A sexual subject: black women’s sexuality in Insecure

ABSTRACT

The black woman’s body has often been objectified in popular culture, exotified for its sexual otherness and objectified as inferior. Bearing on such tradition, the HBO series Insecure (2016—) utilizes the sexualization of the black woman’s body in both an intertextual and a resistant manner which in many ways reclaims the subjectivity of the objectified black woman. I argue that Insecure works to characterize its black women via their sexuality, as it ostensibly sexualizes them in ways reminiscent of retrograde exotification of black women’s bodies, but in fact reveals a subjectivity that is constructed through the women’s owning of their desires.

KEYWORDS:

• Insecure HBO
• black women
• sexuality
• television
• jezebel

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. To distinguish between Insecure creator-star Issa Rae and Insecure character Issa Dee, I henceforth use Rae to refer to the former and Issa to the latter.

2. It bears to mention the work of creators-stars of Broad City, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, who present unapologetic sexual subjectivity. The show marks a midground in addressing the racialized difference of the stars’ Jewish identity (see Jonathan Branfman 2019).

3. The phenomenon of the “actor-auteur” of color is much wider in web series (see Aymar Jean Christian 2018, 103), where Rae’s creative career budded.

4. Living Single (1993–1998) can be perceived as a precursor to the 21st century complex representation of black women’s sexuality. The show featured black women characters whose sexuality was neither stereotypical nor silenced (Cheers), but it nonetheless addressed sexuality more implicitly than do 21st century series.

5. Amalia Ziv (2015) names three main components of which the term “sexual subjectivity” consists: “1. sexual identity—sexuality being central to one’s self-definition or sense of self; having and being aware of distinct sexual tastes or desires and regarding them as defining characteristics of oneself; 2. desire—experiencing oneself as a desiring subject and as one whose desires are not merely reactive but self-originated; 3. agency—possessing sexual agency, that is, a capacity not only to identify one’s desires but also to act upon them” (16).

6. It is important to address, in this context, the British series Chewing Gum (2015–2017), which also features a black woman creator-star—Michaela Coel—and a protagonist set in many awkward situations, including sexual ones (Francesca Sobande 2019a). Seeing as it is a British production, however, the cultural context in which black women are represented sexually is somewhat different from that of American cultural context, as the two cultures have different racial and gender histories (see Hazel V. Carby 1997).

7. Havas and Sulimma (2020) argue that Insecure’s “cringe aesthetics” (focusing on viewers’ expected phenomenological cringe reaction to the awkwardness on screen) is more racial than gendered.

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Yael Levy

Yael Levy holds a PhD in Film and Television from the Tel Aviv University, where she teaches courses in film, television, and feminist theories. She has published articles regarding gender, sexuality, and textuality in film and television. E-mail: [email protected]