Gender Identity and Television In highly segmented television systems like the cable and satellite TV systems

Gender Identity and Television In highly segmented television systems like the cable and satellite TV systems

common in North America, East Asia, and Europe, gender has often become one major means of splitting the audience into specific interest groups. Channels like Oxygen or Lifetime in the United States target women directly. In less segmented systems, the direct targeting of women as an audience is more subtly worked into the schedules of mass audience networks; for example, Univision, which targets U.S. Hispanics, or TV Globo, which tar­ gets all classes of Brazilians. On such networks, women are targeted in cer­ tain talk shows and as a major part of the audience for telenovelas. Certain daytime hours are seen as key times for women-oriented programming.

During his interviews with people in Macambira in rural northeast Brazil, La Pastina found that gender, patriarchal culture, geographic isolation, and differing levels of cultural capital were central mediating factors influencing readings, interpretations, and occasional appropriations of the telenovela The Cattle King. Gender was central not only to the engagement and inter­ pretation of the telenovela text but also to the shaping of cultural capital and other subject positions adopted by the viewers.

In many ways, established gender norms and attitudes in Macambira structured the levels of interaction between viewers and text. Women's increasing economic power, due to their work as embroiderers, and the increasing dependence amo�g males on women's income, has created a fracture in the traditional male-female domination patterns in the area. This has allowed women to question their roles and men's roles in the household and community. Through the telenovela, women could observe alternatives, which they then appropriated to assess their own lives and the life of the community in relation to that of the characters in the south. La Pastina's finding supports earlier reception study findings by Leal ( 1986) and Vink ( 1 988). Women viewers in Macambira perceived the melodramatic roots of the genre and expected the writers to follow conventions. Incorporating

a more contemporary social context in the telenovela narrative seemed to

Making Sense of World Television 251

distance these texts from their melodramatic roots, apparently making it harder for women to engage with the characters.

Males, on the other hand, saw these contemporary aspects as a bridge to what they perceived to be a realistic narrative, which is how they j ustified their viewing and enjoyment of the telenovela. Established norms and atti­ tudes regarding gender roles in the community made it unlikely that men

would acknowledge enjoying the melodrama. Telenovelas, for these males, were valued according to their perceived informational content and realism.

Men felt that their masculinity, many times questioned by their inability to provide for their households, could be damaged even more by their associa­

tion with a feminized text, such as a telenovela. When they watched telen­ ovelas, men preferred to talk about issues that interested them; in the case of

0 Rei do Gado, it was land reform and the rural lifestyle (La Pastina, 1 999). Even if the genre was perceived as feminine, males used the rural lifestyle and the political narrative to think about their lives in relation to the urban mod­ ern south (La Pastina, 200 1 ) . Their interest in these elements of the narra­

tive seemed to indicate that perceived gender norms hindered male viewers' engagement with the more traditional melodramatic elements of class ascen­ sion, love, and betrayal. This, however, does not mean that men paid no attention to those elements. It means they took a greater interest in elements associated with the male sphere, such as politics and farm techniques, rather than engaging with elements normally associated with the female sphere, such as child rearing and romance.

Telenovelas, Gender, Sexuality, National Values, and Local Values

Viewers in Macambira frequently blamed television for many problems in the community, especially the behavior of young people. Some complained about violence and drugs. Others said that children misbehaved and did not respect parents and elders anymore. But the most common accusation was that television, and telenovelas, in particular, were showing too much sex, making young children excited and prone to engage in it. Some in Macambira felt a conflict between a desire to see their children better informed and the need to hide and protect them from what some perceived to be difficult times, in which traditional sexual norms and roles had been challenged. As most parents and adults saw it, television led children and adolescents to become more aware of the world around them and therefore to be more demanding. In some cases women were also considered potential victims of television. It would seem that only adult males were perceived to be immune to the impact of television.

252 Chapter 9 Augusto thought telenovelas showed the road to change in traditional

social behaviors and adoption of behaviors he perceived to be more modern or civilized. He also believed that telenovelas could influence the way female adultery was perceived. He acknowledged that women's reputations were still much more vulnerable than those of men, but he thought that was changing. For him, women in the telenovelas, and consequently in larger

urban centers, were already liberated and engaging in practices that were still perceived to be wrong in a small town such as Macambira. He believed that women, even in rural communities, had gained more freedom and that society was more accepting. This view was corroborated by many other accounts in the community, but the question that remained was how much of the perceived change affected women's rights and independence.

From the interviews La Pastina conducted it seemed clear that most viewers believed telenovelas had a role in promoting behavior that many deemed inappropriate. Ultimately, telenovelas seemed to be showing a society in which gender relations were different than what was accepted

locally, and in doing so, they presented the danger of subverting established norms. This awareness of different lifestyles also highlights the distance

between local viewers' perceived culture and the culture represented in the telenovela. In this process, the viewers in Macambira felt themselves to be on the periphery of an urban modern world broadcast daily in the telenovela.