Analyzing Talia Mae Bettcher's 'Unbelievable'

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Unbelievable, a Netflix series released in 2019, deeply dives into the experience of rape victims and how the people around them affect the rest of their lives. The purpose of this essay is to analyze the series of representations of the emotional and physical violations these victims go through. I begin by explaining the feminist philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher’s analysis of moral violations regarding gendered anatomy. After outlining her ideas about moral violations and how she views them, I will bring these ideas into real-world context. I will then bring Bettcher's philosophies into the Unbelievable series. I briefly summarize the show and the different storylines that are happening. I describe in more detail the depiction of moral violations in the series, while utilizing real-world analyses that also …show more content…

So even though these boundaries are inherent to individuals’ bodies, they also function as interpersonal boundaries that draw moral lines between people” (Bettcher). Bettcher uses the pronoun ‘he’ when describing a person who exposes themselves, this is because moral violation in Bettcher's terms is a very gendered concept. Throughout Bettcher's writing, she describes how male anatomy is viewed as violating and female anatomy is viewed as regularly violated. Bettcher continues to use these gendered pronouns throughout her writing to drive this point, including when she says, “In eurocentered culture, one way to transgress a boundary is to look at a person's privates without her consent” (Bettcher). The use of these pronouns drives the idea that it is more common for people who identify as male to be violators while people who identify as female to be violated. This idea is very prevalent in society and the series that is discussed later. Bettcher's concept of moral violations very clearly fits into the crime of rape on multiple

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