26/08/2026
What happens when feminist critique becomes platform content?
In their CFMS and DMS Lab research seminar, Prof Tanja Bosch brought together the disciplines of film and media studies to examine how the societal critique in the Apple TV+ series, ROAR, specifically the episode, 'The Woman Who Disappeared' (2022), remains politically meaningful, but its circulation is inseparable through the technological platform. Through the theoretical lenses of intersectional invisibility, postfeminist visibiliy, and platform value, Prof Bosch argues that visibility is not recognition, recognition is not authority, and critique does not stand outside the platform.
Prof Bosch's paper will be published soon, so keep an eye out for the link!
Abstract
Apple TV+’s anthology series Roar (2022) opens with “The Woman Who Disappeared,” in which a Black novelist becomes invisible to the white executives adapting her memoir. Using the episode as a case study, this paper examines racialised and gendered invisibility across three connected sites: the episode’s narrative and visual form, biometric recognition systems that fail to register darker skin, and Apple TV+’s commissioning and branding practices. Drawing on intersectionality, postfeminist theory and scholarship on platform capitalism, it asks what happens when a critique of cultural and technological exclusion is produced and circulated by a global technology company. Apple is particularly revealing because it owns the platform carrying the critique and develops biometric recognition systems implicated in the episode’s wider politics of visibility. I argue that this contradiction is constitutive of platform television, where feminist critique can expose inequality and contribute to a platform’s prestige, brand identity and commercial value. Platforms consequently shape which critiques become visible, how they are made legible and what commercial value they acquire.
