Surviving R. Kelly: a budding space for Black feminist discourses?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Surviving R. Kelly (Part I) (SRK) was intended to amplify the voices of tens of Black and Latino women who have faced sexualized violence at the hands of singer Robert Kelly. The creators hoped to highlight the fact that these women’s testimonies had been deemed untrustworthy by the American legal system, and accosted within mainstream American media. Given that a lack of mainstream outrage regarding the violent experiences of Black women is neither new nor isolated to those victimized by Kelly, and considering that SRK documents the stories of visibly Black women, the docuseries constitutes a potential space for resistance to the harms perpetrated against Black girls and women overall. Thus, I will use a feminist critical theoretical lens to examine the extent to which SRK disrupts the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal paradigm within which Black girls’ and women’s accounts of sexualized violence are systematically denied credibility and/or attention. I argue that, while SRK begins to critique the harmful social norms that hinder the testimonies of Black victims/survivors from being both heard and believed, the docuseries falls short of holding responsible both the people and the systems complicit in the marginalization of Black female victims/survivors.