Gender is represented in different ways in Stranger Things and Deutschland 83. There are many reasons for this, but one of these could be the fact that they were made in different countries.
In Stranger Things Joyce Byers is a single parent, struggling to look after her two sons and work at the same time. After Will goes missing, she is distraught about this and goes to visit the local sheriff and as she talks to him she is visibly shaking and smoking a cigarette. This shows that she is agitated and seems to have lost control. Her voice raises and she seems hysterical. Van Zoonen’s theory suggests that gender is a construct and is more about what we do rather than who we are. Joyce is acting like a stereotypical, hysterical woman here. However, she has just lost her son and it would be understandable for any parent to act in this way. This representation of a single parent struggling is quite typical of how Americans may have seen women at the time. There was a lot of pressure to be a nuclear family (such as The Wheelers) and Joyce is not favourable to society’s ideal.
Comparably, in Deutschland 83, Lenora also breaks the trend of how society believes women should be. We see in West Germany that all of the people in authority are men. In the army barracks, the male soldiers joke about how they want to “get laid” before being blown up by a nuclear bomb, objectifying women (Van Zoonen’s theory) . However, Lenora, an East German, shows that women can be strong and lead a spy mission. She is not viewed as weak, but maybe in a dangerous way. This gives her a lot of power.
Unlike Joyce, Lenora is an anti-stereotype and promoting feminism. There is no question of her capabilities, unlike Joyce, who is constantly challenged (e.g. by Hopper when Will goes missing). This may suggest that German TV programmes have a more liberal approach to representing women in a positive way, unlike American shows which tend to stick to age-old stereotypes.
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