There is an interesting contrast between the fictional portrait of women in media and the roles they play in the creation of media texts. In this essay, I shall speculate on the reasons for this divide and on ways to bridge it creatively, taking examples from television.

Women in Soap Operas

Let us consider the fictional portraits first. Much analysis of the portrayal of women in the media confines itself to the vapid and insensitive characters created for popular soap operas by poor writers (or by cynical teams of uncoordinated writers). One is unsure if any of the writers of these soap operas are actually women, although there does seem to be at least one woman producer behind these serials. If we are to move away from saasbahu and family sagas which often seem completely unreal, we need to have authentic writers who know the contexts that they are writing about – some of these may be men, but surely there would be a majority of women writers here.

This is not to say that we should not have saas-bahu sagas. The fact that they have an audience suggests the relevance of the theme. Human relationship is the broad area of the soap opera – human relationships rooted in local realities. Infidelity, loss, honour, society, family – these are also the themes of the great classic novels.

There is a basic connection between a woman's experiences in real life and a woman's experiences in visual media, which essentially forms the relationship between the spectator and spectacle. It is assumed that women are generally taught to be objects of spectacle in their everyday life and they have something in common with the image of women on the screen/visual media. The woman enters into the mediated world of film or television with a context that is structured wholly for her absence/invisibility, which of course, often mirrors her real life. Feminist film critics Laura Mulvey has said that, “The woman is not visible in the audience which is perceived as the male” and Claire Johnston observes, “The woman is not visible on the screen, as she is merely a surrogate for the phallus, a signifier for something else.…” (Gamble, 79)

The visual media codes have manipulated the absence of the woman to such an extent that the limited choices allowed to her are – to identify firstly with the image of the woman (structured by the male) on the screen, secondly with the male audience sitting by her side in the theatre and finally with the heroes in the films and their super human actions. The narrative of the film places the woman spectator with the ‘hero’. The emotions of the women accepting ‘masculinization’ (a term used by Laura Mulvey, 1975) while watching the actions of the hero are enriched by the emotions of a heroine of a sentimental comedy.

“Because I'm worth it!”! This punch-line for a TV (and print media) advertisement, uttered in a very confident tone by a ‘reigning beauty’ of our times, endorsing a high-priced imported range of cosmetics, encapsulates many aspects of what the media has come to represent. It has an obvious visual-cum-celebrity appeal, wide reach, and is tapping ‘aspiration’-al (a clichéd word by now) desire among the target audience; the impact it makes, reinforces the fact that the media is ‘objectifying’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘commodifying’ women, the feminine, female sexuality, and so on.

This paper attempts to go a little beyond this litany of charges nailing the media for perpetuating patriarchy. The objective of the paper is to contextualise what appears to be an ‘unstoppable’ phenomenon and to interrogate the place of feminist theory in all this. A brief appraisal of critiquing media portrayal will be followed by a postulate to understand the role played by the interplay of the ‘two economies’ involved. The dominance of the media, particularly that of the technological media, appears ‘unstoppable’ as the communication industries are proving to be among the most lucrative of all avenues, generating profits in mindboggling numbers world-wide. In India, as consumers, we are witness to the astonishing rise of communications technology and the related entertainment industry. These have certainly resulted in more employment opportunities, more revenue and given the electronic media's obvious control over its own hype, the whole thing has ‘come of age’ – a recurrent cliché which translates into appreciating all the programmes/products which are closely modelled on everything that is the current rage in the West.

A soap opera is an ongoing, episodic work of fiction/non fiction usually broadcast on television or radio and more recently on mobile phones. Indian soap operas (written, filmed, enacted and produced mostly by Indians for an Indian audience), with episodes broadcast on a daily/weekly/semi-weekly basis on Indian television channels/channel chains (Star Network, Sony Entertainment, Sun Network, Doordarshan) are not always limited to India alone, but are broadcast overseas in the UK, USA, and some parts of Europe, South Africa, and Australia.

The term ‘soap opera’ was coined by the American press in the 1930s to denote the extraordinarily popular genre of serialized domestic radio dramas, which by 1940, represented some 90 per cent of all commerciallysponsored daytime broadcast hours. The ‘soap’ in soap opera alluded to their sponsorship by soap manufacturers while ‘opera’ suggested an ironic incongruity between the domestic narrative concerns of the daytime serial and the most elevated of dramatic forms.

The defining quality of the soap opera form is its seriality. A serial narrative is a story told through a series of individual, narratively linked installments. Unlike episodic television programs in which there is no narrative linkage between episodes and each episode tells a more or less self-contained story, the viewer's understanding of and pleasure in any given serial installment is predicated, to some degree, upon his or her knowledge of what has happened in previous episodes.

The global review observation of 1980 states, “A consistent picture emerges from those research studies which have investigated the media's portrayal of women. At the very best, the portrayal is narrow; at worst it is unrealistic, demeaning and damaging.” (Gallagher, 1981)

Media has erased the geographical distances and is now an integral part of man's living space. The impact of visual media as well as print media on the mind of the viewers and readers is tremendous. This necessitates looking into the coding and construction of femininity and whether or not it reflects reality. This essay will attempt to examine the images of women in newspaper advertisements and television commercials.

We often feel that there exists a disparity between women's actual lives and their representations in the media. This disparity exists, as the images of women in media seem to be a male fantasy and not a living reality. It is therefore necessary to understand how media constructs femininity. In the book, Affirmation and Denial: Construction of Femininity on Indian Television (1990), Prabha Krishnan and Anita Dighe refer to the complexity of women and media interaction, which is an outcome of the production of self-consciousness by media and society. Media as an organization seems to consolidate patriarchal ideology and define femininity. Decoding the content by analyzing images, is an attempt to question that ideology, which has commodified women and stereotyped them.

Women on television need to be discussed under two heads: women in media (as work force) and women as media subjects (as content in media). Another category is that of women as viewers. Women as viewers are also participants in a significant way. It has been established beyond doubt that all over the world, women constitute a considerable percentage of television viewers. In India, perhaps the percentage of female television viewers is even higher as television constitutes the chief source of entertainment for moderately educated middle-class women. A lot has been said about how badly women are portrayed in soap operas and how these serials, in all languages, are reinforcing the stereotypical female image. Much has also been said about the way women are portrayed in advertisements. Through this paper, I will try to build up an argument in favour of a Gender Policy in media.

Indian media, whether print or electronic, has recently been facing serious questions about the lack of a policy where women and depiction of women's issues are concerned. Print media has often been criticised for publishing advertisements which are demeaning to women, in the same pages where women's issues are seriously discussed. But such objections are rarely met with serious consideration by policy makers because media is, in the ultimate analysis, only a business enterprise. Advertisements give revenue which can obviously not be ignored by any policy maker.

What is perhaps central to the debate on women in media is the question of how completely a woman is identified with her body and how limited she is to her gender. When we talk about women, the subtext is usually the body. Critical discourse on the representation of women in media invariably focuses on how her body is represented. And when we say the media is sexist or insensitive, it is the treatment of women's bodies that we are troubled by. Therefore, the site on which my paper is built is primarily the body. However, in a polemical sleight of hand, I intend to make the body disappear and explore how gender is construed.

Discourses surrounding the body often hinge on the classic binary of sex: male and female. But how real is this binary? Tracing its origins, Thomas Laqueur, in his extensively researched book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, shows how our concept of the body has evolved from the one-sex to the two-sex model. Examining medical and philosophical literature, and accounts from reproductive anatomy and physiology from the second century A.D. down to the twentieth century, he shows how descriptions of the body were used by scientists, political activists, literary figures and theorists to explain gender. In the one-sex model, prevalent from antiquity to the early seventeenth century, man was the only sex and woman was merely an inversion of this basic form.

I have been a woman in the media for about thirty years and ever since, I have been grappling in various ways with issues relating to both women in the media and women and media, both as a media practitioner and as a media watcher and, of course, as a person who is concerned about social issues in general and gender issues in particular.

My work on gender and media has been primarily related to the print media, particularly news and current affairs, but also women's magazines. However, in this article, I would like to highlight an aspect of the subject that cries out for more attention from academic researchers: the implications of media globalisation for concerns about women in/and media.

This is, of course, easier said than done, especially since it is a relatively uncharted territory. While both globalisation and media globalisation have received considerable attention from scholars and activists in recent times, the process of developing a gender analysis of media globalisation is still, evidently, a work in progress. But it is clearly a process that we all need to engage with and contribute to. It is particularly important, I think, for scholars in India – which boasts of a large, growing, influential and complex media environment – to provide a perspective on media globalisation, in general, and gender within media globalisation, in particular, from the global South.

The debate on women and media has, over the years, become increasingly complex. Early issues of the positive or negative portrayal of women in the media have given way to questions of representation, of numbers, of the nuances of class, caste, region, religion, geography, to name only a few. With the exponential growth in all forms of media, whether print, broadcast, electronic, or those related to the Internet, to messaging and mobile telephony and so on, issues of access, of voice, of censorship and regulation, and indeed of reach have also become significant. Women are now much more visible in television programming, and in content. They are significant among the numbers of viewers and readers. They make up an important segment of the consumer market and are therefore the ones who are primarily addressed in advertising. And, increasingly, they are beginning to count among the numbers of media owners, gatekeepers and content creators.

These changes have also meant that questions relating to women and media have become more complex and troubled. Despite some seeming and some very real changes in the media, women still remain in the background in a number of ways. Media summits – increasingly popular today – mostly feature male media magnates and editors, with the occasional woman thrown in.

In this article, I will be focusing on the representation of women in crimestories in mainstream English newspapers and to what extent these are reflective of a deeper social position which itself is constituted of various contradictory attitudes; neo-conservative as well as radical.

The cases of Jessica Lal and Priyadarshini Mattoo have brought to the fore, discussions about the representation of women in media reports. The crimes committed against these women are not just rape and/or murder, but also delayed justice and media reporting. Even at its most sympathetic, the mainstream English print media has been blind and insensitive to certain gender issues. It does not understand for example that bringing crime against women to public notice is as important as the ideological/theoretical underpinning of the exercise. Through my paper I would like to explore this with special reference to the Lal and Mattoo cases. I would also like to look at how continued media focus may inadvertently help in perpetuating a discourse of oppression, by deflecting attention from the real issues to peripheral ones, which in turn may indirectly support a conservative approach to gender matters.

The story of the Jessica Lal case goes as far back as eight years. She was shot dead on April 29, 1999. The media has been congratulated for whipping up public interest in this case and mobilizing popular support to reopen the case.

Telugu Film industry, the second largest of its kind in India, celebrated its platinum jubilee recently. Conservative estimates indicate that the industry produces around 150 films a year. The corpus of Telugu films is therefore so large that it is hazardous to offer any generalizations about its trends and themes. The one aspect I wish to examine here is the forging of issues related to women in films, and the patterns that appear in the presentation/representation of these issues. I will quickly track here the trajectory of woman-centric films in Telugu and examine the ideological underpinnings of these film texts. This will enable us to determine the discursive shifts in the genre and note if these have made a qualitative difference to the perception and handling of women's issues. To plot this, I shall point to the dominant trends in each decade. Let me add that the analysis is by no means exhaustive; it only focuses on certain nodal issues at different points of time, in the evolution of women's film as a sub-genre in Telugu cinema.

Cinema has always been sensitive to the problems of women and given considerable space to women's issues. It is significant to note that the 30s witnessed the making of some reformist movies such as Mala Pilla (The Harijan Girl, 1938) and Malli Pelli (Remarriage,1939). Issues such as dowry, child marriage and widow marriage engaged the attention of the film makers through the 50s.

If there is one single revolution which has decisively impacted the lives of the largest number of people in the twentieth century, it is the explosion in the field of media, and its reach. There is not a single social group which is outside the influence of media; not a single issue that is not mediated by media. In fact media has erased several borders and facilitated trafficking of images across barriers. Media constructs and deconstructs identities, prescribes and proscribes values, makes and unmakes lifestyles, creates and destroys icons, and simply mediates every aspect of our life. Even remote geographic areas are influenced by advertising, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, music, films and other print and electronic media. The mediated images and messages construct the very fabric of everyday life, knowledge and frameworks of reality. Given this omnipotence and omnipresence of media, it is imperative that we examine the ramifications of this huge apparatus for all sections of people.

In the last two decades Media Studies has quite rightly and understandably become a popular discipline operating under the broad rubric of Cultural Studies and has provided the necessary critical analyses of the developments in media from a variety of perspectives. One of the major concerns of media critics has been “the gendered structures and relationships between human beings on the inside of media industries who control the resources, determine the images, words, and sounds that we consume” (Ross and Byerly: 1).

The words woman and women have intrinsically interwoven masculinity in them and scream out that a lady is incomplete without the other gender ‘in’ her, and if she ever dared to reject, she is left with nothing but woes. The terms are to be recognized and accepted as derivatives of a ‘phallogocentric’ society.

A new vocabulary that has arisen from many feminist movements will help us in redefining the role of modern human beings in a liberated society. ‘Wimin’ ‘womin,’ ‘womyn’ are terms produced by many parts of lesbian feminist movements to distinguish it from men and masculine (or ‘phallogocentric’) language. I choose to derive from this vocabulary in this paper. ‘Wimin’ are people who consciously reject men from their lives and choose to live their own lives free from the binding shackles of the dominant man (men) made society and cultures. They feel, find, and enjoy completeness bereft of the other gender.

Feminism as a philosophy is a shift of focus to women from men, to prove that women matter too. Gynocentrism is a focus on women as a clan and their views and experiences, needs, desires, likes, dislikes, usually without consideration of the other gender's views. Ultra-feminism (caused by both internal and external factors) can give birth to misogamy.