5 - Gender and Sexuality

Summary

In the summer of 2019 US television executive Jeffrey Hirsch set out the new direction of subscription cable channel Starz, whose programming had up until then been relatively male-focused. Based on the awkwardly worded concept ‘premium female’, this new strategy targeted women aged twenty-four to fifty-four who liked ‘high scripted drama’ and ‘great women in history’ (in Goldberg 2019). The foundation of Starz's women in history theme was the highly successful Outlander (2014–) along with the channel's adaptations of Philippa Gregory's historical novels The White Queen (2013) (co-produced with BBC One), The White Princess (2017) and The Spanish Princess (2019–). Hirsch claimed of Outlander's appeal that ‘you can say that it's great because women like it because she's a surgeon who goes back in time, but there's also another side of that, which is there's some eye candy for that audience’ (in Goldberg 2019). Hirsch's reductive characterisation was not well received by Outlander's creative team or its fans. His comments illustrate Jorie Lagerway's (2017) assertion that the generically hybrid Outlander has been framed as female-targeted romance. This aligned the series with the lower cultural status of melodrama rather than the higher-status prestige TV linked to similar masculine-focused narratives.

Hirsch's comments illustrate how period drama is frequently perceived as a ‘quintessentially “feminine” genre’ (Pidduck 2004: 16), one whose investment in fantasy and melodrama creates ‘a special critical relationship with women and feminine culture that revolves around identity, taste and consumption’ (Vidal 2012a: 24). The ‘feminine’ nature of period drama is not necessarily tied to a gendered body, as we can understand both femininity and masculinity as but ‘one form of gender expression – a trait that a range of sexed bodies may possess or perform’ (Levine 2015: 5). Although period drama frequently engages with ‘masculine’ topics of war, action and crime, these topics often lead a programme to be positioned as ‘historical drama’ to avoid the genre's feminised connotations. For example, Andrew Higson's discussion of early twenty-first-century trends in period film divides the masculine, action-focused ‘dirty realist’ historical epic from ‘the middlebrow, middle-aged and feminine’ intimate ‘costume dramas’ set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2010: 194–5).