Feminist Discourse and the Hegemonic Role of Mass Media

Abstract

There has been a notable cultural trend in which feminist concerns are conveyed through many popular culture texts in South Korea since the early 1990s. Many different social groups and organizations have been engaged in the formation of feminist discourse in popular culture, among them the mainstream media. To broadly address the role of media in incorporating feminist discourse within the dominant ideology in specific socio-economic contexts, the research sought to identify the ways in which feminist discourse was generated and/or assimilated into the dominant ideology in newspaper content about the messages in the two television dramas Lovers (1996) and The Woman Next Door (2003) and other socio-cultural phenomena surrounding the dramas. Newspaper content became more favorable to the sexually liberated female characters and acknowledged changing gender roles as a current socio-cultural trend. However, it never questioned the nuclear family system itself—which occupies the hegemonic realm in patriarchal capitalist society.