Popular Culture Review 32.1
for her children , while the sexual deviant ’ s authority comes from her innate sexuality and self-preservation . The two archetypes are inextricably bound ; Jacobs , for example , played the sexual deviant with Sands to escape Flint ’ s abuses , which directly resulted in her getting pregnant — twice — and becoming the outraged mother to protect her daughter from the same fate . She appeals to Sands as the purported father of her children , combining both archetypes , to compel him to buy and possibly free her children . The sexual deviant is the outraged mother ’ s shadow because Black women were seen as primitively sexual ; white people , especially women , pointed to this as a reason to deny them basic respectability and decency . White women demanded the strictest morality possible from Black women to even consider permitting them into the cult of true womanhood , while disregarding the abuses white men performed on Black women . Women ’ s slave narratives had to be both titillating and prude to function as effective political texts .
Contemporary television series depart from slave narratives in that slave narratives are autobiographical and largely centered on an individual ’ s experience , while television as a medium allows for narrative threads following multiple characters in depth . As a result , The Handmaid ’ s Tale and Westworld cleave the outraged mother from the sexual deviant , embodying the two archetypes in , for the former , two different characters , and for the latter , two different loops . While these series claim a sort of race-blindness that ties narratives of enslavement to women regardless of gender , it is notable that in both , the sexual deviants are only played by Black women .
In The Handmaid ’ s Tale , the sexual deviant is Moira ( played by Samira Wiley ), June ’ s best friend . In scenes pre-Gilead , Moira is an outspoken Black lesbian who works with fem-
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