Transnational (post)feminist television drama made in Spain

Abstract

This article explores and complicates the cultural logics of postfeminism as a transnational discourse through analysis of recent popular television drama made in Spain and streamed outside Spain. It argues that while feminism in Spain has been considered to have developed differently to much of the western world, recent television drama has enabled a new Spanish female subject in the light of a transnational televisual literacy that apparently conforms to many of the tropes considered postfeminist. These tropes are visible in these dramas in the foregrounding of strong female leads, economically independent female subjects and, in the period dramas, a focus on the historical development of women’s rights. The dramas I analyse are Locked Up (Antena 3 2015 -), Cable Girls (Netflix 2017 -) and Velvet (Antena 3 2014–2016). I combine specific socio-political context with textual analysis and engagement with existing scholarship in this area to present a nuanced and complex debate surrounding television drama and feminist visibilities that might be explored through television beyond the Anglocentric stage on which it has frequently been assumed to perform.