Gender Blindness on Turkish Children’s Televisions

Abstract

The representation of the dominant gender-based discourse on television inevitably affects children’s perceptions of masculinity and femininity. Gender blindness, the embodiment of gender hierarchy in which gender differences are exaggerated and attributed to natural differences between men and women, is inevitably used in the media, especially in children’s broadcasting. This study aims to reveal the gender blindness in children’s television on Turkey’s only thematic children’s television stations Minika GO and Minika Cocuk’, focusing on all local productions aired in 2020. Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of representation debates and text analysis expressed as constructing the meaning world of relationships and collective culture, guided the study. The representations are conveyed to the audience through the narration of the story in the animations, the plots of the story, the presentation of male and female characters, the use of space and images. In the cartoons, the frequency of female and male characters appearing on the screen, the physical appearance of the characters, their behavioral characteristics, and the spatial presentation in the stories were searched. As a result, it is possible to say that male and female characters are depicted unequally in all the themes studied in animations resulting in gender blindness.