This thesis explores how the renewed Spanish feminist movement is reshaping the portrayal of women in popular culture. The study delves into contemporary Spanish TV series spanning from 2015 to 2022. Close analysis of the series La otra mirada (2018–2019), Señoras del (h)AMPA (2019–2021) and Paquita Salas (2016–2021) demonstrates how they provide more authentic and progressive depictions of women and break away from the limitations of the postfeminist ideals cultivated in popular media since the 1990s.
This research employs the concept of ‘postfeminist sensibility’ as developed by Rosalind Gill (2007) to examine the presence of postfeminist themes in modern fiction, which give shape to models of femininity that uphold patriarchal values. Drawing on Gill’s framework, Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters (2014) outline three archetypes of female representation within twenty-first-century popular culture: the girl, the housewife, and the career woman. These archetypes are constructed around limited ideologies of femininity rooted in patriarchal myths of beauty, maternal love, and romance. This thesis analyses how contemporary TV series challenge these female models and offer alternatives, creating more inclusive and empowering representations of women.
I demonstrate how each of the TV series examined in this thesis undertakes the deconstruction of one of the three postfeminist models along with the patriarchal myth it embodies. La otra mirada dismantles the girl model and interrogates the underlying beauty myth; Señoras del (h)AMPA explores the housewife model, specifically focusing on the idealised mother figure promulgated by the new momism discourse; finally, Paquita Salas presents alternative portrayals of female professionals that diverge significantly from the postfeminist career woman archetype and the myth of romantic love. Through the portrayal of female characters that are not confined to outdated gender norms, these series contribute to a broader conversation about gender equality and empowerment in contemporary Spanish television and society as a whole.