Women's Interpretation of the "Female Identity" Representation

Abstract

Regarding the importance of representation in redefining individuals and social groups’ identity, the interpretation of women from representation of feminine identity in television is examined in this article. The main question asks: what is the relationship between women’s interpretation of feminine identity in television and their media consumption. It was assumed that women resist against those media contents which reproduce unwanted identity for them, and they do this through not consuming the presented contents. The research method was qualitative, using intense interviews with women from different social groups having different characteristics. Using Stewart Hall’s concept of Encoding and Decoding, it is examined that how women with different characteristics in terms of occupation, education and their marital status, adopting different readings, produce different meanings for those serials which try to reproduce a housewife identity for women. The results showed that the kind of women’s interpretation of media representations is different according to their different characteristics, and that this is in relation to their selective usage of media contents and shaping the desired contents for them.

Keywords

• interpretation
• media
• media consumption
• representation
• television
• women