Put a Woman in Your Life: An Analysis of the TVE Series “Mujeres” and “Con dos tacones” (2005-2006) from a Gender Perspective

Abstract

TV fiction in Spain experimented a great impulse in the first five years of the 21st century, something that was especially obvious in public television at the time when socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, strongly committed to the cause of equality, came to power. Around the same date, some U.S.-produced TV dramas marked a turning point in the representation of female characters, offering new possibilities for women, as was the case of Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives. This paper defends the thesis that the year 2005, particularly significant in Spain due to the number of series produced for the public TV channel, is an example of a meeting point between the two variables that results in a larger presence of women protagonists on the small screen. The focus is placed on two series shot in that period, “Con dos tacones” and “Mujeres”, and it develops a study of TV fiction and gender representation based on the contributions of feminist epistemology. The (re)signification of U.S. dramas will offer uneven results: although one of the series chosen for the corpus is a positive exception in the midst of all the other fictional products with female protagonists, the other one follows the mainstream of local productions, those that instrumentalize female subjectivity more as a tool to ridicule than to empower women.