Breaking the Fourth Wall: How Fleabag Defies Traditional Gender Representation on Television

Erving Goffman's book Gender Advertisements (1976) looked into gender representation in advertisements almost 45 years ago. Results of his work was a framework of six categories, that patterned the gender representation in media content. Goffman’s research has been applied to many different media and gender studies. The emergence of video streaming platforms in the last years and the increase in strong female lead television shows on such platforms have caught the attention of feminist media studies, especially what this shift means for gender representation in media. Applying Goffman’s framework, this thesis aims to understand how women’s representation has changed since his analysis, using the television show Fleabag (2016-2019) as the unit of analysis. Fleabag is a critically acclaimed show aired on BBC and later on Amazon Prime, written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge who is both the creator and the lead role on the show. The show is praised for the way it presents its female characters from a feminist perspective with brutal honesty. Results of a qualitative content analysis on the two seasons of Fleabag reveal power dynamics between female characters that are discussed within Goffman’s framework. Honesty on female experience and power relations between female characters are presented as overall results which points to an improvement in women’s representation in media. Some of the categories from Gender Advertisements (1976) still appear, predominantly, Relative Size and Feminine Touch. Adopting a feminist perspective, the thesis also discusses the effects of postfeminist discourse in television content.