Abstract
How can “difficult women” be understood in the television field, especially in relation to feminist concerns in international TV dramas? Difficult Women on Television Drama: The Gender Politics of Complex Women in Serial Narratives by Isabel C. Pinedo identifies and clarifies difficult women in nine dramas to understand feminist issues on economic inequality, sexual desires, violence, and intersectionality.
In Chapter 1, Pinedo argues that the economic viability of niche programming and the increasing demands for TV content creates room for difficult women. Pinedo discusses direct authorship and indirect authorship as the framework to understand difficult women at industrial and social levels. Direct authorship refers to the dominance of key creative roles while indirect authorship indicates the milieu caused by a larger context in which sexual and racial standards are imposed on females. By engaging with female-centered stories, the book addresses issues of gender and social justice that impact women on- and off-screen.
Chapter 2 compares the Danish detective thriller series Forbrydelsen with its American adaptation The Killing. Denmark's egalitarian institutionalization of gender equality shapes its production culture, especially considering the American remake and indirect authorship of the series. Chapter 3 uses the gendered politics of nudity and sexuality that are interwoven in two cable television dramas, Outlander and Westworld, to deconstruct conventional erotic coding to produce a female gaze. Chapter 4 explores the legal system's failure to protect women from rape and domestic violence in Big Little Lies, Orange is the New Black, and Wentworth. The author addresses second-wave feminist demands: eliminating the stereotype of working mothers, endorsing female sexual pleasure, and advocating rape and violence prevention legislation.
Chapter 5 analyzes three racially conscious dramas created, directed, and written by women of color: Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, and Vida. The author applies aesthetic markers and dramatic complexity to construct a political vision that encompasses axes of sexist, racist, and class oppression for Black and Latino realities. In Chapter 6, the author summarizes the relation between the difficult women and female-centered dramedies and satires by highlighting that the series explored in this book “share an overlapping concern with the direct consequences of the gender gap – discrepancies in social justice” (p. 175).
Instead of merely analyzing how difficult women are represented in dramas, this book identifies how direct and indirect authorship contribute to the creation of feminist texts. Major networks and over-the-top (OTT) streaming dramas act as case studies to illustrate the extent to which this topic can be explored. However, the intersectional exploration of Black and Latino women can be further engaged critically with Asian women who simultaneously encounter social, political, and cultural difficulties in and outside the television landscape in American society. Overall, the book benefits readers to comprehend images of complicated women in television and makes visible the potential of the creative industry in addressing political issues and promoting social change.
