Symbolic violence: Reproduction of gender inequality in Turkish media: Case of "New Bride" television serial

Violence in symbolic form is more consequential in reproduction and perpetuation of social inequalities and hierarchies than physical one. Of the mass media, especially television, with the capacity to access to almost every household and produce a great amount and variety of cultural commodities, has great power to construct social order, thus functions as an agent of socialisation. Despite the fact that internet technology is highly developed and penetrated into our lives, television is still one of the major free time activities in Turkish society. Television serials cover a substantial amount of prime time hours and become an important daily ritual for many audiences. The plight of gender inequality to this day remains grim reality in Turkish society and televisions, as one of the primary agents of socialisation, matters a lot in this regard. Bourdieu as a sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher, strived for getting a deep insight into how social order and structure is constructed and reproduced with a reflexive sociological view in modern capitalist societies. He established the theories of symbolic violence, capital, habitus, which are interrelated and embraced together. The research analyses how "New Bride" television serial reproduces gender inequality by wielding symbolic violence. The research adopts qualitative content analysis technique, which is commonly and frequently used in media studies. The research analyses the latent content of the serial for the nature of Bourdieu's theory of symbolic violence. "New Bride" television serial is the unit of the content analysis. "Symbolic violence" is the main category and "sexual division of labour and space, exclusion from public space, androcentric vision, bodily emotions, symbolic dependence, love of dominant, ancien regime" are the subcategories in the coding frame. The research reveals that "New Bride" television serial involves in large part symbolic violence and thus contributes to reproduction of gender inequality.