Abigail Loxham – författare

The works of popular Spanish film directors Julio Medem, Juan José Bigas Luna, and José Luis Guerín are newly appraised in relation to their engagement with alternative national and cinematic subjectivities. Their films examine the limitations of the cinematic gaze, as the author shows, highlighting the ways in which these directors make recourse to hybridity, contact, and interface to overcome the binary power dynamic previously thought to be a feature of cinema. This book explores their status as solely “Spanish” filmmakers while focusing on their diverse and immensely creative output, offering new readings that engage with current debates in visual culture surrounding psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, and theories of documentary practice.

Recent social and political events in Spain have prompted a resurgence of feminism in the Spanish public sphere. Popular culture intervenes in these debates, and television does so specifically through the dramas which foreground female stories and female subjects, in many cases redefining and interpreting key moments in the progression of national gender politics. This pioneering study maps these developing concerns onto a selection of TV dramas which centre on feminisms and female identities, and as such are key interlocutors in social change. Our intention is to mainstream Spanish television studies and, in our analysis of its innovative and varied approach to gender politics, to take it out of the ‘interpretative isolation ward’ (Smith 2006). This monograph fills a significant gap in the literature on transnational popular culture; it is ground-breaking in its interdisciplinarity (television, modern languages, gender studies) and is the first of its kind in English.