To Be or Not to Be? The Essentialist Paradigm in Spanish and Catalan Television’s Depiction of Sexuality

Abstract

In this essay I aim to challenge the essentialist paradigm which has so far dominated the representation of sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, on television. I focus on a corpus of narrative materials comprising Spanish and Catalan television series, although I also employ a comparative approach with British and American television narratives. This is a timely exercise because television has been largely disregarded in LGBT studies in Spanish and Catalan academia, especially as far as the analysis of characters and storylines is concerned. My essay aims to be a contribution to this field in the Spanish and Catalan contexts.

Keywords:

• essentialism
• constructionism
• homosexuality on TV
• Spanish and Catalan television series

Notes

¹ ‘There is a queer nostalgia for difference and alterity […]. There is, it would seem, a queer desire for a time when being gay/lesbian was still dangerous, furtive, criminal’ (Davis, 2004, 58).

² The extensive array of film studies of sexual dissidence (Benshoff, 1997; Doty, 2000; Dyer, 1977, 2002; Mann, 2001; Russo, 1981; Tyler, 1993; Whatling, 1997) has not been matched by a similar range of studies of non-heteronormative content on television and television studies of sexual dissidence began to acquire a certain presence in academia only in the twenty-first century. Most of the works belonging to this field focus on American television and present a chronological overview of sexually dissident characters and their plotlines (Capsuto, 2000; Johnson, 2001; Tropiano, 2002). Other authors such as Suzanna Danuta Walters (2001) and Larry Gross (2001) contextualize the analysis of non-heteronormative television content as part of a wider examination of the relationship between media and politics. This dismissal of television studies from a sexual perspective is even more prominent in the Spanish and Catalan contexts, where television has been mainly examined for its role in the ideological apparatus of Franco’s dictatorship (Baget i Herms, 1992; Palacio, 1992; Rodríguez Márquez & Martínez Uceda, 1992) and for its role in sustaining a Catalan national imagery (Castelló, 2005; De Carreras, 1987; Faura, Paloma, & Torrent, 1998; Gallego, 1999; Izquierdo, 2002; O’Donnell, 2002; Terribas, 1994; Tubella, 1999). There are some notable exceptions such as Ricardo Llamas’s Miss Media: Una lectura perversa de la comunicación de masas (1997). Yet, in this study Llamas employs a sociological perspective in his analysis of news segments and talk shows and does not offer, therefore, an examination informed by cultural studies of television series and characters.