Gender and Sexual Dissidence on Catalan and Spanish Television Series: An Intercultural Analysis

Silvia Grassi

sept 2016 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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Taking as a starting point an interpretation of the television medium as an Ideological State Apparatus, this book examines how gender roles and non-heteronormative sexualities are constructed in Spanish and Catalan television series. In the first part, which focuses on the construction of gender roles in Catalan soap operas, it applies the analytical paradigms founded by Anglo-Saxon feminist scholars for the content of soap operas to a corpus of material which has rarely been analysed through this perspective. In the second part, which focuses on the construction of non-heteronormative sexualities in Spanish and Catalan television series, the book challenges the rhetoric of “normalisation” and the “essentialist” paradigms which have so far dominated the examination of the construction of sexuality in television series.

As such, this book addresses the role performed by television in the construction of meanings which surround gender issues and non-heteronormative sexualities. This is a timely exercise because gender studies and studies of sexual dissidence are fairly recent fields in Spanish and Catalan academia and television has been largely disregarded, especially as far as the analysis of characters and storylines is concerned. As a result, this book represents a major contribution to these fields in the Spanish and Catalan contexts.

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Silvia Grassi is a scholar in Cultural Studies, Media Studies and Gender/ LGBT Studies. Dr Grassi obtained her undergraduate degree in Cultural Studies (2006) and her MA in Cultural and Media Studies (2008) at Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. In 2014, she received her PhD from the School of European Languages, Translation and Politics of University of Cardiff. From January 2015 to July 2016, she was a member of the research project “Discourses of the Nation and the National” at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages of the University of Oslo. Dr Grassi’s research focuses on how cinema and television from different cultural contexts (mainly British, American, Spanish and Catalan) construct meanings around gender and sexuality. She is also interested in examining how mass media construct meanings around national and cultural identities, particularly in the Catalan context.