NARRATIVES / AESTHETICS / CRITICISM SHONDA RHIMES’S TGIT: REPRESENTATION OF WOMANHOOD AND BLACKNESS MARTA ROCCHI, ELISA FARINACCI Name Marta Rocchi ABSTRACT Academic centre Università di Bologna, Italy For the first time in television history, Shonda Rhimes, a E-mail address
[email protected] Black female showrunner, obtained an entire prime time programming block on American broadcast television. She Name Elisa Farinacci has been recognized as one of the most successful and Academic centre Università di Bologna, Italy influential TV showrunners and her shows are celebrated E-mail address
[email protected] for promoting a strong feminist agenda that tends towards equality regardless of gender, race, class, religious belief or sexual orientation. Concentrating on ABC’s prime time KEYWORDS night “Thank God It’s Thursday”, our analysis focuses on Shonda Rhimes; TV series; blackness; womanhood; Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005-), How to Get Away with Murder post-feminism. (ABC, 2014-) and Scandal (ABC, 2012-2018), respectively a medical, a legal and a political drama. The main goal of the paper is to propose a hybrid methodology to investigate which aesthetics, identities and relationships of race and womanhood are represented in these three case studies. 29 SERIES VOLUME VI, Nº 1, SUMMER 2020: 29-42 DOI https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/10454 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TV SERIAL NARRATIVES ISSN 2421-454X NARRATIVES / AESTHETICS / CRITICISM > MARTA ROCCHI, ELISA FARINACCI SHONDA RHIMES’S TGIT: REPRESENTATION OF WOMANHOOD AND BLACKNESS 1. INTRODUCTION 90% of showrunners are White, and almost 80% are male” (Ryan 2016). Conversely, “The Status of Women in the U.S.