“Having a vagina doesn’t stop me from believing that my balls are bigger than yours” : en kvalitativ studie om kvinnorna i TV-serien Suits

Sammanfattning: Historically, women have been given significantly less space than men on the TV screen andtheir roles have often been secondary to men's. The woman's role has often been a passive supporting role alongside the man's main role that drives the action forward (Greene, 2010, ss.1066–1071). This distribution of gender representation aroused the interest to study a television series from the 2010s with three female lead roles. The choice fell on the American series Suits, which takes place in New York's legal profession, an industry that, according tostatistics, is dominated by the male gender (American Bar Association, 2019). In this essay, a qualitative film analysis is performed, focusing on the three female maincharacters in Suits. The study is based on theories of representation, gender and stereotypes and takes a feminist perspective. The study also delves into Laura Mulvey's psychoanalytic perspective which is used to analyze the female representation. The purpose is to create anawareness of how fiction produces gender and how it affects masculinity and femininity. The study examines how women in a male-dominated profession are portrayed on television and how their roles are consistent with, what according to the study's theories, are considered to be female coded. The material has been analyzed focusing on mise-en-scene, cinematography and editing. The analysis is presented in four different themes based on how the women are portrayed and each theme is exemplified by a number of scenes. The analysis shows that there is an imbalance between the male and female representation. The male characters are dominant and the female usually plays a passive and submissive role.