Serial Imaginaries

Gender, Young Audiences and the Negotiation of Diversity in the European Mediascape

Abstract

This issue of Mediascapes Journal, titled GEMINI-SCAPES. Detecting the Interplay between Serial Dramas, Gender Issues and European Young Audiences and edited by Marica Spalletta, Louise Brix Jacobsen and Valentina Re, investigates the interplay between gender, seriality and youth in the contemporary mediascape. Originating from the final conference of the European project GEMINI (CERV-2022-GE), it brings together eighteen contributions by forty scholars from Italian, European and US universities. Bridging the social sciences and the humanities, the articles show how serial dramas have become privileged spaces in which gendered imaginaries are produced and circulated, and at the same time accepted, opposed or negotiated by increasingly transnational audiences. They also lay bare the ambiguity of a cultural diversity that, in the platform society, works as a strategic asset and a marketing lever rather than a value to be safeguarded – and, still more sharply, the question of authenticity, which marks the boundary between transformative inclusion and cosmetic normalisation. What emerges is an ambivalent picture, one in which progressive visibility coexists with persistent conventions, and where diversity and inclusion prove to be contested achievements rather than settled gains.