable channel that targets Black audiences.10 The audience for Being Mary Jane was three quarters female (Okoro 2014). It is a racially conscious drama about an upper middle-class professional Black woman with a primarily Black cast, that is created by a Black woman, Mara Brock Akil, and executive produced by her, her husband and producing partner Salim Akil, and star Gabrielle Union. The central protagonist is centered in a Black community. Though her bosses are white, her executive producer and close friend is Latina. Her scripted experiences are racially specific to reflect the social complexities of her life. This successful series combines elements of drama, as the central protagonist, Atlanta-based television journalist Mary Jane Paul addresses serious subjects that affect Black communities, and

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melodrama, as she deals with a complicated love life, extended family, and wide network of friends. She has a burning ambition to become a primetime anchor and a desire to marry and have children. Both the melodrama and the politically inflected drama are designed to appeal to its Black female target demographic. In publicity discourse, “. . . Akil has been vocally critical of ‘colorblind casting,’ and . . . has worked to create characters that are ‘Black on purpose’ ” (Rowe 2019: 31, see also Smith 2015).11 For this reason, Kay Siebler regards Being Mary Jane as “a counter narrative to [the] systematic annihilation [of] post-racial media” (2019: 154). Not only is Mary Jane surrounded by friends and family who matter to her, she cares about covering issues at work that affect various aspects of the Black community. The program she anchors, Talk Back, is a narrative “safe space” or “social [space] where Black women [can] speak freely” and hear themselves think, resist, and empower each other (Collins 2000: 100–101 in Siebler 2019: 156). But the series also provides an ambient sense of safe space for viewers, on the soundtrack and in the mise-en-scene. Siebler argues that Being Mary Jane relies on the “. . . music of socially conscious African American female songwriters/composers like Mary J. Blige, Nicki Minaj, Bittersweet, Stacy Barthe, Ella Fitzgerald, and Me Shell Ndegeocello . . .” (2019: 159–160), rather than on African American crossover hits more familiar to white audiences in the style of Scandal. Episodes begin with an epigram drawn from the writings of people who have fought for social justice, many of them Black women such as Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. These epigrams, and others, appear on post-its written by Mary Jane as sources of inspiration and tacked on bedposts and glass doors, often unremarked upon but legible in shots for the audience to read. The “rich, affirming, Black community” (Siebler 2019: 159) that Mary Jane creates on the news show she anchors, Talk Back, features guests drawn from real-life public intellectuals and activists who appear on her show as themselves to comment on social issues. Ava DuVernay, for instance, appears as an activist to comment on the prison industrial complex (“Blindsided” S1 E7, 2014). Talk Back becomes a platform to discuss issues impacting the Black community both diegetically, in Mary Jane’s story world, and extradiegetically, as a forum to inform viewers, who then take the discussion to “Black Twitter,” a safe space where users can “talk back” to discourses that disparage Black subjectivity (Steele 2016 in Rowe 2019, see also Harris and Coleman 2018). Mary Jane Paul embraces her professional drive, commitment to serve the community, and sexuality with gusto. But she can also be harsh, condescending, and envious. She is, in other words, a difficult woman. In one episode, written by Akil (“Facing Fears” S3 E1, 2015), Mary Jane’s younger brother even calls her a “difficult woman” who is “complicated and challenging” and lovable. This multidimensionality is intended to make her more fully human, more relatable to her intended audience. As a writer–producer, Akil

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creates a space for her characters to be fully human and for the audience to resonate with them. Timeka Tounsel calls it an “[investment] in Black women’s pleasure, [which] though marginalized in liberation struggles, are, as Joan Morgan (2015) has written, central to recognizing their full humanity” (2018: 323). Sexuality is a basic element of that pleasure, and Mary Jane’s sexuality is a part of her subjectivity. She expresses her desires and experiences sexual pleasure as an essential aspect of human experience. Tounsel argues that “[r]ecuperating Black women’s sexuality” is a defining feature of Akil’s work (2018: 312). In season 2, we see how a counternarrative of Black worth, particularly Black female worth, operates as a narrative thread through four episodes that both assert the importance of Black lives and deconstruct racist myths. In “Let’s Go Crazy” (S2 E7, 2015), written by Akil and directed by Regina King, Mary Jane decides to assert more control over her program’s content so she can focus on “the Black community, Black women, and shedding light on stories that don’t get enough attention.”12 To this, her Latina producer, Kara Lynch (Lara Vidal), responds, “Wait. All Black stories?” Mary Jane doubles down, “Yeah, all Black everything.” Later, her white boss, Greg Roberts (Michael Cole), who has been briefed about this direction by Kara, spits out, “. . . you want to make Talk Back, Talk Black.” Mary Jane retorts by reframing this direction – overlooked topics that impact the Black community – as one that focuses on the audience that built the success of not only her show but also that of the network. Thus, she resignifies the Black audience as central rather than secondary. Two episodes later (“Line in the Sand” S2 E9, 2015) she is assailed in the parking lot by an enraged white male driver who wanted the parking spot she pulled into. He hurls insults that are both gendered and racial in nature and impugn her as “ugly.” She keeps her composure in public but in private, she is visibly upset. Her response is to invite a panel of speakers to her show on the topic of Black women’s beauty. She cites a blog post in Psychology Today (2011) that questioned Black women’s beauty and argued for their undesirability.13 Written by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, it was taken down after protests. African-American Studies scholar Mark Anthony Neal, who plays himself, calls the article an attack and challenges the complicity of Black male silence in its wake. In the next episode (“Primetime” S2 E10, 2015), Mary Jane, filling in for a primetime anchor, conducts a previously scheduled interview with an author promoting a book on the merits of charter schools. When she confronts the white author on the limitations of charter schools and asks about her decision to go with a racist publisher, she calls Mary Jane a “race baiter” who sees herself as “an ugly Black woman.” Mary Jane counters that they are both women “fighting to be heard and . . . seen” and so, when she looks at the author she sees an angry Black woman, resignified to mean a woman fighting to be heard and seen. Though this exchange plays out on social media in Mary Jane’s favor, the brass try to muzzle her. She is soon called to meet with high ranking

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executive, Shohreh Broomand (Kathleen Gati), who offers her the coveted primetime co-anchor position if she can “tone down the all-Black agenda” (“Reading the Signs” S2 E11, 2015). After she leaves, the executive tells Greg to “keep her on a short leash” so they don’t “have an ugly Black woman running wild.” This backbiting slur is indicative of the institutional sexism/racism that Mary Jane must negotiate. Being Mary Jane extends female agency to Black women in a sustained manner, so that Black female viewers need not identify with white women or read against the grain to feel empowered in a society forged by and still significantly committed to institutional racism. It also legitimates Black female pleasure and its pursuit. It is limited, however, by its focus on heteronormative and cisgender characters. Throughout the series, Mary Jane pursues professional advancement and marriage. By the end of the series, she achieves both goals. The finale is a movie-length episode that revolves around her wedding.14 Although the wedding-as-happy-ending trope would be a limitation for the representation of white women, it holds different significance for a Black woman. As Amanda Rossie argues, Mary Jane’s consciously racial depiction frames her concerns about finding a Black man to marry in the context of “. . . a unique set of political, economic, and historical oppressions” (2018: 36). Given the Black-white wealth gap, high rates of incarceration, and obstacles to a quality education, it is hard for her to find a romantic partner who is comparable to her professional success and affluence. The fact that she does provides a particular form of pleasure for its viewers, one distinct from the white-centric postfeminist narrative.15 Queen Sugar Queen Sugar (2016–present) is a scripted drama adapted by Ava DuVernay from the novel by Natalie Baszile (2014), which airs on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). This network, like BET, targets Black audiences, particularly Black women ages 25–54 (Okoro 2014). Ava DuVernay is the first Black woman director nominated for an Oscar for best picture for the film, Selma (2014). She is keenly aware of directing’s importance, and the institutional barriers that limit women’s access to work in the film and television industry, so she made hiring female directors on the series, most of them women of color, a normative practice.16 “The credentials that women directors gained working on Queen Sugar [has] helped them expand their careers and [has led to] direct[ing] other acclaimed television programs (Blake 2017)” (in Williams 2019: 2). This is another instance of what Cheers describes as efforts by Black women in positions of power to hire women of color on their productions to redress the routine sidelining of female talent, particularly women of color, in the industry. It constitutes a form of “media activism” at the trade level (Luckett 2019: 15). It is also an intervention that pushes to expand the boundaries of who gets defined as a

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creator on television work, one that pushes against the routine diminishing of the role of director in television in favor of the writer–producer.17 The series is a racially conscious drama that focuses on a Black middleclass family, with a primarily Black cast, created by a Black woman, based on a book written by a Black woman, and directed exclusively by women, most of them women of color. Set in Louisiana, the series revolves around the three Bordelon siblings, who inherit and operate their father’s sugar cane farm: business woman Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), journalist and activist Nova (Rutina Wesley), and paroled single father Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe). Also central is Aunt Vi (Tina Lifford), the matriarch of the family who has been raising his son while Ralph Angel has been imprisoned. The Bordelons are part of a Black community. The series combines elements of drama, as it addresses serious social issues that affect Black communities, and melodrama, as the characters deal with complicated love lives, extended family, and a wide network of friends and neighbors. Both the melodrama and the politically inflected drama are designed to appeal to its Black female target demographic. Among its dramatic issues, the series confronts “. . . the structural barriers that left their father in destitute poverty” namely, the exploitative whitecontrolled economy of the sugar industry and the dearth of Black land ownership (Qureshi 2017: 67; McInnis 2019: 767). As they work the farm and eventually set up their own sugar mill under Charley’s management, they encounter resistance from the white Landry family, which controls the sugar industry in the area and which once owned their land and enslaved their ancestors. The series thematizes the importance of Black ownership and control, the need for Black community to support each other and to organize together, the importance of Black culture, and the pervasive threat of racist violence. The scripts of this Black production thematize “painful in-group memories and experiences” (Zook 1999: 9), and delve into a more systematic account of how racism operates, beyond the intentions of individuals. This approach constitutes a form of dramatic complexity. For instance, Nova covers the story of a Black minor, Too Sweet (Isaac White), who is arrested for marijuana possession and shipped to an adult for-profit prison, where he is brutalized. In the course of her investigation, she “discovers that the for-profit prison makes up budget shortfalls [in the post-Katrina economy] for the police department and the district attorney’s office in exchange for a continual supply of bodies in the prison. As a result, officers regularly over-police the Black population of New Orleans, throwing people in jail for [minor] crimes . . .” (Petermon and Spencer 2019: 349). Though the series shows the threat of violence and its aftermath, including PTSD, it refrains from displaying violence. Rather than focusing on Black male abjection, it instead hones in on the institutional mechanisms that enable it, including “anti-Black policing” (Petermon and Spencer 2019: 350).

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Nova’s activism in exposing the complicity between police department and for-profit-prison leads to an interview by Melissa Harris-Perry, reallife scholar and television host, in a public forum. This is akin to Being Mary Jane’s stunt casting of public intellectuals on Talk Back. At this event, Nova names the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and speaks directly to its female and queer origins, which are routinely obscured in mainstream accounts of the movement.18 She calls attention to the fact that “. . . civil rights work has been organized by communities of women, queer, and gender nonconforming people of color” (“Far Too Long” S1 E12, 2016). In their comparison of Queen Sugar, Scandal, and Orange is the New Black (2013–19), Jade Petermon and Leland Spencer demonstrate that “popular television dramas with majority-White audiences [like Scandal and OITNB] create a gender- and sexuality-neutral backstory for BLM . . . [but] Queen Sugar . . . which has a much smaller and more diverse audience, acknowledges BLM’s queer history and offers a more complex view of the movement as a whole” (2019: 339).19 This suggests that “. . . the more highly funded and institutional the network, the narrower the range of possible images for minority groups will be . . .” (Sender 2013 in Petermon and Spencer 2019: 342–343), and serves as another illustration of how television produced for the white gaze limits the discussion of social justice issues in significant ways. Queen Sugar’s re-centering of “women, queer, and gender nonconforming people of color” in the account of civil rights movements, including BLM, constitutes a counternarrative to mainstream discourse which separates civil rights from feminism, understood broadly to include equality for all women. This series explores the repercussion of racial oppression on Black women, even when its direct impact is on men. This includes its critique of mass incarceration’s devastating impact on the Black family. Ralph Angel inherits the farm because, unlike his sisters who are educated and economically successful, he is economically precarious. But because he needs a W-2 as a condition of his parole, he formally becomes Charley’s employee on the farm. Prior to this, he is easily exploited where he works because jobs are so scarce for parolees. This is a form of humiliation he has to withstand for a time to support his young son.20 In another episode, Nova appears on a panel on mass incarceration at Spelman College where she argues that it must be understood as a system of oppression that defines which populations’ lives do not matter. “Who does society say is disposable or trash? . . . If not through physical death, then social death, economic death, or political irrelevance” (“What do I Care for Morning” S2 E3, 2017). This through line continues in season three, when the Bordelons learn that the Landry family intends to amass and rent out the land surrounding their farm to a for-profit prison, a move the community emphatically opposes. Charley speaks publicly against the project at the local council meeting, as well as maneuvers to stop it from happening behind the scenes, a move that unexpectedly results in a romantic entanglement with one of the Landrys.

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Queen Sugar’s social justice rhetoric is earnest and didactic and often entwined with romantic or familial relations in its intermix of drama and melodrama. Being Mary Jane’s didacticism also comes in the form of journalism and argument, but the issues that series addresses have less of a direct impact on Mary Jane’s life. In contrast, Ralph Angel is a sympathetic central character who is vulnerable to various forms of exploitation as a Black man and ex-convict, and Charley’s teenage son Micah (Nicholas Ashe) is also susceptible to police abuse in a driving-while-Black incident, so there is more at stake for the viewer’s sympathies in politically inflected wrongs. This is a series that centers on the (Black) family, and other key elements of the soap formula: “personal relations, familial ties, and emotional crises, which are generally worked out in domestic space or in a domesticated work place” (Byars 1994: 16). This emphasis also shapes the use of music, which is “. . . didactic . . . to double down on emotional states [and] represents one of the drama’s more obvious soap gestures. . . .” (Szalay 2019: 482) However, as Bilal Qureshi observes, although the series is saddled with “too much soapoperatic melodrama. . . . it is the way that each episode speaks to major crises in contemporary Black life that elevates the series above standard melodramatic fare” (2017: 66). Moreover, the melodramatic impulse that Linda Williams describes, “strong affect combined with moral legibility to create a felt good” is itself founded on the drive for justice (2012: 529; Szalay 2019: 475). It is this logic which motivates the series’ “. . . willingness to sit in moments of discomfort and emotion, whether mundane or momentous” (Ford 2018: 20). Both Charley and Nova are difficult women, fiercely independent women who take risks to advance their goals and protect their communities. But they commit no violence and are shown only in placid and unrevealing sex scenes, both straight and gay, where they are playing against historic stereotypes of Black women as lascivious. The absence of nudity, here and on Being Mary Jane, is consistent with the strategy of using images of respectability to counter discourses of hypersexual availability, or what MillerYoung refers to as “meanings created about Black women’s bodies during slavery” (2014: 31). But within this respectability, there is also creative variation. Nova is bisexual, Charley dates a Mexican man, Ralph Angel dates a Vietnamese woman, and Aunt Vi dates and marries a younger man. As Charley says “. . . one of the most important things a woman can control is her own story” (“Freedom’s Plow” S2 E8, 2017). Queen Sugar extends female agency to Black women in a sustained manner. It also legitimates Black female pleasure and its pursuit. Although it examines how racism operates systematically, beyond the intentions of individuals, it is limited by the degree to which conflicts are resolved by individuals privileged with racial or class power. For instance, the trumped up charges against Too Sweet are dropped when Nova’s white cop boyfriend calls in favors on her behalf, and Micah is released from jail (there also on

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trumped up charges) when his wealthy celebrity athlete dad uses his fame to ingratiate himself with the custodial cops. Despite this limitation, the series provides a much-needed counternarrative of Black worth and Black ownership.

Where are the Latina complex narratives that center difficult women? the Latina media gap When considering what female-centered dramas feature difficult women who are women of color, I had a hard time finding ones that focus on Latina/os, demographically the largest minority in the United States. At issue, is that the dearth or trivialization of Latinas and other women of color in the dramatic format constitutes a form of what George Gerbner and Larry Gross termed “symbolic annihilation” (1976: 182). It is not merely an omission, but a mark of “social impotence” (1976: 182). This invisibility is not innocent, but rather an assertion of racial power, a systematic privileging of whiteness that is part of a racial project (Omi and Winant 2014). Those who craft images in their own likeness and consequently constitute the majority of those represented as agents on television are the ones who “dominate the social order” (Gerbner and Gross 1976: 183), and symbolic erasure reinforces that system of inequality. While the age of streaming has created white female-centered dramatic and comedic oases, the opportunities on screen and behind the camera are much more limited for women of color, especially Latinas and Native Americans. The UCLA “Hollywood Diversity Report” (Hunt et al. 2019) indicates that Black representation across broadcast, cable, and digital formats is proportional to or higher than the actual presence of African Americans in the US population (see Table 5.1).21 Some of the earliest efforts to diversify mainstream on-camera talent came in the wake of the Black civil rights movement, which included as one of its central planks demands to increase non-stereotypical representation in media, both fiction and news.22 This activism has had a slow but formative impact on Hollywood. The demand for positive representation followed in the context of a prolonged history of damaging racial stereotypes formulated to justify first the enslavement of Black people, then post-emancipation continued subjugation under evolving forms. This history also shapes the racial dyad of Black and white that has long informed the understanding of race relations in the United States. Some of the advantages of the neo-platoon casting strategy is that it not only increases racial and ethnic media visibility but also it transcends the binary understanding of race in order to accrue diverse racialized audience fragments that appeal to advertisers. Despite this, albeit superficial, gain on-screen, there has not been a comparably significant effort to diversify behind the scenes talent. Further, I suggest that a lingering binary understanding of race may persist behind the scenes. Historically, Blackness has signified otherness, and the scale on which the devaluation of Black life has

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been organized has helped to found US society’s institutions. I suggest that it is this legacy that drives the contemporary proportional and above proportional representation on television today; Black people symbolically stand in for all minorities, as the limit case for exploitation in the United States.23 Or, as Cheryl Clarke suggests in a different context, Black women serve as “a metonym for women of color” (2010: 782). The upshot is that neither Native American nor Latina/o television representation is proportional to that of the population. In the 2017 census estimate, Native Americans make up 1.7% of the population, but get only between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of roles on television, depending on platform, which is a significant enough underrepresentation to constitute erasure. Similarly, in 2017, Latina/os constitute 18.1% of the US population, but account for only between 5.3 and 7.2 percent of television roles, depending on platform (see Table 5.1). The widespread media exclusion of Latina/ os has been termed the “Latino media gap” by Frances Negrón-Muntaner et al. (2014). It is even more stunning when we consider that a representational decline parallels a population increase. As Isabel Molina-Guzmán describes it, “even though the U.S. Latina/o population has grown since the 1950s, the media presence of Latina/os actually shrank during that same time period” (2018: 21). Counterintuitively, the growth in the Latina/o market has not resulted in commensurate media visibility. Latina/o representation is likely to be absent, stereotyped when present, or sidelined in favor of the dominant culture. There are various forces that contribute to this gap, including racial whitewashing, ethnic pan blurring, Latina/o viewership trends, and the paucity of Latina/os in key creative roles. Arlene Dávila sees the Latina/o media gap as the outcome of what she terms “ ‘Latino spin’ . . . the ethnic and racial whitewashing and middle class homogenization of Latina/o identity in everything from advertising to TV and film” (2001: 22). This includes “the U.S. media’s pan-ethnic blurring of specific Latin[a/]o differences and racial identities” (2001: 42). This suggests that there are two dimensions to the Latina/o media gap: the dearth of representation relative to population numbers (Molina-Guzmán’s Latino media gap), and the whitewashing and pan blurring of Latina/os that are represented (Dávila’s “Latino spin”). This refers to the institutional preference for casting light-skinned Latina/o actors (also common in Latin American media) and failing to give them cultural/ ethnic specificity, similar to color-blind casting practices. Both the racial whitewashing and ethnic pan blurring contribute to the lack of cultural/ racial specificity and diversity when depicting Latina/os. Another factor that contributes to this gap is that a program does not need a Latina/o lead to draw a Latina/o audience. According to Nielsen, “. . . Latina/o audiences generally follow white viewership trends,” so purchasing power is not flexed in favor of increased representation, as has historically been the case with Black audiences, which “are more likely to watch programming with Black actors and characters” (Molina-Guzmán 2018: 115; see also

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Bodroghkozy 1992).24 It is possible that Latina/o audiences are put off by the persistence of stereotypes. Molina-Guzmán contends that the stereotypes that Charles Ramírez-Berg (2000) identified in Hollywood film twenty years ago persist on television today, namely “the Latino lover or harlot, the dark lady or bandito, the female [clown/spitfire] or male buffoon, and the [religiously pious] senorita” (2018: 15), to which we can add the narco criminal. The shortage of fully developed Latina/o characters on screen indicates a serious lack of Latina/o presence in key creative roles behind the scenes. The UCLA “Hollywood Diversity Report” (Hunt et al. 2019) does not break down “minority show creators” by race or ethnicity, perhaps because the numbers are too small (see Table 5.1). Felicia Harris and Loren Saxton Coleman have called the “lack of diversity in behind-the-scenes roles . . . a form of systemic and institutionalized racism . . .” (2018: 44). The paucity of Latina/os in key creative positions of production – as creators, executive producers, writers, and directors – helps explain the dearth of non-derisive, fully fleshed-out representations on-screen. Another factor may be that productions that make only token gestures at creating diverse writers rooms, the entry point for many future show creators, may be satisfied with one person of color. So, if that person is Latina/o, there is no seat at the table for a Black writer. Or if that person is Black, there is no seat for an Asian writer. And so on. Furthermore, the inclusion of token people of color often comes at a heavy price for those who are included. Diverse writers are often isolated, their ideas dismissed, and opportunities to advance scarce, according to a 2019 study from the Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity (TTIE). “The study found that 64% of diverse writers reported having experienced bias, discrimination, and/or harassment by members of the writing staff with less than half reporting it. When it comes to pitching in the room, 53% have been rejected only to have a non-diverse writer pitch the same idea and getting accepted. 58% experienced pushback when pitching a non-stereotypical diverse character or storyline while 58% later experienced micro-aggressions in the room” (Ramos 2019). These findings suggest that more robust numbers of people of color, particularly women, need to fill key creative roles to have real impact on productions in the US. To create more fully dimensional Latina/o characters and racially specific narratives, you need Latina/o executive producers, writers, and directors who can draw on their experiences or frameworks of knowledge to convey depth, nuance, and complexity. Vida is just such a production for Latina/o representation. Vida Vida (2018–2020) is a thirty-five-minute drama on Starz, created by Tanya Saracho, a Mexican and American woman, inspired by a short story by

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Richard Villegas Jr. In 2018, Saracho acquired a three-year overall deal with Starz, which means that they have a claim to anything she produces during this time. Starz is the premium network previously discussed in relation to Outlander, as targeting the underserved female demographic on premium cable in 2014. Starz CEO, previously COO, Jeffrey Hirsch recently doubled down on this counterprogramming strategy of targeting the “premium female,” while expanding their scope to the global level (Goldberg 2020; Lynch 2019). Although Vida’s US ratings are low, its value is assessed in light of its global market reach.25 Hirsch described the network’s directive as “serving the underserved and giving voices to talent that has never been seen on TV before” (Goldberg 2019). Consistent with this narrowcasting strategy, Starz’s senior vice president of original programming, Marta Fernández pitched the idea of a Latina/o-centered series about millennial chipsters (upwardly mobile Chicano hipsters) who gentrify or “gentefy” a low-income Latina/o neighborhood, to Saracho, who is Vida’s showrunner and executive producer (together with two other women and two men). Saracho told Starz she wanted an “all-Latinx” writers room, all women department heads, all directors either “Latinx” or women of color, and they agreed to everything, with a level of support that is rare (Martinez 2018).26 She wanted this level of diversity because she knew they would share a “cultural shorthand” (Fernandez, n.d.). Or, as series writer Lindsey Villarreal puts it, “[w]e can have more nuanced conversations because we’re not busy explaining things” (in Norlian 2019). The writers feel heard rather than isolated or dismissed as is common in less diverse writers rooms. Saracho and the writers share a cultural awareness about being Latina, about being queer, about learning the dominant culture but also being outside of it. In addition, Saracho hired a Latina cinematographer, composer, editor, and casting director, because “. . . that matters . . . Hollywood is built on networks and ‘who you know.’ We don’t have that. We don’t have those structures’ ” (in Phillips 2018a). The third season was produced by an all Latina group of writers, directors, and editors (“The New Season” S3 Starz Extra). One way to make systemic change is to hire in-group and create a talent pipeline to seed other productions, as Saracho and DuVernay have done, in interventions that push the boundaries of who gets to create television. Moreover, there are aesthetic contributions that come out of this approach, as illustrated by the Filipina Director of Photography, who Saracho says, “understands our skin tone[s]” (S1 E1 Starz Extra). Saracho’s approach grew out of her background as a playwright who broke into television writing through the ABC Diversity Program, an outreach effort to diversify behind the scenes talent. Prior to this, she cofounded a theater company in Chicago, Teatro Luna, an all-Latina ensemble, to create a safe place to be creative. “We formed because we wanted a safe space where we wouldn’t have to play the maids or, if we were playing the maids, we were talking about it in a really complicated manner . . . You want a space where you can have power and agency” (in Myers 2014). This is the social space that Collins talks about, where women of color can speak

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freely and hear themselves think, resist, and empower each other (2000: 100–01 in Siebler 2019: 156). With the production of Vida, Saracho has similarly established a safe space for Latinas in the television arena. Over three seasons, fourteen of the sixteen writers are Latinas, the two men are also Latinos. All the directors are people of color, almost all are Latina/o, most (78% or 7) are women. Women directed 90% (20 of 22) of the episodes. The series features Latina talent behind the camera and on-screen. Vida is set in Boyle Heights, a working class Mexican-American/Chicano neighborhood of East Los Angeles that is 94% Latina/o. Mexican-Americans constitute the largest Latina/o population in Southern California. Some date back to Spanish colonial times, others are recent immigrants. The ethnic specificity of the series talks back to the mainstream media’s muddying of distinct Latina/o identities into an undifferentiated mass. Consistent with this, much of the series is written in Mexican-American Spanglish and slang, without translation, as characters code switch in conversation. Saracho has described the series as being by us for us, but others are invited. “. . . If you don’t speak Spanish maybe you’re a little otherized and that’s okay . . .” (in Patten 2018).27 Vida centers around the Hernandez family. Estranged MexicanAmerican sisters Emma (Mishel Prada) and Lyn (Melissa Barrera) return to the neighborhood when their mother, Vidalia or Vida, dies suddenly. They discover that she was in a committed relationship with Eddy (Ser Anzoategui), who claims to be her wife. Emma feels betrayed to learn her mother came out without telling them, or including them in her new life, particularly after severely disciplining an adolescent Emma for her lesbian desires. Once there, they face the daunting challenge of saving the near-bankrupt building and queer bar they inherit, in a low-income neighborhood that is hostile to gentrifying interlopers, especially gentefiers. The series explores colorism, class issues, particularly gentrification’s impact on Latina/o communities, as well as female sexuality, be it heteronormative, heteroflexible, lesbian, or queer. Vida extends the female gaze to a “female brown queer” gaze, or what Saracho calls “the Latinx gaze . . . a very female gaze but also a very brown gaze . . .” (in Martinez 2018; Starz 2019).28 The show rejects the narrow spectrum afforded by stereotypes and reveals a range of different Latina/os, including the various shades we come in within the same family. Season 2 of the series drew “the largest Hispanic audience composition for [a] premium series” according to Starz (Patten 2019). This response speaks to the series’ power as a counternarrative to mainstream portrayals (or erasure) of Latina/os, and the authenticity of its depictions. This dynamic plays out on the multiple dimensions that Zook (1999) describes as constitutive of racially specific narratives shaped by [Latina/o] frameworks of knowledge: autobiography, aesthetics, and dramatic complexity. First, the series is informed by the autobiographical sense of bicultural identity or living on the border between different worlds, the dominant culture and the subculture, shifting between cultural identities, and experiencing what

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Zook calls “the pain of cultural homelessness” (1999: 2) when neither world accepts you in your multidimensional entirety. Saracho herself was born in Mexico, then lived in Texas near the border when her parents divorced, and went back and forth. She, like many Latina/os, is both acculturated to the dominant culture and a subaltern culture, assimilated and otherized. Spanglish embodies this sense of living on the boundary, with its mix of English and Spanish, as does “Espanglais (Spanish with a sprinkling of English)” (Pickard 2018). The script is dotted with references to things like “abuelita candy,” the candy your grandmother gives you. Saracho, like others in the writers room, set out to make a series in which they could recognize themselves. As she put it, “I’m a brown queer girl and I’ve never seen myself on television . . . I built the show I wanted to see” (Patten 2018), expressing a sentiment common to otherized people who get to make art. Second, sonic and visual aesthetic signifiers of Mexican-American culture provide texture to lived experience and express a sense of pride through music, language, and art. Latin music fills the score and ambient soundscape. The music in the bar is often Mexican ranchera. Much of the music was composed for specific episodes, made by and featuring Los Angelesbased artists who sometimes perform as themselves in the bar (Contreras 2019). Songs are in Spanish or a Spanglish mix, many by women. Moreover, Lyn’s inability to speak or understand Spanish represents the Latina/os born in the US for whom this is true. Murals, with their roots in Mexican muralism, pepper the neighborhood, including the Hernandez bar exterior. One of the central publicity images of the series, depicting the two sisters (see Figure 5.1) posed in a fashion modeled after Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s painting “Las Dos Fridas” (see Figure 5.2), is a double self-portrait of bicultural identity. One Frida (Emma) is dressed in a Victorian dress, the other (Lyn) in a traditional Tehuana dress. In a pan-ethnic move, the series also includes dabs of magical realism drawn from Latin American literature, for instance when Emma sees Vida as a child in the corridor, without recognizing her, or when we see the child, then the mature woman holding Eddy’s hand at her hospital bedside.29 Lyn goes to the local “bruja” or witch for readings and ritual cleansings. Saracho herself brought a bruja in to bless her work space (Turchiano 2019). All these elements of regional MexicanAmerican culture lend authenticity to the series. Third, Vida features the dramatic complexity of addressing serious issues that affect Latina/o communities, as expressed through the lives of difficult women: the emotionally closed off Emma, the irresponsible Lyn, the hypocritical dead mother whose influence has lasting impact on her family. Emma left home when her mother found out she was involved with a girl and, in effect threw her out, sending her to live with her emotionally distant grandmother in Texas.30 In retrospect, Emma can see her mother was closeted and acting out of her own gay shame. Vida convinced Lyn that she only has her looks going for her. She has learned that when she incurs debt, she can find a rich white boyfriend to pay it off. Her inability to take

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Figure 5.1 A central publicity image depicts the two sisters posed to resemble a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (Source: Vida courtesy of Lions Gate Television Inc.).

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Figure 5.2 Frida Kahlo’s painting “Las Dos Fridas” is a double self-portrait of bicultural identity (Source: “Las dos Fridas” by Frida Kahlo reproduced from www.wikidata.org/wiki/ Q3232010#/media/File:Las_Dos_Fridas.jpg, CreativeCommons license CC BY-SA 4.0)

responsibility extends to the emotional damage she leaves in the wake of her impulsiveness. In season 1, she runs up $14,000 in credit card debt using a card that came in the mail for her mother. They start as unlikable characters, one brittle, the other thoughtless. Saracho has described them as “. . . messy girls who aren’t always likeable . . . I don’t care about likeable . . .” To create more realistic characters that expand the repertoire of Latina representations on television, she sought to make them “. . . complicated, often ugly, compelling women . . .” (in Pickard 2018). As the sisters struggle to deal with the economic difficulties of a second predatory mortgage Vida took out, without raising the rents on tenants already living on the edge

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of economic precarity, we see them fail but persist in their efforts. In the process, their vulnerabilities emerge. Emma has to admit that she needs help and cede some control to let people in. Lyn has to believe in her management skills when no one else does. In their own ways, they become “chingonas,” Mexican slang for bad ass women who live life on their own terms, in other words, difficult women at their best. Vida acknowledges sexuality as a key element of women’s subjectivity and agency. The sex scenes, both queer and straight, are shot from a female gaze and a queer gaze and presented at length. They serve to advance character development. For instance, Eddy’s non-normatized body is shown naked in the tub in a scene that expresses the grief of a woman who has lost her wife and lover (S1 E3, 2018). Lyn’s character is consistently underestimated because of her prettiness, but her sex scenes consistently reveal her agency. She is enthusiastically willing to try unconventional acts, as when she pegs the councilman, Rudy Marquez (Adrian Gonzalez), an act in which she dons a strap-on dildo to anally penetrate him. Both women insist on their own sexual pleasure. For Emma, sexual encounters with both men and women exclude kissing or other forms of emotional intimacy. She dictates terms in a distanced and choreographed manner. When she grows close to Nico (Roberta Colindrez) in non-sexualized contexts, she begins to let go of these defenses. Their sex scenes involve kissing and her willingness to let go of complete control for a more equitable exchange of sexual energy and intimacy.31 Saracho rejects the “artsy [and piecemeal] way” in which “queer women . . . having sex [on TV]” are often presented, in service to the male gaze (in Swartz 2018), and sought to depict more realistic female-centered sexual encounters. Sex scenes and nude scenes are discussed and choreographed with care prior to being shot. The scenes are workshopped with Frida Kahlo and Oscar Wilde dolls before they are rehearsed (Starz 2019). Condoms are also used prominently in one queer scene and one straight scene, a move that is rare in premium cable’s sex scene repertoire. Vida also thematizes intracommunity conflicts such as the question of what constitutes in-group authenticity. When Emma is once again dating her high school sweetheart, Cruz (Maria-Elena Laas), Cruz’s friends call Emma a “baby queer,” a term she decisively rejects. This line of dialogue grew out of Saracho’s autobiographical experience of being called a “tourist.” At a 2019 For Your Consideration Starz Panel, Prada, who plays Emma, and Saracho remarked on in-group conflicts about what is authentic: “. . . Who’s the final authority on authenticity?” “We police each other” PRADA: “. . . We see it a few times in the series. It’s not just with the queerness but with the Latinaness, with the womanness . . .” (author’s transcription) PRADA:

SARACHO:

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The series likewise touches on the thorny subject of colorism, or the privileging of lighter skin tones and concomitant discrimination against darker skin tones within Latina/o communities and families, a form of internalized racism.32 Saracho describes this practice as a source of community shame that is not often discussed outside the in-group (Erazo 2019). Lyn’s friend Marcos talks about being hated by a tia/aunt for being “morenito” or a dark boy, a tia who refers to her cinnamon-colored daughter as “prieta” or dark girl (S2 E7, 2019). This conversation emerges in the context of how parents instill self-hate in their children, and it follows the scene in which Mari (Chelsea Rendon) is kicked out of the house by her father, despite the fact that she takes loving care of him and helps to support him financially. He takes this punitive measure when he learns that a boy, Tlaloc (Ramses Jimenez), posted a video of her performing fellatio, a video taken without her knowledge or consent. Prior to Mari’s involvement with Tlaloc, also an activist, she was presented as very powerful and in charge, but with him, she is sexually shy and submissive, as well as inexperienced. Saracho wanted to show awkward sexual encounters between them rather than the glossy sex scene more typical of premium cable. Mari is a key character in the organized opposition the sisters encounter as they renovate the bar and reopen it. She is a vlogger and activist who belongs to a group called Vigilantes, which opposes gentrification. They identify upwardly mobile Latina/os as the primary forces of gentrification or, more precisely, “gentefication” in the neighborhood. Mari calls Emma and Lyn “pinche Tia Tom” (fucking Aunt Tom) and “white-tinas” (whitepassing Latinas). She sees them as chipsters, or Chicana hipsters, who are insensitive to how their refurbishing practices drive up costs for poorer, long-term residents who are then both othered and displaced (Viruet 2018). In one episode (S2 E9, 2019), Mari tells Emma that people in the neighborhood do not want to be erased and driven out. What Mari does not realize until later is that the Hernandez sisters’ white-passing Latina privilege is context-specific and contingent. In one episode, Lyn becomes disillusioned with the rich white guy who takes her to a hipster party when she sees how condescending he is toward the Mexican cleaning woman who could have been her mother (S1 E4). In another episode, Emma is seen as other by a white woman who calls the police on her (S1 E5). The shift in perception can be abrupt, and unpredictable, as one is relocated from chipster to other. Boyle Heights, where the series is set and shot, is vulnerable to gentrification, and its residents resist displacement. The production had to balance authenticity, associated with location shooting, with political sensitivity, by minimizing shooting in a community that perceived the series itself as a gentefying force (Contreras 2018). It was a political choice to shoot more scenes on set. As Anzoategui put it, “It’s about the respect of how you tell the story. It’s how you treat your neighbors. It’s understanding that if the activists or the community are saying, ‘we don’t want you there’ – then you

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don’t go there’ ” (in Phillips 2018b, emphasis in original). They also hired a local activist as community consultant on the production to help them navigate the complicated local politics (Contreras 2018). When Mari has no place to live, and her close friend Yolanda is herself “borderline homeless” and sleeping on someone’s floor, Emma takes her in (S1 E7, 2019). Prior to this Emma had hired her to help take care of Eddy after she was brutally beaten by a Latino homophobe. From that vantage point, Mari observes how Emma and Lyn struggle to salvage the bar and building, which was left in financial straits. She comes to realize that there is insensitivity on both sides, that gentefication is not a black and white issue, and she grows ambivalent about protesting the bar’s reopening. Is the bar in Emma and Lyn’s hands a force of colonization or a safe queer community space? Or to echo Prada’s question about queerness and Latinidad, who gets to decide what is authentic? These are the questions Mari is left struggling with, in a self-reflexive move that speaks to Vida’s status as a production within the Boyle Heights community. The series attempts to complicate this ongoing in-group conflict as part of its commitment to dramatic complexity. When Starz renewed Vida for a third season, the network hailed it as having “the largest Hispanic audience composition for [a] premium series” (Patten 2019). The series is a much-needed and scarce counternarrative that expresses a queer Brown Latina gaze. But in 2020, Starz announced that the third season would be the series’ last. On the surface, this seems to contradict Hirsch’s directive to target a female audience. However, he specified that the network’s objective is to draw “premium women,” which he defines as “24–54 and a little more economically viable than other segments” (in Goldberg 2019). In keeping with this, “[h]e is looking for period dramas that resonate with the upscale and older female viewers who are drawn to the Starz hit Outlander” (Goldberg 2020). So perhaps Jude Dry of IndieWire is right to suggest that “[t]he audience for Vida – LGBTQ folks, people of color, and women – are far less likely to have the resources to subscribe to a premium network like Starz” (2020). If this is the case, then the female-centric market logic that led to the creation of the show has now shifted to a more affluent segment of the female audience and precipitated Vida’s cancellation. Vida extends female agency, including sexual pleasure and its pursuit, to Brown women, both queer and straight, in a sustained manner, so that Latina viewers need not identify with white women to feel empowered. It does so both at the level of the program, and in publicity discourse, where Saracho, writers, and actors articulate a politics of diversity and inclusion specific to the Brown queer female gaze. The series is limited, however, by its brevity. With a total of 22 episodes, the series clocks in at 13 hours, the equivalent of a single season’s running time for drama on premium cable. Despite this (imposed) limitation, the series provides a much-needed counternarrative of Latina/o worth in a media landscape marked by an appalling level of Latina/o mis- and under-representation.

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In closing, the three Black and Latina productions analyzed in this chapter used collective experience, aesthetic markers, and dramatic complexity to express a political vision of Black/Latina realities, informed by their creators’ frameworks of knowledge. In a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Saracho asked about the future of counternarratives about queer people of color by queer people of color working together in a safe space, of the sort that she, and Maril Brock Akil and Ava DuVernay have created. “Is it a moment or a trend? . . . I hope to God it’s not a trend, and that we’re going through a moment that will change things, that will usher in more inclusivity of our perspectives” (in Viruet). One disturbing possibility is that the female gaze and the queer gaze may endure in many future productions but that gaze will be largely white. A better one is that one of the streaming channels will see an opportunity and not only pick up Vida for a fourth season but also invest in diverse productions robustly enough to grant showrunners the right to decide when a series will end, giving viewers the satisfaction of seeing fully fleshed out counternarratives.33

Notes 1 The speech that came to be known as “Ain’t I a Woman” was penned by white feminist and abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage, modeled after Truth’s extemporaneous speech, but written in Southern dialect, which is not how the New York born and raised Truth spoke. 2 Thompson argues that normative second wave history traces the roots of feminism to the civil rights and New Left movements, but suppresses the more radical Black Power movement’s impact on women’s activism (2002: 341). 3 The more expansive vision of feminism described by Barbara Smith informed, what Rebecca Walker (1992) called, the third wave, but these issues were only new to feminism if you accept the normative historiography. Similarly, the monolithic view of the Black Power movement as sexist and homophobic is belied by Angela Davis’ account of its history (1998: 292 in Thompson 2002: 350). 4 Brook (2009) argues that the neo-platoon format is indebted to the World War II combat film, which features a multi-racial, multi-ethnic group of soldiers representing different regions of the United States, forced to work together to survive, one that ideologically shows America not as it is but as it should be. 5 See Molina-Guzmán (2018) for a consideration of post-racial strategies on network comedies. 6 See Joseph (2016: 312–313) for a consideration of the 2014 incident when Rhimes not only called out New York Times journalist Alessandra Stanley, who described her as an “angry Black woman” in print, for racism and sexism but also called out the media for disparities in the treatment of Black women vis-avis white women. 7 Get Christie Love! Was a police detective series influenced by blaxploitation icon Pam Grier of Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) fame. 8 Rhimes also references Julia on Grey’s Anatomy (“I am a Tree” S3 E2, 2006) when Diahann Carroll, who played Julia, a nurse, appears as Dr. Preston Burke’s mother. Warner (2015b) refers to Carroll and Richard Roundtree, who played the eponymous Shaft (1971) and who plays Dr. Burke’s father on this episode, as iconic figures of Black representation.

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9 After Rhimes brokered a deal with Netflix, she continued to executive produce Grey’s Anatomy, but Kristin Vernoff, took over as showrunner. Under her supervision, the episode “Personal Jesus” (S14 E10, 2018) dealt directly with Black Lives Matter issues of racial profiling and police violence against people of color. Written by Zoanne Clack, it was informed by autobiographical experience as the mother of a Black son and a former ER doctor who had seen her share of cases precipitated by police racial bias during her practice (Goldberg 2018). The episode, notably, includes Dr. Miranda Bailey and her husband giving their teenage son the talk, which couples admonitions with love: “. . . [Y]our only goal is to get home safely . . . You can’t go climbing through windows, play with toy guns, throw rocks. And you cannot ever run away from them, no matter how afraid you are . . . Everything that we’re saying to you, we’re saying because we want you to come home again . . . You are amazing. You are perfect. And we want you to stay that way.” This season 14 racially specific moment, which poses Bailey as a Black mother, is antithetical to her unintentional stereotype as a mammy figure in early seasons. Although this appears to be due to the greater license accorded white producers, Petermon and Spencer argue that even before that, “Rhimes’ ability to include storylines that address race and racism . . . increased in lockstep with her foothold in the industry (Petermon 2018). As Warner argues, ‘the more money showrunners make for the network, the less the network interferes’ (2015a: 24)” (Petermon and Spencer 2019: 343). 10 Though BET owner Robert Johnson sold the network to Viacom in 2001, it still targets Black audiences and in-groups. Other cable channels that target Black audiences include Aspire (2012–present), OWN (2011–present), Bounce TV (2011–present), TV One (2004–present), and BET Her (aka Centric 1996–present). 11 Akil started out writing for the short-lived FOX series, South Central (1994) during the period when the upstart network’s narrowcasting strategy targeted urban, Black and Latino youth. Later, she worked as an assistant on Moesha (1996–2001), a Black sitcom that aired on UPN, the upstart network that adopted a similar narrowcasting strategy. 12 See Rowe (2019) for a consideration of this episode’s use of the moment when Mary Jane takes out her weave and shares a moment of intimacy with her niece, one read by Black women viewers as a marker of authenticity. 13 Titled “Why are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive than Other Women, but Black Men are Rated Better Looking than Other Men,” it has been deleted from the Psychology Today archive available online in 2020. 14 The series came to an abrupt end after star Gabrielle Union sued BET for breach of contract (Corinthios and Stone 2016). 15 Rossie (2018: 26) argues that although Mary Jane can be “situate[d] . . . at the center of a postfeminist panic around the timing of marriage and childbearing” and thus enact postfeminism, she cannot embody it, and that her consciously racial depiction breaks with the postfeminism of white women in media. 16 Among Queen Sugar’s directors is Julie Dash, the first African American woman to direct a nationally released film, Daughters of the Dust (1991). 17 Jessica Ford attributes this to auteurist discourses that rely on the notion of the “singular artistic vision” of the creator–showrunner and argues that it is important to expand the role of television author to writers who are not showrunners and to directors. This fixation on the showrunner in publicity practices should also give us pause because it is gendered, “. . . the marketing image of the showrunner is drawn from the idea of the ‘genius male auteur’ (Newman and Levine 2012: 38–39)” (in Ford 2018: 21). 18 This “male-washing and straight-washing of queer Black feminist activism” (Petermon and Spencer 343) is similar to the white-washing and straight-washing

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of mainstream historiographies of the feminist movement described at the start of this chapter. Although Poussey, a Black lesbian in OITNB, is killed by a white corrections officer, which suggests both a gendered and sexuality-specific connection to the Black Lives Matter movement, the episode in which she dies is devoted to officer Baxter ‘Gerber’ Bayley’s (Alan Aisenberg) backstory (“The Animals” S4 E12, 2016). His backstory paints him sympathetically as a naïve young man harmed by the prison system, in a manner that invites pity for his victimization. As Petermon and Spencer claim, “[b]y implicating the institution in Bayley’s demise before he murders Poussey, the show creates a false parallel between her death and the trauma he faces in murdering her” (2019: 347), a move that neutralizes the vulnerability of Black lives, especially queer Black lives. Aunt Vi mindfully hires formerly incarcerated women from the halfway house at the diner she manages. For a more extended analysis by DuVernay on this topic, see her documentary film 13th (2016), which links contemporary mass incarceration policies to other post-emancipation “systems of racial control” and labor exploitation such as convict leasing, disenfranchisement, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation. Asian representation on broadcast and digital platforms is also proportional to that in the US population, but this does not hold for cable, where Asians are underrepresented. This does not include the earlier wave of race films (1915–50), produced by Black directors, with Black casts, for Black audiences, which started in response to Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that led to a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan terrorism. The D.W. Griffith film is considered foundational for classic Hollywood cinema. It is also representative of how mass-mediated entertainment forms of the early twentieth century worked directly to dehumanize African Americans, a phenomenon that led activists to be concerned about media representation. Although other civil rights movements also demanded increased non-stereotypical representation, the Black civil rights movement was the most effective in this regard. This raises the question of why Native American genocide and containment, which also occurred on a centuries-long and vast scale, has not generated equal political consideration, especially given the historical importance of the Western. Although I am unable to address this question in the scope of this book, I hope other researchers will. This claim is supported by the UCLA “Hollywood Diversity Report” (Hunt et al. 2019: 54), which found that, for the 2016–17 season, broadcast series with a 31 to 40 percent minority cast garnered the highest ratings from white audiences. Latina/o audiences preferred broadcast series with both 11 to 20 percent minority casts, and those with more than 50% minority casts, to virtually the same extent. For cable series, white, Latina/o and Asian audiences all favored series with 31 to 40 percent minority casts. White audiences also gave preference to cable series with 11 to 20 percent minority casts. Black audiences are the only ones that consistently favored series with over 50% minority casts across platforms. Vida’s season 2 rating averaged 0.03 with the 18–49 demographic (Anonymous 2020). I use the term Latina/os, rather than Latinx as an inclusive, non-gender specific term that is more consistent with spoken Spanish than the ungendered but academic Latinx. The Mexican-specificity of the speech also otherizes other native Spanish speech communities. When you avoid pan blurring, including using a version of broadcaster Spanish, this is bound to happen. And, as Saracho put it, that’s okay.

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28 Half the writers, including Saracho, “identify as LGBTQ+” (Phillips 2018a). Ser Anzoategui, who plays Eddy, a sensitive butch lesbian, is a non-binary actor. In a season 1 Starz Extra segment, Saracho refers to trans extras who appear without reference to their gender nonconformity. “It’s just that their presence is normalizing” (in Pickard 2018). As part of the series’ inclusiveness, the cast also includes undocumented immigrants and people with DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status (Pickard 2018). 29 This pan-ethnic move identifies a shared cultural element of Latinidad-ness and differs from the pan-ethnic blurring of distinct Latin cultural identities involved in the racial erasure referenced earlier. 30 In season 3, Emma learns that her mother sent her away to protect her from potential violence at the hands of her homophobic father (S3 E6, 2020). 31 Vida won the 2019 GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Media Award for Outstanding Comedy Series, in another instance of the generic elasticity of the 30-minute drama and the hour-long comedy categories. 32 The term colorism was coined by Alice Walker to name this long-standing practice (2004: 290–291, orig. 1983). 33 Saracho ended the series but refused to bring the narrative to a premature conclusion in the six episodes allotted to season 3. Vida ends with questions about the survival of the bar, the sisters’ romantic lives, Eddy’s at large attacker, and the gentefication of the neighborhood unresolved. The resolution she provides comes in the form of the sisterly connection Emma and Lyn forge.

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Grace, Cheryl, Andrew McCaskill, and Rebecca Roussell. “African-American Women: Our Science, Her Magic.” Nielsen (2017). Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for ‘Blackness’. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Grey’s Anatomy. 2005–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–16. USA: ABC. Harris, Felicia L., and Loren Saxton Coleman. “Trending Topics: A Cultural Analysis of ‘Being Mary Jane’ and Black Women’s Engagement on Twitter.” The Black Scholar 48, no. 1 (2018): 43–55. Heroes. 2006–10. Television Series. Seasons 1–4. USA: NBC. How to Get Away With Murder. 2014–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. USA: ABC. Hull, Akasha (Gloria T.), Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. New York: The Feminist Press, 2015 (orig. 1982). Hunt, Darnell, Ana-Christina Ramón, and Michael Tran. The 2019 Hollywood Diversity Report. Los Angeles: UCLA College Division of Social Science, 2019. Joseph, Ralina L. “Strategically Ambiguous Shonda Rhimes: Respectability Politics of a Black Woman Showrunner.” Souls 18, nos. 2–4 (2016): 302–320. Julia. 1968–71. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: NBC. Lauzen, Martha M. “Boxed in 2018–19: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television.” In Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. San Diego: San Diego State University, 2019. Long, Amy. “Diagnosing Drama: ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, Blind Casting, and the Politics of Representation.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 5 (October 1, 2011): 1067–1084. Lost. 2004–10. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. USA: ABC. Luckett, Josslyn. “The Daughters Debt: How Black Spirituality and Politics Are Transforming the Televisual Landscape.” Film Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2019): 9–17. Lynch, Jason. “Starz’s New Mandate: Only Make Shows That Appeal to a ‘Premium Female Audience’ Worldwide.” Adweek, July 27, 2019. Martinez, Kiko. “How First-Time Showrunner Tanya Saracho Got Her Queer Latinx Series Greenlit by Starz.” Remezcla, February 6, 2018. McInnis, Jarvis C. “Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation.” American Literary History 31, no. 4 (2019): 741–774. Miller-Young, Mireille. A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Mittell, Jason. “Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies).” In Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, edited by Roberta Pearson, 119–138. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2009. Moesha. 1996–2001. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. USA: UPN. Molina-Guzmán, Isabel. Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-racial Network Era. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983 (orig. 1981). Morgan, Joan. “Why We Get off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure.” The Black Scholar 45, no. 4 (2015): 36–46. Myers, Victoria. “An Interview With Tanya Saracho.” The Interval, October 29, 2014.

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Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, Chelsea Abbas, Luis Figueroa, and Samuel Robson. “The Latino Media Gap: A Report on the State of Latinos in U.S. Media.” Columbia University 19 (2014). Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. New York: Routledge, 2012. Norlian, Allison. “ ‘Vida’ Writers Weigh in on What It’s Like to Be Part of the Groundbreaking Show.” Final Draft, September 11, 2019. Okoro, Enuma. “ ‘Being Mary Jane’ Is No ‘Scandal’ – and That’s a Good Thing.” The Atlantic, January 16, 2014. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2014. Orange Is the New Black. 2013–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–7. USA: Netflix. Patten, Dominic. “ ‘Vida’ Renewed for Season 3 by Starz.” Deadline, March 31, 2019. Patten, Dominic. “ ‘Vida’s’ Tanya Saracho on Starz’s East L.A. Drama, Seeing Herself & Having a Vision–Next Generation TV.” Deadline, June 19, 2018. Petermon, Jade D. “Race (Lost) in Shondaland: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Primetime Network Television.” In Adventures in Shondaland: Identity Politics and the Power of Representation, edited by R. A. Griffin and M. D. E. Meyer, 101–119. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Petermon, Jade D., and Leland G. Spencer. “Black Queer Womanhood Matters: Searching for the Queer Herstory of Black Lives Matter in Television Dramas.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 36, no. 4 (2019): 339–356. Phillips, Carmen. “ ‘Vida’s’ Non-Binary Latinx Actor Ser Anzoategui Already Knows Their Show Will Be Your New Favorite.” Autostraddle, April 30, 2018a. Phillips, Carmen. “Tanya Saracho Made ‘Vida’ With, for and About Latinxs–And She’s Not Apologizing.” Autostraddle, May 3, 2018b. Pickard, Michael. “Walking the Walk.” Drama Quarterly, May 2, 2018. Private Practice. 2007–13. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. USA: ABC. Queen Sugar. 2016–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–4. USA: OWN. Qureshi, Bilal. “Elsewhere: The Cultural Consolation of Ava DuVernay’s ‘Queen Sugar’.” Film Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2017): 63–68. Ramírez-Berg, Charles. “Stereotyping and Resistance: A Crash Course on Hollywood’s Latino Imagery.” In The Future of Latino Independent Media: A NALIP Sourcebook, edited by Chon A. Noriega, 5–13. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2000. Ramos, Dino-Ray. “New Study Shows Lack of Equity and Advancement for Diverse TV Writers.” Deadline, March 14, 2019. Rossie, Amanda. “ ‘Being Mary Jane’ and Postfeminism’s Problem With Race.” In Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture, edited by Jessalynn Keller and Maureen E. Ryan, 25–41. New York: Routledge, 2018. Rowe, Kristin Denise. “ ‘Nothing Else Mattered After That Wig Came Off’: Black Women, Unstyled Hair, and Scenes of Interiority.” The Journal of American Culture 42, no. 1 (2019): 21–36. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Scandal. 2012–18. Television Series. Seasons 1–7. USA: ABC. Selma. Ava DuVernay. USA: Paramount Pictures, 2014.

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Sender, Katherine. “Transgender, Transmedia, Transnationality: Chaz Bono in Documentary and Dancing With the Stars.” In The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender, edited by Cynthia Carter, Linda Steiner, and Lisa McLaughlin, 300– 310. New York: Routledge, 2013. Shaft. Gordon Parks. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1971. Siebler, Kay. “Black Feminists in Serialized Dramas: The Gender/Sex/Sexuality/Race Politics of ‘Being Mary Jane’ and ‘Scandal’.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 47, no. 3 (2019): 152–162. Smith, Barbara. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000 (orig. 1983). Smith, Jada F. “With ‘Being Mary Jane’, Mara Brock Akil Specializes in Portraits of Black Women.” The New York Times, October 20, 2015. South Central. 1994. Television Series. Season 1. USA: FOX. Starz. “ ‘Vida’ 2019 for Your Consideration Panel STARZ.” YouTube, June 12, 2019. Steele, Catherine Knight. “ ‘Signifyin’, Bitching, and Blogging: Black Women and Resistance Discourse Online.” In The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online, edited by Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, 73–94. New York: Peter Lang, 2016. Swartz, Anna. “ ‘Vida’ Creator Tanya Saracho on Queer Latinx Identity, Authentic Slang and Writing Good Sex Scenes.” Mic, June 9, 2018. Szalay, Michael. “Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV.” Theory & Event 22, no. 2 (2019): 465–488. Thompson, Becky. “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism.” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 337–360. Tounsel, Timeka N. “Productive Vulnerability: Black Women Writers and Narratives of Humanity in Contemporary Cable Television.” Souls 20, no. 3 (2018): 304–327. Turchiano, Danielle. “ ‘Vida’ Boss on Inviting a Bruja to Bless Her Workspace Before Beginning to Write.” Variety, May 29, 2019. Vida. 2018–20. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: Starz. Viruet, Pilot. “How Starz’s ‘Vida’ Created a Safe Space to Explore Latinx and Queer Stories.” The Hollywood Reporter, May 4, 2018. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004 (orig. 1983). Walker, Rebecca. “Becoming the Third Wave.” Ms., January 1992. Warner, Kristen J. The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. New York: Routledge, 2015a. Warner, Kristen J. “The Racial Logic of Grey’s Anatomy: Shonda Rhimes and Her ‘Post-Civil Rights, Post-Feminist’ Series.” Television & New Media 16, no. 7 (2015b): 631–647. Williams, Linda. “Mega-melodrama! Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the ‘Classical.’ ” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (2012): 523–543. Williams, Sherri. “ ‘Queen Sugar’s’ Women Directors: Nourishing Complex Images.” Feminist Media Studies 19, no. 7 (2019): 1043–1046. Zinn, Maxine Baca, and Bonnie Thornton Dill. “Theorizing Difference From Multiracial Feminism.” Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 321–331. Zook, Kristal Brent. Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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ConclusionConclusion

The difficult women programming trend was made possible by a variety of economic and cultural factors. The economic viability of small desirable audience niches in a cluttered TV landscape fostered first dramatic serials about difficult men, then ones about difficult women, on premium, then basic cable and streaming channels. This media landscape generated the Peak TV era, which led to the demand for content that created opportunities for women and people of color, in an industry that had long limited creative access mostly to white men. Economic changes led to innovations in creative practice and reception practices. The sizable increase in the number of female television critics who waded through the multitude of programs and directed viewers to noteworthy shows that featured female antiheroes and difficult women informed audiences and helped curate viewing choices. The series I discuss in this book are produced with significant direct authorship by women in key creative roles behind the camera. They also share narrative and aesthetic strategies that foreground the female gaze, deconstruct the male gaze, address a range of feminist issues, and revolve around complicated (largely white) female characters who claim agency. Taken together, most of the programs examined share an overlapping concern with the direst consequences of the gender gap – discrepancies in social justice. Chapter 3’s discussion of Outlander and Westworld establishes the colonial and racial nature of the male gaze, which underlies mechanisms of social control and punishment. Chapters 2, 4, and 5 share a thematic concern with the social justice gap, and its racial and class permutations, mainly the legal system’s failure to protect women from rape and other forms of male violence. Specifically, Chapter 2 compares the Danish and American Killing’s treatment of how class disparities render indigent girls and women more susceptible to violence while simultaneously buffering class-privileged men from prosecution. Chapter 4 examines how Big Little Lies (2017–19), Orange is the New Black (2013–19), and Wentworth (2013–16, 2017–present) show the legal system’s disproportionately harsh treatment of female violence, while failing to protect women from male violence. Chapter 5 looks at Being Mary Jane and Queen Sugar’s consideration of various forms of institutional

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aggression aimed at black women and men. Chapters 2 and 4 are further concerned with the criminal justice system’s propensity to dismiss violence committed against women, particularly when they are poor. Chapters 4 and 5 are critical of the legal system’s biased treatment of people of color, specifically the court’s propensity to mete out harsher punishment for women of color who kill, and its failure to protect men of color from police brutality, respectively. Chapter 5 also examines Vida’s (2018–20) treatment of color and class inflected in-group conflicts in Latina/o communities. This programming trend is a step in the right direction, but until a diverse assortment of women shares equal power behind the camera – as producers, writers, directors, editors, and directors of photography – as well as in the executive suites of film studios and television networks, we will not have equality in the television industry. To secure diversity in creative access, we also need robust improvements in economic equality. This means, among other things, guaranteed access to quality universal child care, higher education, and health care. The case of Denmark, examined in Chapter 2, illustrates that once those conditions have been met for generations, even male-dominated television productions, ones with relatively limited female input in key creative roles, will be feminist thanks to the indirect authorship of egalitarian culture. But until then, and for a long time to come, we will need significant levels of direct female authorship to create programs that represent women as fully human subjects, to express the myriad of lived female realities, and to empower female audiences and in-groups.

What I don’t look at but other feminist scholars do: comedies, dramedies, tragicomedies, and satires This book considers a group of dramatic serials that revolve around difficult women and engage with feminist issues. Although Orange is the New Black (2013–19) is a dramedy, it leans heavily on the dramatic side. Other scholars have started to consider the important work of female produced, femalecentered complex comedies, especially dramedies, that are either feminist or operate with a “feminist sensibility” (Ford 2019). When dissident perspectives were relegated to the comedy genre, as the Black shows of FOX’s early years were, the format in question was the sitcom. Writers had to create room for dramatic moments that addressed issues significant to in-group audiences in a format designed to do something else. But dramatic moments are intrinsic to dramedies and easily accommodated by complex comedies, with their commitment to innovative storytelling strategies (Mittell 2015), willingness to deal with controversial subject matter, and sophisticated address to audiences.1 Feminist media scholars have identified a group of complex comedies that are female-produced, (predominantly white) female-centered, and feminist or which operate with a feminist sensibility and that draw on the strategies of independent feminist films (Ford 2018, 2019). Some center vulnerable,

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disempowered female protagonists depicted from a sympathetic perspective (Alsop 2016). Jessica Ford (2018, 2019) characterizes them as a recent cycle of television shows. Both Ford and Elizabeth Alsop argue that they draw on independent feminist films of earlier eras. Among the series, they include are Girls (2012–17, HBO), Transparent (2014–19, Amazon Prime), Catastrophe (2015–19, Channel 4, UK), Better Things (2016–present, FX), and Insecure (2016–present, HBO). In addition, Ford references Broad City (2014–19, Comedy Central), One Mississippi (2015–17, Amazon Prime), Divorce (2016–19, HBO), SMILF (2017–19, Showtime), and Shrill (2019– present, Hulu). Alsop adds Enlightened (2011–13, HBO) and Fleabag (2016–19, BBC, UK). Ford looks to the aesthetic strategies of smart cinema or a low-key style distinct from the more spectacular tradition routinely identified as cinematic. She argues that these series’ lack of visual spectacle is the reason they are regularly disregarded as quality television. Alsop refers to them as female produced, female-centered tragicomedies that draw character elements and themes from independent feminist film. The characters are not only flawed but weak or vulnerable and depicted non-judgmentally and sympathetically. The series aim their critical lens on patriarchal social expectations women face rather than on the women who do not meet these expectations. Again, the series are often not read as feminist due to their lack of strong females at the center of the narrative. Both Ford and Alsop note the recurrent use of awkward sex scenes in these series. Cultural critic Teddy Wayne (2016) argues that these scenes are now a staple of television shows and may reflect a sea change in heterosexual politics. They serve as a metonym for a sense of dislocation in the wake of feminist changes that have rendered the aloof male socially less acceptable, while preserving the unattractive status of the needy male. This is different from the awkward sex scene in Vida (2018–20) which is due to inexperience and lack of sexual confidence, as well as the realistic mechanics of first-time lovers who are unaccustomed to each other’s rhythms and preferences. Both types of awkward sex scene can be poignant. In addition to these complex comedies, this book leaves out a large number of relevant texts for want of space and time. Among the most interesting of these is Dietland (2018, AMC), the Marti Noxon drama based on the novel by Sarai Walker (2015). Alsop (2019) considers this program under a group of serials that engage a “rhetoric of sisterhood” and evince “women’s suffering under patriarchy,” but permit women to overcome it through female collective action (Alsop 2019: 5).2 To enable a narratively and emotionally satisfying ending, they retreat from realism and allow women to successfully engage in retaliatory violence. This revenge narrative, she argues, functions both on the narrative level and the metanarrative level as a retort to all the violence meted out against women in male-centered serials, serials warmly embraced by critics and scholars as quality television. The satiric drama Dietland goes where Wentworth (2013–16, 2017–present) and even Big Little Lies (2017–19) would not. In Wentworth (2013–16, 2017–present), Bea

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disavows the vigilante actions of a group, The Red Right Hand, inspired by her plight and formed to commit retaliatory violence against abusers, in defense of abused women. In contrast, after much deliberation, the central protagonist of Dietland embraces the actions of “Jennifer,” the terrorist group that kills powerful men with histories of unpunished sexual abuse. Unlike their premeditated targeting of sexually predatory men, the killing in Big Little Lies (2017–19) is the outcome of an attempt to stop a brutal beating. Only the cover-up is premeditated. And season 2, not based on the original source material, undoes that romanticized but satisfying conclusion. Another ground breaking counternarrative is the Emmy Award-winning series Pose (2018–present, FX), a racially conscious drama about Black and Latina/o gender nonconforming people, set in the ballroom culture of the ’80s and ’90s that constructs a Black and Brown queer gaze. The series features several transgender women of color, played by transgender actors, and is made by transgender producers, writers, and directors.3 As I conclude this book in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the boom in Black Lives Matter activism, I am alternately filled with dread and optimism. Dread at the disproportionately harsh effects of the pandemic on the health, lives, and livelihoods of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) due to racial disparities, and its correlate, economic disparities (Oppel et al. 2020). Optimism at the multiracial activism of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the killing of George Floyd and the systemic racial violence of police departments that his death represents. Under the impetus of that pressure, some corporations are developing initiatives to redress racial inequities. On July 13, 2020, CBS announced that it will dedicate a quarter of its development budget to projects created or co-created by Black, Indigenous and people of color, starting with the 2021–2022 season. Furthermore, CBS committed to increasing diversity in writers rooms by adding BIPOC writers to some 2020–2021 programs, and mandating a minimum of 40% BIPOC representation for the 2021–2022 season, set to increase to 50% for the 2022–2023 season (Otterson 2020). This is an essential step necessary to produce the kind of counternarratives I have been analyzing in this book, and one I hope other media entities will pursue. Following Teresa de Lauretis’ (1984) notion that narratives constitute identity, I argue that the series discussed in this book help constitute a more empowered sense of self by opening up visions of female agency and engaging public narratives about work, motherhood, sexuality, sexual and racial violence, and displacement, from a female gaze. Difficult women programs pose challenging questions about gender, sexism, racism, and the costs of inequality. In order for this to be more than a passing trend, we need institutional change at the level of the industry and social structure. We need robust numbers of women of color, as well as women, people of color, trans and queer people in general, in key creative roles to produce complex, fully dimensional diverse characters with racially, ethnically, and sexually specific

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stories. We need to tell our stories and to see ourselves as subjects in all our messy humanity on-screen.

Notes 1 Examples of complex comedies that won Emmys include Fleabag (2019), Veep (2015–17), Modern Family (2010–14), 30 Rock (2007–09), The Office (2006), Arrested Development (2004), and Sex and the City (2001). 2 Alsop also includes other dramas – Big Little Lies (2017–19), discussed in chapter 3, and Top of the Lake (2013–17) – as well as dramedies GLOW (2017–19), and Orange is the New Black (2013–19), likewise discussed in chapter 3. 3 I would be remiss if I did not mention some significant counternarratives produced by and featuring men of color. The Emmy Award winning Atlanta (2016– present, FX) is a racially conscious dramedy that is not made to please the white gaze and boasts an all-Black writers room that creates nuanced characters and addresses issues significant to in-group audiences, including police brutality, gun violence, homophobia, transphobia, and the prison system. Although the series revolves around men, its Black gaze is doing important work to deconstruct the political project of the white male gaze. Similarly, Ramy (2019–present, Hulu) is a racially conscious dramedy that constructs the Brown gaze of Arab American Muslims living in New Jersey, as both immigrant parents and first-generation adult children negotiate the pulls of bicultural identity. Though not about men of color, Schitt$ Creek (2015–20, CBC, CA) also deserves mention here for its ground breaking normalization of a gay gaze in the titular small town, a safe space that functions as a retort to the homophobia meted out against gay men and women in the name of television realism.

References 30 Rock. 2006–13. Television Series. Seasons 1–7. USA: NBC. Alsop, Elizabeth. “Sorority Flow: The Rhetoric of Sisterhood in Post-Network Television.” Feminist Media Studies 19, no. 7 (2019): 1026–1042. Alsop, Elizabeth. “Why TV Needs ‘Weak’ Female Characters.” The Atlantic, December 4, 2016. Arrested Development. 2003–06, 2013–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–3, 4–5. USA: FOX, Netflix. Atlanta. 2016–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. USA: FX. Better Things. 2016–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–4. USA: FX. Big Little Lies. 2017–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. USA: HBO. Broad City. 2014–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–5. USA: Comedy Central. Catastrophe. 2015–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–4. UK: Channel 4. de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Vol. 316. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Dietland. 2018. Television Series. Season 1. USA: AMC. Divorce. 2016–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: HBO. Enlightened. 2011–13. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. USA: HBO. Fleabag. 2016–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. UK: BBC. Ford, Jessica. “Women’s Indie Television: The Intimate Feminism of Women-centric Dramedies.” Feminist Media Studies 19, no. 7 (2019): 928–943.

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Ford, Jessica. “Feminist Cinematic Television: Authorship, Aesthetics and Gender in Pamela Adlon’s ‘Better Things’.” Fusion Journal 4 (2018): 16–29. Girls. 2012–17. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. USA: HBO. GLOW. 2017–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: Netflix. Insecure. 2016–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–4. USA: HBO. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Modern Family. 2009–20. Television Series. Seasons 1–11. USA: ABC. The Office. 2005–13. Television Series. Seasons 1–9. USA: NBC. One Mississippi. 2015–17. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. USA: Amazon Prime. Oppel, Richard A. Jr., Robert Gebeloff, K. K. Rebecca Lai, Will Wright, and Mitch Smith. “The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequality of Coronavirus.” The New York Times, July 5, 2020. Orange Is the New Black. 2013–19. Television Series. Seasons 1-7. USA: Netflix. Otterson, Joe. “CBS Commits 25% of Development Budget to BIPOC Projects.” Variety, July 13, 2020. Ramy. 2019–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. USA: Hulu. Schitt$ Creek. 2015–20. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. CA: CBC. Sex and the City. 1998–2004. Television Series. Seasons 1–6. USA: HBO. Shrill. 2019–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. USA: Hulu. SMILF. 2017–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. USA: Showtime. Top of the Lake. 2013–17. Television Series. Seasons 1–2. UK/AUS/NZ: BBC. Transparent. 2014–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–5. USA: Amazon. Veep. 2012–19. Television Series. Seasons 1–7. USA: HBO. Vida. 2018–20. Television Series. Seasons 1–3. USA: Starz. Walker, Sarai. Dietland. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Wayne, Teddy. “Awkward Sex, Onscreen and Off.” The New York Times, October 8, 2016. Wentworth. 2013–16, 2017–present. Television Series. Seasons 1–4, 5–7. AUS: SoHo, Showcase.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. Page numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate a note. ABC 6, 31n5 Abrahamsson, Elin 81 Abrams, J.J. 7, 87 ACLU 32n23, 126 activism 24, 156; Black Lives Matter 178; feminist 2, 140; gender 139; media 147, 152; social justice 139 Aduba, Uzo 8 advertisers 6 aesthetic strategies: female gaze 24; female subjectivity 23; use in Forbrydelsen and The Killing 49; use in Outlander and Westworld 62, 86; use in Spartacus and Girls 64–65, 67 African Americans 143, 146, 156 agency: female 22, 40, 53, 86, 152; and sexual pleasure 78 Ajinkya, Julie 123 Akass, Kim 31n11, 44, 45, 126 Akil, Mara Brock 30, 147, 149–152 Akil, Salim 149 Albrecht, Chris 72 Alias (2001–06) 7 Allen, Debbie 149 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982) 140 Ally McBeal (1997–2002) 2 Alsop, Elizabeth 118–119, 120, 177, 179n2 Amazon 8, 17 AMC channel 7, 44, 51 Americans, The (2013–18) 2, 14, 32n20 Ang, Ien 77 angry women 1

antihero 2, 4; difficult men and 4–9; narratives 13; wives 12–15; see also female antiheroes Anzaldúa, Gloria 140 Apatow, Judd 69 Arrested Development (2003–06, 2013–19) 8 Atlanta (2016–present) 179n3 authorial control 68–73 authorship: direct 15–18; indirect 19–21, 28; male/female 89 Bahr, Lindsey 66 Baird, Julia 134n27 Bak, Frans 49 Baszile, Natalie 152 BBC 31n9 beauty stereotypes, feminine 119 Behr, Ira Stephen 85 Being Mary Jane (2013–19) 21, 30, 147, 148, 149–152; see also specific episodes Benioff, David 70 Berger, John 60 Berger, Peter 90 Bernth, Piv 50 Best Comedy Series award 1 Best Drama Series award 1 Better Things (2016–present) 177 Big C, The (2010–13) 18 Big Little Lies (2017–19) 21, 29, 110, 111, 112–114, 118–119, 178; see also specific episodes Birth of a Nation (1915) 169n22 Black civil rights movement 156, 169n22

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Black female creatives 147 Black feminist gaze 23 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement 154, 169n19, 178 Black shows 142 Borgen (2010–13, Denmark) 41, 52 Born in Flames (1983) 119 “Both Sides Now” (S1 E8, 2014, Outlander) 84, 84 “Boxed In: Women on Screen and Behind the Scenes on Television” (San Diego State University report) 15 Bradshaw, Carrie 12, 31n14 Bradshaw, Lara 18 branding 51 brazen gaze 61, 75, 102n20 Breaking Bad (2008–13) 7, 8, 12–15 Bridge, The 19, 41 Brixius, Liz 18 Broadchurch (2013–17, UK) 43 Broad City (2014–19) 177 Bron/Broen (2011–18) 19, 41 Brooks, Peter 11 Brook, Vincent 143, 144, 167n4 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) 2, 4, 6 Burke, Tarana 109 Bushnell, Candace 11 Butler, Judith 79 Caldwell, John 31n5 canonical female body 65 Caputi, Jane 122 Catastrophe (2015–19, UK) 177 Caulfield, Bernadette 70 centrifugal complexity 121 channels, proliferation of 9 Chapman, Jane 113 Chase, David 4 Cheers, Imani 131, 142, 143, 147 “Chestnut” (S1 E2, 2016, Westworld) 93, 93–94 “chick lit” 112 childcare: and paid parental leave 46, 52, 53; universal 45–46, 52, 53 China Beach (1988–91) 31n5 choice discourse 123–124 cisgender heteronormativity 86, 99, 152 civil rights movements 154, 169n22 Clack, Zoanne 168n9 Clarke, Cheryl 157 Clark, Kenneth 104n38

Close Up With the Hollywood Reporter (2015–present) episode 1 Cody, Diablo 18 Coleman, Loren Saxton 158 collective intelligence 8 color-blind casting 120, 144–145, 150 color consciousness 147 colorism 160, 165, 170n32 conformity, to normatized model 119 consensual sex scenes 65, 92, 101n7 content development 2 Cooper, Anna Julia 139 counternarratives 21–22, 26, 154, 167 Cowie, Elizabeth 81 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 121, 139, 140 Crichton, Michael 87 critical reception 80–82 cultural acceptance, in complex television narratives 19–20 cultural homelessness 161 cyborg 103n35 D’Acci, Julie 10 Damages (2007–12) 12, 31n12 Danes, Claire 1 Danish public broadcasting (DR) 41 Dávila, Arlene 157 Davis, Maril 71, 101n14, 102n17 Davis, Viola 1 Death in a Cold Climate (2012) 42 de-fetishized nudity 90 DeKnight, Stephen 70 Delos Corporation 88 Denmark: childcare and paid parental leave 46; gender equality 40, 50, 54n9 Dern, Laura 112 diegetic world, post-racial/postfeminist characters in 95–98 Dietland (2018) 177 Difficult Men (Martin) 4, 12 difficult men and antihero 4–9 difficult women: antihero’s wife 12–15; changing contours of 3; depiction of 41; direct authorship 15–18; direct female authorship 25–30; and female antihero 21–25; figure/pattern of 2, 4; gender politics in programming trend 2–4, 175; indirect authorship 19–21; pathologized female antihero on Showtime 18–21; Peak TV and Third Golden Age of Television 4–12; rise in serial narrative television

Index drama (2005–20) 1–30; stigmatized 21; transgressions of 40 digital video recorders (DVRs) 7 direct authorship, in contrast to indirect authorship 15–18 direct female authorship 25–30 disciplinary gaze 60 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 60 discrimination 141 distinctly female gaze 126 Divorce (2016–19) 177 Doelger, Frank 70 dogmas 42 domestic violence: complex psychology of 113; female prisoners as victims of 126; legal system’s failure to protect women from 109 Donelan, Carol 72 Donen, Joshua 70 double consciousness 60 Douglas, Susan 45 Dresbach, Terry 74, 101n17 Du Bois, W.E.B. 60 Dunham, Lena 66, 67, 68, 69 Dunsky, Evan 18 DuVernay, Ava 30, 143, 147, 149, 150, 152–156 Dwyer, Tessa 130, 133n20 Dyer, Richard 85, 103n32 economic inequality, and working mother 40–54 Ellis, John 100n2 Emmy nomination: for Best Drama Series 1; for Outstanding Comedy Series 7, 8; for Outstanding Dramatic Series 7, 8, 31n10; Outstanding Lead Actor in Drama Series 7 Engber, Daniel 66 Enlightened (2011–13) 177 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, US 32n23 equal labor force participation 26, 28, 45–46 erotic coding, conventional: centering male pleasure 75, 93; facile use of rape 29, 59; fetishizing female nudity 29, 59, 89, 90–94; heteronormativity 29, 59, 99 erotic coding, reworked: centering female sexual desire and pleasure 58–99; deconstructing fetishization of female nudity 29, 59, 89, 90–94;

183

deconstructing male gaze 64–68, 70, 90–92; de-eroticizing rape 59, 90; depicting rape from subordinate perspective 58, 83–84, 86 Evolution of Black Women in Television, The (Cheers) 143 Falco, Edie 1 female antiheroes 3, 14, 18–25, 40, 88–89, 120; contrast with male antihero 2, 4, 12, 21, 27, 30n1, 40; centralized 12, 14, 173; stigmatized 1–31 female audience 10, 82; targeting 1, 18, 22, 28, 68, 125 female-centered serial narratives on television 1 female creative control 2, 16, 22, 25, 28, 41–42, 47, 49, 51–53, 71; directors 143, 147; producers 22, 27, 49–51, 143, 147; writers 6, 27, 143, 147 female gaze 2, 22, 23–24, 32n26, 58–59, 68, 71, 72, 73, 81, 86–87, 90, 100n5, 102n24, 160, 166–167; female agency 1, 23–24, 71, 72–73, 79, 80; in contrast with male gaze 23–24, 59–68, 63, 73, 80, 90; sexual subjectivity 22, 27, 84–85, 90, 164; televisual 61 females/female: agency 22, 40, 53, 86, 152; bodies 59–60, 62, 65–66, 90, 119, 155; canonical body 119; character, as sexual object of heterosexual male gaze 59; desire 78; direct authorship 25–30; directors 112; empowerment 1, 2, 21, 61; homosociality 12; opportunities for writers/producers/ directors 9, 18, 112, 147–149; protagonist 20; representation on television centers 41; sexuality 86; sexual pleasure and freedom 58–104; subjectivity 22–23, 73, 79, 86; television critics 9, 80; see also difficult women femininity 86, 119 feminism/feminist 25, 32n27, 140, 167n3; hegemonic 139, 140; indirect creative control 52; movement, white-led 139; narrative 89–98; neoliberal 25, 32n27; politics 1, 40; sensibility 176

184

Index

feminist issues, unresolved: equal labor force participation 26, 28, 45–46; intersectionality 139–170; sexual and domestic violence 109, 113, 118, 126, 131; sexual pleasure and freedom 58–104 feminist text: aesthetic strategies 23, 24; narrative strategies 22–23; production cultures that facilitate 24–25 Fernández, Marta 159 fetishized nudity 90 Feuer, Jane 31n10 fiction 5 Fincher, David 8 Fin-Syn (Financial Interest and Syndication Rules) 6 Fleabag (2016–19, UK) 177 Floyd, George 178 Foerster, Anna 71, 73, 85 Foka, Anna 101n7 Forbrydelsen (2007–12, Denmark) 21, 26, 28, 40–41, 42–43; aesthetic strategies 49; feminist approach 48; narrative strategies 48; production culture 49–51; season 3 of 46–51; see also Killing, The (Forbrydelsen; 2011–14) Ford, Jessica 22, 67–68, 168n17, 177 Ford, Robert 87–88 formal complexity 113, 147 Forshaw, Barry 42 Fortini, Amanda 99 Foucault, Michel 60, 68, 100n2 FOX 5, 101n16 Freaks and Geeks (1999) 8 Friday Night Lights (2006–08) 31n10 fuckability 9, 31n8 FX channel 7 Gabaldon, Diana 71, 73, 102n25 Game of Thrones (2009–19) 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 70, 83; see also specific episodes Gay, Roxane 80 gaze: brazen 61, 75, 102n20; disciplinary 60; as gender neutral 100n2; oppositional 23, 32n26, 61; politics of 59–68; see also female, gaze; male gaze gender gap: disproportionate sentencing 29; failure to protect subordinate parties 29, 30, 109, 175–176;

minimizing 28; racial and class permutations 30, 175; social justice 29, 110, 131, 175 gender/gendered: disparity 66; character of nude display 64; equality 21, 40, 50, 52, 99; imbalance 16; inequality 25, 45, 146; power dynamic 60; and racial diversity, in key creative behind-the-scenes positions 148; tropes 145 “Gender Matters” initiative 112, 126 gender politics: assessing of golden age discourse 9–12; of nudity and sexuality 58; in programming trend of TV serials 2 gentrification 165 Gerbner, George 156 Get Christie Love! (1974–75) 145, 167n7 Get Out (2017) 132n7 Gilbert, Sarah 88 Gilligan, Vince 4, 13, 31n16 Gill, Rosalind 51 Girls (2012–17) 2, 19, 58, 64–69, 177; see also specific episodes Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The (2008) 42 Gitlin, Todd 31n4 GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Media Award, for Outstanding Comedy Series (2019) 170n31 gladiators 64–65 Glaubman, Jane 32n21 Gleeson, Hayley 134n27 global capitalism 42, 51 GLOW (2018) 2 Goffman, Erving 92 Golden Age discourse, assessing gender politics of 9–12 Gråbøl, Sofie 50 grammar of individualism 51 Graphia, Toni 71 Graves, Alex 83 Gray, Herman 142, 143 Greer, Amanda 45 Greven, David 5 Grey’s Anatomy (2005–present) 144, 148; see also specific episodes Gross, Larry 156 Gubar, Susan 88 guests see hosts/guests Gunn, Anna 13

Index Haglund, David 66 Hale, Charlotte 91 Hale, Mike 114 Handmaid’s Tale, The (2017–present) 1, 4, 8, 118 Hansen, Miriam 100n5 “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” (S2 E8, 2012, Scandal) 146 Happy Valley (2014–present, UK) 9, 53n5 Haraway, Donna 103n35 Harpo Studios 143 Harris, Felicia 158 Havrilesky, Heather 19 HBO 6, 7, 8, 101n15 hegemonic feminism 139, 140 Hepburn, Audrey 120 Herman, Judith 109 Heroes (2006–10) 144 Herrmann, Tara 111 heterosexual sex scenes 78 Hill Street Blues (1981–87) 6 Hirsch, Jeffrey 70, 103n34, 159 Hollywood Diversity Report, UCLA’s 141, 156, 158, 169n24 Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983) 140 Homeland (2011–20) 1, 18–19 homesteading 104n45 homosexual desire 99 hooks, bell 23, 61 hosts/guests 88, 92–94, 103n35 House of Cards (2013–18) 4, 8, 14, 32n20, 120 How to Get Away with Murder (2014–present) 1, 145 Hull, Gloria T. 140 Hulu 8, 17 Hunt, Darlene 18 “Imaginary Enemies” (S1 E4, 2013, Orange Is the New Black) 122–125 incarceration rate, in US and Australia 122, 126, 134n27 income, education and disposable 6 Indigenous characters 130 indirect authorship 19–21, 28; cultural context 19, 24–25; industrial imperatives 19; interpretive grids 28, 45; production culture 19, 24 indirect feminist creative influence 28, 42, 52 indirect feminist creative input 51

185

indirect patriarchal creative input 51 industrial production culture 24 Insecure (2016–present) 177 institutional aggression, facing 30 intercourse 86, 103n31 intersectionality 139–170 iTV 31n9 Jermyn, Deborah 31n11 Jessica Jones (2015–19) 83 Johnson, Robert 168n10 Johnson, Steven 8 Joseph, Ralina 144, 146, 167n6 Joy, Lisa 29, 87, 99 Judging Amy (1999–2005) 2 Julia (1968–71) 146 Kackman, Michael 119 Kahlo, Frida 161, 162–163 Kaklamanidou, Betty-Despoina 31n14 Kanazawa, Satoshi 151 Kelley, David E. 111 Kenney, Anne 74 Kerman, Piper 110, 120 Kidman, Nicole 111, 112, 118 Killing, The (Forbrydelsen; 2011–14) 20, 21, 26, 28, 40–41, 43–46; aesthetic strategies 49; narrative strategies 48; postfeminist approach 48; production culture 49–51; season 3 of 46–51; see also Forbrydelsen (2007–12, Denmark) King, Regina 149, 151 Klinger, Barbara 113 Kohan, Jenji 18, 111, 120 Konner, Jenni 69 Kravitz, Zoe 112 Landgraf, John 1 Larsson, Stieg 42 “Las Dos Fridas” (Kahlo) 161, 163 Latinas/Latinos 147, 149, 169n26; audiences 169n24; in key creative positions 158; media gap 156–158; spin 157 Latinx gaze 160 Lauretis, Teresa de 178 Lauzen, Martha M. 87, 111–112, 147, 148, 149 Lawson, Richard 80, 81 Legitimating Television (2012) 9, 82 “Let’s Go Crazy” (S2 E7, 2015, Being Mary Jane) 151

186

Index

Levine, Elana 9, 10, 82, 83 Lewis, Justin 53n3 “Line in the Sand” (S2 E9, 2015, Being Mary Jane) 151 Long, Amy 146 Loofbourow, Lili 65, 112 Lost (2004–10) 7, 8, 144 Lotz, Amanda 5 Lotz, Amanda D. 2, 31n4 Louis-Dreyfus, Julia 2 lust, nudity and 64 Mad Men (2007–15) 4, 7 male-centric dramas 4, 11, 12 male gaze 24, 58–67, 79, 81; constructing and deconstructing 62–68, 70, 90–92; destabilizing 65, 67; as mechanism of social control and punishment 29; racial nature of 32n26, 89, 91, 99, 175, 179n3 males/male: antihero cable dramas 5; and female authorship 89; glance 112; nudity 65; violence against women 94–95 Marcella (2016–present, UK) 19 Martin, Brett 4, 11–12, 31n13, 40 Martin, George R.R. 70 Martin, Peter 66 Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The (2018–present) 8 masculinity 5, 10 Maslany, Tatiana 1 mass culture 10 Masters of Sex (2013–16) 101n13 McCabe, Janet 31n11 McCall, Katie 102n18 McNutt, Myles 62 McTighe, Peter 127 media: activism 147, 152; gap, Latino 156–158 melodrama 11, 110–111, 119, 150, 153 Meston, Cindy 102n18 #MeToo movement 27, 109, 131 Miami Vice (1982–89) 6 Michaels, Meredith 45 Milano, Alyssa 109 Millennium Trilogy (Larsson) 42 Miller-Young, Mireille 155 misogynists 13 Mittell, Jason 5, 11, 31n4, 41, 121, 122 “Mockingbird” (S4 E7, 2014, Game of Thrones) 70–71, 71

Molina-Guzmán, Isabel 157–158, 167n5 Moonlighting (1985–89) 31n5 Moore, Ronald D. 71, 72, 74, 85–86 Moraga, Cherríe 140 moral legibility 111 Morgan, Joan 151 Moriarty, Liane 110, 111 Morrissey, Tracie Egan 66 Moss, Elizabeth 1 mothers: maternal ambivalence 45, 53n5; new momism 45; see also working mother “Mother’s Mercy” (S5 E10, 2015, Game of Thrones) 64 Mueller, Hannah 62, 65, 104n40 multiracial feminism 139 Mulvey, Laura 59–60, 100n2 Murdoch, Rupert 142 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) 132n8 Nagoski, Emily 103n31 Najumi, Mohadessa 123 nakedness 24, 90, 92 NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers) 132n8 narrative strategies: female gaze 23–24; female subjectivity 22–23; use in Forbrydelsen and The Killing 48 Native Americans 157 NBC 6, 31n5 Neal, Mark Anthony 151 Negra, Diane 31n11 Negrón-Muntaner, Frances 157 neoliberalism 44; feminism 25, 32n27; intensification of 51; as interpretive grid 28 neo-platoon format 143 Nestingen, Andrew 47 Netflix 7, 8, 17, 146 Newman, Michael Z. 9, 10, 82 new momism 45 Newton, Thandie 131n1 niche markets 6 Nolan, Jonathan 29, 87 “No Place Like Home” (S1 E1, 2013, Wentworth) 127–131, 133n21 Nordic noir 42–43, 47 normatized model, conformity to 119 Nowalk, Peter 145 Noxon, Marti 1, 177

Index nudity 24, 62–68, 80, 90, 92–93 Nurse Jackie (2009–15) 1, 18 Nussbaum, Emily 12, 31n13, 80, 81 Och, Dana 71 “One Man’s Trash” (S2 E5, 2013, Girls) 66, 69 One Mississippi (2015–17) 177 operative contradictions: complicating feminist narrative 89–98; diegetic world’s post-racial/postfeminist character and gendered coding 95–98; fetishizing female nudity and deconstructing male gaze 90–94; male and female authorship 89; male violence against women 94–95 oppositional gaze 23, 32n26, 61 oppositional texts 21–22 oppression: axes of 141; Black 20; experiences of 143; interlocking 139–140; racial 146, 154 Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) 30, 143, 152 Orange is the New Black (2013–19) 2, 8, 21, 29, 64, 110, 111–112, 120–122, 127, 129, 132n13, 133n24, 134n25, 176; see also specific episodes Orphan Black (2013–17) 1 OTT media services 1, 9 Outlander (2014–present) 21, 26, 28, 58, 71–72; aesthetic strategies 62, 86; case study 73–74; depiction of sex on 86; rape on 82–86; romance and sex on 74–82; sexual codes on 86–87; see also specific episodes Outstanding Lead Actress: in Comedy Series 1; in Drama Series 1 Oz (1997–2003) 4, 7, 111, 121, 129, 133n24 pan-ethnic blurring 157, 170n29 Paragis, María Paula 119 Paul, Mary Jane 149 Peak TV 1, 141; rise of 2; and Third Golden Age of Television 4–12 Pearson, Roberta 5 “Personal Jesus” (S14 E10, 2018, Grey’s Anatomy) 168n9 Petermon, Jade 154 Pinedo, Isabel 132n7 politics: of empathy 113; of gaze 59–68 Ponterotto, Diane 60, 65, 119

187

Porter, Jo 112 Pose (2018–present) 178 postfeminism 25, 32n27, 41, 51, 95; discourse of choice 28; as interpretive grid 45, 53 post-racial strategies 95, 143–146; color-blind casting 143–145; diversity without cultural specificity 145 Power/Knowledge (Foucault) 60 premium cable, visual codes of sex and nudity on 62–68 prestige discourse 10 “Primetime” (S2 E10, 2015, Being Mary Jane) 151 primetime dramas 11 Prisoner (1979–86) 110, 125–126 Private Practice (2007–13) 145 production culture 16, 24–25, 49–51 protagonists 2, 21 Psychology Today (2011) 151 pulpy material 112 “Push Comes to Shove” (S1 E4, 2017, Big Little Lies) 119 quality: audience 6; demographic 9, 82; TV, discourse of 9–10, 82, 119 Queen Sugar (2016–present) 21, 30, 147, 148, 149, 152–156; see also specific episodes Qureshi, Bilal 155 racial diversity, in behind-the-scenes and on-screen positions 142, 148 racially conscious strategies 147–149; centering women of color 147–149; cultural specificity 145; social complexity 147 racism/race 145, 165 Radulovich, Lara 112, 126, 127 Radway, Janice 77 Raimi, Sam 70 Ramírez-Berg, Charles 158 Ramy (2019–present) 179n3 “Randy, Red, Superfreak, and Julia” (S4 E1, 2014, Scandal) 146 rape: facile use of 29, 59; legal system’s failure to protect women from 109; on Outlander 82–86 Reading the Romance (Radway) 77 “Reading the Signs” (S2 E11, 2015, Being Mary Jane) 152 reality checks 5, 92 Red Right Hand, The 133n22, 178

188

Index

Redvall, Eva 49 Reich, Nadia Kløvedal 50 Reid, Mark 22, 42 Reinhard, Michael 112–113 relative morality 5 representational intersectionality 121 residual gender scripts 5 Rhimes, Shonda 143, 144–145, 146, 167n8 Robbins, Bruce 42, 44 Robinson, Jocelyn 125 romance, and sex on Outlander 74–81 romantic sex scenes 62 Rome (2005–07) 91 Rosenberg, Alyssa 13 Rosenberg, Melissa 83 Rossie, Amanda 152, 168n15 Rottenberg, Catherine 25, 32n27 Rowe, Kristin Denise 168n12 Ryan, Maureen 15, 73, 81, 87 San Diego State University 15 Sandoval, Chela 139 Saracho, Tanya 30, 147, 158–167, 170n28,n33 Saraiya, Sonia 112 Scandal (2012–18) 145–146, 148; see also specific episodes Scandi noir 42 Scott, Patricia Bell 140 Screening Sex (2008) 67 “Seeing Things” (S1 E2, 2014, True Detective) 62, 63 Selma (2014) 152 serial narratives: intertwining narrative arcs 29, 59, 95; television drama 1–30 “Serious Mothering” (S1 E2, 2017, Big Little Lies) 113 Sex and the City (1998–2004) 2, 4, 7, 11–12, 31n15 sex scenes: awkward 177; consensual 65, 92, 101n7; depiction on Outlander 74–81, 86; heterosexual 78; queer and straight 164; romantic 62; visual codes of sex and nudity, on premium cable 62–68 sex/sexual: abuse 109; assault 83, 85, 126, 127; codes, on Outlander 86–87; desire and gender identification 60; encounters 78; energy 80; and gender double

standard 20–21, 65; interludes 67, 79; pleasure 61, 71; position 62; realism 81; verisimilitude 67; violation, on Game of Thrones 83 sexuality 68, 79, 151, 164 Shabazz, Rashad 130 Sharp Objects (2018) 1 Shield, The (2002–08) 4, 7 shows about Blacks 142 Showtime (SHO), pathologized female antihero on 18–21 Shrill (2019–present) 177 Siebler, Kay 150 Silver, Steven 13 Simon, David 4 Six Feet Under (2001–05) 31n10 Sjowall, Maj 42 SMILF (2017–19) 177 Smith, Barbara 140, 167n3 Smith, Murray 5 Snyder, Kieran 20–21 soap opera 10, 77, 82 social complexity 147 social justice, gender gap in 29, 110, 131, 175 Soloway, Jill 18 “Somebody’s Dead” (S1 E1, 2017, Big Little Lies) 113 Song of Ice and Fire, A (Martin) 70 Sons of Anarchy (2008–14) 14, 32n20, 83 Sontag, Susan 65 Sopranos, The (1999–2007) 4, 7, 11 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois) 60 Spacey, Kevin 8, 31n7 Spartacus (2010–13) 58, 64–65, 67, 70 Spencer, Leland 154 Stanley, Alessandra 167n6 Star, Darren 11 Starz cable network 72 stereotypes 22, 43, 99, 119, 158, 160 Stoeffel, Kat 19 strategic ambiguity 146 Strauss, Carolyn 70 subscription-based networks 25–26 Sud, Veena 50 Sveistrup, Søren 42, 49, 50 symbolic annihilation 156 Talk Back 150 Tapert, Rob 70 target audience 26, 34n34

Index Telecommunications Act (1996) 6 Television Critics Association, female membership in 9 television: complex 41; complex dramas 5; complex narratives 11, 19–20, 40, 111; industrial practices 9; production, key creative roles in 50 Television’s Second Golden Age (Thompson) 10 Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity (TTIE) 158 Third Golden Age of Television 4–12 thirtysomething (1987–91) 31n5,n10 This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) 140 This Is Us (2016–present) 31n10 Thompson, Becky 139, 167 Thompson, Robert 10 three-plot narrative structure 48 #TimesUp movement 109 Time Warner see WarnerMedia “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” (S1 E16, 2015, Outlander) 84 Tounsel, Timeka 151 Transparent (2014–19) 4, 177 Trojan horse 120 True Detective (2014–present) 20, 43, 58, 61, 62, 63, 66; see also specific episodes Truth, Sojourner 139 Twin Peaks (1990–91) 6, 31n5, 43, 49 Union, Gabrielle 131n1, 149, 168n14 United States of Tara (2009–11) 18 universal childcare 45–46, 52, 53 Upadhyaya, Kayla Kumara 80–81 UPN 5 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 32n23 Vaage, Margrethe Bruun 5, 13, 82 Vallée, Jean-Marc 111, 112 Veep (2015–17) 1 Vera (2011–present) 9 Vernoff, Kristin 168n9 Vida (2018–20) 21, 26, 30, 147, 148, 149, 158–167, 177 Villarreal, Lindsey 159 Villegas, Richard, Jr 159 Vint, Sherryl 96

189

violence against women 109–134 visual codes of sex and nudity, on premium cable 62–68 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Mulvey) 59 Wächter, Cornelia 129 Wahloo, Per 42 Walker, Alice 170n32 Walker, Rebecca 167n3 Walker, Sarai 177 Wallander (2005–13, Sweden) 41 Wallem, Linda 18 Warhol, Robyn 11 Warner, Kristen 143, 144, 167n8 WarnerMedia 7 Watson, Reg 112, 125 Wayne, Teddy 177 Ways of Seeing (Berger) 60 WB 5 Weber, Arnold 87, 88 “Wedding, The” (S1 E7, 2014, Outlander) 73, 74–82, 76–77, 78 Weeds (2005–12) 18, 120 Weiner, Matthew 4 Weinstein, Harvey 109 Weiss, D.B. 70 Wells, Ida B. 139 Wentworth (2013–present) 21, 29, 110, 112, 125–127, 128, 177–178; see also specific episodes Westworld (2016–present) 2, 21, 29, 58–59, 87–98; aesthetic strategies 62, 86; deconstructing male gaze 90, 91; distinction between nude and naked through non-mutually exclusive strategies 90–93; exploiting male violence against women 94; female gaze 87; feminist narrative 89–98; fetishized nudity 90; see also specific episodes “What do I Care for Morning” (S2 E3, 2017, Queen Sugar) 154 Wheatley, Helen 61, 64, 75 white-led feminist movement 139 Williams, Linda 11, 111, 155 Wilson, Patrick 66 Winfrey, Oprah 143 Win, Penny 112 Wire, The (2002–08) 4, 19 Witherspoon, Reese 111, 112 “Wolf and the Lion, The” (S1 E5, 2011, Game of Thrones) 64

190

Index

women: bodies 62; childless, voluntarily 31n14; of color 147–149; in key creative roles 2, 15, 18, 22, 112, 147; labor force participation of 26, 28, 45–46; legal system’s failure to protect from rape and domestic violence 109; pathologizing of 18–21; political participation by 2; in prison 122, 126, 130, 134n27; sexual arousal in 102n18; share of behind-the-scenes and on-screen positions 15, 17, 69, 111; violence against 109–134; working, market of 11; writers on TV 50, 69, 72, 87, 147–149; see also females/female Woodley, Shailene 112 Wood, Rachel Evan 131n1 Woods, Faye 80, 103n30

working mother: “bad mother” trope 28, 44, 48, 52; economic inequality and 40–54; universal childcare 45–46, 52, 53 Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) 2 X-Files, The (1993–2002) 4, 6 Yong, Amy 72 “You Get What You Need” (S1 E7, 2017, Big Little Lies) 114–120 “You Win or You Die” (S1 E7, 2011, Game of Thrones) 62, 63 Zalcock, Beverley 125 Zook, Kristal Brent 22, 42, 101n16, 142, 143, 160–161