Supplemental Post #2-Tiana Williams

This week after rewatching the pilot episode for Insecure, I started looking into various assessments/opinions of the show as feminist as well as Issa Rae’s perspective on feminism. In an interview with Bust magazine, when discussing feminism, the article reads/quotes Rae saying-- 

 “My female friends are everything. They’re my support system. My rocks. We keep each other grounded and lift each other up. We definitely have a group chat going.” Leaning on and supporting other women is also connected to her identity as a feminist, though she wasn’t always at ease with the word. “I probably first became aware of the term ‘feminism’ in high school. I didn’t really identify with it because it just felt very white. I didn’t take the time to really explore it. In college, I discovered Alice Walker’s version of feminism—womanism. The word feminism still has a tinge of whiteness to it, but I understand the definition of the word now. I identify as a feminist because that’s what I believe in.”

Although Issa Rae doesn’t go deeper into her understanding of being a feminist (or perhaps the interviewer just didn’t probe) and how her own definition is directly influenced by Alice Walker’s definition of a womanist, it seems as though Rae understands feminism to be a source of empowerment and community, while also identifying feminism as “very white,” insinuating the exclusive nature of the term. In any case, it seems that Rae might not have fully articulated exactly how she specifically employs the term, especially in a political sense. Going back to the show’s pilot episode in which Issa Dee is shown at one point singing to her best friend Molly, “Nobody wants you cus you got a broken pussy,” I kept thinking back to Shoniqua Roach’s work on black pussy power and actress Pam Grier’s use of black pussy power in her films that enables her to “resist racialized gendered sexual subjection and tap into modes of erotic agency otherwise denied to her”(Roach, 10). Roach theorizes this by placing importance on “moving away from delimited understandings of pussy as female genitalia or an objectified entity of female sexuality” and in mobilizing black queer feminist thought in relation to black sex and gender. In watching the pilot episode of Insecure with Roach’s and Jess Butler’s texts in mind, I found the different abstractions of “pussy” and “power” within this particular moment in Insecure (compared with Roach’s text) really interesting. The episode in many ways “takes feminism into account” (McRobbie) in “normalizing post-feminist gender anxieties” (McRobbie, 262) by representing one of the main characters, Molly, as a successful, outspoken attorney who despite all of her career successes, is apparently unable to secure a man due to her “broken pussy.” Roach on the other hand discusses “black pussy’s discursive connection to black feminine sexuality” that  “animates the insurgent potential of black pussy power to secure nominal black freedoms in the face of state-sanctioned infringements on black erotic life.” Roach's explication of the pussy and its power appears more political than Insecure's joke within the pilot, but the question that still remains about this particular aspect of the episode, for me at least, is what does having a broken pussy imply and what does its fixing allow for? Is the type of power the emerges within its reconstruction similar to the insurgent erotic potential that Roach discusses in her work or is it simply to cater to the needs of men by presenting oneself as worthy of marriage within a heteronormative framework?