Reading Television and the Constructions of Family and Gender Roles

In order to comprehend the relationship and the influence of television on the family and
gender roles we shall start discussion with certain theory.
Firstly, we shall start with theory on gender roles, so that we could grasp further
studies and discussions.
According to psychologists such as Sandra Bem, one cognitive process that seems
nearly inevitable in humans is to divide people into groups. We can partition these
groups on the basis of race, age, religion, and so forth. However, most of the times we
split humanity on the basis of gender. The first thing we instantly determine, when
meeting someone new, is their gender.
So now that Ive established that I shall discuss Morleys theory on television watching, and
unlike Hobsons theory it is more of a family consumption.
After Hobson, television viewing was seen as more of a social, even a collective,
activity, fully absorbed into everyday routines. Morley shifts his interest from the text
to the domestic viewing context itself as the framework within which readings of
programs are (ordinarily) made'. As a result the unit of consumption is no longer the
individual viewer; it is the family or household. Morleys study reveals how television
is adapted to families economic and cultural (or psychological) needs. He like
Hobson sees the family as a place of female subordination.
Although both Hobson and Marley are concerned with the power and position in the family
throughout watching television they still had different approaches and theories about gender
roles and family constructions.
Both accounts look at power within patriarchal Britain in the 80s through 'watching
television' as a private activity in the domestic sphere. The 'gendering of genre'
Hobson finds a sexual division of 'spheres of interest': the women reject programs
relating to the masculine world of the public sphere (news, current affairs, action),
while they actively choose programs representing their own world (entertainment and
fiction, especially soap operas), which they find more 'interesting', yet less 'important'
than masculine tastes. They could relate to "a feminine realm of fictional programmes
that connected with the personal and emotional concerns of family life or else offered
a fantasy alternative to their own daily experiences." News-stories were described as
male-orientated and 'boring' and believed to have a depressing effect. Nonetheless they
seemed to automatically accept their husbands' right to watch them.

Through watching television we can see the status of women in the family, and also the

difference between women and men when it comes to watching television. Furthermore
television doesnt just present the position of woman in the household, but also emits the
status of women in the society.
Male dominance is clear in most of the families and takes the most bullying of forms:
some men not only chose the programmes for the whole family and denigrated the
choices of others, but also took possession of the remote control device when they left
the room in order to stop anyone switching around the channels in their absence.
Women rarely knew how to work the video recorder. Men liked to watch in total
silence, while women and children found this oppressive; to resist this regime women
tended to watch the black-and-white set in the kitchen, while the children retreated
upstairs.
According to Hobson's theory women were also in disadvantage compared to men. Such was
the construction of family that even when woman finds time to watch television she would
feel guilty of doing it.
Women had fewer moments of licensed leisure, when they were free to give the
television their undivided attention; as Hobson found, many women are cooking meals
or bathing children at the times when their favourite soaps are on and can watch their
favourite shows only in brief bursts. Many women talked of the pleasure of being able
to watch afternoon soaps free of this regime, although they also spoke guiltily of this,
as if it were an luxury of which they should be ashamed.
However the gender roles are different if woman works and man does not. It changes the
status of woman within the family. A woman who was the main breadwinner while her
husband stayed home caring for the house and children exercised a degree of domestic power
and demonstrated viewing preferences more like those of the males in the survey than those of
other women. Thus the power in the family and its construction depends on the domestic
status of one partner regardless of the gender. Families and gender roles presented on
television are different, because television offers varieties of different programmes and every
each of them may present families and gender roles in a different way. Television may have
great influence on families and gender roles due to family representation within a TV show or
television may just be an object which presents to us how families are constructed.
Those who watch more television than average, particularly children, tend to hold
more traditional notions of gender roles. Television cultivates beliefs in children such
as "women are happiest at home raising children" and "men are born with more
ambition than women". Images of family life itself may also be influenced. Heavy
viewers tend to perceive being single as negative, express profamily sentiments, and
believe that families in real life show support and concern for each other. On the other
hand, heavy soap opera viewers tend to overestimate the number of illegitimate
children, happy marriages, divorces, and extramarital affairs.

Both men and women have different vision of television watching and TV shows. Man would
consider TV shows that woman watches very unintelligent, and woman would consider TV
shows which man watches very uninviting.
The male degradation of soap operas may reflect a lack of abilities to access this
sphere of intimate talk and feeling the predominantly female "Melodramatic
Imagination". Men thus reject those programmes as 'stupid' and 'unrealistic' -while
their own world of heroism in sports, war on the news may seem important and 'real'
to them and, moreover, acts as social currency that can gain them respectability in their
spheres.
We shall again return to Hobsons studies of womans leisure, her vision of watching
television, and not only how does that effect on her status in the family but also how it creates
her own meaning.
Women may find it hard to argue for their own tastes in presence of their husbands,
as they perceive their own preferences as "more interesting and relevant to them, but
secondary in rank to 'real' or 'masculine' world", but part of the pleasure of watching
soaps "lies in their defiance of masculine or parental control". Through watching a
"nice weepy" on their own or with other female friends, women "create a gendered,
oppositional space" (...) "to produce their own meanings and pleasures". Watching in
secret may be a "strategy to avoid confrontation and conflict". When housewives
indulge in their 'guilty pleasures' and "in the kind of attentive viewing which their
husbands engage in routinely", they abandon their role as "domestic manager" and use
the home as leisure space, momentarily reversing its gendered use. As 'ritual of
resistance' this "alternative viewing" confirms the women's commitment to the status
quo, which suggests that women may have their reasons for accepting this "dominant
ideology".
All in all, we may conclude that television in home certainly depicts, according to
Morley and Hobson, the difference between woman and man. It also presents the gender roles
within the television and it influences the gender roles and the family. Despite the influence, it
has also shown a strong relationship among watching television and family constructions and
gender roles, showing that they are all interrelated. Thus by observing the family watching
television we can discover the domestic role, the status of woman and the whole family
construction.