Mediated representations of violence against women (VAW) in the South African public broadcasting service: a study of cognitive effects of gendered communication

Abstract

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.