Olivia Pope: a black post-feminist subject? Analyzing Scandal’s intersecting post-feminist and colorblind discourses

ABSTRACT

Previous analyses of Scandal have focused on how colorblind discourse in the series influences the representation of lead character Olivia Pope’s Blackness. Less has been written about how dominant discourses of race and gender intersect in the series. Correspondingly, post-feminist scholarship has overwhelmingly concentrated on discourses of gender in depictions of white women. This article seeks to bridge the gaps between scholarship on representations of race and gender on television. Situating Scandal within the context of post-feminist and colorblind discourses of gender and race that have been prominent on mainstream television since the early 2000s, this article takes an intersectional approach to interrogate how Olivia Pope, a Black woman, is incorporated into post-feminist discourse. Rhetorical analyses of episodes of Scandal’s seasons 1 through 5 uncover how colorblind and post-feminist discourses provide at their junction a restricted space for a Black post-feminist subject. Olivia Pope’s post-feminist characterization comes at the expense of obfuscating how her Blackness affects her identity as a woman, and effectively “posts” her Black womanhood. The visibility of the Black post-feminist subject in colorblind post-feminism is thus paradoxically contingent on the concurrent invisibility of Black women’s experiences and Black feminist concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-feminism
• colorblindness
• Scandal
• intersectionality
• representation

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dayna Chatman for her help and encouragement in writing this article, and for her invaluable insight that made the submission possible. I also thank two anonymous reviewers whose constructive comments considerably shaped this final version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristina Brüning

Kristina Brüning is a graduate student of American studies at Freie Universität’s John-F.-Kennedy Institute in Berlin. Her scholarship focuses on television studies and feminist media studies and her work explores the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and sexuality in contemporary American media culture. E-mail: [email protected]