“It’s (not) handled”: race, gender, and refraction in Scandal

Abstract

Much scholarship on mediated representations of race and gender claims that contemporary texts are examples of post-race and post-feminism, effectively communicating that our society is past the eras of inequality of races and sexes. Yet, many scholars have also argued that such representations are not so straightforward. Extending the work of this latter group of scholars, we call this tension refraction, a term we define as representational practices that draw attention to, or magnify, innate oppositions and inconsistencies in mediated representations surrounding identity markers. Through a case study of the first three seasons of the television series Scandal, we find multiple examples of refraction, as the protagonist Olivia Pope simultaneously embodies and critiques specific race/gender tropes. This ultimately depoliticizes issues of race and gender by simultaneously calling attention to, and drawing attention away from, those issues.