Post-racial public relations on primetime television: How Scandal represents Olivia Pope

Abstract

Scandal follows the fast-paced fictional world of Olivia Pope, an attorney, crisis management expert, and former White House communications director who owns and manages her own public relations agency. As the first U.S. network television drama with an African American woman in the lead role since 1965, Scandal represents a step forward for televisual portrayals of African-American women. Nevertheless, this program recirculates common constructions of race and gender. I use a cultural studies framework to interrogate representations in the post-racial world Olivia Pope navigates, through the lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989). Findings reveal that the representational reality of Scandal is decidedly different from the lived reality of public relations professionals.