You get to stop him! Gendered violence and interactive witnessing in Netflix’s Kimmy vs The Reverend

Abstract

Across four seasons of her Netflix hit comedy, Kimmy Schmidt emerged as a strong, female survivor of sexual violence. However, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt would often walk a fine line between post-feminist and feminist understandings of rape and gendered violence, while reinforcing harmful racial tropes rooted in ‘white feminism’. In 2020, Netflix brought Kimmy back for her ‘biggest adventure yet’ in Kimmy vs the Reverend, but, this time, the viewer had the power, as the tagline read, to ‘decide what happens’, with Netflix’s interactive feature. The article argues that Netflix’s interactivity feature is employed in potentially transformative ways, providing a call-to-action to fans and implicating the audience as both spectators and witnesses to injustices of systemic violence against women. However, the 2020 film's investment in, and deployment of white feminist politics mirrors a broader media erasure of the experiences of racialised women, while closing down the interactive potential of identification across difference.