Post-racial politics and the mandate to desire: interracial love as liberation in Bridgerton

ABSTRACT

Shonda Rhimes’ latest televisual sensation updates her post-racial and post-feminist fantasies for a post-Trump world. Discarding her trademark colorblind casting, Bridgerton confronts racial tensions and gender disparities within a fanciful reimagining of the aristocracy of colonial Britain. Yet, in a move familiar to longtime viewers of Shondaland, the means of resistance to such injustice is gratuitous displays of interracial relationships. Bridgerton constructs a historical fantasy that centers authentic love and desire as the exclusive mechanism for constructing a post-racial and post-feminist society. Through love, the English aristocracy is transformed into a permissive, racially inclusive matriarchy wherein one’s duty is to live and love authentically. While previous scholarship has contextualized Rhimes’ work within neoliberalism, I argue that the racial and gendered politics of Bridgerton are more adeptly understood through Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism, which describes contemporary capitalism’s investment in mystifying authority and equating authentic consumption with identity construction.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-racial politics
• post-feminist politics
• capitalist realism
• television
• popular culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).