Media Discourses, Hybridity and “Manufacturing Consent” for Women Empowerment

Abstract

The media is associated in critical theory with cultural imperialism. Through discourses (de)legitimated through media, norms of society are molded to construct consent for consumerism; making it a part of modern world system. The media narratives convey messages’; cutting across the geographical constraints. Cultural rigidities recede to create space for new choices. The media has (de)territorialized the self, and built consumer heterotopias; blending the acclaimed western universals with ethnocentric local cultures; creating hybrid selves. Media creates an ambivalent cultural space and also provides a looking glass to perceive society. According to Charles Horton Cooley, people shape their conception about self; based on their understanding of “other’s” perception about them. Despite the negative connotations associated with Media discourses due to its links with hegemony, these can be alternatively viewed as transforming agents having positive impacts. It can play a central role in transforming the lives of vulnerable segments like women by challenging the givens of cultural particulars and providing the alternative narrative for more equalitarian gender roles. The paper is an effort to view media discourses with a postcolonial feminist lens. It is an account of gendered dimension of hybridity and ambivalence inherent in media advertisements discourses, in South Asian context by employing the technique of Critical Discourse Analysis.