Liars, scammers and cheats: con(fident) women and post-authentic femininities on television

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Banet-Weiser, Sarah and Higgins, Kathryn Claire. 2024. Liars, scammers and cheats: con(fident) women and post-authentic femininities on television. Journal of Gender Studies, ISSN 0958-9236 [Article] (In Press)

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Official URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09589...

Abstract or Description

In this paper, we analyze the conjuncture framing the recent rise of media representations of female con artists, looking at two recent examples of the trope on television: Inventing Anna (a fictionalized account of con artist Anna Delvey) and The Dropout (a fictionalized account of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes). We situate the new visibility of women who lie, scam and cheat on television within a set of distinct yet interlocking cultural anxieties: about the “believability” of women’s speech in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement; about the capacities for inauthenticity, artifice, and deception inherent to digital media culture; about the con logics of contemporary global capitalism; and about the pernicious role that white women’s believability plays within everyday operations of white supremacy in the United States. Read through this lens, the “post-authentic” con woman becomes legible as an ambivalent backlash text: a parable that warns about what happens when (white) women are taken at face value and allocated the benefit of the doubt. In a contemporary popular feminist context where women have been implored to be confident, self-assured, and self-possessed “girlbosses”, shows like Inventing Anna and The Dropout reposition the con(fident) woman as a figure of necessary cultural suspicion.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2024.2418108

Additional Information:

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Gender Studies on 27 October 2024, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2024.2418108. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.”

Keywords:

Con women; confidence; television; post-authenticity; capitalism; popular feminism; girlboss

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Dates: