Mediated representations of violence against women (VAW) in the South African public broadcasting service: a study of cognitive effects of gendered communication
Manala, Thabile Keletso
This research seeks to investigate, in an explanatory nature, how South Africa’s
broadcast media represents the narrative of gender equality amid the culture of violence
against women (VAW) within this society. Feminist scholars have over the years seen
the emergence of work concerned with the representation of gender with specific focus
on women. The crucial argument is that gender politics are central to the project of
representation. In a way representations of women, mostly negative, such as
domesticated roles, submissiveness and powerlessness have encouraged this inquiry.
The South African Broadcasting Service (SABC), owing to its wide audience reach, has
been a key catalyst for the progression and limitations regarding the representation of
women. The South African society has been deeply and consistently exposed to the
public broadcaster as it has entrenched itself in the living rooms of the nation and
created an intimate resonance through daily soap operas that seek to illuminate the
populace’s lived experiences. However, dramas and soap operas have not been a
passive agent of entertainment. It is either they are a direct expression of social reality
or an actual distortion of that reality. They have psychological and social weavings that
inform how we attach meaning to the world, each other, and our own selfhood. Thus, in
a country spotlighted for Violence Against Women (VAW) and femicide, this study,
using four soap operas and three tv dramas investigates how the SABC represents
women in its programming content. This qualitative study employs the critical political
economy of the media (CPEM) as its theoretical framework to explore gendered
dimensions of texts in television representation. Further, an inquisition of gendered
production is drawn from Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model as the interpretive
framework that unpacks the process of representation both at the production/encoding of texts by producers and decoding/consumption by the audiences to map out the true
effects.
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