Intersectionality in Fox Network's Empire: Affirming how and why Jamal Lyon Provides Rare Representational Value

Abstract

The world of Film and TV has consistently and historically misrepresented, restricted or ridiculed on-screen gayness, especially when that gayness has intersected blackness. This thesis presents the Lee Daniels created TV show Empire (2015- ) through the role of Jamal Lyon, using the intersecting aspects of his identity, as well as his interactions with family, the music industry and love interests, to affirm the series as a groundbreaking, progress-inducing African American visual and narrative novelty in American Film and TV. This thesis uses Roderick A. Ferguson’s queer of color critique, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s hallmark explanations of intersectionality and contemporary thesis’ and dissertations on gayness and blackness, such as Stephen Kochenash, Meya Joyell Hemphill, Lisa Bowleg and Alfred Leonard Martin Jr.’s academic research, to take an in-depth look at intersectionality through Jamal Lyon as a character. His personal and private experiences, emotional response and interaction with family as a gay, black person with an inextricable connection and importance to the hip hop music industry, is a contrast to former ways of representing black and gay people as performing their sexuality and race, often through comedy, parody or ridicule. Chapter Two provides an extensive selection of various black TV shows that equips the reader with thesis-relevant reference points of the last 50 years of African American TV portrayal. Because of the novelty and multifacetedness Jamal Lyon as TV character, Chapter Three is a large and varied chapter, but with themes and intersections that all converge with Jamal’s gay and black identity. By exploring other aspects of Jamal that extends beyond his race and sexuality, such as class, femininity, masculinity, gender and his place in the music world as a public figure, this thesis provides specific dialogue, character and storyline examples of how Empire can be seen as progressive, and as a groundbreaking contribution to representation of minority in America.