"Gladiators in Suits": An Analysis of Strong, Black Women in Television

Abstract

In this study, I conduct a content analysis of television shows featuring Strong, Black Women as main characters in order to determine whether the series are more positive illustrations of black women and whether the characters authentically represent black women’s lived experiences. Using Stuart Hall’s paradigm of encoding / decoding, my findings reveal that despite the various characterizations of the strong, black female characters, all the women were placed within similar structural contexts. A comparison with preexisting studies on this demographic shows that most series directly referenced black women’s lived experiences, but that the rates of success and interracial relationships in the series are higher than in reality. Interviews with show developers show that the main goal of the series is to portray black women as fully, complex human beings. Overall findings reveal new implications for the representation of race in media and for the universality of black women’s stories.