Television Diversity? How to study intersectional representations in TV narratives.

The recent GLAAD report (2024) shows that in 2022-2023 the percentage of LGBTQ characters appearing in American scripted series was 10.6 percent, a drop with 1.3 percent. Contradictorily, current public debates critique the ‘wokewashing’ of TV. From the Little Mermaid to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, fans and non-fans have raised questions about the casting and storylines that are ‘so diverse they are distracting’. Simultaneously, some TV series, such as Sex Education or Sense8 are lauded for their progressive, diverse representations. Yet, what diversity means, and how diverse the representations actually are, remains unclear as critiques in public debates are mostly based on viewers’ experiences, intuitions and ideas.
Academically, researching televised representations is a longstanding tradition which has shown that studying representations is a complex affair. The complexity is manifold, yet three (intertwined) dimensions stand out. First, TV presents us with both visual and textual narratives that amplify, undermine, strengthen, contradict or supplement each other. Second, representations in one TV series are easily contradicted by the representations in another. This makes the meanings produced and identities articulated on a social level hard to grasp. Third, representations should be viewed from an intersectional perspective. However, taking multiple axis of power into account in an empirical unraveling of representation is extremely challenging (Hermes & Kopitz, 2021).
In this study, the focus lies on how to grapple with intersectionality. The question raised is ‘How do the textual and the visual narratives in popular TV mutually inform each other and how does this contribute to an intersectional understanding of diverse representations?’. Sex Education is taken as a case study, as the series is lauded for its successful diverse representations. A mixed method design is used to analyse the series’ first season. The textual storylines of the main protagonists (Otis, Maeve, Eric, Adam, Lily, Ola, and Aimee) are charted throughout the season with special attention for kernel events (Chatman, 1978) in terms of diverse representation of gender, sexuality, class, and race. For these kernel events, a semiotic analysis of the accompanying visual narrative is performed, after which the textual and the visual are synthesized in order to unravel what is meant by ‘diverse representations’ and how these can be understood from an intersectional perspective.
The results point towards ‘surface diversity’. The visual narrative is employed to obscure the less diverse textual narrative. The junction of the textual and the visual narrative reiterates common narrative formulas and tropes, rather than to refresh or revolutionize them. Yet, the results do suggest that this set-up is a useful approach to understanding representation within an intersectional perspective.


Chatman, S. (1978). Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University
Press.
GLAAD (2024). Where we are on TV 2022-2023. URL: https://glaad.org/whereweareontv22.
Hermes, J., & Kopitz, L. (2021). Casting for change. Following the media industries’ move beyond essentialized identity definitions: opportunities for feminist media ethnography. Media and Communcation, 9(2), 1-20.