Imagining the Welsh nation in a post-patriarchal, post-national world: Y Gwyll/Hinterland and the re-construction of trans/national masculinity

Abstract

Television drama has been a key site to investigate masculinities. This article examines Hinterland/Y Gwyll (S4C, BBC, 2013–2016) in order to understand the interrelationship between critiques of masculinities and the construction of post-national imaginations of the nation. It draws largely on Saskia Sassen’s work [1996, Losing control? Sovereignty in an age of globalization. The 1995 Columbia University Leonard Hastings Schoff memorial lectures. New York: Columbia University Press; 1999, Globalization and its discontents: Essays on the new mobility of people and money. New York: New Press; 2003, Globalization or denationalization? Review of International Political Economy, 10(1), 1–22] on the post-national, developments of R.W. Connell’s [1987, Gender and power. Sydney: Allen and Unwin] theorisation of hegemonic masculinity and Raymond Williams’s [1977, Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press] conceptualisation of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emerging’ forms of culture in order to understand how the programme imagines the emergence of a new, post-patriarchal Wales.