Television and the “Honest” Woman: Mediating the Labor of Believability

Abstract

Between 2019 and 2020, three streaming series premiered on Netflix, Apple+, and BBC One/HBO: Unbelievable, The Morning Show, and I May Destroy You. All three narratively centered sexual violence against women, foregrounding the experiences of the women characters, and were produced within the context of the global movement #MeToo. We offer a conjunctural analysis of these programs within what we call the economy of believability, arguing that these shows should be read as fictionalized real-world phenomena, distilled for television but nonetheless reflective of deeply sedimented assumptions about women, sexual violence, and believability. We argue that the programs examine the struggle for belief as it manifests in three key forms of labor: (1) the affective performance of believability; (2) payment of the costs of believability; (3) entrepreneurially attaching value to believability. Our analysis positions the discourses and narratives of these shows—and of the real-world contexts they speak to—within the broader frame of a mediated, intersectional economy of believability, where contestations about how and when women may be believed play out in and through struggles over visibility, authenticity, and recognition.

The Influence of K-pop on Chinese Fans’ Gender Perspectives: A Comparative Analysis Based on BTS and Blackpink

“…In this case, Blackpink's development model emphasizes the integration of both local and international markets. They cater to the traditional East Asian concept of female sexual fantasies while also meeting the market demands for pop feminism and selfempowerment [13].…”

“…To break the barriers of patriarchy, Chinese fans prioritize a sense of female empowerment as it suggests the members of female idol groups have worked hard to dismantle the myth of self-reliance perpetuated by pop feminism and neoliberalism [13]. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that this perspective exists within a cultural context where heterosexuality remains orthodox and has not fundamentally altered the traditional gender status gap, as exemplified by the status of BTS [14].…”

Situating #MeToo: a comparative analysis of the movement in Catalonia and Portugal

“…These discrediting narratives were also echoed in some opinion pieces published in traditional media (e.g. Raposo, 2021), thus highlighting the contentious politics of believability that surround women who speak out about sexual assault (Banet-Weiser and Higgins, 2023).…”

Art after the Untreatable: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Violence, and the Ethics of Looking in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You

“…An illustrative example of the excesses of potentially signifying material in Coel's show is the last episode, when she stages three back-to-back fantasies in Arabella's attempt to resolve the narrative of her book. These scenes are animated, as a dream is by the "day's residues", by the discourses and figures of contemporary Anglo-American culture in the wake of feminist social movements like #MeToo and Time's Up [25] 11 (p. 228). Indeed, Coel brings the audience on a tour through revenge fantasy, softer encounters with restorative justice, and role reversing libidinal liberation.…”

“…Emerging scholarship on I May Destroy You has examined the series' portrayal of the stages of trauma and grief in the wake of sexual assault, its intersectional depiction of the labor of believability in its main character's attempts at legal redress, the show's subversion of rape television, and its resistance to genre, among other analyses [9][10][11][12]. In contrast to "most British and American television" that "uses assault scenes to pigeonhole victims before they get to be anything else", Caetlin Benson-Allott observes that I May Destroy You reinvents rape television by presenting its main characters-Arabella (Michaela Coel), Terry (Weruche Opia), and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), each of whom experience sexual assault in the show-as loving, strong, hilarious, suffering, complex people first [9] (p. 101).…”