Call for Papers: Gender and TV in Iberia and Latin America

Anja Louis (Sheffield Hallam) and Abigail Loxham (Liverpool), UK

We invite original papers to be published as part of an edited collection. Our aim is to forge interdisciplinary links between those working in Television and Media Studies, Gender Studies, Iberian and Latin American Studies. We consider television as a key cultural mediator in the understanding of gender and a significant interlocutor in social change. If we consider TV one of the most influential agents of value construction, then TV shows can be considered a powerful tool to guide viewers through the moral climate of their time, attesting to a collective process of working through social issues.

Television and media research has been theorised in terms of the technological advances that changing modes of distribution bring, its textual, narrative and aesthetic developments, and its role as a mediator of cultural identity. Scholarship has produced prolific studies of US and UK television to exemplify the ways in which constructions of gender are mediated through different televisual formats and genres. We will refocus this research and consider the important work being done on Iberian and Latin American TV to analyse the ways in which mediations of gender are made visible, produced and understood through popular television. As a response to a global political landscape, in which power and gender have been brought into sharp focus, it will examine the way in which structures of power play out in these ‘other’ television cultures. We will explore cultural specificities and provide an important interdisciplinary intervention.

Themes and research questions may include but should not be limited to:

  • How is gender made visible on television?
  • How are gendered subjectivities negotiated in different TV genres? How are they framed by the format of the TV genre?
  • To what extent is character engagement dependent on genre, hybridisation and/or actors?
  • How do critics deal with gender on TV? What other extra-textual discourses contribute to the production of meanings surrounding gender on television?
  • To what extent is the continued application of Anglophone theory in a non-Anglophone context useful?
  • Can the analysis of the geo-specific productions contribute to the theorisation of the media representation of gender?
  • How does the reception of international productions compare to that of indigenous television?
  • How has the transmedial configuration of television altered the ways in which configurations of gender and nationality are understood?
  • How have streaming platforms changed the ways in which gender is mediated transnationally?

The above list is not exhaustive, we are happy to consider any piece which works on Gender and TV in Iberia and Latin America – please contact us with any questions! We welcome submissions from PhD students, early career researchers and established academics.

Abstracts and papers should be submitted to the editors by email (a.louis@shu.ac.uk; Abigail.Loxham@liverpool.ac.uk )

Deadline schedule:

  • Abstracts: 1 February 2022 (word limit 350 words). Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2022
  • Submission of full chapters: 1 July 2022 (word limit 8000 words)
  • Publication date: To be confirmed, we are currently in talks with various publishers.