Lesbians blending with the crowd on prime-time Spanish television

This article examines how five series on prime-time Spanish television introduced and experimented with lesbian characters. These efforts reveal the complex workings of stereotypes, as discussed by Richard Dyer, as well as Judith Butler’s performative nature of gender, which has the potential to transgress gender roles but also to perpetuate them. The image of the lesbian on Spanish television underwent various representations, often attempting to portray lesbians blending with the crowd and thereby exposing societal angst about their difference. Following Dyer’s insistence that there is nothing inherently wrong with stereotypes but rather the problem is who controls them, it becomes clear that either political ideology or market ideology plays a decisive role in the construction of cultural representations of lesbians. Although all of these series are lacking a more diverse and realistic representation, overall the cultural changes can be viewed positively, for they brought the lesbian character into mainstream Spanish (popular) culture.