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immatalk · 3 months

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QUEENIE on hulu

queenie; a timely yet tepid take on black womanhood

“I think it’s important to break the tradition of what a Black Woman has always been. Also, to shift the focus away from what she did for white people.”

To say this and then have the show be what it was, is almost laughable.

Queenie boasts many promising ideas about black womanhood but doesn’t deliver, instead executing its story in a superficial, rushed manner that had me asking: who, exactly, is this for?

The summary of the show (based on Candice Carty-William’s book of the same name—read a little bit but the basic, uninspired writing style bordered on YA, and I’m grown and have no time for blandly executed dramas) reads, “Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in south London, living in between two cultures and entering neatly into neither.” And while that’s true, I do think this summary hints at a very light take of the actual contents of the show. A more accurate description is that Queenie is show about a young black woman who‘s had an especially rough go of it and is constantly mistreated by the men she invites into her life. After one particularly gutting experience at work, she has a panic attack that pushes her into therapy and helps her realize that perhaps something needs to change. The road to that change is a long and muddled one.

Queenie opens with the title character at a gynaecologist appointment where she’s just been told, quite uncaringly, that she’s had a miscarriage. Queenie didn’t even know she was pregnant. She leaves the office in a daze, lying to the aunt who accompanied her to this appointment, not wanting to share this news for fear of judgment and shame. This fear and subsequent distance in her behaviour are present throughout the entire series, a main trait of Queenie’s that she’s practiced since childhood.

The series goes on to show the dissolution of Queenie’s relationship (at a birthday dinner, her boyfriend Tom, refuses to defend her against his racist family; this leads to a harsh conversation wherein they break up and the miscarriage is never brought up) and her spiral after the fact. In the wake of the breakup, Queenie moves out of Tom’s home into a smaller, dingier place. Feeling unmoored and unworthy, she takes stock of her life and decides to put herself out there. The breakup has brought up latent anxiety and abandonment issues stemmed from Queenie’s childhood, when her mother discarded and isolated her at the whim of her boyfriend. In an effort not to revisit those fears of dismissal and unwantedness, she starts hooking up with men she meets on the apps. Rather than the care and attention she so desperately craves and needs, these hookups leave her roughed up and raw, both emotionally and physically.

The first 5 episodes show Queenie matching and sleeping with various white men (and one arab man who fetishizes her body and blackness, cowering when his wife finds out about the affair and leaving Queenie to defend herself despite him being the one who took vows) who have no care or respect for Queenie as a person. The men approach her with corny, racist lines, have degrading, pornified expectations of her sexuality due to her race, and all but force themselves on her with to little pushback on her part. It’s a lot to watch and even harder to take, on Queenie’s part. One man in particular, is so violent with Queenie that her doctor assumes she’s been assaulted. Queenie brushes off the concern by claiming it’s rough sex.

She continues waving off off these mistreatments and others (from one of her so called friend and well meaning but clueless family) for 5 of the 8 episodes. As the show progresses, each episode details her depressing downfall and sexual entanglements with what came off to me like salacious indulgence.

Coercion, mental distress, emotional abuse, fetishization, racism, and general lack of care are all extremely relevant and relatable issues Queenie touches upon but examines quite poorly. The handling of race is superficial, the characters outside of Queenie shallow and the story itself held up by a string of series of unfortunate circumstances, the root of which the writers fail at thoroughly portraying and addressing. The show shoddily spreads a handful of flashbacks throughout the series, answering vital questions too late into the narrative. Queenie’s backstory is vital in understanding why she makes the decisions she does, why she can’t seem to stand up for herself or realize that the men she lets into her life are damaging to her, but this backstory comes on so late that it almost feels like an afterthought.

In episode Episode 6, the audience is made privy to Queenie’s family history, how she became the insecure mess she is in the present day. The episode starts with the birth of her mother follows her life until she has Queenie and reveals the violence Queenie and her mother face at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend Roy. He’s physically and emotionally abusive, violently harming Queenie’s mother while telling Queenie that she’s useless and will amount to nothing. Eventually her mother and Roy move away and leave Queenie in an apartment for fend for herself. It’s months before Queenie is discovered by her aunt and taken to live with her father (who gives her back) and eventually, her grandparents. This displacement scars Queenie, and in effect, makes her fearful of black men, although this takeaway is only somewhat alluded to in the series. In the book Queenie actually says this. In the series, when Queenie is asked point blank why she never dates black men and instead seeks out these disrespectful and often racist white men, she says ‘it’s complicated’ and moves on. So does the show.

In one of the later episodes, Queenie’s (white) therapist helps her admit that the sex she’s having is harmful, that she’s trying to substitute rough physical contact for legitimate caring connection. And while this revelation is all well and good, they never broach the topic of race. A socially aware watcher might draw these conclusions but will the general audience? I don’t think it’s on the show to handhold the audience but people are naive and ignorant and given the fact that Queenie seeks out the same behaviour in white men that she rebukes in black men at the cost of feeling wanted, I needed more than a throwaway line that on partially alluded to this fact.

In contrast to the underwhelming way the show portrays Queenie’s backstory and subsequent healing, the abuse she suffers at the hands of men is almost gratuitous in its depiction. Episodes 1 to 5 display scene after scene of Queenie experiencing sexual and emotional violence, at the hands of multiple white men. Sometimes her preoccupation with white men is played up sometimes for laughs, other times as a fun personality quirk . This tonal mismatch does the story a giant disservice and waters down the gravity of the situation and intricacy of the racial dynamics.

To be clear. My issue wasn’t that Queenie liked white men. Location, job, culture, etc can all lead—not that it’s a disease lol—to interracial dating and I think everyone should get in where they fit in. But the refusal to meaningfully interrogate this desire and its root plays into my other criticism of this show: the disingenuous engagement and usage of blackness through aesthetics and played out references. With all the paltry #blackpower signalling this show (and Queenie herself, when it came to wanting to be taken seriously at work) did and the fact that Queenie seemed to live and hang out in black parts of her city, her staunch swirling came off as strange. Even more so when she faced violence at the hands of these men and that very violence went wholly unaddressed. Her preference might not have been rooted in self hate, but it was rooted in something painful and tragic and should’ve been addressed and examined with more than the equivalent of a shrug. It’s less that I wanted Queenie to find blacklove* and more that I needed her to get to the root of this ‘preference’ so she could heal and not let this fear guide her life. Also it was just fucking weird. These men suck bad and yet it’s mayo misters for life? Come on now.

But rather than meanfully engage with the story it claimed to be telling, the show brushes against the deeper underpinnings of its story and then sinks almost gleefully into the salacious and disturbing. Eager to linger on the suffering while rushing the relief. It’s odd. In regards to Queenie’s porcelain princes, the show hastily patches up the preference ‘problem’ with a bland bandaid in the form of her best friend’s cousin.

Frank, a character made solely for the show and, I’m sure, to fend off criticisms like mine, is black and boring and nice and around. He and Queenie are friendly but it isn’t until she has a sexy dream of him, that he becomes prominent in her mind. But she’s in the thick of it and doesn’t really have time to canoodle and connect. They continue to orbit each other; Frank treats her with kid gloves at times but it’s chalked up to care, and in the final episode he blandly admits his feelings. Queenie responds somewhat in kind, kissing him while saying she wants to take things slow, as she’s still on a healing journey. It was…fine. Their chemistry was convincing and although I didn’t mind it, it came off less like a romance and more of an obligation. Because of the narrative’s refusal to acknowledge race in any significant manner, this relationship suffered. As did general character work for and beyond Queenie herself.

Queenie as the ever fading sun, is the show central conceit, and it’s fatal flaw.

In an interview with Carty-Williams, she says she wanted to write a book about a black woman who not only spiralled, but did so selfishly. Made herself the centre of everyone’s world, regardless of whether they cared for her or not. I actually love this premise, it’s cool to see a black woman’s verison of the #messywoman trend. I just wish the execution wasn’t so lacking.

My issue with this is that because Queenie is so solipsistic, the other characters are, by default, flat and cliche and stuck on the periphery. And while this approach this might work for a book, on a tv show it comes off like poor character design and sloppy writing. We get glimpses of other characters, sometimes solid (Queenie’s family felt lively and realistic and even their meddling, as exhausting as it was, was true to life and convincing) and sometimes silly (her conflict with her mother is undercooked, she eventually gets an apology and acknowledgment but Queenie’s family pesters her about forgiveness and letting go until she does and its ridiculous and disingenuous; her friends were all various cliches; Kyazike, my favorite, somehow came off like an ever patient, ever supportive, black sidekick who would usually play the long suffering best friend of an irritating white girl in a romcom and I hated that the black best friend effect was present even in a black woman’s story but the white friends didn’t fare much better). It’s clear that Carty-Williams and the other writers wanted to tell a very specific black woman’s story and that’s fine; I just wish it was done better, with a little more finesse.

For a show that claimed to be about a young black woman’s journey to self actualization, a significant portion of its narrative centred whiteness and men, almost undermining the story it was aiming to tell.

Queenie pays a lot of lip service to uplifting and centring black womanhood and the idea of blackness, but while the show highlights black aesthetics, slang, and racism, it never quite engages with Blackness in any substantial way, instead preferring to focus on Blackness more as a plot device one that either weighs down or elevates Queenie, depending on where the story needs Queenie to be.

I didn’t need an academic breakdown or examination of black womanhood in relation to whiteness in the 21st century. Obviously, a 20 minute drama is not a scholarly hour. But it’s disingenuous and nonsensical to so shallowly engage with the same topics you claim to be championing, when in actuality you’re focusing on whiteness and white perception. Similarly disappointing was the lack of time given to respite. The same way the story had time to sit in the hurt and ache was the same way I wanted it to sit in joy and healing, the same way I wanted them to engage with black womanhood outside of obligitary racism here and there and perfunctory (and at times corny) one liners (strong black woman cliches, cheesy clap backs, dated race takes suited for 14 year olds who’ve just discovered social justice, etc).

I just wanted there to be a hint of common sense, especially when Queenie would make broad statements and speak for black women in general. Just because you’re black and experiencing something doesn’t make it a uniquely black experience. I really need tv/book/film writers and hell, even the everyday black person, to stop spreading this bullshit.

Anyway.

While it’s true that real life doesn’t resolve things beautifully and at once, fiction needs closure and earned endings. Not the didactic, haltingly honest narrative this series presented.

Queenie and her audience deserved better.

footnotes- *black love: no, i don’t subscribe to the ‘black women belong to black men and should only seek them out as romantic prospects’ school of thought. we’re not property and that thinking enables abuse and struggle love in the name of furthering the race. im good on that for LIFE. go where you’re wanted and like whoever you want etc etc. better yet scrap men altogether and get yourself a woman. #happypride 😁

#queenie #queenie hulu #black female characters #candice carty williams #black tv shows #the author’s behaviour online when people asked her why she continuously prioritized and positioned whiteness and white men as a prize #was VERY telling #people love to rag on shonda rhimes for her ‘post racial swirl loving’ but THIS is the true culprit and mayor of swirltopia😭#like she was reveling in it lol #tv review #mytpn

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