Audience and television programs: women readings of television commercials

Portraying women in the media is one of the main social and cultural issues especially on television. Television commercials as a genre have ideas about goods and services, but it constructs a secondary discourse about society, culture and gender roles along the way. The main goal of this paper is to examine women’s readings of gender roles representation in Iranian television commercials from the cultural studies perspective. To achieve this objective, focus group interviews were used to study women readings and then their readings was analyzed. The results showed that television commercials are heedless of socio-cultural developments and the gender roles changes in different aspects in the society, but it represents dominant ideology in media and minimal status group of woman in Iranian society. Currently, different groups of women are engaged in different discourses and they will gradually engage in other discourses. If this trend continues by different groups of women and the misrepresentation or exclusion of women doesn’t stop in the media, the audiences with different readings will become the most rethinking groups.