ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on issues that have long been central to scholars: the representation of gender, sexuality, and transnationalism. It explores questions of authority and society as depicted mainly in cinema. The book addresses the questions of genre and transitivity, or the passage between both formats and nations. It also addresses the small and much-studied canon of feature films on the vital social issue of immigration and ethnicity, contrasting it with the less-known corpus of episodes of television series on the same theme. The book also focuses on television, as yet little researched for Spain and hence the medium that is treated at greatest length in the book. It explores the blurring of boundaries in two long-running and innovative series that hybridize situation comedy with soap opera and pseudo-documentary.
