Popular Cultural Products Research Articles

INTRODUCTION: THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY PACIFIC RIM: VICTORIAN TRANSOCEANIC STUDIES BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL MATRIX

the Victorians’ driving interest in exploration and expansion is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly truisms about the age and its literature. While the British Empire was rapidly expanding and commercial competition began to stretch across the globe with a newly perceived urgency, Victorians at home throughout this expanding empire were at once fascinated and anxious in reading about the wider world. Armchair explorers might have confined themselves to a vicarious enjoyment of the gold-nuggets that seem to lay scattered throughout the expanding settler world, of adventures in an excitingly exoticised “bush,” and of shipwrecks and dubious impostors who sometimes seemed to return from the middle of nowhere. Readers could even indulge in a smugly self-congratulatory sense of amusement when witnessing the satirised ignorance of Flora Finching in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857), when she famously evokes semi-colonial China as such a country to live in for so long a time, and with so many lanterns and umbrellas too how very dark and wet the climate ought to be and no doubt actually is, and the sums of money that must be made by those two trades where everybody carries them and hangs them everywhere, the little shoes too and the feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a traveller you are! (152; ch. 13) With its bizarre juxtaposition of exotic references and vague gesticulations towards imperial commerce's impact at home, Flora's confusion is first and foremost funny, and readers were clearly meant to recognise it as such. In the same vein, adventure tales set in far-off islands in the Pacific or in new settlements in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand certainly continued to feature the enticingly wild and exotic. Yet increasingly, popular fiction made it clear that we ought to know more about the world out there, and that this entailed a different sense of responsibility as well. It is tellingly the satirised, pompous characters who wildly joke about the hero's escapades “down under” in Anthony Trollope's John Caldigate (1879), while the novel instead shows that the widespread notion “that anything done in the wilds of Australia ought not ‘to count’ here, at home in England” (322; ch. 42) does no longer hold in a world that is clearly not only expanding, but contracting and narrowing in the process. But if these widely read Victorian triple-deckers show how aware readers were becoming of the British presence throughout the world – including such indisputably still mystified, exoticised places as China – and how this impacted on literature and culture “back home,” the way the Victorians thought about, imagined, and discussed their own shifting place in this changing world was markedly wide and varied. Public interest in sinology, for example, as reflected in the magazines of the time, or contradictory accounts by missionaries, military officers, and emigration societies, and how these discourses were worked into popular culture productions, all testify to an ambiguous, contested field. The depiction of settler societies in particular underwent enormous shifts in the course of the century. How the most persistent images of the expanding settler and commercial empire were generated and circulated in Victorian Britain can be gleaned from shipboard diaries, popular ballads, broadsides, as well as from more official accounts such as the manuals and pamphlets produced by emigration societies. A close analysis of this rarely discussed material, in turn, compels a reconsideration of the way literary works engaged with discourses on emigration, travel, and imperial adventure. In going beyond what we see merely reflected in Victorian canonical literature, this special issue on nineteenth-century representations of the region spanning, roughly, what we now consider the Pacific Rim allows us to get a wider perspective on what “the Victorians” made of the changing world around them.

The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano

Reviewed by: The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano Michael Dylan Foster The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 295. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper, $25.00 e-book. There is always a complex and ambiguous relationship between state-imposed order and cultural practices that critique that order, between official hierarchies and popular behaviors that subvert such hierarchies. Nowhere is this relationship more evident than in Tokugawa-period Japan, known both for the rigidity of government authority and the simultaneous rise of a vibrant urban culture, with such creative, expressive forms as kabuki 歌舞伎 and puppet theater, spectacle shows (misemono 見世物), woodblock prints (ukiyo-e 浮世絵), and myriad inexpensive written and illustrated texts. In The Politics of Dialogic Imagination Katsuya Hirano explores this period, and the complex interactions of power and play that characterize it, through close readings and theoretical considerations of a number of popular culture products, along with some of the legal edicts and philosophical documents with which they were in conversation. The book opens with a long quotation from Louis Althusser, the influential twentieth-century Marxist thinker. Indeed, the words and work of Althusser—along with a panoply of other Marxist and post-Marxist philosophers, sociologists, historians, and literary critics—inform Hirano’s thought-provoking readings of cultural production under the Tokugawa bakufu 幕府. The “dialogic imagination” of the title is also, of course, an explicit reference to M.M. Bakhtin and his [End Page 476] focus on the “dialogical interaction of divergent voices and perspectives” (p. 3).1 Hirano’s own focus is the way in which conflicting voices within popular culture, particularly from the eighteenth century onward, critiqued the hegemonic order and “provoked the sustained concern and interference of the authorities” (p. 2). He also explores how these relationships changed with the onset of Meiji-period modernity. Hirano chooses to use the body and its regulation as a touchstone for exploring the complex interplay between popular cultural production and the hegemonic discourse of the Tokugawa government and Neo-Confucian elite. He explains in chapter 1 that, to the powers of the early Edo period, an idle body or a body at play was a problem: “The state made attempts consistently to delimit the meaning and function of the body to the moral imperative of productive work based on its deep concern that the failure to regulate the body, especially its excessive desire, would result in people’s awakening to the irrepressible presence of history” (p. 68). The formal structure of the state, with its official hierarchies and rice-based economy, was threatened during the eighteenth century by the emergence of “a new space of cultural production and consumption” (p. 56). Each of the next three chapters focuses on a different form of production within this new space. But rather than structure his argument around specific genres—for example, kabuki, woodblock prints, puppet theater, gesaku 戯作, and the like—Hirano explores particular rhetorical modes of expression: parody in chapter 2, comic realism in chapter 3, and grotesque realism in chapter 4. The concluding chapter of the book (chap. 5) focuses on the Meiji period and new discourses on subjectivity that emphasize “interiority” over bodily desires and excesses. A careful reading of Hirano’s text reveals a narrative arc that traces the meaning of the body in popular culture. In chapter 1, we see the rift between individual bodily desires and the imperatives of governmental power expressed through, for example, the love-suicide dramas of Chikamatsu Monzaemon 近松門左衛門 (1653-1724). This sort of dramatic and literary expression gives way in chapter 2 to the [End Page 477] visceral, defamiliarizing parodies by writers such as Santō Kyōden 山東京伝 (1761-1816), which are followed in chapter 3 by the laughter in response to a master farter in a spectacle show. And this bodily humor resonates in chapter 4 with the emergence of a critical role for the grotesque and ghostly body in late Edo-period kabuki such as, for example, The Ghost Story of Yotsuya (Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan 東海道四谷怪談) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV 鶴屋南北 (1755-1829). Throughout...

Impacts of Western Popular Culture on Youths in Hawassa City, South Ethiopia

Background: With the expansion of technological progress in mass communication, consuming western popular culture has come to be a valuable activity for youths. The objective of this study was to examine youth's exposure to the western media and cultural products and the potential consequence of this exposure. Methods: School-based “sample survey design” were employed in Hawassa city from 1 April to 1 May, 2012. A total of 125 sample were included in the study. Pre tested self administered structured Amharic questionnaire and in-depth interview techniques were used to collect the data. Simple statistical methods were used to analyze the quantitative data. A framework of analysis technique which is developed along with the interview guides were used to analyze the qualitative data. Results: usage of western media by the youth now seems to reach a stage that could affect young people's perception and feelings toward westerns and their products in a substantial way. As far as the behavioral impact of the usage of western media and popular cultural products is concerned, this study only examined the likelihood of the youngsters to model after the westerns. Moreover, results of this study showed that western media is more likely to exert modeling effect on the youngsters, making it more likely for them to dress and have a hair-do like the different idols portrayed in movies and music clips. Conclusion: While further research is needed to draw definitive conclusions about the impacts on young people of exposure to pornography, the little evidence available provides grounds for serious concern about exposure of young people to different types of pornography.

Childhood re-edits: challenging norms and forming lay professional competence on YouTube

This article presents the initial findings of research into how YouTube culture can become an arena for young YouTube videographers to remodel mainstream, sub-cultural, and media content (YouTube clips, music, film content, and viral memes). We juxtapose analyses from both media and child studies to look at the ways in which preferred images and notions of the “good” and idyllic childhood are re-edited into a possible critique of the prescribed Swedish childhood. Also, we look at ways in which these media-literate actors use YouTube to display their skills in both media editing and social media “savvy.” We discuss how “lay” professional competence in digital culture can be inherent in a friction between popular (children's) culture and social media production, where simultaneous prowess in both is important for how a mediatised social and cultural critique can emerge.

Reflections of neo-Ottomanist discourse in Turkish news media: The case of The Magnificent Century

Abstract Starting from the 2000s, when the neo-liberal conservative AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in Turkey, the neo-Ottomanist idea and identity became more visible as a political discourse in the public sphere. Increased use of neo-Ottomanist references, especially within the past ten years, has also appeared through popular cultural products such as books, feature films, TV commercials and TV series. Redefining the concept of Turkish nationalism and Turkish–Islamic synthesis within the neo-Ottomanist context, these products transferred these Ottomanist references into the popular arena. These attempts are not always welcomed by the AKP due to disagreements about the definition of Turkish conservatism and have sparked criticism. In this study, press coverage of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoan’s neo-Ottomanist reaction and criticism towards the very content of a TV series, titled Muhteem Yüzyl/The Magnificent Century (Tims Productions, Star TV, 2011–14), has been analysed. The research sample consisted of three national dailies, Cumhuriyet, Radikal and Yeni afak, and the newspapers were examined using the method of content analysis. As a result, it can be argued that the sample newspapers have supported different ideological backgrounds around the discussions and speculations regarding the The Magnificent Century.

Cultural Proximity and Reflexivity in Interpreting Transnational Media Texts: The Case of Malaysians Consuming Japanese Popular Culture

Television programs such as animation and drama series from Japan have become common transnational products in Malaysia. Since studies on Malaysians who consume Japanese popular culture are lacking even a decade after its substantial rise in popularity, this qualitative study was designed to explore the media consumption of Japanese popular culture in Malaysia. In this article I examined how Malaysians are interpreting their favorite media texts from Japan specifically revisiting the concepts of “cultural proximity” and “reflexivity” suggested in the other studies of Japanese popular culture and the audience. I conducted in-depth interviews with 12 participants who have been consuming various Japanese popular cultural products over the years, and thematically analyzed transcribed audio-recordings of the interviews. Individual proximity in the particular life stage was found in their favorite media texts, and that was a part of their pleasure in addition to enjoying encountering foreignness, which they did not find or accept in their real lives. Transnational media texts of Japanese popular culture are suggested to be potential materials to reflect upon and discuss the individual proximity in people, social issues, or phenomenon rather than essential “culture” which is often associated with national or ethnic origin.

Binders full of LOLitics: Political humour, internet memes, and play in the 2012 US Presidential Election (and beyond)

This paper examines the phenomenon of humorous Internet memes within the context of news and political culture, sometimes referred to as LOLitics. LOLitics are a category of digital texts created by ordinary individuals that, like most political humour, are usually responses to news events or gaffes committed by political figures. The analysis situates LOLitics as popular culture products that exist within the intersection between pleasure-driven ‘play’ and (arguably) genuine political discourse. LOLitics are prominent due to their spreadability and replicability, and the amount of texts being produced has visibly risen over the last election cycle. Internet memes have become one of the default ways to respond to particular situations online, and this certainly reflects the reaction towards news and political culture. The 2012 US Presidential election is applied as a case study in examining the significance of these Internet memes to everyday citizen discourse, and the relationships between ordinary citizens, the mainstream media, and politics. The results argue that humorous viral texts, both visual and verbal, reveal the potential power that ordinary people have in setting the agenda for newsmakers, and to communicate political criticism through popular culture.

Fighting for an intervention in history in the face of dreams deferred in the making: Twenty years of South African democracy

This essay offers critical framing of the articles in the Special Issue on Twenty Years of African Democracy. It prioritizes the ideas of radical scholars and their take on how contemporary South African democracy is being experienced. It focuses on a series of important paradoxes, such as those presented by the challenge to provide truly free and accessible public education and the challenge to provide rights to the city for rural women migrants, the challenge to navigate the foreign policy role of South Africa on the African continent, the challenge posed by new laws for the protection of the reproductive rights and the prohibition of gender-based violence, and the challenge offered by popular cultural production that intervenes in African humanities. These essays explicitly think about South African democracy beyond the basic and normative terms of measuring whether or not democracy has been consolidated and can deliver steady and safe support for civil society and competing political and social interests. Instead, contributors are particularly attuned to how state projects and entrenched power attempt to incorporate and deploy or dismiss alternative indexes of democracy that may in fact be far more insightful measures: it includes research on the seemingly non-political – the genre of crime fiction, the youth poetry scene, masculinity studies, and philosophical debates over the historiography of the struggle for liberation.

Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives and Digital Cultures (Danielle Kirby)

<i>Fantasy and Belief: Alternative Religions, Popular Narratives and Digital Cultures</i> (Danielle Kirby)

THE TRANSNATIONAL SUCCESS OF COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE

Studying about an American popular culture product such as the Cosmopolitan magazine for American Studies’ scholars can no longer be framed in studying how it is operated within the U.S. only. Instead, a look at how it is being transferred across nation’s borders and how it is regulated in other nations become a concern also to scholars. Time and space is no longer a border for a world that is transnational, so global values that are being sold in the magazine’s advertisements are being made continually popular by inserting local ideas. How has Cosmopolitan successfully achieved its globality? The following article discusses on the transnational culture that Cosmopolitan and its magazine advertisement brings and howit has taken in the local to support the global.Key words: Cosmopolitan, Global, Local, Transnational, Popular culture

Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture

Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture

Regionalizing culture: the political economy of Japanese popular culture in Asia

This ambitious work provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded study of the production, circulation, and reception of Japanese popular culture in Asia. While many studies typically employ an interactive approach that focuses on the of popular culture from an anthropological or cultural studies point of view, Regionalizing Culture emphasises that the consumption side and contextual meaning of popular culture are not the only salient factors in accounting for its proliferation. The production side and organisational aspects are also important. In addition to presenting individual case studies, the book offers a big-picture view of the dramatic changes that have taken place in popular culture production and circulation in Asia over the past two decades. The author has gleaned information from primary sources in Japanese, English, and other languages; research visits to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul; as well as insights of people with firsthand knowledge from within the cultural industries. From this broad range of source, he develops an integrative political economic approach to popular culture. Regionalizing Culture offers a dialectical look at the organisation of cultural production, primarily at the structure and control of cultural industries, interconnections between companies and production networks, and relations between the business sector and the state. It traces the rise of Japan as a popular culture powerhouse and the expansion of its cultural industries into Asian markets. It looks as well at the creation of markets for Japanese cultural commodities since the late 1980s, the industrial and normative impact that Japanese cultural industries have on the structure of the local cultural industries, and the wider implications these processes have for the Asian region. The growing popularity and importance of Japan's popular culture will make this book a basic text for scholars and students of popular culture as well as for those interested in political economy, media and communication studies, Japanese-Asian relations, Asian studies, and international relations.

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

ITALIAN SCREEN STUDIES IN THE ANGLOPHONE CONTEXT: 2008–2013

In 2011, Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe called for a moratorium on the use of the term ‘neorealism’ for at least half a decade and asked, ‘Let us see what such a moratorium might allow us to reveal in its stead, what our silence on realism might allow us to reveal about other modes and genres.’ In their polemical piece, O’Leary and O’Rawe made the provocative claim that ‘all cinema is popular cultural production’ and suggested, ‘we should not neglect the ability of popular film to speak to the national or to contribute to a discourse of national memory.’ As they cogently point out, popular genres such as the commedia all’italiana and the poliziesco engaged with Italian terrorism some years before the so-called cinema impegnato of Francesco Rosi or Elio Petri. At Ohio State, I teach a large enrolment (150–200 student) General Education class on Italian cinema annually, and over the last few years have toyed with the course content, removing films by Scola, Pasolini, and Fellini, to make space for units on genre cinema and contemporary popular films, content that more closely mirrors my own research interests. As my teaching and research move more towards the popular, broadly considered, I have found, in line with O’Leary and O’Rawe’s position, that popular cinema is the centrepiece of the Italian cinematic tradition and quite aptly ‘elaborates a national experience’ and fascinates my students. Taking into consideration O’Leary and O’Rawe’s call, together with my own developing teaching and research interests, I endeavoured to see what Italian screen studies has looked like in the Anglophone context over the last five years and I was particularly interested in gauging the extent to which ‘popular’ genres and topics are taught in the classroom and are the subject of recent scholarship. I began by pooling information from seventy-six scholars at universities and liberal arts colleges working in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States who primarily teach and/or publish on Italian cinema and television. I asked them to share with me any details of the content of courses on Italian film and television that they have offered since 2008 (including the level and delivery language) and also to provide me with information regarding any forthcoming books or edited volumes primarily on Italian cinema and television not yet available in searchable databases. I was particularly interested to discover whether Italian screen studies is witnessing a move in the direction towards the popular both in teaching and research. I was also curious to discover whether we could identify a shift away from courses and monographs and volumes The Italianist, 34. 2, 242–249, June 2014

Medya Aracılığıyla Popüler Kültürün Aktarılmasında Toplumsal Değişkenlerin Rolü

As the mass media penetrates social life increasingly, the area of social studies with the focus on the popular culture is becoming increasingly an interesting field for academical studies. In Turkey, popular culture products have increased in occurance, to the wide masses as an entertainment element occupying their whole lives than a directly engaged cultural output. Particularly after the privatization of the broadcasting industry, many television stations actualized the theme by focusing on programming of heavily popular cultural content. These reasons have made the overlapping areas of media and popular culture a worthwhile academical field of study. This study is focused on celebrity contests on television in particular and on popular culture in general. Because popular culture is emitted through the media and is consumed by individuals, the object of this study is to deliver an answer why -as typical popular culture products- celebrity contests are so much in demand among audiences in Turkey. The study is basically divided into three sections. The first section introduces the relation of the media and culture while the second section evaluates the relationship of popular culture and the media. The last section explains the methodological aspects used in the study. The sample of the study is selected from Konya and consists of 939 people. In the study various hypotheses have been tested on the relationship of media and popular culture.

A regional gateway: Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong, 1990–2005

In popular culture, Hong Kong is probably the most “Japanese city” outside Japan. It is home to a wide variety of Japanese popular cultural products and a regional base to many of the Japanese music and television companies who expanded their operations in the city in the early 1990s. Hong Kong's emerging middle class, especially the younger generation, has enthusiastically accepted Japanese contemporary culture and lifestyle, making the city one of the biggest destinations for Japan's cultural exports. Based on fieldwork surveys and interviews, this paper looks at the organizational aspect of popular culture during the heydays of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong in the 1990s and early 2000s. The investigation focuses on the marketing strategies and promotional efforts used by agents of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong and the role of popular culture piracy in this process. Beyond analyzing the Japanese case, the paper introduces a new framework to examine the transnational expansion of popular cultures across markets in East and Southeast Asia, highlighting the role of companies and promoters in this process.

Reflected Spaces: “Heterotopia” and the Creation of Space in William Gibson’s Neuromancer

Michel Foucault's concept of is finding a welcome place among twenty-first century theoreticians who are concentrating increasingly on space in relation to social, cultural, and political arrangements. The widespread use of Foucault's in literary and cultural theory stems from the popularity of a lecture titled Des Espace Autres, 1 given in 1967 but not published until 1984, only a few months after his death and the same year, coincidentally, as the publication of science fiction writer William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. This essay will argue for a renewed look at heterotopia, both in and outside of Foucault's writing, as a contextually and theoretically situated concept, using Gibson's Neuromancer as a literary backdrop for the theoretical mise-en-scene.2 As a potent theoretical tool (Foucault sometimes referred to his texts as providing toolkits), can be deployed more productively by resituating it into Foucault's broader and continually evolving theories on space (especially in relation to social technologies/regimes of knowledge). Such a resituation is important for critical discourse today-not only in literature, but also in conversations ranging from political philosophy to digital humanities-because the theoretical investigation of space has re-entered the dialogue in force. That such theorization is receiving renewed importance can be seen in contemporary analyses of a wide array of (from all eras)-for example, the city, the prison camp, the brothel, the sex club, the restaurant, the department store, the resort, etc.-as well as in concerns over the new digital or virtual spaces constantly emerging and bringing with them political, social, and legal questions. Many of these (both of the past and present, real and virtual) may too easily be construed as special, deviant, and free, and be idealized under what I will argue is the ossified version of heterotopia as any other or heterogeneous disconnected space. Yet the designated in Foucault's work is not simply an other, deviant space, but, as a real or virtual instantiation of a utopian ideal, heterotopic space carries the potential for abuse, for the violent rounding of real comers that refuse to conform to the ideal, or merely for ignoring the parts of the instantiation that do not fit. More importantly, these spaces, and the violence that accompanies them, function to maintain the network of places that constitute normal space.Neuromancer is an excellent vehicle for elaborating the complexity of Foucault's heterotopology, as well as the difficulties that can emerge from attempts to deploy it theoretically. Not only was it composed and published in the same theoretical milieu (i.e. with similar concerns about space and life in a late capitalist world) in which Different Spaces came to prominence, but it also reflects many of the spatial arrangements that Foucault posits. Both the text itself and the critical writing around the text can serve as examples for describing Foucault's theories and the ways in which critics deploy such theories by applying them to relevant or popular cultural productions. The body of literature surrounding cyberpunk and Neuromancer in particular3 offers a unique example of repetition and fashion in theoretical terminology. As the bulk of this criticism dates from the late eighties and early nineties, the conversation often comes back to the idea of networked space, global connectivity, and the dominance of so-called postmodern themes in science fiction.4Literature, in this case Neuromancer, serves as an object-anchor, something that can be returned to, speculated upon, something that gives shape to the theory at hand. It is, strictly speaking, unnecessary in the theoretical domain to bring such an object to the fore. However, for my purposes here, it is beneficial to have an objective counterpoint to the abstraction of theorizing spaces-in-relation. …

International television formats and national variations: the case of IDOL in Vietnam

This paper examines different ways in which modern entertainment companies are involved in the production, marketing and distribution of popular culture. This paper focuses generally on the contemporary production of reality television and more specifically on the television program IDOL in Vietnam.

Social distribution: K-pop fan practices in Indonesia and the ‘Gangnam Style’ phenomenon

Global consumers are increasingly enjoying popular cultural products such as music, film, television and other audiovisual media content through online social media community networks. Recently, Korean pop music, or K-pop, has become one of the most dynamically distributed forms of pop culture in the global pop market through these ‘social distribution’ networks. This article explores the ways that this new mode of social distribution is characterised by bottom-up grassroots aspects as well as corporate-controlled top-down aspects by analysing the recent dynamics and practices of K-pop consumption and circulation on social media, using a case study of K-pop fandom in Indonesia and the ‘Gangnam Style’ phenomenon.

Women Representations in Television Narrative in the Context of Popular Culture and Turkey

Utterances in the products of popular culture, the culture of daily life and an escape from the negative aspects of reality, are shaped and produced by hegemonic culture of the ruling powers, thus preventing reality from being noticed. Patriarchal system, generated by or thriving on sovereign ideology and handed down from one generation to another, is a part of this ideology. One means of formation and conveyance of patriarchal system is television narrative, which is the product of popular culture. The real power of television, which is capable of reaching many people and regarded as a fundamental source of information and entertainment, lies in the fact that it has the power to shape and reshape people’s points of view and that it can be the fundamental source of their thoughts and notions. With an indispensible role in spreading new radical thoughts and values, television encodes the discourses of social life into its narratives and holds its place in the integrity of the system of cultural representation which builds up the social reality by internalizing those representations. Narrations that legitimize the existing system through concrete representative strategies and the effects they have created play an important role in consolidating and normalizing the social roles of men and women by the gender representations they already possess. The aim of this study is to determine the outlook of popular television series on women, which have flourished since the year 2000 in Turkey. For this purpose, in this study, women representations in Turkish television series which rank high in ratings in Turkey and have broken viewing records in several other countries, especially in the Middle East will be investigated and it will be analyzed whether women are presented as a part of the existing ideological discourse. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n8p564