“My Turn”: il movimento #MeToo e l’ultima evoluzione di House of Cards

In November 2017, the American media streaming company Netflix removed Kevin Spacey from the cast of its flagship series, House of Cards, as a strong reaction against the actor’s accusations of sexual misconduct and in direct response to the contemporary rise of the #MeToo movement. Consequently, the sixth and final season of the TV show was rewritten without its main character, Frank Underwood, while the focus of the story became his wife, Claire (played by the show’s co-star Robin Wright). The article aims at offering a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of the wide-ranging shifts between the last two seasons of House of Cards, focusing on how the story, its characters, and their language have changed in relation to a new awareness of the role of power and gender relations triggered by the emergence of the #MeToo movement.