Representaciones de género: una mirada (más bien) conservadora

Abstract

The present text is a first advance of work from the “Representation Analysis in Communication Workshop”, developed with Communication students at the faculty of Higher Education in Acatlán, UNAM. The workshop’s goal is to analyze the processes of mediation in the stories of public communication, and analyze the treatment given to some topics and different kinds of communicative products in television, radio, films and magazines. The project began with the analysis of gender representations in television stories. The point is to go over the gender issue either in products conducted by a host (where ritualization exerts great importance in the mediation process), or in fictional productions (where mediational operation consists of mythification). In the first, a comparison will be made between what is said about gender as a topic, and the behaviour of the show’s host and hostess: is there consistency between what they say and what they do, or not? In fictional stories, the following questions will try to find an answer: what attributes and actions associated to “being a man” and “being a woman” are included? Which ones are excluded? How do they relate with one another? How are they valued in the representations of this kind of stories?