Women Representations in Television Narrative in the Context of Popular Culture and Turkey

Utterances in the products of popular culture, the culture of daily life and an escape from the negative aspects of reality, are shaped and produced by hegemonic culture of the ruling powers, thus preventing reality from being noticed. Patriarchal system, generated by or thriving on sovereign ideology and handed down from one generation to another, is a part of this ideology. One means of formation and conveyance of patriarchal system is television narrative, which is the product of popular culture. The real power of television, which is capable of reaching many people and regarded as a fundamental source of information and entertainment, lies in the fact that it has the power to shape and reshape people’s points of view and that it can be the fundamental source of their thoughts and notions. With an indispensible role in spreading new radical thoughts and values, television encodes the discourses of social life into its narratives and holds its place in the integrity of the system of cultural representation which builds up the social reality by internalizing those representations. Narrations that legitimize the existing system through concrete representative strategies and the effects they have created play an important role in consolidating and normalizing the social roles of men and women by the gender representations they already possess. The aim of this study is to determine the outlook of popular television series on women, which have flourished since the year 2000 in Turkey. For this purpose, in this study, women representations in Turkish television series which rank high in ratings in Turkey and have broken viewing records in several other countries, especially in the Middle East will be investigated and it will be analyzed whether women are presented as a part of the existing ideological discourse.