Fiction, Gender and Political Power: The French Series L’État de Grace and the “Republic of Males”

In order to highlight the ideological underpinnings of fiction with regard to gender, this article explores the secondary characters in the French political television drama L’État de Grace (France 2, 2006). Functional analysis of the characters reveals that the proposed egalitarian narrative situation is contradicted by storytelling which offers alternative readings of the female presidency. Incoherencies in action and characterization, as well as ambiguities arising from the serial form and from the adopted tone underline an implicitly male conception of political power.