Gender Stereotypes: Representation of Men and Women in Indian Mass Media

An Inquiry into the Ontology of Media Encoding

Krishna Pokharel

In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

-T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), Four Quartets

1. Mass Media: The Cultural Sites of Meaning Production

1.1) Broadly speaking, the media messages have two aspects

i) Encoding: the production of narratives and images by the media

ii) Decoding: the consumption of the mediated narratives and the images by the audience

The dominant contemporary discourse on media and the media effects is most apparently obsessed with the latter i.e. decoding aspect of communication. The much attention has been lavished on how the audience, the Holy Grail of the competing media houses, consume the media messages encoded in the images and texts. There has been a paradigm shift from the traditionally ‘passive’, ‘docile’ audience, as perceived by the dominant Anglo- pool of media critics and scholars as Everett M.Rogers, Wilbur Schramm in nineteen-fifties and nineteen- sixties to the  ‘active’ and ‘empowered’ audience as rightly argued by the media scholars as Denis McQauil and Jay Blumler in the subsequent decades.

  The debate and the discussion on this decoding aspect of the mass media have become increasingly intensified and wide-ranging as the symbiotic relationship between the market and the mass media took center- stage post-1990. The mass media, also euphemistically dubbed as ‘popular media’, in all their manifestations – newspapers, books, magazines movies, radio, television and popular music – have been decried for glorifying violence, crime, sex and the exploitation of human bodies especially the female. Moreover, mass media have been facing a lot of flak for reinforcing the dominant stereotypes, prejudices and interests rather than challenging and questioning them.

1.2) Mass media are the cultural industries where the “meanings,” as we perceive and understand them, are produced.  The decoding aspect of the mass media study deals with how the audience consume these meanings. It’s through these mass media-produced meanings that gender stereotypes- the popular understanding and perception of “the male” and “ the female”, are reinforced and continued. What makes man a “man” and woman a “woman” for us is largely what we’ve gathered from our own cultural landscape whose contours are defined by its political and economic arrangements. And the mass media, as being the institutions deeply embedded within that cultural landscape are central to our day-to –day social, economic and political experiences.

1.3) Indian mediascape* has been very much vibrant post-Liberalization in early 1990. Until then the Indian media have been severely state-controlled. Today, this jubilant and vibrant Indian mediascape has been one of the central metaphors of the India’s globalization success story and the rising Great Indian Middle Class. Bollywood, Indipop, the saas-bahu-miya-bibi soap operas, the great Indian newspaper revolution have very much become the canons of the contemporary Indian popular culture.

2. Why mass media are what they are: the “encoding” jigsaw

2.1) The modern mass media came into existence as early as twentieth century as the mass production of goods and services by the industries and the developments in the field of science and technology facilitated the mass production of paper and the ancillary technologies as better printing machines and news dissemination system. The subsequent growth in the advertisement revenue nurtured the mass media making them more independent of the state and political interventions.

2.2) In the post-Industrial world scenario the mass media have been the driving force and beneficiary of the resultant global information revolution that is believed to have started with the development of modern computers, satellite televisions and World Wide Web.In “Global Communication and World Politics: Domination,Development, and Discourse,”  noted media critic Majid Tehranian ( 1999) lucidly sums up the essence of this information revolution:

The current global information revolution seems to have significantly contributed four concurrent and contradictory revolutionary processes in the world: the developmental, information,control, and democratic revolutions. … [T]he information revolution… started with the invention of print technology.  The more recent technological innovations in electronic media have further accelerated this revolutionary process. The widespread diffusion of the print and electronic media throughout the world has the contradictor y consequences.On the one hand, it has created a global pop culture dominated by Western cultural exports. On the other hand, it has led to the deepening of national and ethnic consciousness in the remotest and most oppressed population of the world.

 

The Development Revolution: Economy Communication and control of exchange Accumulation
The Democratic Revolution Society Communication and control of norms Mobilization		The Information Revolution Culture Communication and control of meaning Integration
The Control Revolution Polity Communication and control of power Legitimation

Figure 1.Four Global Revolutions: Institutional Loci and Processes ( Tehranian,1999)

It’s in the backdrop of these four global revolutions in the areas of economy, culture, society and polity that the media encoding of gender stereotypes can be correctly located and analysed.

2.3) Gender, as one of the key concept in sociology and anthropology, is the cultural construct of femininity and masculinity. What makes the “biological male” the actual male/man and what makes the “biological female” actually the female/woman is undoubtedly our cultural schema that comprises of the assumed social roles and the political, economic and cultural spaces provided to these human constructs. And mass media as the embedded cultural institution only reinforce these cultural schemas through the messages encoded in the images and text  and  rarely challenge them with the alternative cultural pictures.

2.4) Representation is the key technique employed by the mass media to purvey messages to the audience. Images,text,graphics are the language tools that carry those messages and provide us the “ pictures in our head* ” and “ the world outside.”We as the audience make the sense of the world through these mediated realities.

2.5) The intellectuals and the professionals employed by the mass media are the one licensed with the authority of meaning production and circulation. As they function in the institutionalized communication framework, which is very much market-driven and pander to  the popular tastes as determined by the hegemonic power interests and the socio-economic and political apparati at place.

Figure 2. The institutionalized communication as characterized by the Indian mass media provide very less space for the “active" audience to challenge the gender stereotypes as peddled by the popular media.

3. Mind colonization by the myths and “truths”: “The prostitution of images*”

Mass media construct reality. The intellectuals and the professionals employed by them construct the reality in such a way that it conforms to the audience’s perception of that reality. And they do so, with the cultural, economic and political scaffoldings as internalized by the medium they work for.

Observation 1. Why Tulsi’s the Tulsi and Mihr’s the Mihr? 

Because Ekta Kapoor,as the producer of the famous Indian soap opera, presumably knows what the fabled Indian middle class family  likes. And what the Rupert Murdoch’s media juggernaut all looks for is the profit through advertisement revenues. Tulsi and Mihr are bound to cater for the gender stereotypes of the rising Indian middle class.

Observation 2.  “ …mein mayeke chali jaungi…”  [… I’ll go to my parent’s home..]

 The popular stereotype of a sulking Indian wife. Once encoded properly and accepted by the audience, these stereotypes are freezed for eternity!

Observation 3. “ bhige hoth tere….”  [ your wet  lips…]

The lecherous metro youth lusting after his lover’s body as if it’s a lollipop! Who says human body is not a commodity?

Observation 4. The “male news “and “female news” 

The professionalized notions of the news as "No news is good news" smacks of male-dominated world's ( does it sound conspiratorial ! ) cosmology of the news on politics, war, crime,etc. that litter the important pages and sections of the newspapers. The 'soft', human interest news and 'good news' are for the  no-brainers and the popular wisdom knows who they are.

4. Conclusion

Mass media peddle the gender stereotypes and the prejudices because they have to pander to their “audience’s tastes”. It’s incumbent upon the audience- the active and empowered audience, to challenge those stereotypes. It’s the power of the signified:  audience’s the ability to put meanings to the mediated images and texts that fit into their own empowered sense of being. And some of them are all ready doing so as Wikicivilians*.