Femininity and Feminism in Spanish TV Dramas

Recent social and political events in Spain have prompted a resurgence of feminism in the Spanish public sphere. Popular culture intervenes in these debates, and television does so specifically through the dramas which foreground female stories and female subjects, in many cases redefining and interpreting key moments in the progression of national gender politics. This pioneering study maps these developing concerns onto a selection of TV dramas which centre on feminisms and female identities, and as such are key interlocutors in social change. Our intention is to mainstream Spanish television studies and, in our analysis of its innovative and varied approach to gender politics, to take it out of the ‘interpretative isolation ward’ (Smith 2006). This monograph fills a significant gap in the literature on transnational popular culture; it is ground-breaking in its interdisciplinarity (television, modern languages, gender studies) and is the first of its kind in English. Anja Louis completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Hispanic Studies at Birkbeck College (University of London). She is Professor of Transnational Pop Culture at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is REF coordinator and member of the research leadership team. She has previously worked at the Universities of Sheffield, New York and Suffolk/Boston. She has published widely in the fields of gender studies, law and popular culture. Her monograph Women and the Law: Carmen de Burgos, an Early Feminist is a seminal study on the Spanish feminist Carmen de Burgos. She has also co-edited a collection of essays that brings together leading international specialists of Burgos's work (Multiple Modernities: Carmen de Burgos, Author and Activist, Routledge, 2017). More recently, her research projects examine the representation of female lawyers and law enforcement officers in film and television. Abigail Loxham completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Cambridge,UK. She is a Reader in Hispanic Film Studies at the University of Liverpool and has previously worked at the Universities of Hull, Queensland and Manchester. She has published on cinema from Spain with a focus on Catalonia, gender and Spanish film, television and memory and more recently gender and postfeminism in Spanish TV drama. More recently her focus has been on popular mediations of feminism in contemporary Spanish culture with a focus on celebrity feminist writers, creators, actors and podcasters.