Women in a men's world: the female representation in Narcos and El Chapo

Abstract

The research presented in this project aims to analyze two narco-series produced by Netflix, released a few years apart, and whose theme is the trajectory of the best-known drug traffickers in both political-police and mass culture: Narcos, which represents Pablo Escobar and the brothers Rodríguez Orejuela, Colombians, and El Chapo, which focuses on the life of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, Mexican. However, although the series have male characters as protagonists, we will not focus on Pablo Escobar, Joaquín Loera, or the agents of the law that persecute him, as agents Murphy and Peña. What makes our perspective original on the subject of narco-series is that we want to analyze the image of women in this world dominated by the male figure and everything that refers to the phallus, such as weapons, drugs, law, state and violence. Films and series dealing with gangs, mafias, and narco-traffickers usually focus on male characters, and the female characters around them are built as part of their system of domination, whether as compassionate wives, trophy-women, and mothers whose love for their children is unconditional. Our object of study here, therefore, is the representation of Latin American Women in two narco-series chosen both by the proximity of the theme, by historical proximity (they are being produced and released almost simultaneously), by aesthetic proximity and also by the fact that, in both, feminine personages does not have great protagonism. Female representation in the world of drug trafficking is a current and relevant subject, as narcoculture becomes popular not only in its environment of origin but also in the globalized mass culture. (AU)