Hospital Worlds, Gendered Roles: Mapping Gender Dynamics in Italian Medical Dramas

As a long-established television genre, the medical drama typically relies on a specific and orderly setting that mirrors recognisable social hierarchies, while foregrounding themes rooted in collective experience, such as interactions with doctors, illness, and healthcare institutions. This combination makes emotional involvement a crucial component of the genre, an aim that is achieved through the interweaving of vertical plots focused on clinical cases, and horizontal plots centred on professional and romantic relationships. Across these layers, gender representation offers a productive lens for examining how medical dramas construct their fictional worlds and the social meanings they convey. If the hospital microcosm reflects broader social dynamics, especially relational ones, then character construction becomes a key tool for shaping audience attachment. From this perspective, the correlation between professional, romantic, and power-related roles and the gender distribution of characters deserves close attention. Recurring themes such as the balance between rationality and empathy, care work, hierarchical order, and scientific authority are likewise shaped by gendered dynamics. Building on these considerations, this paper examines contemporary Italian medical dramas with two main goals: to explore gender roles and dynamics, focusing on the relationship between medical professional positions and the gender distribution of actors/characters, as well as their significance within the narrative; to investigate whether, and how, these configurations engage with contemporary concerns around gender inclusivity, while taking into account the mandate to appeal to a mainstream audience.