Ethnicity and the negotiation of televisual meaning : a French case study
Joanna J. Helcke
2134/14086
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/Ethnicity_and_the_negotiation_of_televisual_meaning_a_French_case_study/9466814
This thesis explores the relationship between ethnicity and television viewing in
France by means of a case study focusing on the situation comedy Fruits et Legumes.
The programme, which was partly financed by the French government via the Fonds
d'Action Sociale (FAS), portrays the everyday life of an Algerian family living in
France, and was intended to be a French version of The Cosby Show. The FAS was
aiming to produce a television series that would not only reassure the French public
about the "innocuous" nature of the Maghrebi population in France but would also
encourage it to identify with an immigrant family. The present study set out to
investigate the role of ethnicity in shaping viewers' perceptions of the programme and
the extent to which Fruits et Legumes may have encouraged greater understanding
among viewers of different ethnic origins.
A sample of 49 viewers was constructed so as to encompass three ethnic
groups ("native" French people, those of Maghrebi origin and people originating from
sub-Saharan/Central Africa), gender differences, two age groups (18 to 30 year olds
and those over the age of 40), and two levels of education (those with less than a
baccalaureat and those with university education). These respondents viewed a
sample episode individually and then took part in one-to-one, in-depth interviews.
Using Hall's three proposed reading positions - dominant, negotiated and oppositional
in relation to the preferred meaning within the text - as a basic structure within which
to analyse decodings of the episode, a further set of interpretive categories was
evolved for the purposes of this study. Having classified viewer decodings of the
programme, patterns in these readings were analysed, so as to ascertain whether there
was a correlation between these distributions of decodings and respondents' ethnicity,
gender, age or educational level.
It was found that nearly a third of all decodings diverged significantly from
the preferred meaning. Numerous patterns amongst viewer responses were identified,
and ethnicity was found to be the main variable shaping these interpretive communities, although in certain instances gender, generation and educational level
were the defining factors. These results do not imply, however, that ethnicity will
invariably have the greatest influence on the decoding process, as it would seem
probable that if the programme had been "non-ethnically marked", ethnicity would
have shaped decodings to a lesser extent.
2014-02-04 15:20:08
untagged
Political Science not elsewhere classified