See front file / Communication Science / MA (COMMUNICATION)

Reality television programming chronicling the daily workings of multiple birth families within American culture has gained notoriety in recent years. Such programs, especially Discovery Health and TLC's 17, 18 Kids and Counting and TLC's Jon and Kate Plus Ei8ht, film, edit and broadcast the "everyday" life of these families. This research study focuses attention on hegemonic ideologies surrounding family values, motherhood, gender roles and religious faith, illuminated through textual and audience analysis. Working from an interdisciplinary approach combining feminist media and cultural studies, this study finds that hegemonic notions of family values, gender representations, religious faith and conceptions of motherhood are evident to varying degrees in the television texts and accepted by fans who negotiate their meanings online. / by Emily M. CIttadino. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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The “tabloid TV” news genre is a relatively new phenomenon in Uganda and Africa. The genre has been criticised for depoliticising the public by causing cynicism, and lowering the standards of rational public discourse. Despite the criticisms, the genre has been recognised for bringing ‘the private’ into a public space and one of the major ‘private’ issues on the public agenda is women and gender equality. Given these critiques, this study set out to interrogate the meanings that young working class women in Kampala make of the tabloid television news programme Agataliiko Nfuufu and to ask how these meanings relate to the contested notions of femininity in this urban space. In undertaking this audience reception study I interviewed young women between the ages of 18-35 years by means of individual in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. The study establishes that Agataliiko Nfuufu is consumed in a complex environment where contesting notions of traditionalism and modernity are at play. The study also establishes that while mediating the problems, discomforts and contestations of these young women’s lives, Bukedde TV1 operates within a specific social context and gendered environment where Agataliiko Nfuufu is consumed. The study concludes that the bulletin mediates the young women’s negotiations and contestations, but it provides them with a window into other people’s lives and affords them opportunities to compare, judge and appreciate their own. Furthermore, the gendered roles and expectations in this context have become naturalised and have achieved a taken-for-grantedness. Therefore, patriarchy has been legitimised and naturalised to the extent that the respondents define themselves largely in relation to male relatives, and marriage. While the women lament the changes that have taken place in their social contexts which disrupt the natural gender order, they construct themselves as subjects of the prevailing discourses of gender relations that see men as powerful and women as weak and in need of protection.