Productive Vulnerability: Black Women Writers and Narratives of Humanity in Contemporary Cable Television

Within the economy of black images, scarcity is the enemy of uninhibited expression. Without an abundance of offerings, series that advance beyond the pilot stage are subject to a kind of representational weathering. The excessive referencing of these texts—as lifestyle scripts and exhibitions of black (un)civility—provokes a heightened level of scrutiny that television shows dealing in white narratives evade. Compounding pressures to comply with industry norms, gratify network executives, and sustain high ratings tend to stifle black television productions and their creators.1 When a series carries the weight of proving that black shows are a worthwhile investment, or that blackness is not a subhuman condition, the esthetic and artistic values that might otherwise guide production become obscured.

Narratives of black womanhood are even more vulnerable to distortion due to the intersecting forces of racism and sexism which cast them as particularly inferior subjects.2 The perverse American mythology established during the slave economy framed black women as either Mammy, Sapphire, or Jezebel; therefore, offering up black female bodies as evidence of subservience and asexuality, unnatural strength and undesirability, or lasciviousness and criminal promiscuity.3 Cinema, radio, and eventually television took their cues from the literature, sheet music, and vaudeville shows that reproduced these repressive images. Black women consistently resisted this assault on their personhood, and developed the image of the Black Lady, in part, to combat the others.4 In contrast to the tropes surrounding her, the Black Lady is a distinctly middle-class performance that “relies heavily upon aggressive shielding of the body; concealing sexuality; and foregrounding morality, intelligence, and civility.”5 Although the derivatives of these images have been modified to fit 21st-century esthetic sensibilities, the Black Bitch, Ho, and Welfare Queen are just as pervasive as their antecedents.6 The culture industries overwhelmingly pander to these archetypes to make black women legible to their audiences, ultimately manufacturing “authentic” black womanhood as a catalog of dichotomies. Taken together, this confluence of vexations often misshape black female subjects into the images of pejorative stereotype, or unattainable ideal.

Even as the second decade of the 21st-century has seen a gradual increase in African American women protagonists on television, alternatives to exhausted tropes are rare innovations with few antecedents in U.S. television history.7 In the contemporary moment of investment in the black female consumer market, some black women writer-producers have leveraged their platforms to construct black women as multidimensional subjects that embody contradictions. Two such content creators, Mara Brock Akil, creator and former executive producer of Being Mary Jane, and Issa Rae, creator and executive producer of Insecure, have used press interviews, public lectures, and social media to reinforce the conceptions of dignified black womanhood presented in their respective series. This article explores how Akil and Rae strategically deploy vulnerability to reframe black women as human, countering the Hollywood convention of representing these raced and gendered bodies in extremes, either superhuman or subhuman.

Casting their protagonists as vulnerable is an intentional maneuver reflective of an active resistance to the “respectability/irreverence binary” that constrains most depictions of black women in popular culture.8 That is to say that Mara Brock Akil and Issa Rae have located black female subjectivity within an in-between space where erotic desire and features of black ladyhood are not mutually exclusive. The lead characters of Being Mary Jane and Insecure are college-educated black women raised in upper-middle-class households. Rather than treat their social standing as a preemptive shield against sexual exposure and potential distortion, however, Akil and Rae highlight the ways in which their protagonists blur traditional understandings of middle-class black womanhood. More than the capacity to fail or possess weaknesses, Akil and Rae operationalize vulnerability as a fundamental quality of humanness that accommodates contradictory attitudes, actions, and desires within their black female subjects without compromising their personhood.

In addition to emphasizing imperfection through narratives centered on relationships and sexuality, the creators also position themselves as the arbiters of their own work by routinely intervening in audience discourses. Thus, central to this inquiry are the numerous interviews and public discussions in which Akil and Rae have participated, offering unique insights into their artistic consciousness. Incorporating this extended material into my analysis reflects my own intention to capture Akil and Rae’s “complex personhood” as artists.9 In two separate studies of African American women screen artists, Rebecca Wanzo and Christine Acham argue that even those performers whose work blatantly conforms to stereotypical molds can and do negotiate various forms of defiance. An adequate critique of fictional texts should therefore include an analysis of the performer’s “verbalized and written reflections” alongside their character work.10

Engaging Akil and Rae’s unscripted content is also salient because they have been targeted as purveyors of negative images. Critics have accused both content creators of violating a sacred racial dictate of projecting only the most pristine portrayals into public discourse.11 As Michele Wallace has argued, the tendency to judge black women’s cultural productions as inherently dangerous to the project of racial advancement is rooted in a white, patriarchal logic invested in silencing black women’s thought.12 A black feminist analysis of Being Mary Jane and Insecure must therefore attend to the knowledge production that the series’ creators take up beyond their shows. Given that Being Mary Jane and Insecure are situated within the rigid infrastructures of elite media corporations, I read Akil and Rae’s additional creative labor as part of their approach to navigate the Hollywood establishment as outsiders, within. Carving out an additional platform beyond their scripted series allows the auteurs to simultaneously maintain status as commercially viable producers and enunciate counterhegemonic ideas that might otherwise be obscured or diluted.

While there are several other content creators whose work stands to disrupt repressive tropes, Akil and Rae are of interest for this analysis for multiple reasons. First, they have occupied comparable positions as auteurs focused on black women’s narratives at cable television networks that are not black owned.13 Platform ownership, which is thought to guarantee creative autonomy, persists as a dependent variable of interest in explorations of the progressive potential of commercial media. Researchers have invalidated the assumption that counterhegemonic images are consistently correlated with black ownership. Nevertheless, the idea that black owner-executives are best positioned to publish progressive black narratives persists.14 Second, Mara Brock Akil and Issa Rae share a similar artistic sensibility regarding black women’s sexuality and articulate humanity through explicit scenes of the erotic. Although their artistic approaches are not perfect, their series ultimately advance the discourse around race and (commercial) representation.

Black Images, Cable Television, and the Weight of Respectability

Black images have historically carried the burden of presenting humanity in forms that simultaneously invalidate pejorative stereotypes and pander to hegemonic esthetics and values that deny the realities of black lived experience.15 Producing media content with an explicit uplift mission is a well-worn pathway to human dignity that falls short of outright defiance, but has been vital to black freedom struggles across centuries.16 For example, commercial magazines penned by black women in early 20th-century America were used as instructive vehicles to model respectable middle-class lifestyles for those lacking socioeconomic privilege.17 Such publications sought to dictate black women’s lived performance with articles covering a range of topics, including mothering practices, adornment, and leisure activities. By relying on individual performances of propriety as a mechanism for racial uplift, proponents of the respectability model appeared to be complicit in self-policing on elitist terms. Practices of image management established in earlier periods prevailed, though not unchallenged, throughout the 20th century.18 As technological advancements transgressed old limitations with new media formats, the question of how best to represent black life, and black women more specifically, persisted.19

Black cultural producers have been enlisted to address this question of representation by generating stories that “protect or save black women, and black communities more generally, from narratives of sexual and familial pathology, through the embrace of conventional bourgeois propriety in the arenas of sexuality and domesticity.”20 Such a strategy of public containment is rooted in a valid anxiety of exposure and distortion that, as Candice M. Jenkins explains, is ultimately an effect of black sexual exploitation during and after slavery. Jenkins argues: “In such an overdetermined cultural framework, in which one’s black body is always already assumed to be signifying desire, the added vulnerability that comes with expressing something as personal and deeply felt as sexual attraction, filial affection, human tenderness, or need, takes exposure to a painful extreme.”21 Thus, black women writers like Mara Brock Akil and Issa Rae are transgressing racial dictates of sexual denial and silence when they dare to construct their characters as full human beings with vulnerabilities, like erotic desire. The politics of respectability demand that middle-class black women subjects, if they are “truly black,” forgo certain appetites and pleasures for the sake of presenting a positive image.22

Various black institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and fraternal organizations act as watchdogs of representation—publicly condemning media texts they deem derogatory and creating an alternative venue to celebrate affirming images.23 Notably, in 2014 a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. established a petition against the VH1 reality series, Sorority Sisters, a cable show centered around nine women who held membership in four different historically black sororities.24 Robin Caldwell, a black sorority member herself, helped disseminate the #BoycottSororitySisters hashtag that fueled the social media activism rampage against the show. Reality series centered around increasingly violent feuds between black women have become characteristic of VH1, and garnered audiences in the millions. Yet, Sorority Sisters is said to have incited more intense and widespread angst because the show pinned degrading stereotypes to the bodies of middle-class, college-educated women, the very bodies that have historically been symbols of respectability.25 Part of what makes Mara Brock Akil and Issa Rae remarkable, then, is their effort to argue for black women’s humanity by disrupting the norms of authenticity that dominate commercial industries like cable television. Rather than situate their black female protagonists in opposition to the excesses of so-called negative images, they force viewers to engage the characters as ambiguous figures that fail to fit into palatable dichotomies.

Cable television, especially premium networks like HBO, defines itself as an alternative space equipped to produce raced and gendered “counterprogramming” otherwise non-existent in network series.26 The proliferation of caricature-laden (un)scripted shows, however, demonstrates that even projects created by black producers often fall into hegemonic modes of representation in order to appeal to white audiences. Jennifer Fuller argues that black narratives function as a branding tool that cable networks use to demonstrate that they are “on the vanguard of television programming,” a quality that bodes well among their target demographic of white, urban, young professionals.27 At the same time, black shows are expected to attract a loyal audience of African American consumers. Surviving the competing demands of industry and culture as a black woman auteur; that is, authoring projects that fit within network logics of “edge” and “hipness,” that appeal to white audiences, and that meet the televisual expectations of authentic blackness, is a complicated endeavor.28 The two writers of focus in this study have authored counter hegemonic projects within a commercial context that inhibits representations that reflect a spectrum of black femininities. Mara Brock Akil’s series, Being Mary Jane, and Issa Rae’s series, Insecure, both emerged on cable networks situated within the entanglements of super-conglomerates: Viacom and Time Warner, respectively. Thus, their production strategies emerge as innovative and worthy of further examination.

Flawed by Design: The Construction of Mary Jane Paul

Mary Jane Paul’s entrance into the media landscape in 2013, shepherded by creator and executive producer Mara Brock Akil, prompted critics and viewers to compare the lead character with another primetime black leading lady, Olivia Pope of ABC’s Scandal. Like Pope, Mary Jane is an elite college-educated woman who, despite her professional success and alignment with normative beauty standards, finds herself unmarried in her late thirties. Falling into the gendered dichotomy that pits romance against career, both characters lead deviant love lives initially marked by affairs with married men. Many viewers that grew to embrace Olivia, whose transgressions occur in a lily-white fantasy world, refused to give equal pardon to Mary Jane.29 Unlike Pope, Mary Jane lives in the heterogeneous black mecca of Atlanta. She often uses sex and alcohol to cope with disappointments, and although she fails to live up to the ideals that she espouses, she is often critical when those around her deviate from black bourgeois conventions. Ultimately, the lead character’s imperfections “hit too close to home,” as one blogger explained, and therefore committed the cardinal sin of piercing the performance of strength attached to ideal black womanhood.30

Although the protagonist publicly embodies the ideal of the Strong Black Woman and seems well-poised to complete the Black Lady image by becoming a wife and mother, her private persona reveals that the projected self is a fragile fac¸ade. Akil makes this tension between the two selves apparent by giving the lead character two names. Mary Jane Paul is the name that appears on her professional resume, and the moniker that her friends use. Pauletta Patterson is the character’s given and family name, reserved for intimate settings with the other Pattersons. Mary Jane presents herself as composed and capable, regardless of the context. She is an excellent journalist who goes to work early and stays late to get the story right. She is a heroine to family and friends, willing to sacrifice anything to support those she loves. She is a hopeful romantic who understands black, heterosexual marriage to be the basis for racial uplift. Conversely, Pauletta is often unhinged. She isolates herself from others out of fear that her flaws will be exposed. She is envious of those who enjoy the things that she believes she deserves, and she tends to express her frustration in heinous and irresponsible acts. Combining behaviors associated with respectability and deviance in a single character is an intentional strategy aimed at exposing the contradictions of black female subjects. “I love to draw the viewers in with images that they think they know already, and I like to sort of dismantle them,” Akil said in a 2015 interview.31 The less easily her characters fit into extremes, the more they can be appreciated as fully human.

While Mary Jane’s unfulfilling love life enhances the dramatic appeal of the series, her labor as a journalist and a family nurturer complicate the character. As the host of her own cable news show, Talk Back, Mary Jane imbues her work with a critical race consciousness often lacking in mainstream news. Her fictional show has a format similar to that of MSNBC’s AM Joy. Like Joy Reid, Mary Jane uses her show as a vehicle to explore racially charged issues in all of their nuances.32 She offers generous readings of subjects that might otherwise be misunderstood by her viewers, such as an elite African American man whose suicide makes headlines. At the same time, Mary Jane is unrelenting and precise in her critique of guests who espouse thinly veiled racist views. Although the talented tenth ethos that pervaded her childhood home tends to impede Mary Jane’s capacity to interrogate her own class privilege—her father was the first African American executive for an Atlanta-based airline, her mother a school principal, and they introduced their children to other black elites through organizations like Jack and Jill of America—she continuously reaches for a black feminist framework to enlighten her viewers. Furthermore, the lead character is perpetually working to enlighten, inform, or otherwise uplift someone in her intimate circle of family and friends. An older brother who is a recovering drug addict, a niece who is a young single mother, a younger brother in college who moonlights as a weed dealer, a suicidal best friend, and an overly-involved mother battling lupus trade places as targets of Mary Jane’s energies. Although she complains about her family’s expectations of her, it is clear that the protagonist garners validation from playing the role of rescuer. Focusing on the dysfunction of others distracts Mary Jane from the reality of her own. Beneath the veil of respectability that her degrees and salary have afforded her, she is actually challenged by the same flaws she is attempting to correct in others.

While the first season of the series offers the audience an interior view of Mary Jane’s life, the second season draws the character’s shortcomings into public settings where her vulnerability becomes more glaring through the constant juxtaposition of Mary Jane and Pauletta. In the opening scene of Mary Jane stripping down to her underwear and shattering the floor to ceiling window that flanks the front of her house, Mara Brock Akil foreshadows the dismantling that awaits the protagonist. Although Mary Jane is herself the cause of the broken glass, as the season unfolds it becomes clear that she is reluctant to relinquish her fac¸ade of contemporary ladyhood. For a moment, the window shattering reads as a move toward freedom. The object Mary Jane uses to facilitate the breaking—a small, cubular fish tank strikingly similar in design to the architecture of the main character’s mid-century modern home—contains a solitary fish that represents her own existence as a discontented, unmarried woman. As a television journalist and the daughter of well-connected parents, she too lives her life on display, entrapped by the very ideal that is supposed to afford her greater social capital. Just before shattering the glass Mary Jane addresses the fish: “Hey Starsky, you still looking for Hutch?”33 Having just returned home from a fraught visit to her ex-boyfriend’s house, which he now shares with another woman who is pregnant with his child, the wounded woman appears eager to finally unshackle herself from the need to continue pursuing her own “Hutch.” She is releasing herself from the yoke of old desires and unmet expectations of marriage and motherhood.

In the very next scene, two weeks have passed and Mary Jane is hosting a dinner party for her equally accomplished upper-middle-class social circle. As she and her guests muse over Walter Mosley’s Life Out of Context and debate the vicissitudes of African American experiences during and after the Jim Crow era, it is clear that Mary Jane’s self-transformation has been thwarted. Just as she has repaired the broken window of her home, she also attempts to reclaim a life of bourgeois respectability which she believes is her birthright. Reaching back to old tactics of self-aggrandizement, Mary Jane proceeds to do something the audience has seen many times before—scrutinize others in an effort to assuage her own feelings of inadequacy and shame. The tequila-fueled rant that precipitates at her dinner party, however, is more malicious than previous speeches Mary Jane has given under the guise of tough love. Beginning with an essentializing critique of the black poor in which she borrows from Bill Cosby’s logic of the uneducated underclass to make her point, she eventually aims her contempt at her own two brothers and the only married couple in attendance at the party.34

Through this failed attempt at progression, Mara Brock Akil makes it clear that Mary Jane is not only unable to move on from her immediate past, but that she is also tethered to a larger history of repressive images of black womanhood. By infusing the scene with the rhetoric of 21st-century debates about respectability, Akil situates Mary Jane’s romantic struggles within the context of gendered notions of racial uplift. She lashes out at others to deflect attention away from herself and what she perceives as her own inability to perform ideal blackness. Her unspoken angst is finally revealed when her brother responds to the verbal attack with a jab of his own: “Wow, now I see why David doesn’t want you. Now I see why he’s with that white chick.”35 In alignment with historical discourses, Mary Jane has been excluded from the conception of true womanhood because she is emasculating, and therefore undesirable. Meanwhile, a white woman has effortlessly taken her place. Since Mary Jane invests in a neoliberal ideology of success that points to “wanting more,” as the most important factor for achievement, she gives herself little room to deviate from the model of respectability embodied by her parents. Mary Jane reads her singleness as a form of racial delinquency, as the result of her own brokenness, and as the cause of her unhappiness.

The unfiltered humanity that Mary Jane embodies initially repelled some viewers, but gratified others. In an article penned for TheAtlantic.com, Enuma Okoro reads Mary Jane as a more authentic and relatable black woman figure because “unlike Olivia Pope, Mary Jane does not pretend to be an unbreakable force unto herself.”36 Indeed, Mary Jane’s abundant shortcomings are the result of one black woman creator’s effort to disrupt images of professional black women as flawless, invincible, and non-sexual, and to replace them with images imbued with the contradictions of everyday life. When asked to describe the character in one word during a promotional interview that aired on BET.com, Mara Brock Akil responded with two: beautifully flawed.

It was our tagline I think for last season, but really she’s beautifully flawed. I think we need to start embracing that part of our humanity, especially black women. We’re trying to sort of correct the wrongness that has been done to us, so we want positive images to combat all these negative stereotypes. And I really feel like positive images can be just as damaging as negative images.… We’re human beings. We’re going to make mistakes. The strong black woman is going to mess up. She is not strong all the time.37

The motive behind exposing Mary Jane’s vulnerability is to allow black women to envision the worst of themselves alongside their best qualities, and to make peace with the tension.

In her first series, Girlfriends (UPN), and again in Being Mary Jane, Akil aimed to avoid scripting characters that conformed to clear definitions of good or bad.38 Rather, her characters tend to breed and embody polarities. They are simultaneously compassionate and vindictive, professional and irresponsible, accomplished and unstable. Akil further punctuates her artistic agenda by explaining the rationale that undergirds her creative choices in consistent terms. In the case of Being Mary Jane the creator’s work of deconstructing idioms is also apparent in the treatment of sexuality. Scenes of an erotic nature are common on the show and transcend conventional notions of the kinds of bodies that perform sex on television. For example, Mary Jane’s elderly parents and her overweight niece also engage in intercourse on the show. It is the main character’s oscillation among disparate roles—mistress, telejournalist, bootycall, hopeless romantic—that complicate her sexual self and expand the definition of dignified black womanhood.

Normalizing Black Women’s Sexuality

The lexicon of black womanhood in the American imagination has always been bound to sexuality. Efforts to degrade black women to the level of inferior others have been facilitated through legal, economic, and ideological discourses that either desexualize or hypersexualize. America’s attempts to render the black female body void of fundamental human capacities and emotions can be read through the caricatures of the asexual Mammy and her derivative, the emasculating Matriarch, who are both uninterested in the erotic and necessarily undesirable. On the other side of this constructed dichotomy, black women have been rendered criminally promiscuous and likely to wield their bodies as destructive forces against innocent men and the state. A singular idea undergirds each of these repressive images: black women are the antithesis of ideal white ladies, and are, therefore, not quite human. Any assertion of black women’s humanity, then, must always be read in relation to sexual politics.

Popular culture tends to allow for black women who are sexually muted characters like Miranda Bailey (Grey’s Anatomy) or the lascivious figures who populate the background of various male-dominated music videos in large quantities.39 Meanwhile, the Carrie Bradshaws of the television landscape represent normative sexuality and sexual pleasure as the domain of white women. Thus, an analysis of how Mara Brock Akil expresses her character’s sex lives is essential to reading her creative work as counterhegemonic. Through representing healthy sexuality as a fragment of the larger self, Akil scripts black women as full human beings whose erotic capabilities are an extension of their humanity.

Recuperating black women’s sexuality is among Akil’s key objectives in her televisual work. She breathes life into her characters by treating them as human beings whose sexuality is a given, rather than a mystery that must be explained to the audience. Akil aims for enlightenment through familiarity. Seeing Mary Jane urinate and masturbate in the first episode of the series reminds the audience of what is already known, while also beaconing toward a more profound truth. Black women’s sexuality, like the urge to empty the bladder, is not a marker of bestiality but a marker of humanity. The complexity of that sexuality, then, demands no further justification than does the basic functions of the human urinary system. Since the bathroom is a gendered space, on and off screen, Mary Jane’s urination scene is itself a critique of “normal humanness” as defined by Hollywood.40 Taking its cues from the philosophical project of whiteness that Sylvia Wynter refers to as the “invention of Man2,” mainstream cinema and television have framed the bathroom as a place where men participate in the self-relieving, biological process of peeing, and where women take up the coerced act of primping.41 By breaching conventional notions of masculinity and femininity, Akil and the other series writers direct viewers to engage Mary Jane as a human, not an Other. Rather than contributing to an apologetics of black womanhood, Akil imbues her protagonist with the right to simultaneously embody and express modes of being that seem at once to be incompatible. Mary Jane, like her creator, is cognizant of the stereotypes that threaten every move of the black female body. Such an awareness is yoked to black female consciousness. Nevertheless, in Akil’s storyworld, the constraints of public perception fail to subjugate the untidy nature of human desire.

Indeed, the complexity of Mary Jane’s sexuality is most vivid through moments of contradiction. When the reality of her sexual nature bubbles up around the elements of her life that more easily yield to self-management, Mary Jane’s vulnerability emerges alongside of her strength. The capacity to be seducible and dominant, and the tension that arises from those qualities, further distinguishes the protagonist from black female archetypes.

The show’s sophomore season explores Mary Jane’s ambiguous relationship with pleasure as she moves across a spectrum of agency. Even as she avows her right to engage her sexuality as she pleases, she struggles to make peace with the limitations of her control over the body. In episode six, titled “Pulling the Trigger,” tensions around bodily autonomy and perception come to the fore when Mary Jane experiences an inadvertent orgasm.

Early in the sophomore season the lead character is faced with the awareness that she may have forever lost her one true love. Following the classic formula for redemption narratives, Mary Jane attempts to redesign her life around new dreams that appear to be more firmly within her grasp. Inclusive of this attempt to reconstruct her reality is securing a career-enhancing interview, and ensuring her future as a mother by undergoing the process of oocyte cryopreservation, or egg freezing. Her goals to advance her career and subvert the biological clock collide when she is finally granted an interview in a subject’s home.

In the midst of debating the gendered nature of racial oppression with Shelton Blake, a prominent attorney who has targeted Mary Jane with increasingly overt romantic advances and has promised to offer information for a story, Mary Jane pauses the conversation to visit the bathroom. Although suspicious of visiting the source in his home, the appeal of an exclusive compels her to agree to the meeting.

The conversation pivots toward the sexual when Shelton comments on her physique.

Mary Jane: … Truth be told, not only has society tried to smother black women, we’ve also been smothered by the very black men who claim to defend our honor. But at least you guys have someone to go home to, chit chat with, talk out your troubles. But who the hell takes care of us? Whose left to love the black woman? … At the end of the day, our men aren’t there. So you think this is hard, living up in this massive house—try being a single black woman in America. That’s hard.
Shelton: Yeah, you’re sexy.
Mary Jane: Ok, see that’s the belittling that I was just talking about. Why is it that men automatically have to reduce us down to our sexuality? Why can’t you, excuse me, hear me, and not try to minimalize [sic] me down to a pair of tits and ass? I thought you were a little smarter than that.
Shelton: I do hear you, Mary Jane. That’s why I think you’re sexy … You know what I find most attractive about you, is your passion, your wit, your, your perceptions on life. That’s why I called you. Not because of your full lips, your high cheekbones, or those soulful brown eyes that you have. I called you because you are the absolute best person to share this story with the world.
Mary Jane: Can you show me which way to your powder room please?42

Upon entering the bathroom and finding physical evidence of what she suspects may have been prompted by her hormone treatment, Mary Jane telephones her gynecologist.

I’m one of Dr. Morris’ patients and I just experienced like a, like a discharge. No, more of like a massive orgasm. [inaudible response] Uh, no, like totally out of the blue. [inaudible response] I just took it this morning. [inaudible response] Oh so it’s totally normal. [inaudible response] Ok, ok.43

The fierce timbre in Mary Jane’s voice as she presents her argument to Shelton reveals that she is speaking to an interior battle between fulfilling the self and capitulating to external forces, a struggle both specific to her own present circumstances and known to black women generally. While she acknowledges that her desires matter and can be no more eradicated than those of any man, she has become exhausted from the public assault on that truth. Each step she takes toward an autonomous femininity is met with an impediment—a man who fails to love her the way she wants to be loved, a reproductive system that fails to align with her ideal life sequence, a public that rejects her nonconformity to gendered restrictions of desire. Collectively, these oppositions fray her sense of self. Nevertheless, Akil’s use of tensions in this scene demonstrates that while Mary Jane’s dignity—and that of all black women—may be under attack, her humanity has not been undone.

Under the barrage of caricature and other calamitous tactics, Mary Jane’s capacity to fully embrace her humanity and stand in the complexity of black womanhood is constrained. Although Mary Jane seeks to correct the falsehoods and impossible expectations that smother black women, she also absorbs them to some degree. Her response to Shelton’s initial statement about her sexual appeal reveals a reading of the body as being in opposition to the mind. The challenge, as presented by the writer(s), is to understand intellect, soul, and body as mutually constitutive, rather than yielding to a societal standard that seeks to compartmentalize these components of self. The burden that society assigns to black women’s bodies obscures what Shelton intends as a compliment, and prohibits Mary Jane from reveling in this moment of potential gratification. Ultimately, Shelton’s corrective representation of his thoughts offers the preferred definition of black female sexuality that Akil invites the audience to exchange for the lady–whore dichotomy.

Through the conversation between Shelton and Mary Jane, Akil communicates that her efforts to place black women’s humanity beyond negative images is not an indication that she ignores their durability. She acknowledges the distortions and invites the audience to transcend them. In this case, the invitation is to accept Shelton’s assertion that his appreciation of Mary Jane’s lips, cheekbones, and eyes are bound up with his attraction to her mind and rhetorical abilities. By defining Shelton’s spectatorial pleasure and Mary Jane’s unpredictable physical pleasure as “totally normal,” the writer(s) render the denial of sexuality as the abnormal practice. This episode communicates that black women can be vulnerable to erotic desire without being hypersexual.

In a sponsored conversation published on the network website following the “Pulling the Trigger” episode, Akil explains her rationale behind these unorthodox scenes of everyday life where female sexuality obtrudes the ordinary. The creator’s aim is to render black female desire as unremarkable and habitual as the mundane moments that it seems to disrupt.

Women need to own their sexuality. Otherwise, if we don’t, then it kind of sends the message that we’re really only here for a man’s convenience. And I think for women, but specifically for women of color, if you are owning your sexuality somehow you’re a whore or a stripper or otherwise you need to be pious. And it’s like no, no, no … I’m a lot in between here.44

These words reiterate that the emphasis on sexuality in Akil’s female-centered work is an intentional component in her larger narrative strategy. Leaning into the subject matter that is typically neglected or framed in ways that elicit shame is part of her creative mission. The sexually-themed stereotypes that haunt black female images do not repel her; in fact, they seem to inspire her. In the aforementioned interview, as in her fictional work, Akil taps into a shared code of anxieties in order to interpolate an intended viewership. Once she has captured their attention, she offers an alternative way of relating to the sexual self—“own[ing]”— and an alternative language of being—“in between.”

Read in concert, Akil’s televisual work and public rhetoric cohere as black feminist pedagogy. Akil does not label her work as feminist, yet, by “embracing rather than defending against the intimate vulnerability that African American subjects face daily,” through empowered sexual representations, she is engaging a critical project of black female subjectivity in the same vein as black women blues singers and hip-hop artists before her.45 She pivots between platforms and personae to broadcast her philosophies, and not just her content, to the widest possible audience. In interviews and speeches she uses her own voice to punctuate and clarify the actions of her characters. This multi-layered communication approach allows Akil to effectively disseminate counterhegemonic ideas even within commercial contexts. For example, BET paired each episode of the second season of Being Mary Jane with post-show interviews featuring Akil and celebrity style expert Tai Beauchamp. Branded as “color commentary” to complement cosmetics maven and sponsor, Covergirl, this linked content was likely conceived of as an additional vehicle for advertising revenue. Nevertheless, Akil uses these concise videos to articulate the deeper meanings and motivations of her work. Drawing on the dramatic material of each episode, these paratexts present the audience with interpretations not easily accessible within the show.46 In the post-show discussion that aired in conjunction with “Pulling the Trigger,” Akil interrogates Mary Jane’s search for a medical explanation for her orgasm. She points to the fact that Mary Jane “needed to feel like it was the hormones” that triggered a physiological response as an indicator that the protagonist is uncomfortable with her body’s capacity to experience pleasure. By attending to Mary Jane’s anxiety around sexuality, Akil guides viewers to acknowledge and reject their own erotic angst.

In addition to her strategic use of paratexts, Mara Brock Akil also uses public lectures as a mechanism for steering the interpretation of her content and disrupting restrictive logics of representation in general. The demand for positive portrayals of black women is a recurring theme in her talks that she typically uses as an entry point to expound on her rationale for writing black women’s sexuality into her work. At a 2015 conference held at Rutgers University, Akil challenged the metrics used to police black bodies on screen and explained their destructive capacity.

I can’t write positive images because that would be buying into fixing an image I never believed in. … Participating in rewriting the wrongs keeps me chasing behind something already done, or better yet, validating the lie by trying to offer a counter experience. It doesn’t allow me to just simply tell the story of our humanity and not apologize for the rough edges.47

Her speech proposes an artistic framework that reads sex scenes and other dramatic tools as more than customary conveniences devised as scene enhancers. Mary Jane’s “rough edges,” and those of other characters Akil creates, are interventions that rescue black audiences from inaccessible standards and envision black humanity through vulnerability.

Mainstreaming Black Female Consciousness

One of the things that sets writer-producer Issa Rae apart from her counterparts is her emergence within the television landscape. Beginning her career as a digital storyteller with the online series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Rae initially conceptualized her brand through a multi-series catalog offered exclusively through her YouTube channel. Her distinct authorial voice, and undoubtedly the millions of millennial consumers drawn to her content, garnered interest from multiple Hollywood executives.48 Struggling to locate her own personality and quirks within the parameters of blackness normalized among her peer group, Rae used her content to imagine a hybrid identity that could accommodate her experience. Her embodiment of awkward blackness ruptured the instinctively cool and fierce Black Lady icon, replacing her with someone more grounded and self-referential. When pressured to mute the racial specificity of her original Awkward Black Girl narrative, Rae resisted. “The black part is what makes it special,” she stated in a 2017 interview. “We don’t get to be those characters. … That is an identity that we’re not allowed to have.”49

Following a failed project with ABC where Rae claimed she struggled to negotiate industry standards while maintaining her cultural fluency, she recommitted to her own rhetoric of flawed black womanhood.50 The outcome of her internal artistic reckoning is Insecure, a series focused around two young adult professionals, Issa and Molly, who are best friends. Together they confront romantic and professional breakthroughs and perils as they work to define themselves. Issa and Molly’s friendship began in college and has strengthened over time as they work through various challenges and triumphs, together. They give each other permission to be painfully honest with each other, even as they keep secrets from lovers and other women in their larger friendship group. Given the depth of their sisterhood, Issa and Molly are also capable of hurting each other with their words. Nevertheless, this is a relationship that survives intense arguments. Through their friendship Rae invites the audience into an intimate area of black women’s experiences, that space that they may only share with one or two others in the span of a lifetime. The friendship is a critical gateway to Rae’s own particular vision of vulnerable black womanhood. The juxtaposition of each character’s actions alongside of her perceptions of herself and of her interpretations of the other constitute an illustrative range of intersecting and competing idea of blackness, friendship, sexuality, and respectability.

Importantly, Insecure is rooted in a cipher of blackness. The consciousness that shapes the show materializes in the visual, sonic, and psychic elements that connect each episode. Landmarks of South Los Angeles, such as Randy’s Donuts, that punctuate each scene locate the characters in an urban terrain just beginning to succumb to the stampeding demands of 21st-century gentrification. Although the lead character, Issa, is required to engage the black and brown domains of Los Angeles for her work at an educational nonprofit, she travels these areas as a native. Her white coworkers routinely look to Issa to clarify the peoples and places of an urban experience that befuddles them as outsiders. She occupies a dual positioning. Issa’s coworkers envision her as one of us, but also as one of them. Her status as a degree-holding professional has not stripped her of cultural consciousness, it has only heightened her frustrations with the colorblind ethos that pervades the white world around her. Furthermore, the music that Issa listens to on her car radio and the subtle code switches she enacts when transitioning from her neoliberal office setting to social settings emphasize her blackness.51

One of the most profound maneuvers that Rae makes toward establishing the humanness of black women is in situating their narratives as widely accessible, while simultaneously emphasizing their particularities. Rae redeems her main characters’ subjecthood from the peripheral function of representing a foil to normative white womanhood. Her storyworld situates black women as both an entry point to universal discourses of relationships, career, and self-concept, and as exhibitions of a pointedly black feminist esthetic.52

In many episodes reflective surfaces function as portals that transport viewers into the soul circuit of the main character, revealing patterns between external triggers and the emotional reactions they provoke. Viewers also have access to the stream of self-dialogue that lives in Issa’s head through voiceovers and her iconic, self-centered rap performances. Taken together, Rae’s series inhabits the complex realm of black female interiority. Nevertheless, she envisions the show as an expansive project that dislocates culturally-specific experiences from the margins of public discourse and drives them to the center. Rae promotes her series as universally entertaining for all viewers who value comedic performance, even if they cannot access her specific consciousness.

Establishing Insecure as mainstream televisual content requires persistent and deliberate intervention from the creator. Such was the case in a 2016 interview conducted by Gayle King for CBS This Morning prior to the show’s premiere.

King: Are you concerned that people will think its only relatable to black people or black women?
Rae: No. I mean, I’m concerned with the people who are open-minded enough to watch and who feel like, [they] want to know more about this.
King: You’ve been compared to Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Rae: Which is an honor because I love Larry David’s work. [In] that show there were a lot of Jewish references and you know I would either look them up or just … figure them out by context clues and still laugh. And … you know that wasn’t an issue for me. I didn’t see a show about like, oh a Jewish guy, an old Jewish guy, what am I supposed to do with that, that’s not for me.53

Rae counters the critique that her series is not mainstream by articulating a revised logic of the relationship between black artistic expression and mass culture. She refuses to sanitize the aural, verbal, and visual rhetoric of the show, or dislocate racial markers from their black cultural context. Instead, she insists that viewers meet the text on her terms. Rae’s response ruptures hegemonic discourses which define normalcy through whiteness, and therefore require artists to dilute ethnic signifiers in order to appeal to white, arguably more desirable, audiences. Furthermore, by pointing to her own amusement with another comedy series outside of her experiential reality, Rae both refutes the invisibility of whiteness and the presumed inferiority of black female audiences. If shows with all-white casts that reflect exclusive perspectives and sensibilities are still accepted as mainstream, ghettoizing content from black artists that is similarly oriented to reflect a particular esthetic is irrational. In this and other interviews Issa Rae directs audiences to register the strangeness of whiteness, and the commonality of blackness.

Even when interviewed for a hip-hop audience on the nationally syndicated radio show, The Breakfast Club, Rae continued to emphasize the value of Insecure as a text that frames black characters as human, as ordinary people managing dilemmas and successes. “We’re just trying to remind people that black people are human at the end of the day,” she asserted. “And we’re not shunning the fact that we are black, like that is very clear.”54 On the one hand, Rae presents her show as an educational tool for white audiences that normalizes blackness without diluting it. Conversely, her project also draws on and assuages the angst of representing marginalized populations by offering expanded notions of dignity. Rather than force her characters to justify their presence in the televisual sphere through pristine behavior, she frees them to be awkward, untidy, and vulnerable without compromising their blackness. By satisfying network ratings expectations and attracting a racially mixed viewership across its first two seasons, Insecure demonstrates the capacity of black art to convey mainstream stories.55

Insecure as the “Prequel to Black Girl Magic”

A lot of you have asked why I decided to call the show Insecure, and it’s because there’s this like narrative going around, that’s awesome, that black women are fierce; they’re strong, they’re flawless. And I don’t know that life. And my friends definitely don’t know that life. So I wanted to center a show around like weak black women and the uncertainty that they feel on that journey to get to greatness. It’s like the prequel to black girl magic.56

Despite being college-educated professionals the lead characters of Insecure consistently face complications in their careers, friendships, and romantic lives. Some dilemmas, such as the significant salary gap between Molly and her equally positioned white male counterpart, reflect structural inequities and exhibit the characters’ resistance strategies and coping mechanisms. The relationship struggles that animate the series, however, are more often consequences of impulsive behavior and poor judgment. Although one member of the central friendship group presents as a class-conscious and respectable wife, Issa and Molly muddle through their love lives with little finesse or wisdom. Through relationship failures, Rae invites the audience to reconsider “weak black women,” and, consequently, interrogate their gendered expectations of strength and restraint.57

Rae’s most generative use of vulnerability was an act of infidelity perpetrated by Issa in the first season of Insecure. At the time of the transgression, Issa was in the midst of a years-long relationship with Lawrence, her unemployed boyfriend. Despite cohabitating, the couple’s intimacy had eroded under the strain of individual frustrations and miscommunication. Disenchantment with her career, exhaustion from Lawrence’s professional drought, and the angst of approaching her thirties culminate in the premiere episode, compelling Issa to confront her biting discontentment. While giving a presentation about her foundation’s offerings at a predominantly black and Latino high school, the students target Issa with questions about the areas of her life where she is most confused and dissatisfied: work, her relationship status, her adornment choices, and her vocal inflections, which they read as contrived and racially inauthentic. Frustrated with their interrogation, Issa offers the students a brief summary of her life in the hopes that their interest will shift to the after-school program that she is there to discuss.

Issa: Ok! Since you guys are so interested in my personal life, here it is. I’m 28, actually 29 ‘cause today’s my birthday. Uh, I came from a great family. I have a college degree. I work in the non-profit world because I like to give back. I’ve been with my boyfriend for five years. And I did this to my hair on purpose. So, I hope that covers everything. Does anybody actually have any questions about We Got Y’all?
Dayniece (Student): Why ain’t you married? Issa: I’m just not, right now.
Dayniece: My dad said ain’t nobody checkin’ for bitter ass black women anymore.
Issa: … Tell your dad that black women aren’t bitter, they’re just tired of being expected to settle for less.58

The intrusive line of questioning within the first few minutes of the series establishes Rae’s method of exposure as a storytelling tool. Issa’s attempts to deny or mute her emotions, to practice dissemblance in accordance with the Black Lady image, is futile.59 Although the protagonist goes about shedding her “aggressively passive” demeanor in imperfect ways, Rae frames her development toward an empowered subjectivity as natural and ultimately healthy.60 A spontaneous tryst with a former boyfriend is her first attempt to assuage the disappointment that haunts her interior life. In the season finale, Lawrence confronts Issa with suspicions of her unfaithfulness, prompting her to confess.

Rae anticipated that writing infidelity into her lead character’s story would jolt viewers. In fact, the decision was motivated by a desire to disrupt the prototype of female protagonists that has proven lucrative in Hollywood.61 Although Issa’s weaknesses are accessible from the first episode, the character does not read as a profligate. She is guilty, yet also underserved within her relationship. She is eager to assert her right to pleasure, yet capricious in her pursuit to secure happiness. Rae explained in a blog post that she intentionally situated the act of infidelity in a more stable moment in the relationship to direct viewers away from assigning blame to Lawrence.62 Instead, she invites the audience to consider the transgression as a critical juncture along a journey of self-discovery. It involves Lawrence and impacts him, but ultimately, the experience does not revolve around him.

After months of avoidance and tension between Issa and Lawrence, the conversation that facilitates closure in the relationship brings Rae’s vision of constructive vulnerability to the fore. The conversation unfolds in the finale episode of Insecure’s sophomore season.

Issa: Lawrence, I wanted to be better, for you, because of you. But, somewhere along the way I depended on you to be better for both of us. And when you were going through what you were going through, I just didn’t know how to handle it.
Lawrence: I mean, what could you have done though?
Issa: More! You know, that’s when you needed me to be better for the both of us. And, I didn’t even know how to do that for myself.
Lawrence: That makes two of us. Issa: And you know, what I did—
Lawrence: You don’t have to go through that.
Issa: It was the worst thing I could have ever done to you. And I wish I could somehow convince you that it wasn’t about you. You’ve only ever loved me, and expected me to want the best for you. And I promise I did. I still do. Lawrence, I still love you so much.
Lawrence: I love you too.63

Although it has taken her an entire season to find clarity, Issa eventually reaches a point where she can own her shortcomings without allowing them to define her. Cheating, in this case, is not an indicator of some intrinsic pathology that demands a cleansing of the black female protagonist. Rather, infidelity is an outcome of Issa’s immaturity and inexperience in managing the competing demands of her partner and herself. Without justifying the transgression, Rae guides the audience to read the act in conjunction with the rational frustrations and valid desires that inspired it. The act of betrayal is no small blemish, but it is also not the totality of Issa’s story. Furthermore, Rae also frames the decision to cheat as a productive one in that it signals the character’s choice to be “aggressively active for once.”64 Issa’s flaws are simultaneously generative, irrefutable, and relatable.

The rhetoric of vulnerability that animates Rae’s work on Insecure answers a third wave black feminist call for black women to be recognized as “fallible human beings and not women of mythical proportions.”65 As Kimberly Springer asserts, the fight against “strong black woman syndrome,” or the notion that black women possess superhuman capabilities to overcome adversity and therefore have no need of reasonable human allowances and protections, has been an ongoing concern for black women intellectuals.66 While Springer’s study focused on literature, Rae’s televisual work demonstrates that commercial media can also function as a site for expressing resistance. Furthermore, by taking up black women’s vulnerability within the context of male–female romantic relationships, an arena where the Strong Black Woman trope is continuously invoked, Rae reinforces the feminist orientation of her work.

Conclusion

In the midst of what has been called a “silver age” in black televisual representation, it is important to examine the images that dominate the contemporary moment and the ideological assumptions that undergird them.67 The overrepresentation of black women in reality series and the prevalence of shows that isolate black female characters in white worlds reveal an industry still ambivalent toward substantive change. Furthermore, contemporary movements to remedy problematic black representations in popular culture reflect a form of resistance that continues to invest in containment as a pathway to freedom. Importantly, these strategies of uplift through representation tend to be bound to black women’s bodies and fixated on how these subjects show up in the public sphere.68 It is reductive to suggest, as scholars and industry professionals have done, that the power to shape the black image economy rests “in the hands of audiences.”69 At the same time, it is impossible for the current system of image management to persist without the participation of black women. Social media platforms have become spaces where critics dichotomize media figures into positive and negative groupings, and malign the latter. Critique is not limited to content; producers and audience members also become targets of disdain when they cultivate and patronize so-called “negative” images. Black women who derive pleasure from Being Mary Jane, for example, find themselves defending their attraction to a show whose lead character urinates, masturbates, and engages in sexual intercourse with a married man on screen.70

Sustaining programming that centers black women’s narratives, then, requires the capacity to maneuver cultural expectations and institutional conventions that threaten the creative spirit. Thus, it is no small triumph that Mara Brock Akil and Issa Rae have used their television series, press interviews, and social media channels to build counternarratives that challenge the dichotomies that dehumanize black female subjects. While they have not succeeded in producing characters completely disentangled from the baggage that enshrouds representations of marginalized bodies, they have offered one template for subversive programming in a commercial medium. Akil and Rae’s strategic deployment of vulnerability in Being Mary Jane and Insecure creates a pathway to humanity that does not require black women to capitulate to hegemonic scripts in order to be visible. Thus, these writer-producers hold space for their characters and audiences to make peace with, and even delight in, the tensions that they embody. Investments in black women’s pleasure, though marginalized in liberation struggles, are, as Joan Morgan has written, central to recognizing their full humanity.71

One could read the contemporary moment in cable television as something less radical than what I have proposed in this article. It is true that, on one hand, black women appear to be recouping a space for playful exhibitions in excess and consumption of the Sex in the City variety, a debt accrued from the erasure of black female voices from third wave feminist treatises that have pervaded the televisual sphere.72 Visibility in the media landscape is a limited indicator of progress, however, as it is often fleeting and does not promise a diversity of images. Nevertheless, it is also true that Being Mary Jane and Insecure are black feminist expressions derivative of earlier articulations of anxiety, delight, fantasy, and fallibility. The work of 1920s blues singers, and eighties and nineties-era female MCs are the predecessors of these contemporary series. Reading these commercial media texts into a larger tradition of subversive cultural creation facilitates a way of imagining black women’s televisual presence beyond the specters of Mammy and Jezebel. Given the disavowal of black women’s pain and vulnerability in numerous arenas—from domestic life to medical texts—public testaments to black women’s humanity are all the more urgent.