Introduction
Besides their supposedly entertaining and informative purposes, Mass media are meant to constructively educate and contribute in the establishment of gendered-free spaces, and thus, leading to democratic nations. In a number of modern democracies, media play, and have played, pivotal roles in the construction of the democratization process of those nations. By the same token, in other part of the world, namely the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), local media have been instrumentalized to vindicate spirits of patriarchy, endocentrism, and fundamentalism, causing more damages then benefits to the aspirations, identities, and roles of the Arab woman. During the few decades in which media, (in all forms: press, radio, audio-visual, and electronic) have infiltrated the Arab world, the woman’s voices, images, and identities have been subject to all forms of stereotyping, objectifications, and marginalization from the State’s sovereign institutions, especially those of politics, economy, and mass-communications.
With the uprising events of the Arab Spring, however, new realities have started to take shape, shaping with them new hopes over the debate of gender equality. Thus, the publicitization of both female’s demands of the political share of power is very significant not only for those women who have made the news, but in the history of the Arab women for the yet to come generations as well. Discussed in this paper is the sweeping change in the Arab Media strategies in their representations of the Arab women, following the unprecedented revolutions in the region. For so doing, the paper will trace back the trajectory followed by the Arab mediocre media vis-à-vis gender’s coverage during the last decade, and spotting more lights on the present political uprising in the region. The paper will conclude by raising a question mark against the future of the Arab women’s political roles within the region after the tide of this political dynamism is evened.
I. The Era of Lullaby Singing
Regardless of all the timid political reforms taking place each now and then in the
MENA region, and regardless of all the regional and transnational conventions signed with discernible cautiousness, and sometimes with recorded reservations, in matters of women human rights, it does not take much time for a foreign visitor to an Arab country to realize how far the existing distance between the lethargic reality the Arab woman lives and the one she deserves to have. In a region where vertebral social and economic disparities, handicaps of illiteracy, poverty, limited access to the health care system, and unreliable justice institution prevail, it is no surprise that talking about women’s rights is going to be the last concern in the local media agenda. Thus, the unjust shocking socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural discriminatory mediated representations of women become the norm for both the subject of these constructed realities (women) as well as the general public/audiences.
The Arab audiences have been raised to watch programs picturing the woman as a hopeless individual, a victim of crimes or social injustice, a protagonist of the rural life, an icon of illiteracy, and/or at best, trying to make her way through historically male-dominated sectors. Often time, the modern Arab woman is mostly seen as a famous singer, actress; but rarely a politician, an investor, or a leader of a decision making position. Her presence in the media has been subordinated to the males’ assertive power. Her voice has been mostly heard through males’ debates. In short, the female prototype in the Arab media has more likely been the problem and very rarely part of the solution. She is usually the object of debate. Her participatory contributions in solving nationally crucial issues are seldom heard of or seen on a regular basis, except in certain occasions such as “Woman’s International Day ”.
In 2000, the special plenary committee’s report of the 23rd extraordinary session of the United Nations general assembly stated “that women in the Maghrebi countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya) were under-represented among parliamentarians, ministers, vice-ministers and managers of social and economic companies and institutions, that the public was not sensitized enough about the importance of men/women balanced representation in the decision making process, and that media continue to disseminate prejudices against women.” The report also noted that there is a growing women’s adherence to political parties - both in terms of quality and quantity – with varying degree from one country to another, if we consider their level of instruction and their professional affiliations. Yet, women rarely hold managerial positions in political parties where they are much more solicited as voters rather than as candidates, and much less as leaders of their parties’ list of candidates; and the diversity of women’s profiles already actively present in the political sphere is still poorly reflected in the media which are globally punctual and selective . That is, the coverage is selective as it favors profiles of some politically active women - such as MPs, members of municipal councils, or senators - and neglects others profiles that can actually reflect the diversity of women’s political actions.
In 2010, in its fourth international Global Media Monitoring Project’s (GMMP) report, the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) found out that the Middle Eastern women are still significantly underrepresented in the news, despite the geopolitical and economic dynamism the world has been witnessing since the tragic event of septmber/11. For instance, the study showed that out of all the people who are interviewed, or whom the news is about in the media, only 16% of them are female. Although, mediated stories related to politics make up the majority of the news agenda, only 10% of these stories represent women’s voice (see table. 1).
Table .1: Frequency of appearance of women Vs. Men in the Media
Topics % of Females
Main Story subject 16%
Representation of Women in Political Programs 10%
Stories specifically focus on women 9%
Even when women do make the news, they are generally represented in stories related to entertainment. Furthermore, the majority of news reinforces gender stereotypes, for 81% of stories were found to support stereotypes, 14% neither challenge nor support stereotypes and only 4% challenge them. Major news topics found to reinforce gender stereotypes happen to be topics about economy (83%) and politics (81%) .
Table. 2: The nature of female mediated representations
Types of Representations Percentage % of Females
News Stories reinforcing gender stereotypes 81%
(Mainly in politics & economy)
News stories neither challenge nor support stereotypes
14%
News challenging stereotypes
4%
Professionally, while females are significantly underrepresented as news subjects, female news professionals are somewhat gaining more space at workforce. For instance, women primarily appear in personal capacity- as eyewitnesses (49%), giving personal views (31%) or as representatives of popular opinion (30%); but 57% of news announcers are women compared to 43% men. Still, as reporters, the number of women tends to lag far behind the number of males. Only 33% of all news reporters in the Middle East are female (see table .3). Very little news- just 9% of all stories- specifically focus on women. As authority or experts, women barely feature in news stories, since only 19% of the portrayed women are experts and 12% are spokespersons. News informational sources are also overwhelmingly male: only 16% of national news is quoted a female source and even less for international news (13%). As to newsmakers, women are underrepresented in professional categories such as politics (12%) and law (11%). When women do make the news it is primarily as students (66%), homemaker/parents (47%) or celebrities (41%) (see table .4).
Table .3: Women Media Professionals
Professions Percentage of Women
News announcers 57%
News reporters 33%
Experts Analysts 19%
Table .4: the social status of the projected women
Women Social Status Percentage of Females
Students 66%
Homemaker/Parents 47%
Celebrities 41%
Spokespersons of national news 16%
Spokespersons of international news 13%
Representatives of popular opinion 30%
Eyewitnesses 49%
Giving personal views 31%
Two main conclusions could be drawn from the two reports discussed above . On the one hand, there is an international consensus that the Arab woman is being discriminated against in the local media, particularly in the government owned media. Put differently, these indicators unveil the high correlation between women’s invisibility in mediated leading roles and their invisibility in the actual political decision-making ranks. On the other hand, since the 2000’s UN 23rd general assembly until the GMMP in 2010, nothing substantial has positively changed in women’s share of political or mediated power, at least as it has been reported by the two studies.
The reasons are various and complex. Some of them are attributed to the absence of a serious and responsible political will; others go back to the lobbying power of corrupt politicians who represent the breathing lungs of totalitarianism and dictatorships, which is another form of patriarchy, adding to that the deeply rooted cultural norms that still locate women on Derrida’s lower scale of binary oppositions. But more importantly, the fact that a considerable portion of females population in the region are illiterate and economically dependent represents a barrier in face of the aspirations of each and every woman, and also gives an excuse to those on power to keep oppressing women with the excuse that the latter can not represent themselves since they are not educated and not professionally qualified.
Nadia Hijab (1989) summarizes the slow process of women’s empowerment in the Arab world into two major reasons. First, she believes that the debate on women’s role in these societies is taking place within the framework of “Arab-Islamic Heritage,” which has resulted in a somewhat schizophrenic approach that both encourages women to take equal part in the developmental process; and yet, holds them back in their place as secondary actors within the family context. The other reason, the author attributes it to the poor design and execution of the development process in the Arab word. The region has been unsuccessful in constructing a robust health and education system and uneven wealth distribution because of “inexperience and apathy, since the majority of the people, not to speak about women, have been excluded from decision-making.” P.7.
During the past few months, the Arab region -Starting from Morocco passing by Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen – has been witnessing an unprecedented political transition, which means that now more than ever all forms of contradictions are at their zenith in the sense that the previous political regime with all its heritage is no more operating and a new one is yet to see light. However, unlike many of the historically recorded transitional phases of which women had to suffer the most, this time women have been major actors whether in triggering and/or surviving the transition; and for the first time, the Arab media, in all forms, have been airing voices and images of militant females invading the emblematic streets of the region’s capital cities, hand in hand with their male partners. The next section sheds light on the shifting media strategy of representations of the Arab woman along with the role she has acted during this period of national transition.
II. Women in the “Arab Spring”: Heard & Seen
While the “Arab spring” is neither about women’s liberation and gender equality nor was it motivated by this cause, it benchmarks a historical moment in the futuristic livelihood of the Arab women who have been so omnipresent in these streets’ revolutions. Women’s visibility in the local and international news channels and social media has reached its peak. Al-Jazeera channels –both Arabic and English- for instance, laid the groundwork by providing skeptical coverage of women’s rights, that traditional government-dominated media had long avoided. Many other international media have unstoppably aired featured stories of young girls leading the Tunisian demonstrations that catalyzed the Arab Spring. We have seen them marching up the capitals’ main streets, with their husbands and children; or forming distinct frontline protests. Then, the outbreak of the 25th January demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square, motivated by a young woman via a video posted on Face-book of Egyptian uprising, forced the president Hosni Mubarak out of office.
By the same token, In Bahrain, mobilized by a huge wave of women sitting in Pearl Square in the capital, demanding change, Zainab al-Khawaja, was the figurehead of those women. She went on a hunger strike in protest at the beating and arrest of her father, husband and brother-in-law. In Yemen, it was Tawakul Karman, a 32 female journalist, who first led demonstrations on a university campus against the long rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Karman emerged as one of the leaders of the revolution. Thousands of veiled women, following Karman, have come out in Sana'a and Taiz to force that country's autocrat from office. Women in Syria defied armed secret police; blockading roads to demonstrate for the freedom of their imprisoned loved ones. In Libya, women’s protest against the regime was initiated by Iman al-Obeidi, a recent law-school graduate from a middle-class family, at the city of Tobruk. Imane broke into a government press conference in Tripoli, and debunk the Gaddafi's troops who detained her at a checkpoint and then raped her. Her case provoked women's demonstrations against the regime in the rebel-held city of Benghazi. The city of Benghazi also witnessed the creation of a new opposition newspaper by a group of young men and women. ''The role of the female in Libya,'' reads one headline, ''She is the Muslim, the mother, the soldier, the protester, the journalist, the volunteer, the citizen .”
In fact, one of the factors that made the prominent roles of the Arab women in these revolutions effectively shocking for the general public in and outside the region was the outstanding level of discipline and efficacy maintained all along the protests. Since it has been a mass movement, women came from different geographical, social and educational backgrounds with different ideological, religious and political affiliations. Labor movements in the Maghrebi countries went out at the public rallies, focusing their political energies on issues of political representation and on laws affecting women's equality, underlining how much more of a public role they now have than is usually acknowledged.
There is also the undeniable fact that a great number of the female participants engender new generations of women who earned quality education abroad, have a high awareness of the legitimacy of what they are fighting for, and an effective mastery of social media components. Even though, Arab media have been propagating the idea that women’s public sittings were spontaneous and not as structured as that of men’s, the real story was rarely talked about, except in some international channels, such as the BBC, that hosted prominent Arab female bloggers and social media users who took the charge of organizing and uniting the females’ lines in the streets. Recent studies, led by international media experts, revealed that personal and community access for young Arabs in cafés, schools, and other public spots rose 62%. According to the Dubai School of Government’s Arab Social Media Report, the total number of Face-book users in the Arab world skyrocketed 30% from January to April of 2011. Arabic-language Face-book users doubled since 2010. Across the Arab world, social media have become cornerstone sources of information about demonstrations around the region. Politically active Arab women of a new generation have adopted social media as an indispensible tool, and they will not be surrendering it anytime soon. Meanwhile, the Arab Spring has also resulted in a more sprawling and vibrant network of local and national news organizations many of which led by female figures.
Among the many pioneer users of social media as a site of national mobility during the up-rise is Leena Ben Mhenni, often called a “cyber activist.” She created her blog under her own name, writing about women’s rights and freedom of press, daring to report what the official media in Tunisia ignored or fabricated, and to encourage others not to be afraid. During the peak of the revolt, she traveled around the country to document government crackdowns on protesters and ran photos of those injured or killed by police. There is also Israa Abdel Fattah in Egypt. Israa was one of the founders of the 6th of April youth movement on Face-book. Asmaa Mahfouz is another Egyptian activist, and now a symbol of heroism, as she was a key organizer of the 18-day uprising that forced the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. In recognition to her heroism, Mahfouz had been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Prize, which was recently given to three women one of whom is the Yemeni Tawakul Karman. Karaman is a-32 journalist and women human rights activist who stood still in front of Saleh’s tyranny. Now, besides her being the first Arab woman to win the Peace Prize, she is also the everlasting Arab figure who rebelled not only against dictatorship but also against a traditional, conservative mindset that fears women as agents of change.
III. Will the Arab Revolution Reward Women?
This is the question that the Arab women along with many local and transnational women human rights activists raise with a great deal of fear and uncertainty. The roots of this uncertainty date back in the early 1960s when Algeria won its independence from France. During the fight for independence, the Algerian woman was a team player aside the Algerian man in their fierce resistance to the colonial power. Ironically enough, once the country got its independence, women once again were pushed back to their private space, and all they gained from the new regime was full civil rights (voting and elections), but debate over their actual personal rights remained an uncharted landscape. With the Arab Spring, and despite the prominent roles played by women, women stare at the future with worry eyes rather than optimistic looks, because they worry that on the road to new democratic parliamentary regimes, their rights will be discarded in favor of male constituencies, whether patriarchal liberals or Muslim fundamentalists. Activists on women's issues and progressives are wondering how to ensure that women's gains this spring not be rolled back.
It was, for example, striking that women were without representation on the commission appointed to revise the Egyptian constitution in preparation for September elections, and that only one woman was appointed to the 29-person interim cabinet. Buthayna Kamel, a prominent newscaster and critic of the Mubarak regime, is running for president. Even if her run gets little traction, her candidacy, she believes, is nevertheless deeply symbolic and historic - and another strikingly brave act by a woman in this new era in the Arab world. Other Egyptian women are hoping that the constitution can be rewritten to strengthen women's rights, and that the 64 seats set aside for women in the previous parliament will be retained. In Tunisia, the leader of fundamentalist group, al-Nahda or the Renaissance Party, politicians in the transitional government are determined to protect the public role of women by making sure they are well represented in the new legislature. Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the party, has been speaking of institutionalizing a "Turkish model" and says that, he supports the right of a woman to become the country's president. With all these inquiries in mind, it becomes lucid that the fight for women’s rights in the region is going to be more difficult than the throwing away of the old regime, because it is not simply a fight against individuals, but against deeply rooted ideologies of endocentrism and male supremacy that the majority of the laymen embrace for granted.
Conclusion
In short, the Arab Spring has been and will stay a turning point in the modern history of the Arab world, as it has pushed the West to reconsider their perception and conceptions of the Arab as an incarnation of the “other”. In the same vain, the Arab woman, through the Arab Spring, has been successful in shaking her family’s, her society’s as well as the rest of the world’s stereotyping convictions toward her, by proving that she is not a second-class citizen as has historically been promoted. Aided by advances in education, by the prominence of articulate female anchors on satellite television networks like Al-Jazeera, and by the rise of the Internet and social media, she asserted leadership roles both in the public sphere as in the cyberspace that young men's dominance of the public sphere might have hampered in city squares.
Of course, there is still countless number of stories, untold by the media for a reason or another about women who have forged the making of the uprising events in the MENA regions. From Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen and Libya, Bahrain and Syria, women were organizers, marchers, rabble-rousers, bloggers, hunger strikers, and, life-losers, nurses in makeshift hospitals and in ambulances, cooks, speakers and freedom songs singers at the demonstrations. They have not escaped the human cost of this uprising. They were beaten to death by the Tunisian police, raped by the pro-Gaddafi militia, detained by the Syrian regime’s Army, and seized by the Bahraini forces. But above all, this not what scares the Arab women as much as the idea that all these efforts will soon fade away once things get back to normal, and once again that same patriarchal mentality floats on the surface. Many are alarmed that their efforts risk going unrewarded and that men who were keen to have them on the streets crying freedom may not be so happy to have them in parliament, government and business boardrooms. Women have helped the Arab Spring, and it remains to be seen if the Arab Spring will help women. One thing is sure is that the Arab woman learned how to make her way to the city emblematic square to ask for her national freedom; so now she knows how to get back there to ask for her own freedom.
References
1. Hamida ElBouri, (2009). Media Coverage of Women’s Political Participation in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia: Media Exercise Synthesis Report. Tunisia: Centre for Arab Women Training and Research (CAWTAR)
2. Global Media Monitoring Project, (2010). Regional Report: Middle East. Available at:
http://www.whomakesthenews.org/images/stories/restricted/regional/Middle_%20East.pdf. (Consulted on September 27th, 2011).
3. Nadia Hijab, (1989). Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work. Cambridge: (Cambridge Middle East Library). P.7
4. Report of the special plenary committee of the 23rd extraordinary session of the U.N General Assembly - New York
5. Shahin Cole and Juan Cole, An Arab Spring for Women: The Missing Story from the Middle East. (April 26, 2011) Available at: www.TomDispatch.com
6. Xan Rice’, The Arab Spring, (May 13, 2011.) Available at: http://www.theage.com.au/world/the-arab-spring-20110512-1ekjh.html. Consulted on (September 12th, 2011)
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Mediating Women’s Voice in the Arab Spring: From a lullaby Whisperer into the Wailers for National Freedom
Introduction
Besides their supposedly entertaining and informative purposes, Mass media are meant to constructively educate and contribute in the establishment of gendered-free spaces, and thus, leading to democratic nations. In a number of modern democracies, media play, and have played, pivotal roles in the construction of the democratization process of those nations. By the same token, in other part of the world, namely the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), local media have been instrumentalized to vindicate spirits of patriarchy, endocentrism, and fundamentalism, causing more damages then benefits to the aspirations, identities, and roles of the Arab woman. During the few decades in which media, (in all forms: press, radio, audio-visual, and electronic) have infiltrated the Arab world, the woman’s voices, images, and identities have been subject to all forms of stereotyping, objectifications, and marginalization from the State’s sovereign institutions, especially those of politics, economy, and mass-communications.
With the uprising events of the Arab Spring, however, new realities have started to take shape, shaping with them new hopes over the debate of gender equality. Thus, the publicitization of both female’s demands of the political share of power is very significant not only for those women who have made the news, but in the history of the Arab women for the yet to come generations as well. Discussed in this paper is the sweeping change in the Arab Media strategies in their representations of the Arab women, following the unprecedented revolutions in the region. For so doing, the paper will trace back the trajectory followed by the Arab mediocre media vis-à-vis gender’s coverage during the last decade, and spotting more lights on the present political uprising in the region. The paper will conclude by raising a question mark against the future of the Arab women’s political roles within the region after the tide of this political dynamism is evened.
I. The Era of Lullaby Singing
Regardless of all the timid political reforms taking place each now and then in the
MENA region, and regardless of all the regional and transnational conventions signed with discernible cautiousness, and sometimes with recorded reservations, in matters of women human rights, it does not take much time for a foreign visitor to an Arab country to realize how far the existing distance between the lethargic reality the Arab woman lives and the one she deserves to have. In a region where vertebral social and economic disparities, handicaps of illiteracy, poverty, limited access to the health care system, and unreliable justice institution prevail, it is no surprise that talking about women’s rights is going to be the last concern in the local media agenda. Thus, the unjust shocking socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural discriminatory mediated representations of women become the norm for both the subject of these constructed realities (women) as well as the general public/audiences.
The Arab audiences have been raised to watch programs picturing the woman as a hopeless individual, a victim of crimes or social injustice, a protagonist of the rural life, an icon of illiteracy, and/or at best, trying to make her way through historically male-dominated sectors. Often time, the modern Arab woman is mostly seen as a famous singer, actress; but rarely a politician, an investor, or a leader of a decision making position. Her presence in the media has been subordinated to the males’ assertive power. Her voice has been mostly heard through males’ debates. In short, the female prototype in the Arab media has more likely been the problem and very rarely part of the solution. She is usually the object of debate. Her participatory contributions in solving nationally crucial issues are seldom heard of or seen on a regular basis, except in certain occasions such as “Woman’s International Day ”.
In 2000, the special plenary committee’s report of the 23rd extraordinary session of the United Nations general assembly stated “that women in the Maghrebi countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya) were under-represented among parliamentarians, ministers, vice-ministers and managers of social and economic companies and institutions, that the public was not sensitized enough about the importance of men/women balanced representation in the decision making process, and that media continue to disseminate prejudices against women.” The report also noted that there is a growing women’s adherence to political parties - both in terms of quality and quantity – with varying degree from one country to another, if we consider their level of instruction and their professional affiliations. Yet, women rarely hold managerial positions in political parties where they are much more solicited as voters rather than as candidates, and much less as leaders of their parties’ list of candidates; and the diversity of women’s profiles already actively present in the political sphere is still poorly reflected in the media which are globally punctual and selective . That is, the coverage is selective as it favors profiles of some politically active women - such as MPs, members of municipal councils, or senators - and neglects others profiles that can actually reflect the diversity of women’s political actions.
In 2010, in its fourth international Global Media Monitoring Project’s (GMMP) report, the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) found out that the Middle Eastern women are still significantly underrepresented in the news, despite the geopolitical and economic dynamism the world has been witnessing since the tragic event of septmber/11. For instance, the study showed that out of all the people who are interviewed, or whom the news is about in the media, only 16% of them are female. Although, mediated stories related to politics make up the majority of the news agenda, only 10% of these stories represent women’s voice (see table. 1).
Table .1: Frequency of appearance of women Vs. Men in the Media
Topics % of Females
Main Story subject 16%
Representation of Women in Political Programs 10%
Stories specifically focus on women 9%
Even when women do make the news, they are generally represented in stories related to entertainment. Furthermore, the majority of news reinforces gender stereotypes, for 81% of stories were found to support stereotypes, 14% neither challenge nor support stereotypes and only 4% challenge them. Major news topics found to reinforce gender stereotypes happen to be topics about economy (83%) and politics (81%) .
Table. 2: The nature of female mediated representations
Types of Representations Percentage % of Females
News Stories reinforcing gender stereotypes 81%
(Mainly in politics & economy)
News stories neither challenge nor support stereotypes
14%
News challenging stereotypes
4%
Professionally, while females are significantly underrepresented as news subjects, female news professionals are somewhat gaining more space at workforce. For instance, women primarily appear in personal capacity- as eyewitnesses (49%), giving personal views (31%) or as representatives of popular opinion (30%); but 57% of news announcers are women compared to 43% men. Still, as reporters, the number of women tends to lag far behind the number of males. Only 33% of all news reporters in the Middle East are female (see table .3). Very little news- just 9% of all stories- specifically focus on women. As authority or experts, women barely feature in news stories, since only 19% of the portrayed women are experts and 12% are spokespersons. News informational sources are also overwhelmingly male: only 16% of national news is quoted a female source and even less for international news (13%). As to newsmakers, women are underrepresented in professional categories such as politics (12%) and law (11%). When women do make the news it is primarily as students (66%), homemaker/parents (47%) or celebrities (41%) (see table .4).
Table .3: Women Media Professionals
Professions Percentage of Women
News announcers 57%
News reporters 33%
Experts Analysts 19%
Table .4: the social status of the projected women
Women Social Status Percentage of Females
Students 66%
Homemaker/Parents 47%
Celebrities 41%
Spokespersons of national news 16%
Spokespersons of international news 13%
Representatives of popular opinion 30%
Eyewitnesses 49%
Giving personal views 31%
Two main conclusions could be drawn from the two reports discussed above . On the one hand, there is an international consensus that the Arab woman is being discriminated against in the local media, particularly in the government owned media. Put differently, these indicators unveil the high correlation between women’s invisibility in mediated leading roles and their invisibility in the actual political decision-making ranks. On the other hand, since the 2000’s UN 23rd general assembly until the GMMP in 2010, nothing substantial has positively changed in women’s share of political or mediated power, at least as it has been reported by the two studies.
The reasons are various and complex. Some of them are attributed to the absence of a serious and responsible political will; others go back to the lobbying power of corrupt politicians who represent the breathing lungs of totalitarianism and dictatorships, which is another form of patriarchy, adding to that the deeply rooted cultural norms that still locate women on Derrida’s lower scale of binary oppositions. But more importantly, the fact that a considerable portion of females population in the region are illiterate and economically dependent represents a barrier in face of the aspirations of each and every woman, and also gives an excuse to those on power to keep oppressing women with the excuse that the latter can not represent themselves since they are not educated and not professionally qualified.
Nadia Hijab (1989) summarizes the slow process of women’s empowerment in the Arab world into two major reasons. First, she believes that the debate on women’s role in these societies is taking place within the framework of “Arab-Islamic Heritage,” which has resulted in a somewhat schizophrenic approach that both encourages women to take equal part in the developmental process; and yet, holds them back in their place as secondary actors within the family context. The other reason, the author attributes it to the poor design and execution of the development process in the Arab word. The region has been unsuccessful in constructing a robust health and education system and uneven wealth distribution because of “inexperience and apathy, since the majority of the people, not to speak about women, have been excluded from decision-making.” P.7.
During the past few months, the Arab region -Starting from Morocco passing by Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen – has been witnessing an unprecedented political transition, which means that now more than ever all forms of contradictions are at their zenith in the sense that the previous political regime with all its heritage is no more operating and a new one is yet to see light. However, unlike many of the historically recorded transitional phases of which women had to suffer the most, this time women have been major actors whether in triggering and/or surviving the transition; and for the first time, the Arab media, in all forms, have been airing voices and images of militant females invading the emblematic streets of the region’s capital cities, hand in hand with their male partners. The next section sheds light on the shifting media strategy of representations of the Arab woman along with the role she has acted during this period of national transition.
II. Women in the “Arab Spring”: Heard & Seen
While the “Arab spring” is neither about women’s liberation and gender equality nor was it motivated by this cause, it benchmarks a historical moment in the futuristic livelihood of the Arab women who have been so omnipresent in these streets’ revolutions. Women’s visibility in the local and international news channels and social media has reached its peak. Al-Jazeera channels –both Arabic and English- for instance, laid the groundwork by providing skeptical coverage of women’s rights, that traditional government-dominated media had long avoided. Many other international media have unstoppably aired featured stories of young girls leading the Tunisian demonstrations that catalyzed the Arab Spring. We have seen them marching up the capitals’ main streets, with their husbands and children; or forming distinct frontline protests. Then, the outbreak of the 25th January demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square, motivated by a young woman via a video posted on Face-book of Egyptian uprising, forced the president Hosni Mubarak out of office.
By the same token, In Bahrain, mobilized by a huge wave of women sitting in Pearl Square in the capital, demanding change, Zainab al-Khawaja, was the figurehead of those women. She went on a hunger strike in protest at the beating and arrest of her father, husband and brother-in-law. In Yemen, it was Tawakul Karman, a 32 female journalist, who first led demonstrations on a university campus against the long rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Karman emerged as one of the leaders of the revolution. Thousands of veiled women, following Karman, have come out in Sana'a and Taiz to force that country's autocrat from office. Women in Syria defied armed secret police; blockading roads to demonstrate for the freedom of their imprisoned loved ones. In Libya, women’s protest against the regime was initiated by Iman al-Obeidi, a recent law-school graduate from a middle-class family, at the city of Tobruk. Imane broke into a government press conference in Tripoli, and debunk the Gaddafi's troops who detained her at a checkpoint and then raped her. Her case provoked women's demonstrations against the regime in the rebel-held city of Benghazi. The city of Benghazi also witnessed the creation of a new opposition newspaper by a group of young men and women. ''The role of the female in Libya,'' reads one headline, ''She is the Muslim, the mother, the soldier, the protester, the journalist, the volunteer, the citizen .”
In fact, one of the factors that made the prominent roles of the Arab women in these revolutions effectively shocking for the general public in and outside the region was the outstanding level of discipline and efficacy maintained all along the protests. Since it has been a mass movement, women came from different geographical, social and educational backgrounds with different ideological, religious and political affiliations. Labor movements in the Maghrebi countries went out at the public rallies, focusing their political energies on issues of political representation and on laws affecting women's equality, underlining how much more of a public role they now have than is usually acknowledged.
There is also the undeniable fact that a great number of the female participants engender new generations of women who earned quality education abroad, have a high awareness of the legitimacy of what they are fighting for, and an effective mastery of social media components. Even though, Arab media have been propagating the idea that women’s public sittings were spontaneous and not as structured as that of men’s, the real story was rarely talked about, except in some international channels, such as the BBC, that hosted prominent Arab female bloggers and social media users who took the charge of organizing and uniting the females’ lines in the streets. Recent studies, led by international media experts, revealed that personal and community access for young Arabs in cafés, schools, and other public spots rose 62%. According to the Dubai School of Government’s Arab Social Media Report, the total number of Face-book users in the Arab world skyrocketed 30% from January to April of 2011. Arabic-language Face-book users doubled since 2010. Across the Arab world, social media have become cornerstone sources of information about demonstrations around the region. Politically active Arab women of a new generation have adopted social media as an indispensible tool, and they will not be surrendering it anytime soon. Meanwhile, the Arab Spring has also resulted in a more sprawling and vibrant network of local and national news organizations many of which led by female figures.
Among the many pioneer users of social media as a site of national mobility during the up-rise is Leena Ben Mhenni, often called a “cyber activist.” She created her blog under her own name, writing about women’s rights and freedom of press, daring to report what the official media in Tunisia ignored or fabricated, and to encourage others not to be afraid. During the peak of the revolt, she traveled around the country to document government crackdowns on protesters and ran photos of those injured or killed by police. There is also Israa Abdel Fattah in Egypt. Israa was one of the founders of the 6th of April youth movement on Face-book. Asmaa Mahfouz is another Egyptian activist, and now a symbol of heroism, as she was a key organizer of the 18-day uprising that forced the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. In recognition to her heroism, Mahfouz had been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Prize, which was recently given to three women one of whom is the Yemeni Tawakul Karman. Karaman is a-32 journalist and women human rights activist who stood still in front of Saleh’s tyranny. Now, besides her being the first Arab woman to win the Peace Prize, she is also the everlasting Arab figure who rebelled not only against dictatorship but also against a traditional, conservative mindset that fears women as agents of change.
III. Will the Arab Revolution Reward Women?
This is the question that the Arab women along with many local and transnational women human rights activists raise with a great deal of fear and uncertainty. The roots of this uncertainty date back in the early 1960s when Algeria won its independence from France. During the fight for independence, the Algerian woman was a team player aside the Algerian man in their fierce resistance to the colonial power. Ironically enough, once the country got its independence, women once again were pushed back to their private space, and all they gained from the new regime was full civil rights (voting and elections), but debate over their actual personal rights remained an uncharted landscape. With the Arab Spring, and despite the prominent roles played by women, women stare at the future with worry eyes rather than optimistic looks, because they worry that on the road to new democratic parliamentary regimes, their rights will be discarded in favor of male constituencies, whether patriarchal liberals or Muslim fundamentalists. Activists on women's issues and progressives are wondering how to ensure that women's gains this spring not be rolled back.
It was, for example, striking that women were without representation on the commission appointed to revise the Egyptian constitution in preparation for September elections, and that only one woman was appointed to the 29-person interim cabinet. Buthayna Kamel, a prominent newscaster and critic of the Mubarak regime, is running for president. Even if her run gets little traction, her candidacy, she believes, is nevertheless deeply symbolic and historic - and another strikingly brave act by a woman in this new era in the Arab world. Other Egyptian women are hoping that the constitution can be rewritten to strengthen women's rights, and that the 64 seats set aside for women in the previous parliament will be retained. In Tunisia, the leader of fundamentalist group, al-Nahda or the Renaissance Party, politicians in the transitional government are determined to protect the public role of women by making sure they are well represented in the new legislature. Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the party, has been speaking of institutionalizing a "Turkish model" and says that, he supports the right of a woman to become the country's president. With all these inquiries in mind, it becomes lucid that the fight for women’s rights in the region is going to be more difficult than the throwing away of the old regime, because it is not simply a fight against individuals, but against deeply rooted ideologies of endocentrism and male supremacy that the majority of the laymen embrace for granted.
Conclusion
In short, the Arab Spring has been and will stay a turning point in the modern history of the Arab world, as it has pushed the West to reconsider their perception and conceptions of the Arab as an incarnation of the “other”. In the same vain, the Arab woman, through the Arab Spring, has been successful in shaking her family’s, her society’s as well as the rest of the world’s stereotyping convictions toward her, by proving that she is not a second-class citizen as has historically been promoted. Aided by advances in education, by the prominence of articulate female anchors on satellite television networks like Al-Jazeera, and by the rise of the Internet and social media, she asserted leadership roles both in the public sphere as in the cyberspace that young men's dominance of the public sphere might have hampered in city squares.
Of course, there is still countless number of stories, untold by the media for a reason or another about women who have forged the making of the uprising events in the MENA regions. From Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen and Libya, Bahrain and Syria, women were organizers, marchers, rabble-rousers, bloggers, hunger strikers, and, life-losers, nurses in makeshift hospitals and in ambulances, cooks, speakers and freedom songs singers at the demonstrations. They have not escaped the human cost of this uprising. They were beaten to death by the Tunisian police, raped by the pro-Gaddafi militia, detained by the Syrian regime’s Army, and seized by the Bahraini forces. But above all, this not what scares the Arab women as much as the idea that all these efforts will soon fade away once things get back to normal, and once again that same patriarchal mentality floats on the surface. Many are alarmed that their efforts risk going unrewarded and that men who were keen to have them on the streets crying freedom may not be so happy to have them in parliament, government and business boardrooms. Women have helped the Arab Spring, and it remains to be seen if the Arab Spring will help women. One thing is sure is that the Arab woman learned how to make her way to the city emblematic square to ask for her national freedom; so now she knows how to get back there to ask for her own freedom.
References
1. Hamida ElBouri, (2009). Media Coverage of Women’s Political Participation in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia: Media Exercise Synthesis Report. Tunisia: Centre for Arab Women Training and Research (CAWTAR)
2. Global Media Monitoring Project, (2010). Regional Report: Middle East. Available at:
http://www.whomakesthenews.org/images/stories/restricted/regional/Middle_%20East.pdf. (Consulted on September 27th, 2011).
3. Nadia Hijab, (1989). Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work. Cambridge: (Cambridge Middle East Library). P.7
4. Report of the special plenary committee of the 23rd extraordinary session of the U.N General Assembly - New York
5. Shahin Cole and Juan Cole, An Arab Spring for Women: The Missing Story from the Middle East. (April 26, 2011) Available at: www.TomDispatch.com
6. Xan Rice’, The Arab Spring, (May 13, 2011.) Available at: http://www.theage.com.au/world/the-arab-spring-20110512-1ekjh.html. Consulted on (September 12th, 2011)
Besides their supposedly entertaining and informative purposes, Mass media are meant to constructively educate and contribute in the establishment of gendered-free spaces, and thus, leading to democratic nations. In a number of modern democracies, media play, and have played, pivotal roles in the construction of the democratization process of those nations. By the same token, in other part of the world, namely the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), local media have been instrumentalized to vindicate spirits of patriarchy, endocentrism, and fundamentalism, causing more damages then benefits to the aspirations, identities, and roles of the Arab woman. During the few decades in which media, (in all forms: press, radio, audio-visual, and electronic) have infiltrated the Arab world, the woman’s voices, images, and identities have been subject to all forms of stereotyping, objectifications, and marginalization from the State’s sovereign institutions, especially those of politics, economy, and mass-communications.
With the uprising events of the Arab Spring, however, new realities have started to take shape, shaping with them new hopes over the debate of gender equality. Thus, the publicitization of both female’s demands of the political share of power is very significant not only for those women who have made the news, but in the history of the Arab women for the yet to come generations as well. Discussed in this paper is the sweeping change in the Arab Media strategies in their representations of the Arab women, following the unprecedented revolutions in the region. For so doing, the paper will trace back the trajectory followed by the Arab mediocre media vis-à-vis gender’s coverage during the last decade, and spotting more lights on the present political uprising in the region. The paper will conclude by raising a question mark against the future of the Arab women’s political roles within the region after the tide of this political dynamism is evened.
I. The Era of Lullaby Singing
Regardless of all the timid political reforms taking place each now and then in the
MENA region, and regardless of all the regional and transnational conventions signed with discernible cautiousness, and sometimes with recorded reservations, in matters of women human rights, it does not take much time for a foreign visitor to an Arab country to realize how far the existing distance between the lethargic reality the Arab woman lives and the one she deserves to have. In a region where vertebral social and economic disparities, handicaps of illiteracy, poverty, limited access to the health care system, and unreliable justice institution prevail, it is no surprise that talking about women’s rights is going to be the last concern in the local media agenda. Thus, the unjust shocking socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural discriminatory mediated representations of women become the norm for both the subject of these constructed realities (women) as well as the general public/audiences.
The Arab audiences have been raised to watch programs picturing the woman as a hopeless individual, a victim of crimes or social injustice, a protagonist of the rural life, an icon of illiteracy, and/or at best, trying to make her way through historically male-dominated sectors. Often time, the modern Arab woman is mostly seen as a famous singer, actress; but rarely a politician, an investor, or a leader of a decision making position. Her presence in the media has been subordinated to the males’ assertive power. Her voice has been mostly heard through males’ debates. In short, the female prototype in the Arab media has more likely been the problem and very rarely part of the solution. She is usually the object of debate. Her participatory contributions in solving nationally crucial issues are seldom heard of or seen on a regular basis, except in certain occasions such as “Woman’s International Day ”.
In 2000, the special plenary committee’s report of the 23rd extraordinary session of the United Nations general assembly stated “that women in the Maghrebi countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya) were under-represented among parliamentarians, ministers, vice-ministers and managers of social and economic companies and institutions, that the public was not sensitized enough about the importance of men/women balanced representation in the decision making process, and that media continue to disseminate prejudices against women.” The report also noted that there is a growing women’s adherence to political parties - both in terms of quality and quantity – with varying degree from one country to another, if we consider their level of instruction and their professional affiliations. Yet, women rarely hold managerial positions in political parties where they are much more solicited as voters rather than as candidates, and much less as leaders of their parties’ list of candidates; and the diversity of women’s profiles already actively present in the political sphere is still poorly reflected in the media which are globally punctual and selective . That is, the coverage is selective as it favors profiles of some politically active women - such as MPs, members of municipal councils, or senators - and neglects others profiles that can actually reflect the diversity of women’s political actions.
In 2010, in its fourth international Global Media Monitoring Project’s (GMMP) report, the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) found out that the Middle Eastern women are still significantly underrepresented in the news, despite the geopolitical and economic dynamism the world has been witnessing since the tragic event of septmber/11. For instance, the study showed that out of all the people who are interviewed, or whom the news is about in the media, only 16% of them are female. Although, mediated stories related to politics make up the majority of the news agenda, only 10% of these stories represent women’s voice (see table. 1).
Table .1: Frequency of appearance of women Vs. Men in the Media
Topics % of Females
Main Story subject 16%
Representation of Women in Political Programs 10%
Stories specifically focus on women 9%
Even when women do make the news, they are generally represented in stories related to entertainment. Furthermore, the majority of news reinforces gender stereotypes, for 81% of stories were found to support stereotypes, 14% neither challenge nor support stereotypes and only 4% challenge them. Major news topics found to reinforce gender stereotypes happen to be topics about economy (83%) and politics (81%) .
Table. 2: The nature of female mediated representations
Types of Representations Percentage % of Females
News Stories reinforcing gender stereotypes 81%
(Mainly in politics & economy)
News stories neither challenge nor support stereotypes
14%
News challenging stereotypes
4%
Professionally, while females are significantly underrepresented as news subjects, female news professionals are somewhat gaining more space at workforce. For instance, women primarily appear in personal capacity- as eyewitnesses (49%), giving personal views (31%) or as representatives of popular opinion (30%); but 57% of news announcers are women compared to 43% men. Still, as reporters, the number of women tends to lag far behind the number of males. Only 33% of all news reporters in the Middle East are female (see table .3). Very little news- just 9% of all stories- specifically focus on women. As authority or experts, women barely feature in news stories, since only 19% of the portrayed women are experts and 12% are spokespersons. News informational sources are also overwhelmingly male: only 16% of national news is quoted a female source and even less for international news (13%). As to newsmakers, women are underrepresented in professional categories such as politics (12%) and law (11%). When women do make the news it is primarily as students (66%), homemaker/parents (47%) or celebrities (41%) (see table .4).
Table .3: Women Media Professionals
Professions Percentage of Women
News announcers 57%
News reporters 33%
Experts Analysts 19%
Table .4: the social status of the projected women
Women Social Status Percentage of Females
Students 66%
Homemaker/Parents 47%
Celebrities 41%
Spokespersons of national news 16%
Spokespersons of international news 13%
Representatives of popular opinion 30%
Eyewitnesses 49%
Giving personal views 31%
Two main conclusions could be drawn from the two reports discussed above . On the one hand, there is an international consensus that the Arab woman is being discriminated against in the local media, particularly in the government owned media. Put differently, these indicators unveil the high correlation between women’s invisibility in mediated leading roles and their invisibility in the actual political decision-making ranks. On the other hand, since the 2000’s UN 23rd general assembly until the GMMP in 2010, nothing substantial has positively changed in women’s share of political or mediated power, at least as it has been reported by the two studies.
The reasons are various and complex. Some of them are attributed to the absence of a serious and responsible political will; others go back to the lobbying power of corrupt politicians who represent the breathing lungs of totalitarianism and dictatorships, which is another form of patriarchy, adding to that the deeply rooted cultural norms that still locate women on Derrida’s lower scale of binary oppositions. But more importantly, the fact that a considerable portion of females population in the region are illiterate and economically dependent represents a barrier in face of the aspirations of each and every woman, and also gives an excuse to those on power to keep oppressing women with the excuse that the latter can not represent themselves since they are not educated and not professionally qualified.
Nadia Hijab (1989) summarizes the slow process of women’s empowerment in the Arab world into two major reasons. First, she believes that the debate on women’s role in these societies is taking place within the framework of “Arab-Islamic Heritage,” which has resulted in a somewhat schizophrenic approach that both encourages women to take equal part in the developmental process; and yet, holds them back in their place as secondary actors within the family context. The other reason, the author attributes it to the poor design and execution of the development process in the Arab word. The region has been unsuccessful in constructing a robust health and education system and uneven wealth distribution because of “inexperience and apathy, since the majority of the people, not to speak about women, have been excluded from decision-making.” P.7.
During the past few months, the Arab region -Starting from Morocco passing by Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen – has been witnessing an unprecedented political transition, which means that now more than ever all forms of contradictions are at their zenith in the sense that the previous political regime with all its heritage is no more operating and a new one is yet to see light. However, unlike many of the historically recorded transitional phases of which women had to suffer the most, this time women have been major actors whether in triggering and/or surviving the transition; and for the first time, the Arab media, in all forms, have been airing voices and images of militant females invading the emblematic streets of the region’s capital cities, hand in hand with their male partners. The next section sheds light on the shifting media strategy of representations of the Arab woman along with the role she has acted during this period of national transition.
II. Women in the “Arab Spring”: Heard & Seen
While the “Arab spring” is neither about women’s liberation and gender equality nor was it motivated by this cause, it benchmarks a historical moment in the futuristic livelihood of the Arab women who have been so omnipresent in these streets’ revolutions. Women’s visibility in the local and international news channels and social media has reached its peak. Al-Jazeera channels –both Arabic and English- for instance, laid the groundwork by providing skeptical coverage of women’s rights, that traditional government-dominated media had long avoided. Many other international media have unstoppably aired featured stories of young girls leading the Tunisian demonstrations that catalyzed the Arab Spring. We have seen them marching up the capitals’ main streets, with their husbands and children; or forming distinct frontline protests. Then, the outbreak of the 25th January demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square, motivated by a young woman via a video posted on Face-book of Egyptian uprising, forced the president Hosni Mubarak out of office.
By the same token, In Bahrain, mobilized by a huge wave of women sitting in Pearl Square in the capital, demanding change, Zainab al-Khawaja, was the figurehead of those women. She went on a hunger strike in protest at the beating and arrest of her father, husband and brother-in-law. In Yemen, it was Tawakul Karman, a 32 female journalist, who first led demonstrations on a university campus against the long rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Karman emerged as one of the leaders of the revolution. Thousands of veiled women, following Karman, have come out in Sana'a and Taiz to force that country's autocrat from office. Women in Syria defied armed secret police; blockading roads to demonstrate for the freedom of their imprisoned loved ones. In Libya, women’s protest against the regime was initiated by Iman al-Obeidi, a recent law-school graduate from a middle-class family, at the city of Tobruk. Imane broke into a government press conference in Tripoli, and debunk the Gaddafi's troops who detained her at a checkpoint and then raped her. Her case provoked women's demonstrations against the regime in the rebel-held city of Benghazi. The city of Benghazi also witnessed the creation of a new opposition newspaper by a group of young men and women. ''The role of the female in Libya,'' reads one headline, ''She is the Muslim, the mother, the soldier, the protester, the journalist, the volunteer, the citizen .”
In fact, one of the factors that made the prominent roles of the Arab women in these revolutions effectively shocking for the general public in and outside the region was the outstanding level of discipline and efficacy maintained all along the protests. Since it has been a mass movement, women came from different geographical, social and educational backgrounds with different ideological, religious and political affiliations. Labor movements in the Maghrebi countries went out at the public rallies, focusing their political energies on issues of political representation and on laws affecting women's equality, underlining how much more of a public role they now have than is usually acknowledged.
There is also the undeniable fact that a great number of the female participants engender new generations of women who earned quality education abroad, have a high awareness of the legitimacy of what they are fighting for, and an effective mastery of social media components. Even though, Arab media have been propagating the idea that women’s public sittings were spontaneous and not as structured as that of men’s, the real story was rarely talked about, except in some international channels, such as the BBC, that hosted prominent Arab female bloggers and social media users who took the charge of organizing and uniting the females’ lines in the streets. Recent studies, led by international media experts, revealed that personal and community access for young Arabs in cafés, schools, and other public spots rose 62%. According to the Dubai School of Government’s Arab Social Media Report, the total number of Face-book users in the Arab world skyrocketed 30% from January to April of 2011. Arabic-language Face-book users doubled since 2010. Across the Arab world, social media have become cornerstone sources of information about demonstrations around the region. Politically active Arab women of a new generation have adopted social media as an indispensible tool, and they will not be surrendering it anytime soon. Meanwhile, the Arab Spring has also resulted in a more sprawling and vibrant network of local and national news organizations many of which led by female figures.
Among the many pioneer users of social media as a site of national mobility during the up-rise is Leena Ben Mhenni, often called a “cyber activist.” She created her blog under her own name, writing about women’s rights and freedom of press, daring to report what the official media in Tunisia ignored or fabricated, and to encourage others not to be afraid. During the peak of the revolt, she traveled around the country to document government crackdowns on protesters and ran photos of those injured or killed by police. There is also Israa Abdel Fattah in Egypt. Israa was one of the founders of the 6th of April youth movement on Face-book. Asmaa Mahfouz is another Egyptian activist, and now a symbol of heroism, as she was a key organizer of the 18-day uprising that forced the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. In recognition to her heroism, Mahfouz had been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Prize, which was recently given to three women one of whom is the Yemeni Tawakul Karman. Karaman is a-32 journalist and women human rights activist who stood still in front of Saleh’s tyranny. Now, besides her being the first Arab woman to win the Peace Prize, she is also the everlasting Arab figure who rebelled not only against dictatorship but also against a traditional, conservative mindset that fears women as agents of change.
III. Will the Arab Revolution Reward Women?
This is the question that the Arab women along with many local and transnational women human rights activists raise with a great deal of fear and uncertainty. The roots of this uncertainty date back in the early 1960s when Algeria won its independence from France. During the fight for independence, the Algerian woman was a team player aside the Algerian man in their fierce resistance to the colonial power. Ironically enough, once the country got its independence, women once again were pushed back to their private space, and all they gained from the new regime was full civil rights (voting and elections), but debate over their actual personal rights remained an uncharted landscape. With the Arab Spring, and despite the prominent roles played by women, women stare at the future with worry eyes rather than optimistic looks, because they worry that on the road to new democratic parliamentary regimes, their rights will be discarded in favor of male constituencies, whether patriarchal liberals or Muslim fundamentalists. Activists on women's issues and progressives are wondering how to ensure that women's gains this spring not be rolled back.
It was, for example, striking that women were without representation on the commission appointed to revise the Egyptian constitution in preparation for September elections, and that only one woman was appointed to the 29-person interim cabinet. Buthayna Kamel, a prominent newscaster and critic of the Mubarak regime, is running for president. Even if her run gets little traction, her candidacy, she believes, is nevertheless deeply symbolic and historic - and another strikingly brave act by a woman in this new era in the Arab world. Other Egyptian women are hoping that the constitution can be rewritten to strengthen women's rights, and that the 64 seats set aside for women in the previous parliament will be retained. In Tunisia, the leader of fundamentalist group, al-Nahda or the Renaissance Party, politicians in the transitional government are determined to protect the public role of women by making sure they are well represented in the new legislature. Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the party, has been speaking of institutionalizing a "Turkish model" and says that, he supports the right of a woman to become the country's president. With all these inquiries in mind, it becomes lucid that the fight for women’s rights in the region is going to be more difficult than the throwing away of the old regime, because it is not simply a fight against individuals, but against deeply rooted ideologies of endocentrism and male supremacy that the majority of the laymen embrace for granted.
Conclusion
In short, the Arab Spring has been and will stay a turning point in the modern history of the Arab world, as it has pushed the West to reconsider their perception and conceptions of the Arab as an incarnation of the “other”. In the same vain, the Arab woman, through the Arab Spring, has been successful in shaking her family’s, her society’s as well as the rest of the world’s stereotyping convictions toward her, by proving that she is not a second-class citizen as has historically been promoted. Aided by advances in education, by the prominence of articulate female anchors on satellite television networks like Al-Jazeera, and by the rise of the Internet and social media, she asserted leadership roles both in the public sphere as in the cyberspace that young men's dominance of the public sphere might have hampered in city squares.
Of course, there is still countless number of stories, untold by the media for a reason or another about women who have forged the making of the uprising events in the MENA regions. From Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen and Libya, Bahrain and Syria, women were organizers, marchers, rabble-rousers, bloggers, hunger strikers, and, life-losers, nurses in makeshift hospitals and in ambulances, cooks, speakers and freedom songs singers at the demonstrations. They have not escaped the human cost of this uprising. They were beaten to death by the Tunisian police, raped by the pro-Gaddafi militia, detained by the Syrian regime’s Army, and seized by the Bahraini forces. But above all, this not what scares the Arab women as much as the idea that all these efforts will soon fade away once things get back to normal, and once again that same patriarchal mentality floats on the surface. Many are alarmed that their efforts risk going unrewarded and that men who were keen to have them on the streets crying freedom may not be so happy to have them in parliament, government and business boardrooms. Women have helped the Arab Spring, and it remains to be seen if the Arab Spring will help women. One thing is sure is that the Arab woman learned how to make her way to the city emblematic square to ask for her national freedom; so now she knows how to get back there to ask for her own freedom.
References
1. Hamida ElBouri, (2009). Media Coverage of Women’s Political Participation in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia: Media Exercise Synthesis Report. Tunisia: Centre for Arab Women Training and Research (CAWTAR)
2. Global Media Monitoring Project, (2010). Regional Report: Middle East. Available at:
http://www.whomakesthenews.org/images/stories/restricted/regional/Middle_%20East.pdf. (Consulted on September 27th, 2011).
3. Nadia Hijab, (1989). Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work. Cambridge: (Cambridge Middle East Library). P.7
4. Report of the special plenary committee of the 23rd extraordinary session of the U.N General Assembly - New York
5. Shahin Cole and Juan Cole, An Arab Spring for Women: The Missing Story from the Middle East. (April 26, 2011) Available at: www.TomDispatch.com
6. Xan Rice’, The Arab Spring, (May 13, 2011.) Available at: http://www.theage.com.au/world/the-arab-spring-20110512-1ekjh.html. Consulted on (September 12th, 2011)
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Women in the Moroccan Media: Amid the Audiovisual Representations and Audiences’ Attitudes: PhD Thesis
Mohammed V University – Agdal - Morocco & Aalborg University - Denmark
College of Arts and Humanities & College of Social & Political Studies
Submitted by:
Abdeslam Badre
A list of abbreviations
Middle Eastern-North African (MENA)
Women Human Rights (WHR)
UNESCO
Syndicat National de la Presse Marocaine” (SNPM)
Superior Institute of Information and Communication (ISIC)
International Federation of Journalists' (IFJ)
Program for Gender Equality in the Media (PGEM)
Association Démocratique de Femmes de Maroc (ADFM),
Women Rights Developments (WRD).
A list of Tables
i. Abstract (Arabic)
ii. Abstract (English)
iii. Abstract (French)
iv. Acknowledgement
v. Dedication
vi. List of Abbreviations
vii. List of Tables
viii. Table of Content
Table of Content
General Introduction
Introduction
1. Statement the Problem
2. Rationale of the Study
3. Broader Goal of the Study
4. Research Questions
5. Objectives of the Research Questions
6. Research Hypothesis
7. Framework of Analysis and Significance of the Study
8. Organization of the Paper
Part One: Theoretical Framework
Introduction
I.1. Key concepts
I.2. Overview on Women and Media
I.3. Feminist Underlying Theories
I.4. Media Underlying Theories
I.5. Literary Work Review
I.6. Empirical Work Review
Part Two: Empirical Framework
II.1. Methodology
Introduction
II.1.A. Restatement of the Questions
II.1.B. Restatement of the Hypotheses
II.1.C. Design
II.1.D. Informants
II.1.E. Instruments
II.1.F. Media Artifacts Samples
II.1.G. Procedures
II.1.H. Coding
II.1.I. Data Analysis
Part Three: Results
III.1. Findings
Introduction
II.2.A. Women in TV: Time and Space Representations
II.2. B. Mediated Domains Featuring Women’s Stories
III.2.C. Women’s Role in Politics TV Shows
III.2.D. Moroccan Viewership Attitudes
III.2. Discussions and Interpretation
Introduction
II.3.A. The Quality of 2M Programs’ Representation of Women
II.3.B. Women’s Role in Televised Politics Shows
II.3.C. Moroccan Audience Attitudes towards TV portrayals
General Conclusion
Introduction
1. Summary of the Results
2. Limitation of the Study
3. Research Implications
4. Recommendation of future Research
Bibliography
Appendices
General Introduction
Introduction
1. Statement of the Problem
2. Rationales of the Study
3. Broader Goal of the Study
4. Research Questions
5. Objectives of the Research Questions
6. Research Hypotheses
7. Framework of Analysis and Significance of the Study
8. Organization of the Paper
Introduction
The impacts of mass media texts, in general, and audiovisual ones in particular have become so deterministic; not only on our understanding of the world around us but even on the shaping of our own identities, and on the ways we tend either to identify with or differentiate ourselves from others. Quite often, the beliefs people tend to hold about a number of maters, including gender relations, do not reflect the actual substance of these subjects, but simply constructed ones, based on sets of institutionalized rules and agreed upon social norms. Among the social institutions that guarantee the transferability of these constructed beliefs from one generation to another is Media. The latter plays an unprecedented role in shaping our perception of women, as an individual, as a personality, and as an “other” as opposed to the “self”. A perception most of the time is colored with prejudgemental beliefs and stereotyped convictions, which fuels the historical gender discrimination. Consequences of this discriminatory projection have proved to be dramatic not only on the meanings of the represented “reality” (women), but also on its readers (the audience/society.) While some Arab media conglomerate have worked out substantial reforms to fairly redefine and reposition the image of women within their societies through a radical evaluation of their media performance, such as Al-Jazeera, MBC group, and Al-Horra, to mention few. Yet, many countries in the Middle Eastern-North African (MENA) regions are still undecided on whether the issues of “media representation of women” should be considered as one of the national issues that requires committed political debate.
Morocco, for instance, is relatively one of the leading countries in the Arab world in regards to women's rights and freedom. While there are still definite gender gaps in some socio-cultural and political contexts, the country has made some significant reforms. The Moroccan Constitution, for instance, does not only recognize gender equality principles, it also preserves women’s rights to practice and enjoy their active involvements in all social intuitions including that of Politics and Economy. In 2004, the Family Code (Mudawwana ) was amended to abolish many discriminatory provisions towards women: such as repudiation and husbands’ authority on household, and to give women equal rights in demanding divorce. Economically, in 2008, the Moroccan women’s share to overall employment reached 24.6%; and, politically, in the 2009 national elections , 3406 Moroccan women were elected out of 20458 candidates (16.65%) in addition to five current women ministers in a cabinet of 34.
The facts above show some remarkable progress in matters of Women Human Rights (WHR) and economic integration, especially if compared to many an Arab Nation. Due to the persistence of patriarchal values, Women’s status, however, remains marginal in the country’s sovereign institutions, namely Media, Politics, and Economy. According to a survey conducted by the Moroccan Ministry of Communication in 2006, nearly 48% of women journalists worked in the broadcasting sector and 33% in the Print media. A study published by UNESCO the same year showed that women presence in leadership positions in the media does not go beyond 10%. If anything to be understood from these findings is that there is high correlation between women’s invisibility in mediated leading roles and their invisibility in the political decision-making. In 2008, the “Syndicat National de la Presse Marocaine” (SNPM) congress passed a quota of 25% minimum participation of women in the SNPM board. The union’s membership in 2009 reached 3056 members, 801 of whom are women (26.2%), second in the Arab world after Tunisia (33.3%) . The union’s board counts currently five women in a team of 19 (26.3%). The SNPM has a gender council that aims to mainstream gender in its program, recruits and promotes women journalists’ rights. Furthermore, according to the Superior Institute of Information and Communication (ISIC), the Rabat main institute in the country for media studies, the proportion of women graduates between 2000 and 2007 was 41.4%. Yet, women’s portrayals and roles in different media forms and genres still do not match the Moroccan women’s as well as society’s aspirations and identities; besides, the female’s voice and image in both political and economic audio-visual programs is very scarce in quantity and mediocre in quality, a reality that does neither reflect the actual profile of the Moroccan female politician and/or businesswoman, nor does it echo Morocco’s politically official discourse that propagates the full integration of women in the politico-economic social fabrics. To put it in the words of the Moroccan journalist and coordinator for the Maghreb region for the International Federation of Journalists' (IFJ) Program for Gender Equality in the Media (PGEM), Mounia Belafia: “images of women in the media still contain insulting stereotypes. They either are victims or consumers or a means to urge consumption. ”
Descriptive in nature, the present study seeks, on the one hand, to explore the Moroccan audiovisual representations of Moroccan women and women’s issues in one monitored political TV programs; on the other hand, to determine the Moroccan female viewers’ beliefs and attitudes towards televised programs related or/and targeting female audience in 2M-TV’s programs. That is, the research endeavors to qualitatively and quantitatively explore the Moroccan local 2M television channel’s representations of the Moroccan women’s images and roles, along with issues related to their lives in the political institutions of the country through a media monitoring of a monthly televised political show “TAYA’ARAT” TV program. Meanwhile, the paper attempts to sketch out the Moroccan female audiences’ attitudes and interactions with the channel’s different programs revolving around women’s lives and issues.
1. Statement of the Problem
The controversy, raised in this paper, vis-à-vis the Moroccan media representations of women is twofold: 1) the contents’ quality of the representations along with their underlying meanings; and 2) the impact of the mediated representations on both the subject of representations – women- and the target audience, along with the way they both receive and interact with the broadcast messages. Firstly, many of the mediated images of Arab women in Arab media, in general, and that of the Moroccan ones, in particular, are loaded with biases, devaluing women’s contribution in national developments, and/or attributing them negative associations. These tele-visual texts often vindicate myriad of void but taken for granted beliefs in the mind of a great number of illiterate Moroccan laymen. During the last decades, however, a few Arab countries have started to implement strategically reformative procedures within their media institutions: tremendous efforts are being invested to rectify the ills in the ways women’s images are being portrayed. The Moroccan media institution is no exception. During the last decade, the national media, in all forms, have started to witness qualitative and quantitative improvements.
“What has been done so far is not enough ,” said Ms. Nouzha Skelli (2008), Morocco’s Minister of Social Development, Family and Solidarity, in her comment on Morocco’s local media representation of women. In fact, it does not take much time to realize how far a distance is between the Moroccan media actual position and the point it needs to reach for a fair and constructive women media representation. Unjust socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural discriminatory projections is assumed to be held still within 2M televised political and economic shows in which the Moroccan woman is more likely pictured as a hopeless individual, a victim of a crime or social injustice, a protagonist of the rural life, an icon of illiteracy, and/or at best, trying to make her way through historically male-dominated sectors. The modern Moroccan woman is often seen as a famous singer, actress; but rarely a politician or in influential investor/leader. Her presence in the media is usually subordinated to the males’ assertive power. Her voice is mostly heard through males’ debates. In short, the female media prototype in the Moroccan media is more likely believed to be part of the problem and very rarely part of the solution. She is usually the object of debate. Her participatory contributions in solving nationally crucial issues are seldom heard of or seen on a regular basis, except in certain occasions such as “Woman’s day ”.
Secondly, media representation, regardless of the extent of its validity, is expected and meant to transmit specific messages to a target audience along with general signals to the large public. The wash-back effects of the Moroccan media representation have far immeasurable consequences not only on women, being the subjects of as well as the receivers of the mediated messages, but also on the Moroccan large public. When a Moroccan layman, for instance, gets exposed to an average of six hours a day of local media products – almost the same amount of time a Moroccan student spends daily at school - it goes without saying that this exposure is going to have far reaching impacts on the viewer’s perception of the mediated reality along with his/her actual attitude and behavior within the real world. Thus, watching economic or political television programs/debates hosted and animated only by males is going to construct in the mind of viewers the idea that politics or/and economics are men’s worlds. By the same token, watching TV programs on cooking and cuisines, beauty, health, and/or entertainment run and hosted by females is going to propagate a cultural stereotype that associate women with the private sphere. The impact of programs as such does not stop at this level. It goes further in shaping the individual’s beliefs and attitude within his/her community.
Seen as such, Mediated messages play crucial roles in shaping and reproducing the individual's as well as the community's self-identity, and orienting collective representations of and attitudes towards gender issues. Impacts that can bring about either fruitful or destructive outcomes, depending on the nature of the general make-up, formats, contents, and distributing strategies of the mediated products. On this ground, the present research identifies the question of ‘representations’ of the Moroccan women in the Moroccan audiovisual system as one major problematic issue. At another level, the Moroccan viewership beliefs in and attitudes towards the televised coverage of women need a moment of scrutiny in order to determine the extent to which these beliefs and attitudes’ intervention is said to be efficient in monitoring, evaluating, and/or resisting biases in the local audiovisual media, if there were any.
2. Rationale of the Study
The study is motivated by academic, bibliographic and personal motives. Academically, as mentioned earlier, Morocco has taken remarkable steps in social and human and Women Rights Developments (WRD). A number of official international sites along with many geo-political experts have acknowledged the fast transitions taking place at various levels in Morocco. Women human rights have become among the major points in the nation’s governmental agenda. The transition has been the outcome of a long and tiresome struggle in which women have been active team players. Moroccan women have, indeed, made revolutionary infiltrations in all the Nation’s institutions. However, there is immeasurable gap between both this evolution and the Moroccan political positive discourse concerning women rights and the role Moroccan media play. In other words, the Moroccan women’s outstanding performances and powerful profiles are, unfortunately, not yet seen or heard of with the same rigor in media broadcast. While women are omnipresent in all of the Moroccan vivid sectors, their presence in sociopolitical and/or socio-economic TV programs is assumingly very modest, if not harmful.
Bibliographically, there is a considerable scarcity of academic research dealing with the issue of the Moroccan Women within the Moroccan political and Economic local TV program shows. A cohort body of empirical as well as theoretical literature dealt with a wide variety of subjects related to issues of woman representation are already in record. A number of researchers have tackled Female’s Representation in Literature , Woman's Role in Economic Development, Women's Integration Within Economy, Male-Female equity at Workplace, Motherhood, Womanhood and the patriarchal institution. A few investigations have dealt with the issue of Arab and Moroccan Women in the press Media. Cases in point are Loubna Skalli’s, Through a Local Prism: Gender, Globalization, and Identity in Moroccan Women’s Magazines ; Naomi Sakr’s, Women and Media in the Middle East: Power through Self-Expression ; and Deborah Kapchan’s, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition. More discussion of some of the above mentioned will be catered for in the literature review’s section of this paper. The birth of the present project, accordingly, endeavors to add some academic values to the existing body of literature in the area of Gender and Media, and generate some programmatic recommendations for national media strategies, by raising and answering few an unanswered questions.
Personally, being fond of the fields of Mass Media, Gender, and social studies; having taken various graduate courses and training in Media Studies, I have been full of intent and motivation to undertake this project. In short, investigating Media Representations of Women in Morocco is a multi-dimensional-value project. The next section sheds light on the research boarder goal followed by the research questions and objectives.
3. Broader Goal of the Study
Following the Media Monitoring Projects of World Media News coverage of Gender issues that have been taking place since Beijing platform 1995, in which the Moroccan Media were not part, the present project seeks to provide tentative answers to the issue of representations of women in the Moroccan audiovisual media, and the Moroccan female audiences’ beliefs and attitudes, especially in programs targeting economics and politics. This is done through monitoring (watching and recording) an adequate number of hours of 2M audiovisual programs, broadcasted during the period of November 2008 through June 2010. The collected data are, then, qualitatively and quantitatively scrutinized for the sake of measuring both the special and timely settings being devoted to women, as well as the content quality of those representations. The analysis goes into some details as to the origins, potential meanings, and actual impacts of the selected media artifacts on the Moroccan female viewers. In short, the study aims at determining if Morocco’s national Media follow any strategy that tries to fairly relocate woman’s status within the Moroccan both public and private spheres; and thus, taking the national debates of gender issues into higher and more challenging levels. For operational reasons, this goal is paraphrased below into three main measurable research questions.
4. Research Questions
The following research questions have been formulated according to both the research broader goal as well as the research empirical design, which is exploratory in nature. This piece of work does not seek to control variables; rather, it attempts to observe, describe, and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the collected data, for the sake of drawing valid conclusions. Thus, the research three questions are all unidirectional, turning around the “what” dimensions. The underlying objectives behind raising each of these questions are made clear in the section that follows this.
I. What time and space settings are devoted to women and women’s issues in 2M-TV political program “TAYA’ARAT”?
II. What is the nature of the roles attributed to the broadcast women within this TV show?
III. What are the Moroccan female audiences’ beliefs and attitudes towards the audiovisual portrayal of women in 2M TV programs?
5. Objectives of the Research Questions
Each of these questions is part of establishing the investigatory ground of the overall scope of the study. Answering each of these questions constitutes a departing ground out of which an overview on the local media strategy toward women’s issues is to be formulated. Therefore, Question 1 sets off the monitoring of 2M TV representations of women and women’s issues at two levels: a) the Formatting of the underlined program; B) the latter’s content. On the one hand, both the amount of time and physical settings (street, office, city, rural area, house) in which women images are either perpetuated or made to be absent in the TV shows are going to be measured. Following these structural monitoring, question 2 sets a content analysis of the monitored stories in order to analyze the quality of the mediated representations in terms of their validity, reliability, social meanings, and potential impacts on the audience. Question 3 endeavors to determine both the Moroccan female audiences’ beliefs and attitudes towards 2M audiovisual representations of women and women’s issues. While question 1 and 2 are answered through a media monitoring procedures along with a television a coding sheet; question 3 is answered by administering a questionnaire to a randomly chosen pole of Moroccan female informants.
6. Research Hypotheses
On the basis of the research broader questions and objectives, the thesis holds four falsifiable hypothesizes:
1. First, it is assumed that Moroccan women are stereotypically underrepresented in the Moroccan audiovisual media.
2. Second, it is hypothesized that Moroccan women hold negative attitudes towards the Mediated gender representations.
3. Third, the Moroccan audiovisual representations of women and women’s issues have negative social wash-back effects on both women and the viewers.
4. Fourth, and conclusively, Thus, the national audio-visual media lack strategic vision for improving women and women’s issues coverage, especially in political audiovisual shows, which maintains an unjustified inconsistency between Morocco’s political discourse and aspiration and its political actual practices vis-à-vis an unconditional integration of women in the state’s political institutions.
7. Framework of Analysis and Significance of the Study
The significance of the study lurks in its interdisciplinarity as well as in its methodological novelty. To attain the research promise, developed is a theoretical framework and an empirical design that fuse both Media Theory with Gender Studies within an interdisciplinary research design. Methodologically, approaching the issue of Moroccan Women in the audiovisual media along with the audiences’ attitudes molds the present study within a hybrid framework, which entails the marriage of empirical techniques and procedures from both schools. In the same vain, the endeavor of raising and answering the present research questions meant to veer the national debate of “Audiovisual Representation of Women” toward working out some programmatic measures that would at least align with the nation’s perpetuated calls for equal treatments towards women in the different institutions of society, which is itself an endeavor of a noble significance.
8. Organization of the Paper
This dissertation comprises six chapters. Chapter one, “General Introduction,” folds a statement of the problem, rationale of the study, research questions, objectives, hypotheses, along with the significance and organisation of the study. Chapter two uncovers the “Review of the Literature”. It is constituted of two sections: the first section lays some key concepts of the paper and draws the theoretical framework around which the qualitative analysis revolves; and the second section synthesizes some main literary and empirical work, relevant to the scope of the present undertaking.
Chapter three, “Research Methodology,” outlines embraced approaches in data collection and analysis. A precise and concise description of and account for the project’s empirical design follows. Discussed are the rationales behind the selected media artefacts, the monitoring procedures, the informants, and the research instruments, along with the statistical techniques used for data analysis. While chapter four is devoted to data analysis, chapter five discusses the obtained results in relation to the research questions.
Chapter six, general conclusion, restates the research framework, and opens door to discussing the findings, drawing implications that will be formulated into operational applications, some recommendations for future investigations within the same scope of study, and the limitations of the study. The coming chapter underlines the major reviewed literature work relevant to the scope of this study.
“Media are significant sites of gender negotiations
where both masculine and feminine identities are defined,
redefined, constructed, and deconstructed.”
Adapted from Lohan, Maria 2001.
Part One: Theoretical Framework
Introduction
I.1. Key concepts and Media and Gender Underlying Theories
I.2. Overview on Women and Media
I.3. Literary Work Review
Conclusion
Introduction
The present chapter lays the conceptual and theoretical framework within which the study is couched. To investigate the qualitative and quantitative landmarks of 2M TV political program’s representations of women, it was deemed necessary to opt for an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that would capture both the representational and developmental concerns of the present study. Accordingly, the first section of this chapter underlines a listing of the dissertation’s key concepts, as well as some relevant models and theories of gender and communication studies. The second section presents a review of women and media, in general, and that of Moroccan context in particular. Finally, the third section goes through a review of the most salient literary along with the empirical works that have tackled the issue of media representation of women, globally and locally. What follows, accordingly, are definitions of the most prevailing concepts, starting with those related to Media; then, Gender Studies.
I.1. Key Concepts and Theories of Gender and Media
I.1.A. Medium, Media, and Mass Media
The term “medium” can be defined as simply as “a means of sending or communicating messages, information, or texts of one kind or another, from one person to another, or in the case of mass media, to many people ”. The term dates back to 1880. A quarter millennium after the publication of the first daily newspapers and 150 years after the publication of the first magazines. According to the Oxford English Dictionary:
“Medium ('mi:diem), a. means An intermediate agency, means, instrument or channel. Also, intermediation, instrumentality: in phrase by or through the medium of. spec. of newspapers, radio, television , etc. As vehicles of mass communication.”
The word ‘media’, plural of the term ‘medium’, is said to be a latecomer, dating from only a few years after the rise of the first commercial radio stations, and it is borrowed from the advertising industry. According to the OED,
Media ('mi:dia), pl. [Pl. F MEDIUM sb. After mass media.] Newspapers, radio, television, etc., collectively, as vehicles of mass communication. Freq. attrib. or as adj. Also erron. As sing. in same sense. Mass medium (,maes 'mi:diem). A medium of communications, such as radio, television, newspapers, etc., that reaches a large number of people; usu. In pl. mass media.
Mass media, then, refer to all types of messages, including speech, newspapers, movies, radio, CDs, and Internet. In categorizing media texts, some practitioners classify media in terms of being either electronic or printed; others prefer rather to differentiate between audio or visual media. Under the umbrella of mass media, each communication medium has its identifying form and channel. For example, speech is a medium of communication, used in interpersonal interactions; it is a personal medium, governed by a number of sociolinguistic constraints (sex, age, situation, context…) that help us decode the received messages of our interlocutors. A newspaper is another but different medium form. It is basically a written script, the meaning of which is produced and reproduced differently, by different readers, depending on their background knowledge of the text and intellectual levels, among other things. One advantage of mass media lays in their being the most economical way of getting the story over the new and wider market in the least time, and giving many people the chance to take part in the communication process simultaneously. Notably, the term “media” is going to be used throughout this dissertation in its plural form in reference to the audiovisual from, televised content.
I.1.B. Mass communication
The term is generally used in reference to mediated information and/or entertainment messages distributed via newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, recorded music, and associated media. In this usage "mass communication," according to Eric Rothenbuhler , refers to the activities of the media as a whole and fails to distinguish among specific media, modes of communication, genres of text or artifact, production or reception situations, or any questions of actual communication; and thus takes the term for granted. On the basis of this reductionist usage Eric Rothenbuhle suggests three different levels of definition. These include “(1) reference to the activities of the mass media as a whole, (2) the use of criteria of a concept, "massiveness," to distinguish among media and their activities, and (3) the construction of questions about communication as applied to the activities of the mass media.” (2005).
Significantly only the third of these uses, Eric Rothenbuhler decrees, does not take the actual process of communication for granted. That is, because Mass communication from the point of view of the first two categories either refers to “the activities of the mass media as a whole, or the massiveness of certain kinds of communication,” the importance of and emphasis on aspects of the massiveness of the distribution system and the audience are not taken into consideration. Instead, attention is spared on mass media because they are the institutional and technological systems capable of producing mass audiences for mass distributed "communications." The latter ends up implicitly defined as a kind of “object (message, text, artifact) that is reproduced and transported by these media.” R. Eric argues that this reductionist definition diminishes “our ability to treat communication as a social accomplishment, as something people do rather than as an object that gets moved from one location to another.” This idea of “communication as a social accomplishment” sounds more luring and arouses the curiosity of scholars of mass communication more than the notion of “media as mass distribution systems” does.
I.1.C. Mass Communication theory
Throughout the last two decades or so, much have been said and written on the lucid impacts media have had on our lives, and much more is yet to come. This flow of literary production aiming at media is indeed a mere reaction to the omnipresent control media have occupied in our daily societal, emotional and intellectual interactions. In various forms – press, audio, visual, and audiovisual- media have become a forger of a so-called preferred culture, and then persuasively teach the audience how to insert themselves within it. Media are no more passive projectors of the already constructed reality. Rather, media have become another producer of complexly constructed realities, identities, and subcultures. When consuming media products, the audience thinks that they are actually consuming commodities that satisfy their needs, which is partially true. However, the latent effect behind this use is the act of helping the media in propagating and constructing new “culture/identity/realities”. In his “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, Media Culture, ”Douglas Kellner describes how we have allow media to teach us all forms of socialization etiquettes:
We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages… to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire -- and what not to-… How to cope with a seductive culture how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation... (1997)
Understanding how this learning acquisition process takes place requires an understanding of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures, the intended underlying messages, along with various layers of representations of mediated texts. These, in return, entail a reading from within the mass communication discipline. Therefore, the instrumentalization of mass communication theory is basic for the overall theoretical and the methodological frameworks of the present project.
Mass communication theory will also make it possible to understand the way persuasion strategies are employed by media institutions to propagate certain realities, modify others as well as re-shaping new identities of the represented subjects. Hovland, Janis, and Kelly’s “instrumental theory,” for instance, suggests that people’s attitudes change by changing related opinions. Acceptance of new opinions is based on the information and the incentives latent in the message. Other theoretical approaches deal with the ways the audience processes and evaluate information and its value to their personnel lives. Since women presentations and audience’s attitudes constitute touchstones for this thesis, touching upon mass-media theories will be crucial to draw a comprehensive picture (qualitative and quantitative analysis) instead of a portion of it.
I.1.D. Gender in Cultural Studies Theory
Because of its focus on representations of race, gender, and class, its critique is perpetually leveled at ideologies that promote various forms of oppression. Gender studies have benefited a lot from the insurgence of cultural studies theory that has helped shedding more light on the battle of feminism. It has aided in the articulation of women’s views, experiences, and cultural forms, from being excluded from the mainstream culture. This makes it a target of conservative forces that wish to preserve the existing canons of those who have been historically holding the center. For instance, previous approaches to culture tended to be primarily literary and elitist, dismissing media culture as banal, trashy, and not worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, by contrast, avoids cutting the field of culture into high and low, or popular against elite.
Cultural studies is valuable to the theoretical framework of this research because it provides some tools that would yield some valuable readings and interpretations of possible impacts of media representations on women as an oppressed and under-represented social group within the Moroccan social tissue. It also allows a scrutiny of the whole range of media culture that is directed to women within the Moroccan context without prior prejudices, opening the way toward more differentiated political, rather than aesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts in which one attempts to distinguish critical and oppositional from conformist and conservative moments in a cultural artifact. The incarnation of the concepts of “ideology” and “power” will help triggering mainstream thinking to the implications of the gender conceptual upheaval wrought by Moroccan audiovisual media.
These two concepts are of paramount importance in cultural studies school, for dominant ideologies serve to reproduce social relations of domination and subordination, generating, accordingly, an asymmetrical power relation where women are some social institutions. Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrate upper class life and denigrate the working class. Ideologies of gender promote un-sexist representations of women. Ideologies, in this vain, make inequalities and subordination appear natural and just, and thus induce consent to relations of domination. The Moroccan society, like any, is structured by opposing groups with different political ideologies, (liberal, conservative, radical, etc.); so, cultural studies theory can help determine the nature of ideologies propagated by the Moroccan audiovisual artifacts to either serve or subordinate the Moroccan women. Furthermore, because the research raises the question of the Moroccan audiences’ attitudes towards the mediated representations of the Moroccan women, the use of cultural studies theory will put us in better situation to qualitatively analyze and interpret the factors that made different audiences respond in contrasting ways to the same media texts.
I.1. E. Audience and Models of Audience Theory
An audience is a group of individuals, who can be readers, listeners, and/or viewers who take either an active or passive part in the reading/listening/watching act of a piece of work of academia, art, literature, theater, music, and/or film. In media, the concept of audience occupies the touchstone of the planning, construction, distribution, and broadcast of any media text. The exact relationship between the media and their audiences has been the subject of debate since the media were first seriously studied and emphasizes the importance of the audience and of their relationship with the media. The first question a television program producer anticipates is whether or not a TV-show has a target audience; then, comes questions about the nature of this target audience in terms of needs, age, social status, and educational level, among other factors. Crucial as it is, the existence of an audience has a determining say over the success or failure of any TV program. That is why TV program producers invest a myriad of techniques, and finances on the creation of a participatory audience for a TV program. The audience’s participation differs according to the nature of the text itself: some text invite overt audience engagement. Others allow only close modest reception. Insights of audience theory in media studies explain how audiences affect and are affected by different forms of art. In "The Meaning of 'Audience,” Douglas B. Park (1982) differentiates between two types of audiences”
{One} diverges toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate; the other toward the text itself and the audience implied there, a set of suggested or evoked attitudes, interests, reactions, [and] conditions of knowledge which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers, listeners {viewer} .
The Frankfurt school, was concerned about the possible effects of mass media. They proposed the "Effects" model, depicting media as a “hypodermic syringe”, whose content is injected into the passive thoughts of the audience. Advocates of the hypodermic model of Effects adopted a variant of Marxism, emphasizing the dangers of the power of capitalism, which owned and controlled new forms of media. In the mid of the 20th century, however, theorists started to realize that media could not have such direct effects on the audiences. Media then appeared to have a comparatively weak influence in manipulating and reproducing individuals’ beliefs, opinions and attitudes, since personal experiences, religion, and school are more likely to influence people’s beliefs and attitudes. The Effects model is, in this vain, considered to be an inadequate representation of the communication between media and the public, as it does not take into account the audience as individuals with their own beliefs, opinions, ideals and attitudes. That inadequacy paved the way for the forging of a new approach to the dynamics of audience/text relationship; thus, Uses and Gratification model.
The Use and Gratification model shifted the focus from the media effects on audiences, to the audience’s actual usages of the media. The premise of the model holds that audience resorts into media consumption in order to satisfy specific needs. Seen as such, the audience is no more a passive consumer of media products, since the viewers have a say in choosing the kind of media programs they want to watch in order to satisfy their viewership needs. Philip J Hanes, in his The Advantages and Limitations of a Focus on Audience in Media Studies, refers to Blumler and Katz’ (1974) four main needs of television audiences that are satisfied by television. Blumter and katz introduced the idea of Diversion, Personal Relationships, Personal Identity, and Surveillance. The first concept refers to the viewer’s act of escaping from the pressures of every day life; the second is a situation wherein a viewer gains companionship, either by associating or disassociating one’s self with the broadcast story’s character to explore, re-affirm or question their personal identity, the third concept refers to the situation in which the viewer is involved in conversations with other viewers about the televised program, and the fourth concept speaks about the times where the viewer resort to media for the sake of updating their information about the world out there.
Highlighting audience active engagement with the media text, the model depicts media products with a monolithic meaning that all readers would construct in a unidirectional manner. In this, the model fails to acknowledge the multiplicities of audiences and audiences’ interpretations. This shortcoming motivated theorists in the 70s to approach audience from a semiotic and structuralist point of view, with the intent to trace the paths the audience take to pin meaning down. Screen theory, accordingly, submerged. In the core of this model lurks the concept of what semioticians referred to as "mode of address," which proposes that media texts address its intended audience in a particular way, establishing a relationship between the producer of a TV program and audience. That is, different audiences use different media; both the audience that is assumed to be using the media and the particular type of media that is being consumed determines the mode of address. This makes the mode of address central in constructing the audiences’ beliefs and attitudes towards the individual, community, and social institutions alike. “The limitations of focusing on audience in media studies,” according to Philip J Hanes, “can clearly be seen in the mode of address made by the media. However, previous models of audience reception do not take into account what actual audiences are going to do to the media texts.” Screen theory, Uses and Gratifications and Effects models suggest that meaning is embedded within the text, which audiences can access easily and accept without questioning these meanings. Just because producers of media texts have a certain opinion and meaning does not mean that this meaning is obvious in the text, that, in turn, does not mean that the audience will read these meanings or agree with them.
Understanding the audiences’ response to media texts through semiotics was also endeavored by Stuart Hall, from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham during the 70s, again. Hall suggested the concepts “coding” and “encoding,” as process that both the media producer and the viewer resort to in order to reach the media content’s meanings. Hall’s conceptualizes that there is a producer’s preferred meaning in the text. This meaning is encoded by the codes and conventions of the particular medium to hide the texts own ideological construction. The audience interprets the message with the help of a number of extrinsic factors, including the viewer’s past experiences, previous knowledge and experience of the medium, gender, age and education. This current theory underlines the existence of a preferred meaning in the text, but also places emphasis on the audience in the process of constructing a meaning. Hall’s encoding/decoding model draws upon two extreme ends, what Abercrombie (1996) refers to as the dominant {media} stand and the dominant audience stand. (Philip J Hanes. 2000) The advantage of the Encoding/decoding model is that it pinpoints at the existence of a multiplicity of factors that are involved in the audience’s meaning construction process, besides involving the context in which the media message is consumed.
Cultural studies theory also introduced the notion of a four-model type of audience decoding. Whereas the oppositional hegemonic position is when the viewers understand the preferred meaning, but does not buy it because of their own set of attitudes and beliefs, the dominant hegemonic position is when the viewers adopt the full-preferred meaning inherent in the media product. As to the negotiated hegemonic position, it is established when the audience members refuse to adapt the preferred meaning. The forth type of audience response is referred to as aberrant decoding. This is where the audience member reads the text in an unpredicted way, producing a deviant meaning. Regardless of its novelty, this model is not limitation-free, as David Morley (1989) notes. For instance, the preferred meaning is a difficult concept to understand, and is simpler to identify in factual texts, such as newspaper reports, television news and documentaries. In fiction-based texts there are more likely to be different readings of the preferred texts. Additionally, it is unclear whether the preferred meanings are embedded in the text, or whether it is something agreed on by the majority of the texts audience. In short, by mapping out a chronological development of audience theory, it becomes lucid that there are various ways in which the audience can be viewed. Understanding the way the viewers construct meaning and make sense of media, producers can change their texts so that audiences will read whatever meanings the producers want. Ultimately, it is the audience that controls the output of the media. Throughout this paper, the term audience will be used in a plural form, since it refers to a group of individuals. Also, it is going to be used interchangeably with the term ‘viewer’.
I.1.F. Gender vs. Feminism
In a broad sense, 'feminism' is an umbrella term that analyses social relations to gender and patriarchy . It is a critical theory, aiming at examining gender in society. Its major goal is to change all forms of degrading tendencies by which women have been treated by different institutions of society. Feminist mind-sets, accordingly, have been aiming at redefining and reasserting women’s voice and image in education, politics, economics, and media, among other sites. With the advent of this line of thinking, “feminism” has progressively but effectively started to lose its monolithic body at the expense of multiplicity of feminist discourses. That is, starting from the early 1970s, one could no longer speak of feminism as a single unit of research, writing, or theory; but rather speak of feminisms with plurality of purposes and orientations: there have emerged Liberal feminism, Radical feminism, Marxist feminism, post-Marxist or Socialist feminism, post-Modernist feminism, and the list goes on.
True enough, feminism’s rigorous debates have given birth to gender theory as a category of analysis in the early 1980s. Still. Feminism often differs from gender theory in that the former accounts exclusively for women’s standpoints, or those voices that align with the Feminist discourse and it tends to overlook the anti-feminist views. So, in order to avoid this one-sided perspective, and to objectively report on the reality of the Moroccan women within the local Media, and taking into consideration the subjectivity of the researcher’s perspective, analysis of male’s account must also be included because it is due to the male power that women’s representations and identifications are often constructed.
In this respect, while theories and methods of feminism will be brought to bear in this research, the research will basically resort to gender theory more than feminist stands due to the complexity arisen by the plurality of the conceptual framework of feminism. That says, gender theory is benchmarked by monolithic conceptual tools which are going to be beneficial for the consistency of the theoretical analysis of the present paper; besides, gender theory allows us to scrutinize the question of mediated female representations not only from a female perspective but also from that of males, which works in favor of the reliability of the research analytical content.
I.1.G. Representations
The concept “representation” refers to the construction of “realities” such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts, within the frame of any medium, which might be oral, written, and/or in forms of moving pictures – television. Representation can also be defined as the act of placing or stating facts in order to influence or affect the action of others. Of course, the term also has political connotations. Politicians are thought to 'represent' a constituency. So above all, the concept has a semiotic meaning, in that something is 'standing for' something else. Representation is not only about the ways identities are constructed within a text to a given audience; but it is also about the ways how these realities are constructed in the processes of production and reception by people whose identities are also differentially marked in relation to such demographic factors.
A key in the study of representation is concerned with the way in which representations are made to seem ‘natural’. Systems of representation are the means by which the concerns of ideologies are framed; such systems ‘position’ their subjects. In Orientalism, Edward Said emphasizes the fact that representations can never be exactly realistic because of the inexistence of the idea of a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. It follows, then, that representations can never really be 'natural' depictions of realities. Instead, they are constructed images, images that need to be interrogated for their ideological content. Speaking of interrogations, Ella Shohat, in "The Struggle over Representation: Casting, Coalitions, and the Politics of Identification," Late Imperial Culture, claims that we should constantly question representations:
Each filmic or academic utterance must be analyzed not only in terms of who represents but also in terms of who is being represented for what purpose, at which historical moment, for which location, using which strategies, and in what tone of address. (173)
This questioning is particularly important when the representation of the subaltern is involved. The problem does not rest solely with the fact that often marginalized groups do not hold the power over representation; it rests also in the fact that representations of these groups are both flawed and few in numbers. Shohat asserts that dominant groups need not preoccupy themselves too much with being adequately represented. There are so many different representations of dominant groups that negative images are seen as only part of the "natural diversity" of people. In a similar way, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a distinction between "stepping in someone's place to tread in someone's shoes." Representation in this sense is "political representation," or a speaking for the needs and desires of somebody or something. According to Spivak, the complicity between "speaking for" and "portraying" must be kept in mind " Spivak recommends "persistent critique" to guard against "constructing the Other simply as an object of knowledge, leaving out the real Others because of the ones who are getting access into public places due to these waves of benevolence and so on".
As a means of communication, television is believed to be the most 'real' form of media; meanwhile, it is the best terrain where the concept and practice of representations are omnipresent. If this is the case, then it is important to question the degree of reliability of the representations of women in television, and how this affects the attitudes of those who watch it. While representations of women in television have discernibly changed in the last twenty years, the question of how much the ideology has changed behind the more modern representations of women still arises. For instance, women represent half of the population in Morocco; so, if television is more realistic, this should be reflected in its program. Yet women are typically seen less often than men on television and much less frequently in central political and economic roles. Men also dominate the production side of television, so it is hardly surprising then, that the masculine or patriarchal ideology is presented as the norm, when women are so outnumbered by men on screen, and behind the scenes in television. This leads to the conclusion that that television presents its audience with a very masculine perspective.
Gunter argues that television’s sex stereotyping occurs in relation to various roles in which men and women are portrayed and which has a connection with the personality attributes they typically display. He divides stereotyping into sex role stereotyping and sex trait stereotyping. Sex role stereotyping reflects the changes in beliefs about the value of family, childcare, the role of the woman in marriage and the possibility of self-fulfillment through work. Generally, in the world of television, women tend to be confined to a life dominated by family and personal relationships far more than men, outside the home, as well as in it. Sex trait stereotyping, on the other hand, Gunter argues as reflecting more commonly held stereotypes about women's characteristics; for example, that women are more emotional than men. Therefore we can see the different roles that women are shown to fill, and in some aspects they are representative; there are domestic women, career women, single mothers, beautiful women etc. While television can be said to reflect the changing roles of women, it seems to portray them in a light of approval or disapproval, positive or negative according to the roles that patriarchy favors: the housewife is favored, while the woman in power is often shown to be the villain. More importantly, women are often represented as not being so intelligent as men, and having to rely on them. It is also shown that a woman is either intelligent or beautiful; but rarely both. It is important to note also, the effects that these portrayals have on people.
I.1.H. Semiotics in Media
Despite the fact that it is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline, semiotics is a field that involves various theoretical stances and methodological tools. Umberto Eco states that semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign' (Eco 1976, 7). In media, the value of semiotics resides in its questioning of the surface content of reality/signifier as well as the latent significance of the signifier and the signified. From a semiotics point of you, “reality” does never exist independent from human subjectivity and interpretation. Reality, accordingly, is a system of signs put together with the intent to create and propagate certain beliefs and ideologies. By the same token, media messages are just another systematic combination of signs, meant to embody coherently cohesive meanings/realities.
Knowing this helps in debunking how “reality” or “meaning” is not an inherent entity within the media texts/representations, and that the goal of the media is not simply to faithfully transmit reality; rather to put together sets of images/signs through sophisticated set of codes, arranged in a complex interplay in order to make the acceptance and consumption of those realities a taken-for-granted beliefs. “Becoming aware of such codes,” Daniel Chandler argues, “is both inherently fascinating and intellectually empowering. We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized.” Further, within the semiotic theory we can potentially understand how we are actually used by the media through our daily use of them, and thus contributing in the complexity of the world of signs.
On the basis of this approach, analyzing Moroccan women’s representations in 2M T.V. program helps in tracing the procedures followed by media producers in constructing and injecting realities in the mind of the Moroccan audience about the Moroccan women. While content analysis involves a quantitative approach to the analysis of the manifest 'content' of media texts, semiotics seeks to analyze media texts as structured wholes and investigates latent meanings. Hence, both methods represent complementary analytical tools that are going to be approached in the present research. That is, while content analysis will yield quantitative data, deconstructing the newscast clips into series of categorical icons, the semiotic approach will enable us to take the analysis into deeper levels, with the objectives to debunk the potentially cultural meanings/realities and objectives/effects the media representations intend to have on both women, being the content of the message and the audience being the receivers.
II.2. Literature Review
In the current decade, mainstream academic scholarship in Morocco and in conjunction with Middle East has come under severe criticism as a new generation of scholars, raised and trained in a different political and intellectual milieu. A new criticism has come to age, largely fashioned by the concepts and vocabularies of post-isms, mainly the postmodernist and post feminist paradigms in parallel with gender continental theory that has called into question some of the fundamental assumptions, methodologies, teaching, research of established scholarship and more precisely the question of gender representation of women in every living aspects. Thus, the project, at hand, highlights the question of women's representation in Moroccan Media. The choice of this topic stands behind the notion of being among the alluring piles of doctoral topics concerning gender studies, whereby I have found the issue of Moroccan women's representations in Media to be more appealing, not only because of its culturally primordial roots and present depth, but also and mainly because of its open endedness of character.
The debate on gender in the Media in the Arab world, in general, and in Morocco, in particular, is so fresh in the sense that the issue has not been objectively and profoundly explored by the mainstream Moroccan media researchers. However, since the debate has been initiated in the academia as well as in the politic arenas, it has realized far-reaching results, compared to many an Arab country. Admittedly, the discipline of media studies in Morocco is still in its rudimentary phase on the account that most of the conducted investigations as well as published works in this field rely heavily on quantitative approaches to meet the end establishing laws and predictabilities about the female representation or misrepresentation in both the written as well as the audio-visual media. To survey the state of the art concerning this issue, there is a lately published work under the title of “Images of Women in The Moroccan Mass Media Discourse” by a group of Moroccan scholars. The latter seek to draw recurrent results from a monthly investigation of three newspapers namely Al-Alam (The Flag), Al-Itihad Al-Ishtiraqi (The Social Union), and “l’Opinion’ as well as two TV channels (MTV and 2M). Notwithstanding the inadequacy of relying exclusively on the quantitative method, the former study has put the finger on many areas that call for more scholarly research.
Unlike the above researchers, Youssef Amine El Alamy, a Moroccan researcher of media studies, has contributed to the literature by his investigation under the title, “Refashioning Women: Representation and Ideology in Moroccan Francophone Women’s Magazines: Femmes du Maroc and Citadine as a Case Study”. The author covers an era of seven years of the issues of both magazines starting from 1996 up to 2003. This literary work is underpinned by a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates a diversity of methods and techniques along with an emphasis on a profoundly qualitative deconstruction of each pictographic and linguistic corpus. On the same line, in “Through a Local Prism, Globalization, and Identity in Moroccan Women’s Magazine,” Loubna Skalli (2006) explores the impacts of the forces of global culture on the Moroccan local culture and the ways this cultural adaptive interaction results in certain “concerns” in the Moroccan women’s lives and realities. Skalli’s ecxploratory study has scrutinized two Moroccan magazines written in French: “Femmes du Maroc”, and “ Citadine,” with the intent to position the production and the reception of these mainstream women magazine within the Moroccan Society, as well as deconstructing the potential discourses of variously mediated images of the Moroccan female during a period of transition in Morocco.
Indeed, these investigations help for the making of a local feminist discourse that meets with the calls of postmodernism and particularly for the downfall of grand narratives and the establishment of local and culture sensitive theories. Accordingly, these researches aim not only at understanding and demystifying the social reality of women but also at supporting the enhancement of the female cause and conditions for Moroccan as well as Arab women at large.
In much the same way, my research aims at sketching a thorough description of the various ways in which Moroccan women are both represented and/or un-represented in the politico-economic institutions in the local audiovisual media, 2M Television. The uniqueness of this research will be its focus on an uninvestigated audiovisual segment – Moubacharattan Maakoum and Eclairage – as well as it is instrumentalization of innovative and research method – Media monitoring method, and a variety of analytical tools induced from both the qualitative and quantitative underlying theories. Also, the research emphasizes on comparative analysis of Moroccan Audiences’ attitudes from urban as well as rural regions of Morocco, for the purpose of producing holistic results that combines the margin and the center.
II.7. Conclusion
The study of signs and the laws governing them, along with cultural studies theories will open door to different, but equally important, analytical perspectives touching upon the issue of gender and feminism which in turn display firsthand sources of a qualitative analysis. Displaying rich resources for deconstructing media artifacts, these disciplines have been transmitted to the study and analysis of media and become central to the understanding of the of mass/communication studies. Thus, their utility is manifested in the cohort of writings dealing with concepts of “meaning”, “representation”, “ideology”, “power”, “hegemony”, and the structure and function of sings/media text in both language and society. Incorporating them in the framework of this paper will provide prerequisite tools for a valid reading of the portrayal of women in TV Shows. Additionally, encompassing the mass-communication approach, represented in media monitoring method, will yield a quantitative data, which will answer certain research questions in objective ways. This, in turn, will make it possible to formulate qualitatively and quantitatively informing interpretations of Media artifacts related to women and women’s issues in Morocco.
College of Arts and Humanities & College of Social & Political Studies
Submitted by:
Abdeslam Badre
A list of abbreviations
Middle Eastern-North African (MENA)
Women Human Rights (WHR)
UNESCO
Syndicat National de la Presse Marocaine” (SNPM)
Superior Institute of Information and Communication (ISIC)
International Federation of Journalists' (IFJ)
Program for Gender Equality in the Media (PGEM)
Association Démocratique de Femmes de Maroc (ADFM),
Women Rights Developments (WRD).
A list of Tables
i. Abstract (Arabic)
ii. Abstract (English)
iii. Abstract (French)
iv. Acknowledgement
v. Dedication
vi. List of Abbreviations
vii. List of Tables
viii. Table of Content
Table of Content
General Introduction
Introduction
1. Statement the Problem
2. Rationale of the Study
3. Broader Goal of the Study
4. Research Questions
5. Objectives of the Research Questions
6. Research Hypothesis
7. Framework of Analysis and Significance of the Study
8. Organization of the Paper
Part One: Theoretical Framework
Introduction
I.1. Key concepts
I.2. Overview on Women and Media
I.3. Feminist Underlying Theories
I.4. Media Underlying Theories
I.5. Literary Work Review
I.6. Empirical Work Review
Part Two: Empirical Framework
II.1. Methodology
Introduction
II.1.A. Restatement of the Questions
II.1.B. Restatement of the Hypotheses
II.1.C. Design
II.1.D. Informants
II.1.E. Instruments
II.1.F. Media Artifacts Samples
II.1.G. Procedures
II.1.H. Coding
II.1.I. Data Analysis
Part Three: Results
III.1. Findings
Introduction
II.2.A. Women in TV: Time and Space Representations
II.2. B. Mediated Domains Featuring Women’s Stories
III.2.C. Women’s Role in Politics TV Shows
III.2.D. Moroccan Viewership Attitudes
III.2. Discussions and Interpretation
Introduction
II.3.A. The Quality of 2M Programs’ Representation of Women
II.3.B. Women’s Role in Televised Politics Shows
II.3.C. Moroccan Audience Attitudes towards TV portrayals
General Conclusion
Introduction
1. Summary of the Results
2. Limitation of the Study
3. Research Implications
4. Recommendation of future Research
Bibliography
Appendices
General Introduction
Introduction
1. Statement of the Problem
2. Rationales of the Study
3. Broader Goal of the Study
4. Research Questions
5. Objectives of the Research Questions
6. Research Hypotheses
7. Framework of Analysis and Significance of the Study
8. Organization of the Paper
Introduction
The impacts of mass media texts, in general, and audiovisual ones in particular have become so deterministic; not only on our understanding of the world around us but even on the shaping of our own identities, and on the ways we tend either to identify with or differentiate ourselves from others. Quite often, the beliefs people tend to hold about a number of maters, including gender relations, do not reflect the actual substance of these subjects, but simply constructed ones, based on sets of institutionalized rules and agreed upon social norms. Among the social institutions that guarantee the transferability of these constructed beliefs from one generation to another is Media. The latter plays an unprecedented role in shaping our perception of women, as an individual, as a personality, and as an “other” as opposed to the “self”. A perception most of the time is colored with prejudgemental beliefs and stereotyped convictions, which fuels the historical gender discrimination. Consequences of this discriminatory projection have proved to be dramatic not only on the meanings of the represented “reality” (women), but also on its readers (the audience/society.) While some Arab media conglomerate have worked out substantial reforms to fairly redefine and reposition the image of women within their societies through a radical evaluation of their media performance, such as Al-Jazeera, MBC group, and Al-Horra, to mention few. Yet, many countries in the Middle Eastern-North African (MENA) regions are still undecided on whether the issues of “media representation of women” should be considered as one of the national issues that requires committed political debate.
Morocco, for instance, is relatively one of the leading countries in the Arab world in regards to women's rights and freedom. While there are still definite gender gaps in some socio-cultural and political contexts, the country has made some significant reforms. The Moroccan Constitution, for instance, does not only recognize gender equality principles, it also preserves women’s rights to practice and enjoy their active involvements in all social intuitions including that of Politics and Economy. In 2004, the Family Code (Mudawwana ) was amended to abolish many discriminatory provisions towards women: such as repudiation and husbands’ authority on household, and to give women equal rights in demanding divorce. Economically, in 2008, the Moroccan women’s share to overall employment reached 24.6%; and, politically, in the 2009 national elections , 3406 Moroccan women were elected out of 20458 candidates (16.65%) in addition to five current women ministers in a cabinet of 34.
The facts above show some remarkable progress in matters of Women Human Rights (WHR) and economic integration, especially if compared to many an Arab Nation. Due to the persistence of patriarchal values, Women’s status, however, remains marginal in the country’s sovereign institutions, namely Media, Politics, and Economy. According to a survey conducted by the Moroccan Ministry of Communication in 2006, nearly 48% of women journalists worked in the broadcasting sector and 33% in the Print media. A study published by UNESCO the same year showed that women presence in leadership positions in the media does not go beyond 10%. If anything to be understood from these findings is that there is high correlation between women’s invisibility in mediated leading roles and their invisibility in the political decision-making. In 2008, the “Syndicat National de la Presse Marocaine” (SNPM) congress passed a quota of 25% minimum participation of women in the SNPM board. The union’s membership in 2009 reached 3056 members, 801 of whom are women (26.2%), second in the Arab world after Tunisia (33.3%) . The union’s board counts currently five women in a team of 19 (26.3%). The SNPM has a gender council that aims to mainstream gender in its program, recruits and promotes women journalists’ rights. Furthermore, according to the Superior Institute of Information and Communication (ISIC), the Rabat main institute in the country for media studies, the proportion of women graduates between 2000 and 2007 was 41.4%. Yet, women’s portrayals and roles in different media forms and genres still do not match the Moroccan women’s as well as society’s aspirations and identities; besides, the female’s voice and image in both political and economic audio-visual programs is very scarce in quantity and mediocre in quality, a reality that does neither reflect the actual profile of the Moroccan female politician and/or businesswoman, nor does it echo Morocco’s politically official discourse that propagates the full integration of women in the politico-economic social fabrics. To put it in the words of the Moroccan journalist and coordinator for the Maghreb region for the International Federation of Journalists' (IFJ) Program for Gender Equality in the Media (PGEM), Mounia Belafia: “images of women in the media still contain insulting stereotypes. They either are victims or consumers or a means to urge consumption. ”
Descriptive in nature, the present study seeks, on the one hand, to explore the Moroccan audiovisual representations of Moroccan women and women’s issues in one monitored political TV programs; on the other hand, to determine the Moroccan female viewers’ beliefs and attitudes towards televised programs related or/and targeting female audience in 2M-TV’s programs. That is, the research endeavors to qualitatively and quantitatively explore the Moroccan local 2M television channel’s representations of the Moroccan women’s images and roles, along with issues related to their lives in the political institutions of the country through a media monitoring of a monthly televised political show “TAYA’ARAT” TV program. Meanwhile, the paper attempts to sketch out the Moroccan female audiences’ attitudes and interactions with the channel’s different programs revolving around women’s lives and issues.
1. Statement of the Problem
The controversy, raised in this paper, vis-à-vis the Moroccan media representations of women is twofold: 1) the contents’ quality of the representations along with their underlying meanings; and 2) the impact of the mediated representations on both the subject of representations – women- and the target audience, along with the way they both receive and interact with the broadcast messages. Firstly, many of the mediated images of Arab women in Arab media, in general, and that of the Moroccan ones, in particular, are loaded with biases, devaluing women’s contribution in national developments, and/or attributing them negative associations. These tele-visual texts often vindicate myriad of void but taken for granted beliefs in the mind of a great number of illiterate Moroccan laymen. During the last decades, however, a few Arab countries have started to implement strategically reformative procedures within their media institutions: tremendous efforts are being invested to rectify the ills in the ways women’s images are being portrayed. The Moroccan media institution is no exception. During the last decade, the national media, in all forms, have started to witness qualitative and quantitative improvements.
“What has been done so far is not enough ,” said Ms. Nouzha Skelli (2008), Morocco’s Minister of Social Development, Family and Solidarity, in her comment on Morocco’s local media representation of women. In fact, it does not take much time to realize how far a distance is between the Moroccan media actual position and the point it needs to reach for a fair and constructive women media representation. Unjust socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural discriminatory projections is assumed to be held still within 2M televised political and economic shows in which the Moroccan woman is more likely pictured as a hopeless individual, a victim of a crime or social injustice, a protagonist of the rural life, an icon of illiteracy, and/or at best, trying to make her way through historically male-dominated sectors. The modern Moroccan woman is often seen as a famous singer, actress; but rarely a politician or in influential investor/leader. Her presence in the media is usually subordinated to the males’ assertive power. Her voice is mostly heard through males’ debates. In short, the female media prototype in the Moroccan media is more likely believed to be part of the problem and very rarely part of the solution. She is usually the object of debate. Her participatory contributions in solving nationally crucial issues are seldom heard of or seen on a regular basis, except in certain occasions such as “Woman’s day ”.
Secondly, media representation, regardless of the extent of its validity, is expected and meant to transmit specific messages to a target audience along with general signals to the large public. The wash-back effects of the Moroccan media representation have far immeasurable consequences not only on women, being the subjects of as well as the receivers of the mediated messages, but also on the Moroccan large public. When a Moroccan layman, for instance, gets exposed to an average of six hours a day of local media products – almost the same amount of time a Moroccan student spends daily at school - it goes without saying that this exposure is going to have far reaching impacts on the viewer’s perception of the mediated reality along with his/her actual attitude and behavior within the real world. Thus, watching economic or political television programs/debates hosted and animated only by males is going to construct in the mind of viewers the idea that politics or/and economics are men’s worlds. By the same token, watching TV programs on cooking and cuisines, beauty, health, and/or entertainment run and hosted by females is going to propagate a cultural stereotype that associate women with the private sphere. The impact of programs as such does not stop at this level. It goes further in shaping the individual’s beliefs and attitude within his/her community.
Seen as such, Mediated messages play crucial roles in shaping and reproducing the individual's as well as the community's self-identity, and orienting collective representations of and attitudes towards gender issues. Impacts that can bring about either fruitful or destructive outcomes, depending on the nature of the general make-up, formats, contents, and distributing strategies of the mediated products. On this ground, the present research identifies the question of ‘representations’ of the Moroccan women in the Moroccan audiovisual system as one major problematic issue. At another level, the Moroccan viewership beliefs in and attitudes towards the televised coverage of women need a moment of scrutiny in order to determine the extent to which these beliefs and attitudes’ intervention is said to be efficient in monitoring, evaluating, and/or resisting biases in the local audiovisual media, if there were any.
2. Rationale of the Study
The study is motivated by academic, bibliographic and personal motives. Academically, as mentioned earlier, Morocco has taken remarkable steps in social and human and Women Rights Developments (WRD). A number of official international sites along with many geo-political experts have acknowledged the fast transitions taking place at various levels in Morocco. Women human rights have become among the major points in the nation’s governmental agenda. The transition has been the outcome of a long and tiresome struggle in which women have been active team players. Moroccan women have, indeed, made revolutionary infiltrations in all the Nation’s institutions. However, there is immeasurable gap between both this evolution and the Moroccan political positive discourse concerning women rights and the role Moroccan media play. In other words, the Moroccan women’s outstanding performances and powerful profiles are, unfortunately, not yet seen or heard of with the same rigor in media broadcast. While women are omnipresent in all of the Moroccan vivid sectors, their presence in sociopolitical and/or socio-economic TV programs is assumingly very modest, if not harmful.
Bibliographically, there is a considerable scarcity of academic research dealing with the issue of the Moroccan Women within the Moroccan political and Economic local TV program shows. A cohort body of empirical as well as theoretical literature dealt with a wide variety of subjects related to issues of woman representation are already in record. A number of researchers have tackled Female’s Representation in Literature , Woman's Role in Economic Development, Women's Integration Within Economy, Male-Female equity at Workplace, Motherhood, Womanhood and the patriarchal institution. A few investigations have dealt with the issue of Arab and Moroccan Women in the press Media. Cases in point are Loubna Skalli’s, Through a Local Prism: Gender, Globalization, and Identity in Moroccan Women’s Magazines ; Naomi Sakr’s, Women and Media in the Middle East: Power through Self-Expression ; and Deborah Kapchan’s, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition. More discussion of some of the above mentioned will be catered for in the literature review’s section of this paper. The birth of the present project, accordingly, endeavors to add some academic values to the existing body of literature in the area of Gender and Media, and generate some programmatic recommendations for national media strategies, by raising and answering few an unanswered questions.
Personally, being fond of the fields of Mass Media, Gender, and social studies; having taken various graduate courses and training in Media Studies, I have been full of intent and motivation to undertake this project. In short, investigating Media Representations of Women in Morocco is a multi-dimensional-value project. The next section sheds light on the research boarder goal followed by the research questions and objectives.
3. Broader Goal of the Study
Following the Media Monitoring Projects of World Media News coverage of Gender issues that have been taking place since Beijing platform 1995, in which the Moroccan Media were not part, the present project seeks to provide tentative answers to the issue of representations of women in the Moroccan audiovisual media, and the Moroccan female audiences’ beliefs and attitudes, especially in programs targeting economics and politics. This is done through monitoring (watching and recording) an adequate number of hours of 2M audiovisual programs, broadcasted during the period of November 2008 through June 2010. The collected data are, then, qualitatively and quantitatively scrutinized for the sake of measuring both the special and timely settings being devoted to women, as well as the content quality of those representations. The analysis goes into some details as to the origins, potential meanings, and actual impacts of the selected media artifacts on the Moroccan female viewers. In short, the study aims at determining if Morocco’s national Media follow any strategy that tries to fairly relocate woman’s status within the Moroccan both public and private spheres; and thus, taking the national debates of gender issues into higher and more challenging levels. For operational reasons, this goal is paraphrased below into three main measurable research questions.
4. Research Questions
The following research questions have been formulated according to both the research broader goal as well as the research empirical design, which is exploratory in nature. This piece of work does not seek to control variables; rather, it attempts to observe, describe, and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the collected data, for the sake of drawing valid conclusions. Thus, the research three questions are all unidirectional, turning around the “what” dimensions. The underlying objectives behind raising each of these questions are made clear in the section that follows this.
I. What time and space settings are devoted to women and women’s issues in 2M-TV political program “TAYA’ARAT”?
II. What is the nature of the roles attributed to the broadcast women within this TV show?
III. What are the Moroccan female audiences’ beliefs and attitudes towards the audiovisual portrayal of women in 2M TV programs?
5. Objectives of the Research Questions
Each of these questions is part of establishing the investigatory ground of the overall scope of the study. Answering each of these questions constitutes a departing ground out of which an overview on the local media strategy toward women’s issues is to be formulated. Therefore, Question 1 sets off the monitoring of 2M TV representations of women and women’s issues at two levels: a) the Formatting of the underlined program; B) the latter’s content. On the one hand, both the amount of time and physical settings (street, office, city, rural area, house) in which women images are either perpetuated or made to be absent in the TV shows are going to be measured. Following these structural monitoring, question 2 sets a content analysis of the monitored stories in order to analyze the quality of the mediated representations in terms of their validity, reliability, social meanings, and potential impacts on the audience. Question 3 endeavors to determine both the Moroccan female audiences’ beliefs and attitudes towards 2M audiovisual representations of women and women’s issues. While question 1 and 2 are answered through a media monitoring procedures along with a television a coding sheet; question 3 is answered by administering a questionnaire to a randomly chosen pole of Moroccan female informants.
6. Research Hypotheses
On the basis of the research broader questions and objectives, the thesis holds four falsifiable hypothesizes:
1. First, it is assumed that Moroccan women are stereotypically underrepresented in the Moroccan audiovisual media.
2. Second, it is hypothesized that Moroccan women hold negative attitudes towards the Mediated gender representations.
3. Third, the Moroccan audiovisual representations of women and women’s issues have negative social wash-back effects on both women and the viewers.
4. Fourth, and conclusively, Thus, the national audio-visual media lack strategic vision for improving women and women’s issues coverage, especially in political audiovisual shows, which maintains an unjustified inconsistency between Morocco’s political discourse and aspiration and its political actual practices vis-à-vis an unconditional integration of women in the state’s political institutions.
7. Framework of Analysis and Significance of the Study
The significance of the study lurks in its interdisciplinarity as well as in its methodological novelty. To attain the research promise, developed is a theoretical framework and an empirical design that fuse both Media Theory with Gender Studies within an interdisciplinary research design. Methodologically, approaching the issue of Moroccan Women in the audiovisual media along with the audiences’ attitudes molds the present study within a hybrid framework, which entails the marriage of empirical techniques and procedures from both schools. In the same vain, the endeavor of raising and answering the present research questions meant to veer the national debate of “Audiovisual Representation of Women” toward working out some programmatic measures that would at least align with the nation’s perpetuated calls for equal treatments towards women in the different institutions of society, which is itself an endeavor of a noble significance.
8. Organization of the Paper
This dissertation comprises six chapters. Chapter one, “General Introduction,” folds a statement of the problem, rationale of the study, research questions, objectives, hypotheses, along with the significance and organisation of the study. Chapter two uncovers the “Review of the Literature”. It is constituted of two sections: the first section lays some key concepts of the paper and draws the theoretical framework around which the qualitative analysis revolves; and the second section synthesizes some main literary and empirical work, relevant to the scope of the present undertaking.
Chapter three, “Research Methodology,” outlines embraced approaches in data collection and analysis. A precise and concise description of and account for the project’s empirical design follows. Discussed are the rationales behind the selected media artefacts, the monitoring procedures, the informants, and the research instruments, along with the statistical techniques used for data analysis. While chapter four is devoted to data analysis, chapter five discusses the obtained results in relation to the research questions.
Chapter six, general conclusion, restates the research framework, and opens door to discussing the findings, drawing implications that will be formulated into operational applications, some recommendations for future investigations within the same scope of study, and the limitations of the study. The coming chapter underlines the major reviewed literature work relevant to the scope of this study.
“Media are significant sites of gender negotiations
where both masculine and feminine identities are defined,
redefined, constructed, and deconstructed.”
Adapted from Lohan, Maria 2001.
Part One: Theoretical Framework
Introduction
I.1. Key concepts and Media and Gender Underlying Theories
I.2. Overview on Women and Media
I.3. Literary Work Review
Conclusion
Introduction
The present chapter lays the conceptual and theoretical framework within which the study is couched. To investigate the qualitative and quantitative landmarks of 2M TV political program’s representations of women, it was deemed necessary to opt for an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that would capture both the representational and developmental concerns of the present study. Accordingly, the first section of this chapter underlines a listing of the dissertation’s key concepts, as well as some relevant models and theories of gender and communication studies. The second section presents a review of women and media, in general, and that of Moroccan context in particular. Finally, the third section goes through a review of the most salient literary along with the empirical works that have tackled the issue of media representation of women, globally and locally. What follows, accordingly, are definitions of the most prevailing concepts, starting with those related to Media; then, Gender Studies.
I.1. Key Concepts and Theories of Gender and Media
I.1.A. Medium, Media, and Mass Media
The term “medium” can be defined as simply as “a means of sending or communicating messages, information, or texts of one kind or another, from one person to another, or in the case of mass media, to many people ”. The term dates back to 1880. A quarter millennium after the publication of the first daily newspapers and 150 years after the publication of the first magazines. According to the Oxford English Dictionary:
“Medium ('mi:diem), a. means An intermediate agency, means, instrument or channel. Also, intermediation, instrumentality: in phrase by or through the medium of. spec. of newspapers, radio, television , etc. As vehicles of mass communication.”
The word ‘media’, plural of the term ‘medium’, is said to be a latecomer, dating from only a few years after the rise of the first commercial radio stations, and it is borrowed from the advertising industry. According to the OED,
Media ('mi:dia), pl. [Pl. F MEDIUM sb. After mass media.] Newspapers, radio, television, etc., collectively, as vehicles of mass communication. Freq. attrib. or as adj. Also erron. As sing. in same sense. Mass medium (,maes 'mi:diem). A medium of communications, such as radio, television, newspapers, etc., that reaches a large number of people; usu. In pl. mass media.
Mass media, then, refer to all types of messages, including speech, newspapers, movies, radio, CDs, and Internet. In categorizing media texts, some practitioners classify media in terms of being either electronic or printed; others prefer rather to differentiate between audio or visual media. Under the umbrella of mass media, each communication medium has its identifying form and channel. For example, speech is a medium of communication, used in interpersonal interactions; it is a personal medium, governed by a number of sociolinguistic constraints (sex, age, situation, context…) that help us decode the received messages of our interlocutors. A newspaper is another but different medium form. It is basically a written script, the meaning of which is produced and reproduced differently, by different readers, depending on their background knowledge of the text and intellectual levels, among other things. One advantage of mass media lays in their being the most economical way of getting the story over the new and wider market in the least time, and giving many people the chance to take part in the communication process simultaneously. Notably, the term “media” is going to be used throughout this dissertation in its plural form in reference to the audiovisual from, televised content.
I.1.B. Mass communication
The term is generally used in reference to mediated information and/or entertainment messages distributed via newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, recorded music, and associated media. In this usage "mass communication," according to Eric Rothenbuhler , refers to the activities of the media as a whole and fails to distinguish among specific media, modes of communication, genres of text or artifact, production or reception situations, or any questions of actual communication; and thus takes the term for granted. On the basis of this reductionist usage Eric Rothenbuhle suggests three different levels of definition. These include “(1) reference to the activities of the mass media as a whole, (2) the use of criteria of a concept, "massiveness," to distinguish among media and their activities, and (3) the construction of questions about communication as applied to the activities of the mass media.” (2005).
Significantly only the third of these uses, Eric Rothenbuhler decrees, does not take the actual process of communication for granted. That is, because Mass communication from the point of view of the first two categories either refers to “the activities of the mass media as a whole, or the massiveness of certain kinds of communication,” the importance of and emphasis on aspects of the massiveness of the distribution system and the audience are not taken into consideration. Instead, attention is spared on mass media because they are the institutional and technological systems capable of producing mass audiences for mass distributed "communications." The latter ends up implicitly defined as a kind of “object (message, text, artifact) that is reproduced and transported by these media.” R. Eric argues that this reductionist definition diminishes “our ability to treat communication as a social accomplishment, as something people do rather than as an object that gets moved from one location to another.” This idea of “communication as a social accomplishment” sounds more luring and arouses the curiosity of scholars of mass communication more than the notion of “media as mass distribution systems” does.
I.1.C. Mass Communication theory
Throughout the last two decades or so, much have been said and written on the lucid impacts media have had on our lives, and much more is yet to come. This flow of literary production aiming at media is indeed a mere reaction to the omnipresent control media have occupied in our daily societal, emotional and intellectual interactions. In various forms – press, audio, visual, and audiovisual- media have become a forger of a so-called preferred culture, and then persuasively teach the audience how to insert themselves within it. Media are no more passive projectors of the already constructed reality. Rather, media have become another producer of complexly constructed realities, identities, and subcultures. When consuming media products, the audience thinks that they are actually consuming commodities that satisfy their needs, which is partially true. However, the latent effect behind this use is the act of helping the media in propagating and constructing new “culture/identity/realities”. In his “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, Media Culture, ”Douglas Kellner describes how we have allow media to teach us all forms of socialization etiquettes:
We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages… to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire -- and what not to-… How to cope with a seductive culture how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation... (1997)
Understanding how this learning acquisition process takes place requires an understanding of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures, the intended underlying messages, along with various layers of representations of mediated texts. These, in return, entail a reading from within the mass communication discipline. Therefore, the instrumentalization of mass communication theory is basic for the overall theoretical and the methodological frameworks of the present project.
Mass communication theory will also make it possible to understand the way persuasion strategies are employed by media institutions to propagate certain realities, modify others as well as re-shaping new identities of the represented subjects. Hovland, Janis, and Kelly’s “instrumental theory,” for instance, suggests that people’s attitudes change by changing related opinions. Acceptance of new opinions is based on the information and the incentives latent in the message. Other theoretical approaches deal with the ways the audience processes and evaluate information and its value to their personnel lives. Since women presentations and audience’s attitudes constitute touchstones for this thesis, touching upon mass-media theories will be crucial to draw a comprehensive picture (qualitative and quantitative analysis) instead of a portion of it.
I.1.D. Gender in Cultural Studies Theory
Because of its focus on representations of race, gender, and class, its critique is perpetually leveled at ideologies that promote various forms of oppression. Gender studies have benefited a lot from the insurgence of cultural studies theory that has helped shedding more light on the battle of feminism. It has aided in the articulation of women’s views, experiences, and cultural forms, from being excluded from the mainstream culture. This makes it a target of conservative forces that wish to preserve the existing canons of those who have been historically holding the center. For instance, previous approaches to culture tended to be primarily literary and elitist, dismissing media culture as banal, trashy, and not worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, by contrast, avoids cutting the field of culture into high and low, or popular against elite.
Cultural studies is valuable to the theoretical framework of this research because it provides some tools that would yield some valuable readings and interpretations of possible impacts of media representations on women as an oppressed and under-represented social group within the Moroccan social tissue. It also allows a scrutiny of the whole range of media culture that is directed to women within the Moroccan context without prior prejudices, opening the way toward more differentiated political, rather than aesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts in which one attempts to distinguish critical and oppositional from conformist and conservative moments in a cultural artifact. The incarnation of the concepts of “ideology” and “power” will help triggering mainstream thinking to the implications of the gender conceptual upheaval wrought by Moroccan audiovisual media.
These two concepts are of paramount importance in cultural studies school, for dominant ideologies serve to reproduce social relations of domination and subordination, generating, accordingly, an asymmetrical power relation where women are some social institutions. Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrate upper class life and denigrate the working class. Ideologies of gender promote un-sexist representations of women. Ideologies, in this vain, make inequalities and subordination appear natural and just, and thus induce consent to relations of domination. The Moroccan society, like any, is structured by opposing groups with different political ideologies, (liberal, conservative, radical, etc.); so, cultural studies theory can help determine the nature of ideologies propagated by the Moroccan audiovisual artifacts to either serve or subordinate the Moroccan women. Furthermore, because the research raises the question of the Moroccan audiences’ attitudes towards the mediated representations of the Moroccan women, the use of cultural studies theory will put us in better situation to qualitatively analyze and interpret the factors that made different audiences respond in contrasting ways to the same media texts.
I.1. E. Audience and Models of Audience Theory
An audience is a group of individuals, who can be readers, listeners, and/or viewers who take either an active or passive part in the reading/listening/watching act of a piece of work of academia, art, literature, theater, music, and/or film. In media, the concept of audience occupies the touchstone of the planning, construction, distribution, and broadcast of any media text. The exact relationship between the media and their audiences has been the subject of debate since the media were first seriously studied and emphasizes the importance of the audience and of their relationship with the media. The first question a television program producer anticipates is whether or not a TV-show has a target audience; then, comes questions about the nature of this target audience in terms of needs, age, social status, and educational level, among other factors. Crucial as it is, the existence of an audience has a determining say over the success or failure of any TV program. That is why TV program producers invest a myriad of techniques, and finances on the creation of a participatory audience for a TV program. The audience’s participation differs according to the nature of the text itself: some text invite overt audience engagement. Others allow only close modest reception. Insights of audience theory in media studies explain how audiences affect and are affected by different forms of art. In "The Meaning of 'Audience,” Douglas B. Park (1982) differentiates between two types of audiences”
{One} diverges toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate; the other toward the text itself and the audience implied there, a set of suggested or evoked attitudes, interests, reactions, [and] conditions of knowledge which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers, listeners {viewer} .
The Frankfurt school, was concerned about the possible effects of mass media. They proposed the "Effects" model, depicting media as a “hypodermic syringe”, whose content is injected into the passive thoughts of the audience. Advocates of the hypodermic model of Effects adopted a variant of Marxism, emphasizing the dangers of the power of capitalism, which owned and controlled new forms of media. In the mid of the 20th century, however, theorists started to realize that media could not have such direct effects on the audiences. Media then appeared to have a comparatively weak influence in manipulating and reproducing individuals’ beliefs, opinions and attitudes, since personal experiences, religion, and school are more likely to influence people’s beliefs and attitudes. The Effects model is, in this vain, considered to be an inadequate representation of the communication between media and the public, as it does not take into account the audience as individuals with their own beliefs, opinions, ideals and attitudes. That inadequacy paved the way for the forging of a new approach to the dynamics of audience/text relationship; thus, Uses and Gratification model.
The Use and Gratification model shifted the focus from the media effects on audiences, to the audience’s actual usages of the media. The premise of the model holds that audience resorts into media consumption in order to satisfy specific needs. Seen as such, the audience is no more a passive consumer of media products, since the viewers have a say in choosing the kind of media programs they want to watch in order to satisfy their viewership needs. Philip J Hanes, in his The Advantages and Limitations of a Focus on Audience in Media Studies, refers to Blumler and Katz’ (1974) four main needs of television audiences that are satisfied by television. Blumter and katz introduced the idea of Diversion, Personal Relationships, Personal Identity, and Surveillance. The first concept refers to the viewer’s act of escaping from the pressures of every day life; the second is a situation wherein a viewer gains companionship, either by associating or disassociating one’s self with the broadcast story’s character to explore, re-affirm or question their personal identity, the third concept refers to the situation in which the viewer is involved in conversations with other viewers about the televised program, and the fourth concept speaks about the times where the viewer resort to media for the sake of updating their information about the world out there.
Highlighting audience active engagement with the media text, the model depicts media products with a monolithic meaning that all readers would construct in a unidirectional manner. In this, the model fails to acknowledge the multiplicities of audiences and audiences’ interpretations. This shortcoming motivated theorists in the 70s to approach audience from a semiotic and structuralist point of view, with the intent to trace the paths the audience take to pin meaning down. Screen theory, accordingly, submerged. In the core of this model lurks the concept of what semioticians referred to as "mode of address," which proposes that media texts address its intended audience in a particular way, establishing a relationship between the producer of a TV program and audience. That is, different audiences use different media; both the audience that is assumed to be using the media and the particular type of media that is being consumed determines the mode of address. This makes the mode of address central in constructing the audiences’ beliefs and attitudes towards the individual, community, and social institutions alike. “The limitations of focusing on audience in media studies,” according to Philip J Hanes, “can clearly be seen in the mode of address made by the media. However, previous models of audience reception do not take into account what actual audiences are going to do to the media texts.” Screen theory, Uses and Gratifications and Effects models suggest that meaning is embedded within the text, which audiences can access easily and accept without questioning these meanings. Just because producers of media texts have a certain opinion and meaning does not mean that this meaning is obvious in the text, that, in turn, does not mean that the audience will read these meanings or agree with them.
Understanding the audiences’ response to media texts through semiotics was also endeavored by Stuart Hall, from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham during the 70s, again. Hall suggested the concepts “coding” and “encoding,” as process that both the media producer and the viewer resort to in order to reach the media content’s meanings. Hall’s conceptualizes that there is a producer’s preferred meaning in the text. This meaning is encoded by the codes and conventions of the particular medium to hide the texts own ideological construction. The audience interprets the message with the help of a number of extrinsic factors, including the viewer’s past experiences, previous knowledge and experience of the medium, gender, age and education. This current theory underlines the existence of a preferred meaning in the text, but also places emphasis on the audience in the process of constructing a meaning. Hall’s encoding/decoding model draws upon two extreme ends, what Abercrombie (1996) refers to as the dominant {media} stand and the dominant audience stand. (Philip J Hanes. 2000) The advantage of the Encoding/decoding model is that it pinpoints at the existence of a multiplicity of factors that are involved in the audience’s meaning construction process, besides involving the context in which the media message is consumed.
Cultural studies theory also introduced the notion of a four-model type of audience decoding. Whereas the oppositional hegemonic position is when the viewers understand the preferred meaning, but does not buy it because of their own set of attitudes and beliefs, the dominant hegemonic position is when the viewers adopt the full-preferred meaning inherent in the media product. As to the negotiated hegemonic position, it is established when the audience members refuse to adapt the preferred meaning. The forth type of audience response is referred to as aberrant decoding. This is where the audience member reads the text in an unpredicted way, producing a deviant meaning. Regardless of its novelty, this model is not limitation-free, as David Morley (1989) notes. For instance, the preferred meaning is a difficult concept to understand, and is simpler to identify in factual texts, such as newspaper reports, television news and documentaries. In fiction-based texts there are more likely to be different readings of the preferred texts. Additionally, it is unclear whether the preferred meanings are embedded in the text, or whether it is something agreed on by the majority of the texts audience. In short, by mapping out a chronological development of audience theory, it becomes lucid that there are various ways in which the audience can be viewed. Understanding the way the viewers construct meaning and make sense of media, producers can change their texts so that audiences will read whatever meanings the producers want. Ultimately, it is the audience that controls the output of the media. Throughout this paper, the term audience will be used in a plural form, since it refers to a group of individuals. Also, it is going to be used interchangeably with the term ‘viewer’.
I.1.F. Gender vs. Feminism
In a broad sense, 'feminism' is an umbrella term that analyses social relations to gender and patriarchy . It is a critical theory, aiming at examining gender in society. Its major goal is to change all forms of degrading tendencies by which women have been treated by different institutions of society. Feminist mind-sets, accordingly, have been aiming at redefining and reasserting women’s voice and image in education, politics, economics, and media, among other sites. With the advent of this line of thinking, “feminism” has progressively but effectively started to lose its monolithic body at the expense of multiplicity of feminist discourses. That is, starting from the early 1970s, one could no longer speak of feminism as a single unit of research, writing, or theory; but rather speak of feminisms with plurality of purposes and orientations: there have emerged Liberal feminism, Radical feminism, Marxist feminism, post-Marxist or Socialist feminism, post-Modernist feminism, and the list goes on.
True enough, feminism’s rigorous debates have given birth to gender theory as a category of analysis in the early 1980s. Still. Feminism often differs from gender theory in that the former accounts exclusively for women’s standpoints, or those voices that align with the Feminist discourse and it tends to overlook the anti-feminist views. So, in order to avoid this one-sided perspective, and to objectively report on the reality of the Moroccan women within the local Media, and taking into consideration the subjectivity of the researcher’s perspective, analysis of male’s account must also be included because it is due to the male power that women’s representations and identifications are often constructed.
In this respect, while theories and methods of feminism will be brought to bear in this research, the research will basically resort to gender theory more than feminist stands due to the complexity arisen by the plurality of the conceptual framework of feminism. That says, gender theory is benchmarked by monolithic conceptual tools which are going to be beneficial for the consistency of the theoretical analysis of the present paper; besides, gender theory allows us to scrutinize the question of mediated female representations not only from a female perspective but also from that of males, which works in favor of the reliability of the research analytical content.
I.1.G. Representations
The concept “representation” refers to the construction of “realities” such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts, within the frame of any medium, which might be oral, written, and/or in forms of moving pictures – television. Representation can also be defined as the act of placing or stating facts in order to influence or affect the action of others. Of course, the term also has political connotations. Politicians are thought to 'represent' a constituency. So above all, the concept has a semiotic meaning, in that something is 'standing for' something else. Representation is not only about the ways identities are constructed within a text to a given audience; but it is also about the ways how these realities are constructed in the processes of production and reception by people whose identities are also differentially marked in relation to such demographic factors.
A key in the study of representation is concerned with the way in which representations are made to seem ‘natural’. Systems of representation are the means by which the concerns of ideologies are framed; such systems ‘position’ their subjects. In Orientalism, Edward Said emphasizes the fact that representations can never be exactly realistic because of the inexistence of the idea of a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. It follows, then, that representations can never really be 'natural' depictions of realities. Instead, they are constructed images, images that need to be interrogated for their ideological content. Speaking of interrogations, Ella Shohat, in "The Struggle over Representation: Casting, Coalitions, and the Politics of Identification," Late Imperial Culture, claims that we should constantly question representations:
Each filmic or academic utterance must be analyzed not only in terms of who represents but also in terms of who is being represented for what purpose, at which historical moment, for which location, using which strategies, and in what tone of address. (173)
This questioning is particularly important when the representation of the subaltern is involved. The problem does not rest solely with the fact that often marginalized groups do not hold the power over representation; it rests also in the fact that representations of these groups are both flawed and few in numbers. Shohat asserts that dominant groups need not preoccupy themselves too much with being adequately represented. There are so many different representations of dominant groups that negative images are seen as only part of the "natural diversity" of people. In a similar way, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a distinction between "stepping in someone's place to tread in someone's shoes." Representation in this sense is "political representation," or a speaking for the needs and desires of somebody or something. According to Spivak, the complicity between "speaking for" and "portraying" must be kept in mind " Spivak recommends "persistent critique" to guard against "constructing the Other simply as an object of knowledge, leaving out the real Others because of the ones who are getting access into public places due to these waves of benevolence and so on".
As a means of communication, television is believed to be the most 'real' form of media; meanwhile, it is the best terrain where the concept and practice of representations are omnipresent. If this is the case, then it is important to question the degree of reliability of the representations of women in television, and how this affects the attitudes of those who watch it. While representations of women in television have discernibly changed in the last twenty years, the question of how much the ideology has changed behind the more modern representations of women still arises. For instance, women represent half of the population in Morocco; so, if television is more realistic, this should be reflected in its program. Yet women are typically seen less often than men on television and much less frequently in central political and economic roles. Men also dominate the production side of television, so it is hardly surprising then, that the masculine or patriarchal ideology is presented as the norm, when women are so outnumbered by men on screen, and behind the scenes in television. This leads to the conclusion that that television presents its audience with a very masculine perspective.
Gunter argues that television’s sex stereotyping occurs in relation to various roles in which men and women are portrayed and which has a connection with the personality attributes they typically display. He divides stereotyping into sex role stereotyping and sex trait stereotyping. Sex role stereotyping reflects the changes in beliefs about the value of family, childcare, the role of the woman in marriage and the possibility of self-fulfillment through work. Generally, in the world of television, women tend to be confined to a life dominated by family and personal relationships far more than men, outside the home, as well as in it. Sex trait stereotyping, on the other hand, Gunter argues as reflecting more commonly held stereotypes about women's characteristics; for example, that women are more emotional than men. Therefore we can see the different roles that women are shown to fill, and in some aspects they are representative; there are domestic women, career women, single mothers, beautiful women etc. While television can be said to reflect the changing roles of women, it seems to portray them in a light of approval or disapproval, positive or negative according to the roles that patriarchy favors: the housewife is favored, while the woman in power is often shown to be the villain. More importantly, women are often represented as not being so intelligent as men, and having to rely on them. It is also shown that a woman is either intelligent or beautiful; but rarely both. It is important to note also, the effects that these portrayals have on people.
I.1.H. Semiotics in Media
Despite the fact that it is not widely institutionalized as an academic discipline, semiotics is a field that involves various theoretical stances and methodological tools. Umberto Eco states that semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign' (Eco 1976, 7). In media, the value of semiotics resides in its questioning of the surface content of reality/signifier as well as the latent significance of the signifier and the signified. From a semiotics point of you, “reality” does never exist independent from human subjectivity and interpretation. Reality, accordingly, is a system of signs put together with the intent to create and propagate certain beliefs and ideologies. By the same token, media messages are just another systematic combination of signs, meant to embody coherently cohesive meanings/realities.
Knowing this helps in debunking how “reality” or “meaning” is not an inherent entity within the media texts/representations, and that the goal of the media is not simply to faithfully transmit reality; rather to put together sets of images/signs through sophisticated set of codes, arranged in a complex interplay in order to make the acceptance and consumption of those realities a taken-for-granted beliefs. “Becoming aware of such codes,” Daniel Chandler argues, “is both inherently fascinating and intellectually empowering. We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized.” Further, within the semiotic theory we can potentially understand how we are actually used by the media through our daily use of them, and thus contributing in the complexity of the world of signs.
On the basis of this approach, analyzing Moroccan women’s representations in 2M T.V. program helps in tracing the procedures followed by media producers in constructing and injecting realities in the mind of the Moroccan audience about the Moroccan women. While content analysis involves a quantitative approach to the analysis of the manifest 'content' of media texts, semiotics seeks to analyze media texts as structured wholes and investigates latent meanings. Hence, both methods represent complementary analytical tools that are going to be approached in the present research. That is, while content analysis will yield quantitative data, deconstructing the newscast clips into series of categorical icons, the semiotic approach will enable us to take the analysis into deeper levels, with the objectives to debunk the potentially cultural meanings/realities and objectives/effects the media representations intend to have on both women, being the content of the message and the audience being the receivers.
II.2. Literature Review
In the current decade, mainstream academic scholarship in Morocco and in conjunction with Middle East has come under severe criticism as a new generation of scholars, raised and trained in a different political and intellectual milieu. A new criticism has come to age, largely fashioned by the concepts and vocabularies of post-isms, mainly the postmodernist and post feminist paradigms in parallel with gender continental theory that has called into question some of the fundamental assumptions, methodologies, teaching, research of established scholarship and more precisely the question of gender representation of women in every living aspects. Thus, the project, at hand, highlights the question of women's representation in Moroccan Media. The choice of this topic stands behind the notion of being among the alluring piles of doctoral topics concerning gender studies, whereby I have found the issue of Moroccan women's representations in Media to be more appealing, not only because of its culturally primordial roots and present depth, but also and mainly because of its open endedness of character.
The debate on gender in the Media in the Arab world, in general, and in Morocco, in particular, is so fresh in the sense that the issue has not been objectively and profoundly explored by the mainstream Moroccan media researchers. However, since the debate has been initiated in the academia as well as in the politic arenas, it has realized far-reaching results, compared to many an Arab country. Admittedly, the discipline of media studies in Morocco is still in its rudimentary phase on the account that most of the conducted investigations as well as published works in this field rely heavily on quantitative approaches to meet the end establishing laws and predictabilities about the female representation or misrepresentation in both the written as well as the audio-visual media. To survey the state of the art concerning this issue, there is a lately published work under the title of “Images of Women in The Moroccan Mass Media Discourse” by a group of Moroccan scholars. The latter seek to draw recurrent results from a monthly investigation of three newspapers namely Al-Alam (The Flag), Al-Itihad Al-Ishtiraqi (The Social Union), and “l’Opinion’ as well as two TV channels (MTV and 2M). Notwithstanding the inadequacy of relying exclusively on the quantitative method, the former study has put the finger on many areas that call for more scholarly research.
Unlike the above researchers, Youssef Amine El Alamy, a Moroccan researcher of media studies, has contributed to the literature by his investigation under the title, “Refashioning Women: Representation and Ideology in Moroccan Francophone Women’s Magazines: Femmes du Maroc and Citadine as a Case Study”. The author covers an era of seven years of the issues of both magazines starting from 1996 up to 2003. This literary work is underpinned by a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates a diversity of methods and techniques along with an emphasis on a profoundly qualitative deconstruction of each pictographic and linguistic corpus. On the same line, in “Through a Local Prism, Globalization, and Identity in Moroccan Women’s Magazine,” Loubna Skalli (2006) explores the impacts of the forces of global culture on the Moroccan local culture and the ways this cultural adaptive interaction results in certain “concerns” in the Moroccan women’s lives and realities. Skalli’s ecxploratory study has scrutinized two Moroccan magazines written in French: “Femmes du Maroc”, and “ Citadine,” with the intent to position the production and the reception of these mainstream women magazine within the Moroccan Society, as well as deconstructing the potential discourses of variously mediated images of the Moroccan female during a period of transition in Morocco.
Indeed, these investigations help for the making of a local feminist discourse that meets with the calls of postmodernism and particularly for the downfall of grand narratives and the establishment of local and culture sensitive theories. Accordingly, these researches aim not only at understanding and demystifying the social reality of women but also at supporting the enhancement of the female cause and conditions for Moroccan as well as Arab women at large.
In much the same way, my research aims at sketching a thorough description of the various ways in which Moroccan women are both represented and/or un-represented in the politico-economic institutions in the local audiovisual media, 2M Television. The uniqueness of this research will be its focus on an uninvestigated audiovisual segment – Moubacharattan Maakoum and Eclairage – as well as it is instrumentalization of innovative and research method – Media monitoring method, and a variety of analytical tools induced from both the qualitative and quantitative underlying theories. Also, the research emphasizes on comparative analysis of Moroccan Audiences’ attitudes from urban as well as rural regions of Morocco, for the purpose of producing holistic results that combines the margin and the center.
II.7. Conclusion
The study of signs and the laws governing them, along with cultural studies theories will open door to different, but equally important, analytical perspectives touching upon the issue of gender and feminism which in turn display firsthand sources of a qualitative analysis. Displaying rich resources for deconstructing media artifacts, these disciplines have been transmitted to the study and analysis of media and become central to the understanding of the of mass/communication studies. Thus, their utility is manifested in the cohort of writings dealing with concepts of “meaning”, “representation”, “ideology”, “power”, “hegemony”, and the structure and function of sings/media text in both language and society. Incorporating them in the framework of this paper will provide prerequisite tools for a valid reading of the portrayal of women in TV Shows. Additionally, encompassing the mass-communication approach, represented in media monitoring method, will yield a quantitative data, which will answer certain research questions in objective ways. This, in turn, will make it possible to formulate qualitatively and quantitatively informing interpretations of Media artifacts related to women and women’s issues in Morocco.
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