Unvarying States of Womanhood And Manhood: Gender in Television Series

Drawing its data from the findings of the research titled Gender Equality in Television Series (2018), which is one of the most up-to-date studies that reveals via a comprehensive sample the limitations of representations of men and women on screen, this article aims to rethink and re-evaluate the research’s results through textual analysis. The data reveals that the ways in which characters are represented reinforce stereotypical gender perceptions in terms of their physical and emotional characteristics, roles they take, and the scenes they take place, and it can be read as evidence of a reductionist and essentialist approach towards gender on television screens. While the research is a good start in framing screen representations, the data needs to be supplemented with textual analysis to make a feminist reading of these representations. Quantitative data neither includes the formal features of the image inside the scenes nor the details of the scene. This article aims to make an indepth reading of the terms “masculinity” and “femininity” as produced for the screen through the analysis of the sample scenes selected from the series in this study. The understanding of masculinity and femininity on television will be discussed from a feminist perspective by supporting quantitative data with qualitative interpretations.