Social Gender Representation in the Context of the Representation Problem in the Media

Introduction

With the launch of Magic Box in 1990, the first private television broadcasting began illegally in Turkey. The problems experienced by women became an important material for the producers of programs and started to be used as an important material. These “women’s programs”, which focus on women and their problems, became a fact of popularity in the 1990s. However, after the events and speeches in these programs, many violent incidents occurred. As a result of this situation, the necessity of examining women’s programs has emerged. Various researches have been done in the fields of communication.

In the study, firstly the concepts of representation and ideology in the media were analyzed, then gender was analyzed in the context of social gender and literature review was made. Since the historical and social processes cannot be ignored in the evaluation of the existing in the media, the current situation will be revealed by looking at women’s programs in Turkish television broadcasting. The study, which will evaluate the existing situation in the media, will refer to the programs of social gender, Turkish women, feminism, representation of women in the media and women’s television programs in Turkish television broadcasting and analyze the content of the programs within the framework of all these. While evaluating all of these, the study is based on the view that femininity and masculinity are cultural and socially constructed. Critical discourse analysis method was used in the study and it aimed to show that gender patriarchalism is a cultural/historical phenomenon that can be eliminated.

“In qualitative research, qualification refers to the amount of data collected, not the number of subjects, as in quantitative data. Qualification is achieved when a large amount of data is collected and saturation is achieved”. In this study, this method was used by using the feature of analyzing the “narrative analysis”, which is one of the qualitative research methods, and the related sequence of events with multiple meanings i.e. historical, archaeological, linguistic, political, scientific and sociological. All the collected data will be compared and multiple processes, reasons, and features in the evidence will be determined. These relations will be taken into consideration from the beginning of the study as qualitative research will allow us to search for patterns and relations from the beginning of the project. In short, the analysis was not spread to a separate final stage of this research, but to the whole. As a result of the inductive nature of qualitative research, an inductive evaluation was carried out.

In the study, the programs Kind but Firm with Müge Anlı, With Esra Erol, and Chasing the Truth with Serap Ezgü were followed between 24 December 2018 and 28 December 2018. The analysis will be made on the tables created by looking at “how women are represented” and “gender discourse”. The reasons for examining these programs are that these programs are watched by women and women appear in them. Criminal events that happen to women are dramatized and processed in programs.

The aim of this study is to recognize the repetitive patriarchal discourse in the media and to draw attention to the construction of gender through mass media. As a result, the study aims to discuss the general problems and solutions.