A sexual subject: black women’s sexuality in Insecure

The black woman’s body has often been objectified in popular culture, exotified for its sexual otherness and objectified as inferior. Bearing on such tradition, the HBO series Insecure (2016—) utilizes the sexualization of the black woman’s body in both an intertextual and a resistant manner which in many ways reclaims the subjectivity of the objectified black woman. I argue that Insecure works to characterize its black women via their sexuality, as it ostensibly sexualizes them in ways reminiscent of retrograde exotification of black women’s bodies, but in fact reveals a subjectivity that is constructed through the women’s owning of their desires.