A study of scammer culture in popular media

In the last few years, television shows about con women have been popping up on streaming services. From Apple TV's "Hollywood Con Queen" to Hulu's "The Dropout," audiences clearly have a thirst for stories about female scammers.

But why is the "confidence woman" such a hot topic right now? Feminist scholars Sarah Banet-Weiser, dean of Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, and Kathryn Claire Higgins,lecturer in Global Digital Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, examine this in their new paper, "Liars, Scammers, and Cheats: Con(fident) Women and Post-Authentic Femininities on Television,"recently published in the Journal of Gender Studies.

According to the researchers, these series reflect broader societal anxieties about gender, race, and capitalism at a time when women's believability is under intense scrutiny in the wake of movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp. "Television is not just reflective of gender and culture, but it is also crucial in creating cultural norms of gender," says Banet-Weiser, Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication.

The paper highlights two recent and widely discussed fictionalized portrayals of female con artists: Anna Delvey ("Inventing Anna"), who posed as a wealthy heiress to con New York's elite, leveraging confidence and artifice to gain access to high society, and Elizabeth Holmes ("The Dropout"), the disgraced founder of Theranos, whose charisma and ambition were used to manipulate investors, echoing the aspirational, yet hollow narratives of the "girlboss" archetype.

Higgins and Banet-Weiser argue that "Inventing Anna" and "The Dropout" serve as moral tales that warn of the dangers of investing trust in the "con(fident) woman." The shows are, in this way, a kind of backlash - not against second-wave feminism, but rather, against popular feminism and its entanglement with both whiteness and capitalism.

Banet-Weiser sees this kind of backlash in a very different media form: the online visibility of "tradwives."

"The online performances of tradwives of a nostalgic, highly stylized femininity are framed as a romanticized mode of retreat from a broken system-the same system that nourishes con women," she says. "Unlike con women, tradwives surrender to dominant norms of gender; they explicitly do not resist them. Their portrayals of earnest, domestic femininity can be positioned as a foil against the con woman, who wants what men seem to be granted-fame, fortune, independence."

Read more at Annenberg School for Communication.