Media and Cultural Representation of the Gender

By Leonard Ibrahimi

INTRODUCTION

Mass media contribute to the cultural representation of gender and they do it in different ways; however this contribution depends on media form. Some media forms still perpetuate traditional gender stereotypes because they reflect dominant social values. In reflecting them media also reinforces them, presenting them as ‘natural’. A number of media forms, through their programs and list of items, have developed the idea in many people to believe that these programs – based substances are masculine.

This essay will aim to explain the contribution of mass media forms, such as advertising and soap opera, to the cultural representation of gender and the way audiences are positioned by these forms of representation. In media advertisements, gender stereotyping tends to be at its strongest because the target audiences are frequently both male and female. Men tend to be portrayed as more autonomous. They are shown in more occupations than women; women are exposed mainly as housewives and mothers. On the other hand, soap opera as a form of media are a consistent set of values based on personal relationships, on women’s responsibility for the upholding of these relationships and the applicability of the family model to structures. Soap opera, as a form of virtual reality, has a tendency to deal with societal concerns of women, the same things that women typically talk about domestic matters, kinship, and sexuality. Soap operas are like a distinct world where the men take seriously all the things that women have to deal with all day long.


ADVERTISEMENTS AND THE CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF GENDER

Advertising occupies a special position within the economic organization of a modern society, and it is not just an economic entity. Advertising deals with ideas, attitudes, and values, giving them cultural form through its signifying practices (Sinclair 1987, p.57). Advertising as “signifying practices” gives meaning to words and images. Through this process, advertising distributes its meanings into the belief systems of the society. As Schudson (1984, p.13) puts, the promotional culture of advertising has worked its way into “what we read, what we care about, the ways we raise our children, our ideas of right and wrong conduct, our attribution of significance to ‘image’ in both public and private life”.

A significant cultural and structural analysis of advertising is provided in “Decoding Advertisements”, by Judith Williamson (1978, p.43). She explains the ideological processes in advertising by which goods are given meaning. According to Williamson, advertising transforms the practical “use value” of projects into the symbolic “exchange value” of commodities. She calls this the “metastructure”, “where meaning is not just ‘decoded’ within one structure, but transferred to create another”. This means that meaning is created through the audience, rather than meaning being directed at audiences. The exchange of meaning in the advertisement may depend from the reader’s cultural knowledge. Thus, Williamson emphasizes that it is the structure of the advertisement itself which “positions” the reader in a certain knowledge context.

According to Jhally (1987, p.130), there are stages to the constitution of meanings; one of the most important stages is that of “transferring” the meaning of one sign to another. The transference requires the active participation of the viewer of the advertisement. Audiences do not just receive meaning from advertising, they constantly re-create it. As a consequence, advertising plays the role of a mediator.

Since advertising reaches millions of individuals daily, it has become object for serious inspection by researchers interested about woman’s representation on the media. Advertisements have been accused of stereotyping images of women, and they have been targets of various studies. Advertising messages about women are often stereotypical (e.g., a woman's place is in the home, women do not make important decisions or do important things, women are dependent and need men's protection, and men look upon women primarily as sexual objects). Advertisements have constantly restricted women to traditional mother-, home-, or beauty/sex-oriented roles that are not representative of women's diversity.

Studies have shown that the image of women that has predominated in advertisements is of weak, childish, dependent, domestic, irrational, subordinate creatures, the producers of children and little else compared with men. Lucy Kosimar (1971, p.301) suggests the audience of advertising could never know the reality of women's lives by looking at advertising, since “A woman’s place is not only in the home, according to most advertising copywriters and art directors; it is in the kitchen, in the laundry room”. The image created by advertisers about the women is a combination of sex object, wife, and mother who achieves fulfilment by looking beautiful for men. A woman is not depicted as intelligent, but submissive and subservient to men. If a woman has a job, it is as a secretary, or an airline hostess, and nothing else.

Courtney and Lockeretz (1979, Vol. 8, pp. 92-95) examined images of women in advertisements; they reported the following findings:
Women were hardly ever shown in out-of-home working roles.
Not many women were shown as a professional or high-level business person.
Women rarely ventured far from home by themselves or with other women.
Women were shown as dependent on men's protection.
Men were exposed as a subject that consider women as sex objects or as domestic adjuncts.
Females were most often shown in ads for cleaning products, food products, beauty products, drugs, clothing, and home appliances.
Males were most often shown in advertisements for cars, travel, alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, banks, industrial products, entertainment media, and industrial companies.

Surrounded by the stereotypes typically engaged in advertising by the media are the ideas that women do unimportant things and a woman's place is in the home. Sullivan & O'Connor (1988, Vol. 18, pp. 181-188) found that there has been a 60% increase in advertisements in which women are portrayed in purely decorative roles. They also claimed that the woman's role in advertising is sexy and charming. Kilbourne (1990, Vol. 67, pp. 25-31) found that exposure to advertisements using stereotypical sex roles for women resulted in drastically lower perceptions of women's managerial abilities than exposure to advertisements depicting women in professional type roles requiring such abilities. In his book, Goffman (1979, p.182) concludes that women are weakened by advertising portrayals via five categories: relative size (women shown smaller or lower, relative to men), feminine touch (women constantly touching themselves), function ranking (occupational), ritualization of subordination (proclivity for lying down at inappropriate times, etc.), and licensed withdrawal (women never quite a part of the scene, possibly via far-off gazes).

Therefore, more strongly than in earlier years, the representation of both men and women on advertisements is largely traditional and stereotypical. This serves to promote a polarization of gender roles. With femininity are associated traits such as emotionality, prudence, co-operation, a communal sense, and compliance. Masculinity tends to be associated with such traits as reasonableness, good organization, competition, individualism and ruthlessness. Using women in a sexist tone in advertisements has more profound social implications. If the media do shape expectations, opinions, and attitudes, then the audience of these advertisements may accept the way women are depicted as reality. What may be needed is the portrayal of women in roles that actually reflect their perceived attributes and their individuality.


SOAP OPERA AND THE CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF GENDER

Soap opera, as a form aimed at women, was developed in the boundaries of popular civilization as a space for the cultural representation of an underestimated component of experience – personal and emotional life. Soap opera is addressed to the socially mandated concerns of women – the family, the domestic arena, personal relationships as they work out both in the family and at work (Hall 2003, p.376). Soap operas are like a distinct world; with their intriguing plots and lifelike characters, they are able to capture the minds of many viewers.

The audience of soap operas does include men (and almost certainly more men than are ready to admit it), but some theorists argue that the gender of the viewer is ‘inscribed’ in the program (domestic and community issues) so that soaps address women in particular. Soap operas appeal to those who value the personal and household world. Dorothy Hobson (1982, pp.150-157) argues that women typically use soaps as a way of talking indirectly about their own attitudes and behaviour.

Soaps in general have a predominantly female audience, although prime-time soaps such as ‘Dallas’ are intentionally aimed at a wider audience, and in fact a huge number of the audience for this soap was male. According to Ang (1985, p.121), and hardly surprisingly, in ‘Dallas’ the main interest for men was in business relations and problem and the power and wealth shown, whereas women were more often interested in the family issues and love affairs. In the course of her analysis of the representation of women in soap opera, Geraghty (in Hall 2003, p.367) suggests a series of oppositions that produce a world constructed between the poles of gendered difference: women (that are associated with qualities such as personal, home, talk, community) and men (that are associated with qualities such as public, work, action, individualism).

Two of several interesting features of soap opera are its running of several story lines at the same time and the endlessness. Running of several story lines at once is not a matter of sub – plots as adjuncts to a central action but the intertwining of different characters lives. This clearly helps to keep the serial going, so that as one story line runs out, another is coming to the boil (Hall 2003, p.364). Secondly, soaps are unlike traditional drama which has a beginning, middle and an end: soaps have no beginning or end, no structural closure. The structure of soaps is complex and there is no final word on any issue.

Ien Ang (1985, p.45) argues that watching soaps involves a kind of realism for the viewer: an emotional realism which exists at the connotative rather than denotative (content) level. This offers less concrete, more ‘symbolic representations of more general living experiences’ which viewers find recognizably ‘true to life’ (even if at the denotative level the treatment seems ‘unrealistic’). Therefore, soap operas are virtual reality in the way that they expose their viewers to another world. In this world, people are aware that soap operas are a separate entity; however, at the same time, one may feel as if he or she is a part of the show.

Talk, as a defining feature of soap opera, offers a different approach of social action: conversation, gossip, dissection of personal and moral issues, and at crisis points, rows. Talk, in these forms, however is culturally defined as feminine involving the exercise of skills and methods of understanding developed by women in the particular socio – historical circumstances in which they live. It is, therefore, a key to establishing a female cultural verisimilitude, as opposed to the investment of male – oriented genres in action (Hall 2003, p.371). In this respect, soap opera’s talk is the most important factor in its negotiation of gender.


CONCLUSION

To conclude, there is difference between advertising and soap opera regarding to their contribution to the cultural representation of gender and the way audiences are positioned by these forms of representation. Advertisements are conservative and tied to the existing ideology of the culture. They are largely traditional and occupied by gender stereotyping. The ‘dream-girl’ stereotype is gentle, demure, sensitive, submissive, non-competitive, sweet-natured and dependent. The male hero tends to be physically strong, aggressive, and assertive, takes the initiative, and is independent, competitive and ambitious. It seems that advertising has a role to depict women not necessarily how they actually behave, but rather, how advertisers think women behave. Moreover, this depiction serves the social purpose of convincing the audience that this is how women are, or should be.

On the other hand, soap operas are characterized by a tendency to deal with societal concerns of women; soaps appeal to those who value the personal and domestic world. The soap opera genre shares such features as moral polarization, strong emotions, female orientation, unlikely coincidences, and excess. Soap operas define women in relation to a concern with the family. In ‘realistic’ soaps, female characters are portrayed as more central than in action drama, as ordinary people dealing with everyday problems; and men may sometimes be seen as caring, loving and expressive rather than dominating and authoritative.










REFERENCES

Ang, I. 1985, Watching 'Dallas': Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, Methuen, London.

Courtney, A. & Lockeretz, S. 1979, ‘A woman's place: An analysis of the roles portrayed by women in advertisements’, Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 8, pp. 92-95.

Goffman, E. 1979, Gender Advertisements, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Hall, S. 2003, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks.

Hobson, D. 1982, 'Crossroads' - The Drama of a Soap, Methuen, London.

Jhally, S. 1987, Codes of Advertising, St. Martin's Press, New York.

Kilbourne, W. 1990, ‘Female stereotyping in advertising: An experiment on male-female perceptions of leadership’. Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 67, pp. 25-31. Kosimar, L. 1971, Woman in Sexist Society, Basic, New York.

Schudson, M. 1984, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, Basic Books, New York.

Sinclair, J. 1987, Images Incorporated: Advertising as Industry and Ideology, Croom Helm, New York.

Sullivan, G. & O'Connor, P. 1988, ‘Women's role portrayals in magazine advertising: 1958-1983’, Sex Roles, Vol. 18, pp. 181-188.

Williamson, J. 1978, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Marion Boyars, London.

Stolen childhood

By Leonard Ibrahimi

Today, almost two centuries after Dickens promoted the changes, through portraits of child labor in David Copperfield novel, the twin evils of poverty and institutional carelessness perpetuate the destructive practice of abusive child labor. Shockingly, in Kosovo these days might be seen the rebirth of “Copperfieldian Era”.

Artan is fourteen years old, a good looking young man with a disturbed life. His happy childhood ended at age ten, when he left the school and started to work in order to support his family.

Artan’s family lives on the periphery of Peja, not so far from the new market. Their living place looks like everything else except a normal living environment. In fact, they have no house; they live in the tin – plate receptacle, placed on what has remained from the foundations of old house, which was burned during the war.

Artan’s background is full of troubles. His life seems to be a set of unfortunate happenings. However, he hopes that in the predictable future the luck will come back to him since the chance to have a life of a normal human being is all he wishes. “I just want to have an opportunity to get education”, he says, “I always dreamed to be a doctor”.

A fat youngster with a dark face lives in a family of four members and two of them are handicapped. His father, Jonuz, had an accident on the job, ten years ago and he can not work anymore. Artan’s only sister, Arbnesha, who is ten years old suffers from child paralysis for more than seven years.

On the other hand, Artan’s mother Hava, who was the only bread – winner of the family since her husband became a handicapped, was diagnosed as a diabetic and high blood pressure person, five years ago.

All these unlucky happenings will in a way determine Artan’s destiny. Surrounded by an extreme poverty, lack of the elementary needs, and careless of the institutions, Artan, four years ago, at age ten, decides to leave the school in order to feed his family.

As a consequence, Artan becomes a part of the street communities and, the toughness and the cruelty of the streets becomes a part of his everyday life. Since then, the life of a young innocent boy becomes, in essence, a life of a person who deals with difficulties of all natures.

After a while, street atmosphere will influence him. Very soon, Artan will move away from his first aim, taking care of the family. His attitude, as a working child, towards the people around him, including the members of his family, becomes one of extreme suspicion and mistrust. So, while time passes he does not help them anymore; on the contrary, he makes their life even harder.

Inability of the government to implement the law on compulsory primary education, and the law according to which, children under age of 15 are not allowed to work, has given the space for different kinds of children exploitations.

The presence of working children on the streets is a growing phenomenon in today’s Kosovo. Because of the institutions’ failure to understand the seriousness of the problem, working children are continuously used as exploitation means. In the near past, Albanian family had some norms. It was impossible to find a single child laborer. At the present, Albanian families are facing a lot of changes. Everybody, including children, is seen as a potential worker.

Experts say that this is a consequence of economic problems. The accumulation of economic disadvantages can really place the children, at a very high risk for reliance on their families. What is more, children are considered as a mean of profit. “Children, in Albanian society, used to be seen as security for the retirement of their parents, since they were ignored by the regimes of the past”, says Labinot Lekaj, an expert of economy, who is familiarized with the problem of working children. “Today, children are no longer seen as future security but as present – day laborers to bring home food and money for their parents”.

The 220 working children of the region of Peja are just a small part of a much bigger and upsetting picture. According to a local NGO Ta Mbrojmë të Ardhmen (Let’s Defend the Future) which is doing an investigation about the working children in Kosovo, the figures are really shocking.

Estimates are that the number of working children might be some where between 1300 and 1500. And, among them, about eight percent are girls. Most of the working children combine school and work in spite of the difficulties they face. Leaving the school in order to dedicate the time entirely to the work represents an unusual case; only few cases are known. However, the officials of NGO say that, their number is on the rise.

The NGO’s investigative results suggest that most of these children are under age fifteen and according to the ILO convention 138, which is valid in Kosovo, the children under age of 15 are not allowed to work. Actually, Ta Mbrojmë të Ardhmen suggests that more than 80% of the working children belong to the 11–14 age group.

This NGO, at least till now, has no information that any of these children have started to work before age 10. Nevertheless, it does not exclude possibility that such cases might exist.

The officials of NGO say that the phenomenon of working children is increasing very fast. Their information suggests that only for the first three months of this year, at least 70 children have joined the army of working children.

According to Anife Kelmendi, an official of NGO, the situation of the working children is terrible. “If you see a child who sells cigarettes, believe me, you are seeing a very lucky child”, she says, “We have seen the child of age thirteen lifting the bag of cement which is heavy 50 kilograms”.

Kelmendi says that children very often are badly treated; what is more, even their payment is too low. “Can you imagine: you might find a child of age twelve while carrying a full wheelbarrow of goods in a distance of two kilometers for only a euro”, she says, “This is not a job; this is beyond exploitation”. According to her, virtually everyone is guilty of participating in this abusive practice: institutions that allow this by not implementing their own laws and people who employ these children to work for them.

Children work for a variety of reasons. Local experts recognize that the roots of child labor, in our country, lie in family poverty; however, they do not exclude the exploitation and abuse motives.

For instance, Besian, a skinny youngster, who is fourteen years old, works because of the poverty. His family lives in a rented house on Peja periphery for more than seven years. Their house was destroyed during the war and no one gave them any assistance to rebuild it.

He says that his parents have not forced him to work; in fact they do not expect from him to work. His family numbers eight members, and the only bread – winner is his father “I decided to work because my father can not feed us”, Besian says, “Just for rented house we need to pay 80 euros per month”.

Labinot Lekaj, considers that if poverty rates go up, and institutions do not fulfill the family’s elementary needs, predictions are that, the number of children laborers will get higher every day.

Relating to the needs, the latest data of the Statistical Office of Kosovo, show even more hopeless data concerning the resolution of this problem in the predictable future. According to these data, a family of six members which gets less than two hundred euros monthly, lives in extreme poverty. Therefore, even if the Office of Social Assistance gives two hundred euros per family with special needs, which is absolutely impossible for now, these families would still live in extreme poverty.

The poverty is recognized as the main source of child labor, but there are cases when children get forced by their parents to work. Some children are forced to bring home their daily earnings from selling cigarettes, matches and candies on the streets, because their parents want to spend that money on alcoholic beverages. Shockingly, at the same time as children are enslaved in various forms of profitable exploitation, some of their parents are enjoying the fruits of their labor by expending their children’s money for their own needs.

Beni, a teenager with blue eyes, who is fifteen years old, works and, he does it against his will. His father is alcoholic man and he sends him every morning to work. “I have to bring him every evening some money otherwise he will not let me in the house”, Beni says. “I remember, three or four months ago, I couldn’t earn any money and he didn’t let me inside; so, I had to spend the night at my friend’s house”.

These cases show in the best possible way that children are considered as a mean of profit by some parents and the care institutions are doing nothing to stop this. Children’s welfare, since the end of the war, has never been prioritized by the legislative or executive branches of the country. This is so because the institutions are concerned all the time about “bigger concerns”, such as “national cause” and the “issue of final status”.

The irony is that state authorities keep on attributing the problem of child labor to extreme poverty, which on the other hand, according to them, is result of the lack of the competencies. “We can not take loans from any international financial institution, including World Bank”, says Faton Merovci, an official in Ministry of Economy. “As a result, we can not make capital investments, to decrease unemployment and accordingly the poverty”.

Authorities recognize that when parents are not capable to support their families, then it becomes the duty of the State, as a parent of its population, to care about them; however, they did not allocate, at least till now, any budget to provide more programs for poor families.

Helping poor families and reinforcing the implementation of certain laws, is widely seen, by officials, as the only way to stop children labor or to prevent them from abuse and exploitation. They agree that, it was never and it should never be the duty of children to take care of their families; yet, they do nothing to alleviate the problem.

The case of Flaka Gashi, a blond girl fourteen years old, shows that sometimes even citizens do not have understanding toward working children. She works to help her mother to sustain her family; but, she studies very hard too. She wants to improve the economic state of her family, and she is not shame nor worried about that. It is the behavior of citizens what is concerning her.

Sometimes, when she does not sell anything on the street, she goes to restaurants, in order to sell cigarettes or chewing gums; in there she faces the brutality of the people. “They know to be very cruel sometimes”, she says, “Once, an owner of a restaurant told me with ignorance: hey, child without childhood, get the hell out of my property”.

The gap between law and reality for children workers in Kosovo can be explained only by the post – war poverty and the negligence of the institutions to deal with serious problems, say experts. Incapability to implement the laws which are valid might be seen as one of the causers.

Kosovo’s laws provide protection for the country’s children. Kosovo is administered by United Nations, and that means that ILO convention 138 is valuable. So, children under age of fifteen are not allowed to work.

On the other hand, the Kosovo’s Constitutional Framework identifies the provision of education as a principal responsibility of the state. Valid laws establish free compulsory primary education for children ages six to fourteen and mandate that secondary education, including vocational education, must be “available and accessible to every child”. All what will be needed is their implementation.

Education experts are concerned about the phenomenon of the working children and they suggest to the officials to deal with this problem otherwise the consequences will be incalculable. If not treated well, and in time, this problem might cause enormous problems for the children, their families and accordingly for the society.

Teachers and social workers in specialized social rehabilitation institutions believe that the circumstances these children face in the streets might result changes in their behavior. The sociologist, Vlora Kastrati has made some studies concerning the social consequences of children who work. Kastrati’s research, much of which is done in collaboration with a group of sociologists, examines the position of working children. “We should recognize the problem and, as a result, promote social advocacy, which has a crucial long–term role in raising awareness about child labor”, she says, “Otherwise, our society will face plenty of problems with these children”.

According to Kastrati, these children, in most of the cases, are unable to conform to social norms. “Even if they do the work in order to support their families, their system of moral values after a while will be jeopardized”, she says. Their moral conscience and their notions of good and evil, very soon, will be distorted: they often will have only basic needs and primitive interests”.

Kastrati says that this is because of the street environment; the street atmosphere which has replaced their normal youth life, for many of them has its own laws. “Adolescents may forget what friendship is, something that is important for any child”, Kastrati says. “The street communities place more value on qualities such as physical strength, wit, social rebellion, ability to improvise, power over others and so on”.

Artan’s mother, Hava confirms the hypothesis of Kastrati, by saying that her son had a very difficult period of life after he started to work. “He started to lie. More over, once he did a robbery”, Hava says, “When we were a normal family Artan never did these things”.

Child labor can not be viewed in isolation, since this is a cause and consequence of the country’s socio – economic and political reality. The social changes, which can be considered as a result of economic problems, might increase the number of young Albanians who are likely to alter their status from a pupil to a worker. Kastrati hopes that our society will be better prepared in the future to prevent this happening.

There are no conditions to end the child labor quickly; so, the immediate challenge is to educate the public about the dangers that working children face. “Of course, in order to solve the serious social problem of working children”, Kastrati says ”efforts of both governmental and non–governmental organizations should be coordinated”.

From psychological point of view, the case of children who work is very threatening. According to Fatmir Ramaj, a psychologist from Prishtina, children need more than any thing else the enjoyments of childhood and youth.

“Children need a period of time to grow up and to understand the world. Every kind of interference in this period might cause different psychological problems on them”, Ramaj says. “The lack of the childhood’s gladness which is result of the hard work, even if children go on with education, might jeopardize their future”. Ramaj thinks that, in most cases of early labor, there are various psychological and behavioral consequences for children, more or less serious, depending on the labor conditions: distress, psychosomatic problems, inhibition, delayed intellectual development, low self – esteem, and so on.

On the other hand, according to Ramaj, continuous job provokes many well–known problems in children; the physical consequences are numerous: muscle and bone deformation, growth problems, exhaustion.

In general, Ramaj says that, early labor prevents a child from growing up in full physical and moral health. “Working street children rarely have access to normal education and are consequently disadvantaged as adults”, he says, “Children laborers, even on their maturity stages, will have problems with the demons of their past”.

Ironically, while working children problem is threatening our society, the government is doing almost nothing to stop this. The officials of the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare recognize that there are systemic flaws, which lead to children labor. In particular, these systemic flaws have an effect on children who come from families with special needs.

They blame some parts of the legislation of social assistance. Law, according to them, has to be more specific – it must predict special cases such as Berbati family. “It is unserious if you allocate the same amount of money both to a family of four members without any handicapped person and to a family with two handicapped persons”, says Bardhyl Mehmetaj, from this ministry. “These details are very important; they can not be neglected just like that”. However, privately, the officials of this ministry admit that they didn’t initiate any changes to these flaws, but they plan to do so in the near future.

On the other hand, the Ministry of Education, its officials say that they don’t have any information that any child has left the school in order to work and support his family. “Compulsory primary education is valid in this country”, says, Agim Podvorica, from this ministry, “and, as far as I know, everyone is respecting this”. Nevertheless, Podvorica, recognizes that he sees everyday children who work, and most of them are under age of 15. “Well, it is the duty of social services to identify these children and to help their families survive crises”, he says ironically.

Meanwhile, the children laborers continue working to support their families. Some officials say it is not their job to find solutions for this problem; the others say that they have identified the systemic flaws and very soon will initiate their repairing.

The initiatives and proposals are welcomed by educational experts and people of good will; however, much more will be needed, in order to help, unfortunate children such as Artan to get education and to realize their dreams.