“Please don’t show me on Agataliiko Nfuufu or my husband will beat me like engalabi (long drum)”: young women and tabloid television in Kampala, Uganda

Nakacwa, Susan

Title: “Please don’t show me on Agataliiko Nfuufu or my husband will beat me like engalabi (long drum)”: young women and tabloid television in Kampala, Uganda
Title: Please don't show me on Agataliko Nfuufu or my husband will beat me like engalabi (long drum)
Creator: Nakacwa, Susan
ThesisAdvisor: Boshoff, Priscilla
Subject: Television broadcasting of news -- Uganda -- Kampala
Subject: Reality television programs -- Uganda -- Kampala
Subject: Sexism -- Uganda -- Kampala
Subject: Women in mass media
Subject: Sensationalism on television
Subject: Sensationalism in journalism
Subject: Mass media -- Moral and ethical aspects
Subject: Sex role on television
Subject: Uganda -- Social conditions -- 1979-
Date: 2014
Type: Thesis
Type: Masters
Type: MA
Identifier: vital:3551
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020968
Description: 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.
Format: 125 leaves, pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, Journalism and Media Studies
Language: English
Rights: Nakacwa, Susan

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