Heroicity as an arena of gender struggle. The case of the Robin Hood series

Abstract

In the first decade of the 21st century, diverse socio-cultural sectors, with different and even antagonistic agendas, dispute the right to fix the meanings of femininity and masculinity. Such a dispute is refracted in the television series Robin Hood (BBC, 2006-2009), whose figurations of heroicity function as an arena of gender dispute: the arena is the process of subjectivation, and the dispute, the right to normativize the ways of becoming a “man” or a “woman”. The struggle was concentrated around two contentious nodes – the depatriarchalization of masculinity and feminine empowerment– and developed over three seasons, to finally settle on options that annul the lines of flight from the heteropatriarchal system that were initially opened.