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.

KEYWORDS:

• Postfeminism
• transnational
• Spain
• television drama

In his 2007 introduction to a special edition of the “Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies” Paul Julian Smith lamented a myopic tendency within Hispanic Studies that has led to television being sidelined as a serious object of study. He called for greater attention to be paid to popular culture more broadly and for Modern Linguists to research and teach these media that shape everyday life. A discipline (Modern Languages) that embraced film studies as a key site of cultural mediation has (with some notable exceptions) been slow to acknowledge media studies as a route to furthering transcultural understandings of contemporary subjectivities. Meanwhile, feminist media studies have pursued complex and nuanced approaches to the ways in which these gendered subjects are constructed and refracted through a proliferation of diverse media products, but has sometimes overlooked the complexities and cultural richness of Europe.¹ Gendered inequalities and their televisual representations are imposed by and respond to local and national geopolitical configurations even as they partake in global media forms. It is from this perspective that Modern Languages can contribute to a nuanced and innovative approach to gender and media and initiate a dialogue that responds to “a (false) impression of a ‘globalized postfeminism’” (Justine Ashby 2005, 127). I interrogate where Spanish popular television drama finds a voice through which it can both adopt and critique a readily identified and popularly expressed version of postfeminism or “how postfeminist popular culture, a highly contested but unavoidable terrain for feminists, can simultaneously be a productive site of transcultural mediations” (Anikó Imre, Katarzyna Marciniak and Áine O’Healy 2009, 388). Crucially, this intervenes in urgent political debates with regard to the discursive construction of gender that popular culture is both complicit in but also, as I argue below, ideally positioned to contest. I locate a textual iteration of the tropes of postfeminism that make for transnational popularity and argue that these features are central to the dramas’ cultural translatability. Discursive strategies, specifically here the aesthetic tropes of postfeminism, construct female subjects that imitate the features (narrative and stylistic) of postfeminism that transgress national borders precisely because of the aesthetic strategies deployed in this way.²

Theoretical interpretations of postfeminism take various forms but in my analysis of these Spanish television dramas below I contend that they take into account and—to a degree—imitate a version of female subjectivity often seen in popular television that embodies what Rosalind Gill terms a “postfeminist sensibility,” a contested and prolific term but one which has taken root in the examination of popular culture and television (Angela McRobbie 2004; Rosalind Gill 2007, 2016; Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff 2013). The visibility of these subjects beyond national borders contributes to their transnational legibility, or what Simidele Dosekun terms “post-feminism as transnational culture” (Simidele Dosekun 2015, 961). This encompasses the key temporal and locational contradictions of postfeminism as they inform and complicate similar inconsistencies in the television texts under scrutiny, always acknowledging that “postfeminism is context-specific and has to be assessed dynamically in the relationships and tensions between its various manifestations and contexts” (Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon 2009, 5).

A legacy of dictatorship and recent political legislation designed to address this exemplify Spain’s complex relationship with its recent past and numerous film and television texts have addressed this, with period dramas and serial narratives taking a prominent position in the 21^st century television landscape.³ Analysis of these is extensive and elucidates the key place of popular cultural texts, with a key focus on television drama, in the mediation of history and memory (Abigail Loxham 2015; Isabel Estrada 2004; José Carlos Rueda Laffond, José Carlos Rueda Laffond, et al. 2013; José Colmeiro 2011; Paul Julian Smith 2012; Sira Hernández Corcheta 2010). In 2017, the annual report on television consumption in Spain, Portugal and Latin America commented on this “commitment to period drama” (Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes and Guillermo Orozco Gómez 2017). In Spain, these historical and gendered selves are fragmented and contested in the present in a way which reflects a similar fragmentary development of feminism in the country since the beginning of the 20^th century (Lorraine Ryan 2006). Foregrounded in most accounts of the discursive construction of feminism in Spain is its inevitable imbrication in the politics of the country: “unlike the more linear trajectory of feminist thought in other countries, Spanish feminist thinking has traversed a circular path that follows the vicissitudes of twentieth-century Spanish history” (Roberta Johnson 2005, 244). If the same has happened this century, then Spain’s immersion into a neoliberal political landscape might suggest that the popular, cultural version of feminism has kept pace with a broader notion of postfeminism that has become indicative of this political moment. Duncan Wheeler has posited that in relation to cinematic production by women from Spain postfeminism is an unhelpful critical category because he assumes, following Angela McRobbie 2009, that it necessitates previous engagement with and then disregard, for the more ideologically rooted feminism often described as the second wave (Duncan Wheeler 2016). Scrutiny of television dramas made in Spain complicates this construction of Spanish feminism that has assumed (as Wheeler does) a cultural distinction that resides in a retrograde version of the movement (Abigail Loxham 2016). By extension, I argue that it is precisely in the cultural specificity of these television dramas that postfeminist tropes extend and engage with an alternative history of feminist discourses in Spain. When these texts are consumed beyond Spain, the mode of address functions to both perform foreignness even as it must stage a degree of universality; a Netflix strategy which “means that the transnational appeal needs to be coded into the text” (Mareike Jenner 2018, 220). I have selected three dramas with different generic conventions—two of them are historical dramas, Cable Girls and Velvet, and one is a women in prison drama, Locked Up—and conditions of production but which have in common their popularity within and outside of Spain. They all have a female-led narrative and female centred cast and engage narratively with representational politics of gender. I argue that textually these dramas appeal to a mode of cultural recognition fulfilled by postfeminist tropes and modes of characterisation and that in doing so they complicate those iterations of postfeminism as that which disavows the gains made by feminism. This textual analysis functions here to reevaluate the role of popular culture more broadly in the construction of transnational postfeminist discourses and owes much to Gill’s work on the feminist visibilities that postfeminism gives rise to (Rosalind Gill 2016).

The representational strategies and the gendered subjectivities explored by these dramas cherry-pick important features of postfeminist cultural legibility in order to subtly explore the feminist politics that are supposedly superseded by postfeminism but here are integral to an exploration of the developing politics of gender, specific to geographical location and historical epochs. These are dramas that have gained traction as a result of their success, altered platforms of distribution and their key role in wider cultural discourses, some of which I explore in this article in the context of a wider ecology of TV dramas’ deployment of recognisable female subject positions. Such analysis can further our understanding of postfeminism (embedded within discourses on feminism from which it develops) and unfix it from the hegemonic Anglocentric stage on which it has performed in order that the texts themselves enable what Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor call “resignifiying work” (Margaret Henderson and Anthea Taylor 2019, 3). I propose this as a model for further work on transnational feminisms that are articulated by the ways in which these texts travel and are mediated and will therefore provide innovative and necessary feminist approaches to Spanish drama series as they occupy a binary position: articulating gendered televisual subjectivities in Spain and beyond that pay attention to “representational and cultural-historical themes that transcend national borders” (Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerwey 2017, xii).

Spanish language dramas

Spanish language television is newly visible beyond Spanish-speaking territories—which have long provided a receptive market—and drama has been the form that has seen the greatest increase in popularity (Lopes, Orozco Gómez 2017). There has been a proliferation of work on European television and the form that this “transcultural translation” (Anikó Imre 2009, 393) might take, paying specific attention to questions such as “how does the universal interact with more specific local and cultural contexts?” (Ib Bondebjerg, Ib Bondebjerg, et al. 2017, 2). In June 2018 Variety magazine published a list of its top-rated non-US dramas available to “binge watch” during the summer. These were not all non-English language as several UK hits (The Fall, Broadchurch and Happy Valley) were included. Cable Girls was on the list (as was another Spanish Netflix series Money Heist). In February 2019 the New York Times published an op ed which claimed that Netflix was shrinking the world:

Despite a supposed surge in nationalism across the globe, many people like to watch movies and TV shows from other countries. “What we’re learning is that people have very diverse and eclectic tastes, and if you provide them with the world’s stories, they will be really adventurous, and they will find something unexpected,” Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vice president for original content, told me. (Farhad Manjoo 2019)

This space, in which television dramas are transnationally consumed, demands further scrutiny:

Scholars in television studies are now used to the fact that they should pay attention to territories outside the historical legacy of a discipline that arose in the UK and US. But such awareness is often no more than lip service, limited as it is by empirical and linguistic competence. (Paul Julian Smith 2018b, 4)

Studies of television as a transnational, transmedial, and transcultural medium emphasise the expansive (even pedagogical) capacity of representational practices in the ways in which we construct and engage with subject positions that we have not experienced:

International television flows (“travelling narratives” in my re-definition) can be seen in a new light … as flows of symbolic and mobile and mobilizing resources that have the potential to widen the range of our imaginary geography, multiply our symbolic lifeworlds, familiarize ourself with “the other” and “the distant” and construct “a sense of imagined places”: in short to travel the world and encounter otherness under the protection of the mediated experience. (Milly Buonanno 2008, 108–9)

In 2006 Janet MacCabe and Kim Akass referenced the expanded comprehension of feminist media and “the astonishing breadth of feminist insight in discerning how gender is constructed in and by television’s representational practices” which they recognized “also pushes us into new directions for future analyses of the global, national and regional aspects shaping the relationship between gender and television” (Janet McCabe and Kim Akass 2006, 109). These “directions” have been shaped by the different ways in which we connect with feminism and gender through contemporary media: “feminism needs to reconstitute itself in a time of global interconnectedness, when the economic and political processes and representations of media culture inevitably permeate all feminisms” (Imre et al. 2009, 386).

Popular drama in Spain has engaged with a local politics of gender and its popularity would suggest that this engagement has been a facet of its domestic success. Detailed analyses of prime-time series reveal a range of findings with regard to stereotype and gender with domesticity and hypersexuality dominating the representation of female characters according to some studies (B. González De Garay, M. Marcos Ramos and C. Portillo Delgado 2019). Others have discerned more progressive representational strategies in police dramas through attributes that prefigure the postfeminist sensibility of popular culture. A sensibility that I locate in these dramas through representation of female characters who possess “la autonomía, o la iniciativa tanto personal como profesional” (Anna Tous-Rovirosa 2019, 494). Other work has detected an age bias with female characters represented by Spanish television fictions tending to be younger than their male counterparts (Núria García-Muñoz, Maddalena Fedele and Gómez-Díaz Xiana 2012), a trope that is identified in the “acutely age conscious” postfeminist representational strategies (Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker 2007, 11).

Transnational dramas?

Velvet and Locked Up were both broadcast on commercial free-to-air Spanish channel Antena 3, Cable Girls was the first made for Netflix Spanish series. They are apposite for my purposes because they are part of a boom in Spanish drama series with primarily female casts or strong female characters made by independent production companies that, for economic and legislative reasons, have been supported by cinema producers leading to a “renacimiento” (renaissance) of television fiction (Concepción Cascajosa 2016). The aesthetic and textual features that make them attractive to international markets are subsequently reintegrated into a broader dialogue surrounding the aesthetics and narratives of European serial narrative that contributes to the ways in which a European televisual ecology can be theorised. I foreground the postfeminist thematics of these series as they relate to and complicate emerging feminisms in popular culture in Spain to incorporate them into a television history “where questions about the relevant meanings of feminism are always being popularly revived” (Sean Fuller and Catherine Driscoll 2015, 393). As the structures of distribution in a post-network era alter (Amanda D. Lotz 2014) so too do the discursive constructions of the gendered subjects that television presents. Moreover, its storytelling function amplifies to encompass dynamic and mobile subject positions that alter in their interpretative context even as they recount narratives inflected by their origin. Paul Julian Smith has argued “for the vital importance of television drama as the medium that most closely connects with distinct local audiences, even as its genres and formats lend themselves to transnational travel in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond” (2018b, 3). The international visibility of these television dramas sees them becoming key sites through which female subjectivities are represented and produced. There are several reasons for using these series to analyse postfeminist discourse as it becomes visible at the nexus of the popular, the local, and the global. Sustained attention to the form and mediation of these texts repudiates the critical discourse from Spain that has tended to cleave apart feminist politics and popular culture, neither to reify the latter as wholly democratic nor to dismiss the former as inaccessible. The intention is rather to understand both in the context of an international mediascape and their feminist reverberations as they are felt locally and further afield. All of these series have experienced popularity beyond the English-speaking world. In what follows, I have taken examples of the mediation of these texts in part from English language sources, extending and problematising the notion of the anglocentric theories of postfeminism, and from some Spanish responses to the texts as a lens through which to elucidate national interpretations of domestic television.

In my analysis of the drama series that follows, the mediation of them beyond the texts themselves foregrounds this more egalitarian politics of representation not solely as a prerequisite for their transnational success but as evidence of a more far-reaching attention to progress within Spain; visibility of strong female leads is a global media trope and in productions from Spain these become overdetermined symbols of progress towards gendered equality in society.

Vis a vis/Locked Up

In Spain Vis-a-vis first aired in 2015 on the commercial channel Antena 3, owned by the larger conglomerate Atresmedia. It is directed by Álex Pina (who is also the writer of the successful Netflix series Money Heist) and made by production company Globomedia, “known not for envelope pushing dramas but rather for its brand of domesticated dramedies” (Paul Julian Smith 2018a, 75). In Spain, its first series averaged 3.5 million viewers per episode (around 18% of the audience) but its popularity waned during the second series and it was announced in June 2016 that a planned third series had been scrapped due to poor audience figures. However, in a move that speaks to the power of fans and the fickle nature of television programming (and perhaps to its successful transnational reception) FOX commissioned a third series which was released in 2018, released in Spain on the pay platform Movistar +.⁴

Diego del Pozo, head of drama research at Atresmedia, cites the transnational generic dialogue as a potential motive for producing this show and clearly suggests that an eye on the international market has facilitated success, “Locked Up draws together a rich network of personal relationships and vital experiences almost never represented in Spanish television fiction” (Concepción Cascajosa 2018, 168) and “risky innovations to their established practice” (Paul Julian Smith 2018a, 73), innovation that includes the centrality of relationships between women in a liminal and, paradoxically, liberatory space. Del Pozo cites the success of Orange is the New Black as “causing this prison trend to spread to Europe” (Concepción Cascajosa 2018, 167). The apparent dichotomy suggested here between the domestic product, aspiring to a generic transnational idiom, and the ensuing success of these products in the international market are not oppositional but complementary; such shows while adding local traits mobilise transnational types and so, as I argue below, articulate and resignify postfeminist subjects in a transnational context. It is the female-centred narrative that performs the tropes of postfeminist television drama before complicating this logic with the “complex, ambiguous female characters that are taking control of the story” (Julia Echeverría Domingo, 650).

Locked Up is set in a private women’s prison, Cruz del Sur. The central drama of the show is the conflict between the two principal characters, Macarena (played by Maggie Civantos) and Zulema (Najwa Nimri). Despite the inevitable comparisons with OITNB the female subjects that are presented by Locked Up are refracted through structures of race, class, and gender that are very different from the those depicted by the US show and which directly engage with national constructions of gender, key to the series’ innovation that reflects “changing social attitudes” (Paul Julian Smith 2019, 66). Nonetheless, the transnational legibility emerges through the character of Macarena, a televisual type that traverses national borders by way of a postfeminist subject, the white, middle class, successful, female independent subjectivity that constitutes it as postfeminist and is also embodied by Piper in the US series. It is a female subject position that owes much to a broader socio-political reality as it emerges primarily from those countries which have embraced neoliberalism as the dominant political economy, articulated by Stéphanie Genz as “part of a Third Way political economy, participating in the discourses of capitalism and neoliberalism that encourage women to concentrate on their private lives and consumer capacities as the sites for self-expression and agency” (Stéphanie Genz 2006, 337–38). Indeed, the privatisation of the prison in this series also marks the conditions of this neoliberal subjectivity and the female prison director Miranda (played by Cristina Plazas) embodies the independent and successful career woman that Genz describes. The marketability of these shows pivots on these acceptable recognisable postfeminist versions of femininity, as comments by Jenji Kohan, creator of OITNB suggest. “The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it’s relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It’s useful” (Anne Schwan 2016, 2).⁵

Throughout the first series of Locked Up we view flashbacks of Macarena (played by Maggie Civantos) as a successful career woman, living in Madrid; a working, independent woman, well-dressed and clearly terrified in the face of a legal system that she cannot believe will make a judgment against her. The move into the prison redefines her subjectivity; the incarcerated bodies of the women in prison are recognised through the ways in which the power of the institution controls and regulates their somatic freedoms while the women navigate this control in ways that call into question the submissive role we might expect from them. Textually, universal femininity becomes more nuanced once it is incarcerated, escaping the confines of the recognisable heroine and presenting versions of postfeminism on television that take up local concerns framed by a more global aesthetic. Macarena moves from the world outside the prison and her textual constitution as postfeminist subject and into a world which reconstitutes her subjectivity and complicates the universal postfeminism in the depiction of the prisoners. Milly Buonanno calls these subjects “antiheroines” who “counterpoint the male-dominated underworld with the mostly all-female world of the prison institution in which the heteronormative ideology of gender can be transgressed and overturned” (Milly Buonanno 2017, 12). What is mobilised by Macarena’s immersion in this world is the visibility of the women who surround her and are embodied as “other” to her. These women are not read through a straightforward neoliberal-postfeminist lens as the prison is external to society understood on neoliberal lines; they create new “norms” of trade and new forms of display of their bodies. El país notes this innovation in terms of the racial and sexual diversity of the characters represented: “Una transexual, una china de la mafía, una gorda sin complejos y una narco gallego. Hablamos con las protagonistas de la serie de Fox, que revindica la diferencia (A trans person, a chinese mafiosa, a neurosis-free fat woman and a galician drug dealer. We speak to the protagonists of the Fox series that champions diversity).” (Mariló García Martín 2019). This element of the show is understood transnationally too with one UK critic praising it for being “properly bold in challenging racist and homophobic attitudes.” (Mark Lawson 2017) The formal innovation that mimics a documentary style through the interview with characters that break the “fourth wall” reinforces their marginalisation from the mainstream but also allows a space for reflection on their backstories and raises tensions between the external (neoliberal) society and the interior world of the prison. If dominant postfeminist logics are located in the privilege of Macarena’s world prior to entry into the prison then her move into the prison allows the series to subvert these postfeminist tropes or to expose the competing discourses and logics of gender politics. The series adopts local versions of subversive female characters that, in line with other prison dramas, have facilitated “a changing representational politics of femininity” (Milly Buonanno 2017, 10).

To identify the postfeminist qualities of such productions assumes that there exists a firmly established global media ecology. Furthermore, there is a tendency to assume a universal postfeminist logics of representation; the neoliberal economic and political features of the countries where these dramas are made means that we read their female subjects as subjects of this borderless representational ideology and political system, focussing on the recognisability of these female types and their visibility. This visibility of women in an apparently post-national televisual context then does not necessarily further a debate on feminism “in a media context in which most circuits of visibility are driven by profit, competition and consumers, simply becoming visible does not guarantee that identity categories will somehow be transformed” (Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg 2020, 10). Nonetheless, ongoing popularity of this show and the focus it has drawn to its two female protagonists prove there is an appetite for complex female subjectivities on television and that sustained critical attention to these female subjectivities illuminates the transnational dimensions of their discursive construction.

Nostalgia for the future in Cable Girls and Velvet

Cable Girls (Netflix 2014 -) and Velvet (Antena 3 2013–2016) are both examples of historical period drama with traits of melodrama, a genre traditionally associated with an address to a female audience. They are both produced by the successful production company Bambú, co-founded by Teresa Fernández-Valdés. Despite the taint of conservatism and nostalgia with which many of Bambú’s productions are imbued, these dramas present “a wide range of women in powerful positions or in rebellion against the status-quo” (Francisco J. López-Rodrigo and Irene Raya-Bravo 2019, 963).

This mode intensifies commonalities and recognisable constructions of TV subjects, in this case the nostalgia for the past is universalised through costume and a stylised depiction of the past. The historical position of these women, as with all period drama, is one that is constructed and viewed through the social position of women in the present. The strategies that present the “past” as generic rather than locally specific enable a discourse of historic female struggle even as Spain struggles with its lack of a cohesive feminist past (Mercedes Carbayo-Abengózar 2000). They do this by deploying the discursive and aesthetic strategies of mediatised postfeminism that are problematic but obviate, in some degree, the contradictory local/national past and present. The commonalities that these dramas make recourse to here are those of Gill’s “postfeminist sensibility” on the one hand and the generic accessibility of period drama as the “mode of displaying a period” (Prudence Black and Catherine Driscoll 2012) popularised in series such as Mad Men on the other. I argue that this is not solely a strategy for engaging commonalities and ensuring the “transnational […] that is part of Netflix’s strategy for appeal across cultures” (Mareike Jenner 2018, 221). While Jenner’s study is capacious in its analysis of Netflix’s strategies and business model, here textual analysis makes an important contribution to this wider comprehension of the cross-cultural popularity of these shows and their contribution to what constitutes a transcultural iteration of female subjects and their mediation through a dramatic mode. It is an approach that Bielby and Harrington see as central to understanding the medium’s role in the transmission of cultural identities in which we “focus in depth on the aesthetic elements of television’s cultural properties. In particular […] what is entailed in transforming, framing, or representing programs as cultural products for airing in other regions of the globe” (Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington 2008, 102).

Series one of Cable Girls begins in 1928 at the telephone exchange in Madrid. Historically anomalous (the telephone exchange in Madrid was finished in 1929) it firmly situates its narrative as one of the female struggle for equality whilst foregrounding thematic and stylistic tropes common to postfeminist television. Chapter One, Episode One, Dreams, opens with a voiceover from Alba who later takes on an alternative identity as Lidia (Blanca Suárez), the show’s homodiegetic narrator:

In 1928, women were essentially seen as accessories to be shown off, objects unable to express an opinion or make a decision. Life wasn’t easy for anyone but even less so for a woman. If you were a woman in 1928 freedom seemed impossible to achieve. To society we were just housewives and mothers. We didn’t have the right to have dreams or ambitions. To seek a future, many women had to travel far and wide … and others had to confront the norms of a backward, chauvinist society. In the end all of us, rich or poor, wanted the same thing: to be free.

There is little in the opening scenes that accompany the voiceover to evoke the specificities of 1920s Spain, high production values and a sartorial aesthetic that is clearly marked as the 1920s situate the viewer in this generic past. Furthermore, as Netflix (in the UK at least) offers the option to watch non-English language dramas dubbed into English (with US accents) then it might be argued that taking this option effaces all cultural specificity. As the series continues, its persistently twenty-first century soundtrack and narrative prioritisation of women’s struggles that are still relevant in Spain and beyond today cement the continuity that engages with debates in the present about the progress or otherwise of feminism. Leslie Harkema argues that this is a key attraction for viewers of this series but she goes on to analyse it as an intervention in the historical marginalisation of women, “though its main characters are fictional, it extends the work carried out in the other fora, that is the work of recovering the experiences of women who have been overlooked by history” (Leslie J. Harkema 2018, 226). Although historically distant from the emergence of postfeminism, the narrative foregrounding of female friendship, women in the workplace and a sexual autonomy all appeal to recognisable tropes of postfeminist television. The sequence described above establishes a continuity between the lives of these women in 1920s Spain and the challenges that are especially pertinent to the lived experiences of women in Spain at the time of the show’s production and release. At times, this comes through heavy-handed segments of dialogue but the drama foregrounds structural inequalities, sometimes anachronistically, as central to the narrative and to the lives of the eponymous protagonists. If the visibility of feminist discourse is a facet of the contemporary mediasphere that complicates but amplifies an affective politics of protest and an awareness of ongoing material struggle then the stories of domestic violence, the struggles of women in the workplace and the problems caused by illegitimate pregnancy depicted in Cable Girls are transplanted into a world in which the historicisation forces questions about the lack of change in the present.⁶ In the Spanish context this enables us to see the postfeminist strategies of television as an assertion of modernity and progress that grants them recognisability beyond national borders while nationally it can reinvigorate a cultural approach to newly visible popular feminisms acknowledging “cultural transformation as a complex and nuanced process in which new ideas do not simply replace existing ones.” (Rosalind Gill 2016, 625) It also underscores that postfeminism is dependent on feminism and in the context of Spain the former is significant, in popular culture at least, in amplifying the visibility of the latter. As Cat Mahoney reminds us “In the case of both postfeminism and women’s history, then, television is a central source of the construction and consumption of meaning.” (Cat Mahoney 2019, 3)

In 2017, Bustle⁷ published several pieces on Cable Girls, focussing on the show’s feminism “Cable Girls offers the aesthetic of a period piece while keeping its feet planted firmly in the daily challenges facing women today” (Atzeni, Samantha 2017a). In another piece on the show, Atzeni cites the actor Nadia de Santiago (Marga) who claims that Cable Girls, “is set in Spain but is very international. It’s in the 1920s but it could be the 1920s in any other cities. […] We don’t really discuss politics of the decade. It’s not about what’s happening in Spain historically.” (Atzeni, Samantha 2017b) Close attention to the show’s content which makes frequent, if small, nods to historically specific detail disavows this argument; of note is that these details frequently reference progress made towards gender equality; Victoria Kent (prominent Spanish feminist and lawyer) makes an appearance in series one and in series three Las violetas are making a stand against gendered violence. Where these two points of view do coalesce is in the focus on the material improvements to the lives of women which position this period as one in which protofeminism was emerging, staging the optimism for a future equality. The transnational dialogue is enabled by the focus on material and structural inequalities that are depicted as different in their historical iteration but the same in their generic manifestation here and the temporal shift can also be aligned with a geographical and cultural border crossing.

This temporal shift that exemplifies a historicisation of women’s struggles whilst also glamourising the period and exploring themes that would have been problematic at the time in which these shows were set is a key narrative feature of Velvet which ran for four series from 2014 to 2016. Velvet takes place in a CGI version of Madrid and the highly stylised interior of the department store that gives the show its name (high production values are a feature of the ways in which these shows situate themselves as quality television drama). It has engendered a spin-off series which aired in Spain in 2017 and is now available on Netflix, Velvet colección. The premise of the series is the melodrama of infidelity and family secrets. At its centre is the ill-fated romance between the protagonists Ana (Paula Echevarría) and Alberto (Miguel Angel Silvestre SENSE8)⁸ although as the series develops this romance is relegated to the background in favour of the central group of women and their friendship, one that is very similar to that of the women in Cable Girls. This concentration on intimate and affective relationships between women in Velvet imitates the trope of postfeminist shows such as Sex and the City, but in the historical context of Spain in the 1950s it enables an exploration of anachronistic postfeminism. Much of the reception and mediation of this series in Spain focussed on the fact that the series was set during Franco’s dictatorship yet made no reference to the political situation of the time; a generic pastness that might go some way to account for its transnational appeal. La vanguardia (a liberal Catalan broadsheet) was vociferous in this criticism calling it “an offensive fictional period” (Pere Solà Gimferrer 2015) (translation mine). The first series is set in 1958, fewer than ten years after the end of the Civil War. Spain was now ruled by the Nationalist, military government of General Franco the key historical detail that is omitted by the show. The producer (Ramón Campos) has justified these narrative choices as escapism and a response to audience demands. “The audience wanted a Fairy Tale that ignored Franco and they got it with Velvet. It was a deliberate decision that the first image of the series was that of Pepe (Sacristán) with the child Ana, in 1939, in Gran Vía, a Gran Vía that could be in New York. There is no Civil War” (Lorena G. Maldonado 2016) (translation mine). Cinefagia de sociedades, a feminist blog on film and television criticism took up this notion of a fairy tale as it was constitutive of the show’s gender politics and therefore proof of its anti-feminist politics:

The narrative thread of Velvet relies on the form in which romanticism justifies misogyny and that female viewers of the series end up dreaming of being the submissive Ana, waiting for prince charming to appear and give her life meaning. (https://cinefagiadesociedades.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/la-diferencia-entre-la-serie-velvet-y-otras-series-de-epoca/)

The TV critic writing on her blog La chica de la tele diverts from these opinions reminding us that a drama focussed on human relationships does not have a responsibility to recreate an accurate national history. These shows mobilise a popular desire to reimagine a future of emancipation from within an era in which it was far from a possibility while connecting with a postfeminist present through the stars of these shows and the “look” that they promote. Lynn Spigel identifies a similar tendency in the US series Mad Men of which there are more than subtle echoes in Velvet and Cable Girls as she argues that: “Rather than charting a course for feminism, Mad Men charts a teleology for postfeminism” (Lynn Spigel 2013, 273). Both of these shows return the viewers to times in which women’s rights and equality were far from being achieved, they both foreground a struggle for power and independence that is enabled by a strong central group of female friends who present their resistance to class and gender subordination through their strong affective bonds and female friendship or “girlfriendship” (Alison Winch 2013) enabling transnational legibility that resides in selective discourses of postfeminism.

Velvet’s refusal to engage with the tricky politics of its own present speaks to a desire to recuperate the resistant strategies of affect and nostalgia and the popular that “tells us something about our own historical consciousness, about the myths we construct and circulate and about our desire to make history meaningful on a personal and collective level” (Christine Sprengler 2009, 3). The avoidance of the specificities of the historical period in which it is set enables a female subject that has hopes for liberation and independence, specifically economic independence. As with the examples from Cable Girls there are sometimes heavy-handed references to the gender politics of the time. In series 1 Ep. 5 The Designer a dinner party conversation at the Marquez family residence turns to progress in women’s fashion that serves as a barely disguised metaphor for gender progress more broadly understood. A generational conflict between the matriarch of the family and her son generates discussion as to the desirability of change. Alberto’s statement that “Times change, and customs too” is followed by Cristina’s assertion that “Women, for example, aren’t the same now as before.” The professional ascent of the protagonist Ana Rivera from seamstress to international fashion designer that occurs through the course of the drama fashions her as a postfeminist TV subject understood in the 21^st century in terms of choice, empowerment and individual success but it frames this firmly in the context of an economic, class and political system of the 1960s (albeit obliquely) that resists the advancement of women at all costs. While it is the costureras below the Galerias Velvet who sew the expensive designs it is men who design them. Ana’s success in a male field is perhaps doubly remarkable in that she overturns the expectations of her class and her gender in her ascent. The spin-off series Velvet colección/Velvet collection moves into the 1960s in Barcelona and extends this emancipation to sexual liberation in its aesthetic; miniskirts and marketing ensuring the continued success of Ana’s designs. Velvet might go some way to efface the Patriarch, embodied by Franco, but it does not efface the patriarchy, and although the structure, style narrative and aesthetic of the piece is very much in keeping with a retro version of nostalgia it also intervenes in a complex politics of loss and recuperation in which the struggle for gendered equality is just one element.

Conclusions

As my analysis demonstrates these dramas instrumentalise internationally recognisable discourses of postfeminism that have been advanced through popular culture as that which is the preserve of educated white women in the neoliberal political economy of the progressive West, generically understood. While more nuanced and sophisticated analysis of media production has intervened in these discourses (Rosalind Gill 2016; Simidele Dosekun 2015) there remains work to be done to bring these nationally specific dramas into dialogue with transnational conceptualisations of postfeminism. It is clear from these examples though that there is travel and that the storytelling potential of TV is a productive site for analysis of the multiple meanings of Spanish TV and the cultural implications of the different discourse of postfeminism with which it engages. Spanish versions of televisual postfeminism are not solely located in these texts but also reside in an acknowledgement of a cultural viewpoint that has shifted and been shaped by popular cultural forms beyond Spain’s borders. If we are able to unpick the nuances of representations and rehistoricise the feminisms that have emerged and are being renegotiated in local contexts, we might advance new critical positions with regard to feminist media representations which take cultural specificity into account. In these texts, this works in two ways: the first relies on transnationally legible aesthetic traits as a way for these dramas to be made intelligible beyond Spain’s borders; the second uses historical dramas that construct a look and generic pastness now familiar to the TV viewer but also revisits difficult periods of Spain’s past in ways that complicate but make visible alternative developments of gendered equality beyond the anglophone world.

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Notes on contributors

Abigail Loxham

Abigail Loxham is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Film Studies at the University of Liverpool. Her research is on Spanish Film and Television and mediations of feminism in Spanish popular culture.

Notes

1. I would argue that feminist cultural and media studies in Spain have been similarly neglected, with a few obvious and excellent exceptions (Anny Brooksbank Jones 1997; Elena Galán Fajardo 2007; María José Gámez-Fuentes 2001, 2004; Susan Martin Márquez 1999; Xon de Ros and Geraldine Hazbun 2012).

2. For the purposes of this study I refer to the postfeminist aesthetic as identified in English language television and for that reason also look to mediations of these series in the UK and US media that identify these particular tropes.

3. Many of these have also been acquired by Netflix and are popular outside Spain. Gran hotel (Bambú 2011–13), Amar en tiempos revueltos (Diagonal 2005 -), El tiempo entre costuras (Boomerang TV 2013–2014).

4. This series is available in the US on Amazon Prime.

5. Key to this throughout OITNB is of course the question of race, a trope which is explored in Locked Up but is less a focus of the cultural politics of Spain and therefore less visible in The Spanish show.

6. TVE1 drama La otra mirada (2018-) pursues a similar reimagining of the past to comment to questions of feminism that are in the present.

7. “Bustle Digital Group is the largest premium publisher reaching millennial women. Every month, nearly 80 million readers turn to Bustle Digital Group publications—Bustle, Romper, Elite Daily, and The Zoe Report—for impactful conversation around the interests and issues engaging women today. Focusing on everything from pop culture to parenthood, Bustle Digital Group’s content leverages the power of a diverse set of voices from coast to coast. Bustle Digital Group does business with over 300 global brands and ranks among the most popular media companies with our demographic on social media. Bustle Digital Group was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Los Angeles and London.”

8. The recognisability of Spanish actors is also key to transnational travel and success. The popularity of Cable Girls and Locked Up has also been enabled by the emerging celebrity of Maggie Civantos and Najwa Nimri in La casa de papel .