"The devil is always painted black": a queer black feminist critique of the accusatory space in insecure

This thesis examines whether the emergence of Black women television showrunners, creators and executive producers of television series, disrupts the spectator positioning of Black women in the accusatory space by analyzing season one of the HBO scripted series Insecure. I argue that Insecure, by employing established looking relations, continues mainstream medias practice of symbolically annihilating Black women, specifically Black characters who do not embody respectable traits. Despite the long tradition of Black women as oppositional image-makers, this thesis explores how Insecures adoption of mainstream conventions normalizes White supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal hegemony.