Hey everyone, I’d like to introduce you all to a term paper that I wrote about two quarters ago. I think I’ve written about this show before, but I love The Unit. I had to write a large paper about either a racial, ethical, gender, or social topic. Therefore, I looked at how women are represented in the show.It’s long, so I’ll break it up into parts.
Here is the first two sections, so enjoy:
In 2006, CBS began airing a program called The Unit. The series was based on the novel Inside Delta Force, and centers around a secret branch of the United States military. This branch, The Unit as it is called, conducts covert missions, such as assignation, surveillance, and anti-terrorism. The series stayed on the air four seasons until it was cancelled by CBS in 2009.
The Unit is commanded by Thomas Ryan, a hard-as-nails officer, who instills the same value in his men. What’s different about this show as opposed to other military dramas is that episodes of The Unit are broken up into two main story arches. On one hand, The Unit highlights the lives and missions of five soldiers (the number changes later due to a death and new recruitment). On the other hand, the show underscores the lives of those soldier’s wives. Since many of them don’t have jobs, the audience gets to see them in new settings and adventures each episode, just like the soldiers. These wives, bound together by their husband’s professions, form a kind of faction themselves.
What is very fascinating about The Unit is how the wives and women in general are portrayed. Although there are a few positive examples, a lot of the women are presented in a negative light, or presented as weaker compared to their male spouses. Also, whether intentional or not, there are very clear examples of male hegemony, stereotyping, and enforced gender roles. Therefore, I was inspired to conduct a case study using the fictional female characters that were highlighted in the series.
Methods
The TV shows is comprised four seasons, equaling 69 episodes. I own the complete series; therefore I have seen each episode multiple times. However, I had been viewing the episodes with a different mindset in the past. While viewing the series for this case study, I paid particular attention to how women were portrayed and depicted in various segments of life, from gender roles to their positions in the workforce.
I was able to construct two hypothesis statements and two general questions, which I attempted to answer when I reviewed the series. The first hypothesis was that there would be instances in with males would use violence or threats of violence in order to control woman. This would follow along with the principles of male hegemony and stereotypes. The second hypothesis was that the race of the wives and women would have little to do with how they are portrayed. One thing that I will give The Unit credit in is the area of diversity. However, I contended that woman as whole would be shown negatively, race for all intents and purposes wouldn’t really matter all that much.
The first question that I intended to answer was how strong women are portrayed in the series. In a lot of TV series, strong women have certain traits and characters, which aren’t usually deviated from. I wanted to see if these same traits would be present in some the female characters in this show as well. The second question dealt with if women depicted as equally as men are. What I mean by that is, are women in the series shown as having the same equality (freedoms, jobs, etc.) as the male characters? In short, I wanted to see how the women were gendered.
Because of the length of each episode and the total length of the series, I did not re-watch every episode. Nonetheless, I did pick out specific instances in certain episodes. Certain examples spanned multiple episodes, so when talked about those instance, I provided the specific season that the example occurred in.
