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

Abstract

As authors of their own series, Mara Brock Akil, creator of Being Mary Jane, and Issa Rae, creator of Insecure, have articulated their commitment to constructing black women as multidimensional subjects that embody contradictions. This article explores how Akil and Rae strategically deploy vulnerability in their televisual narratives to reframe black women as human; countering the Hollywood convention of representing black women in extremes, either superhuman or subhuman. The cumulative bodies of their work—that is, television series, press interviews, and promotional content—function as a pathway to humanity that does not require black women to capitulate to hegemonic scripts in order to be visible in the televisual sphere.