Speaking Out: Intersectional Denunciations of Sexual Assault and Police Responses in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and Édouard Louis’ Histoire de la violence

Abstract

Increasingly diverse Western European societies have developed their own conversations around intersectionality that focus on local issues. Two artists and public intellectuals that demonstrate this increasing level of engagement with intersectionality in Western Europe are writer and actress Michaela Coel and writer Édouard Louis, from England and France, respectively. In the 2020 TV series I May Destroy You, Coel presents the story of a working-class English black writer named Arabella who has been sexually assaulted. She also gives the spotlight to Arabella’s best friend, Kwame, a black gay man who has also been assaulted but whose experience differs greatly from Arabella due to his gender and sexual orientation. I May Destroy You introduces its viewers to intersectionality by insisting on how Arabella and Kwame’s specific identities lead to different outcomes. Likewise, French writer Édouard Louis’s 2018 novel Histoire de la violence revolves around the author’s rape by a man of North African descent in order to examine the treatment of queer people and ethnic minorities by the police and French society at large. Both creators have succeeded in making their audiences aware of how intersectionality is a necessary tool to comprehend systemic inequality in their respective countries.