Gender Construction Through Interactions Between the Media and Audience in Japan.

This paper traces feminist studies in Japan on mass media texts and the audience’s readings since the 1970s in the historical and social context, and reviews them from a perspective of gender identity construction. The four studies referred to examine differences in text readings by audience, and some also explore the audience’s livelihood as a background. Methodologically, the studies qualitatively analyse populations consisting of people who have been identified as representative or typical of each audience, based on quantitative surveys. The readings made by audiences are defined by characteristics of Japanese society, historical background including media environment, and living situations. In the 1970s, home–oriented adult women found common values in television dramas and identified their way of living as “woman”. The studies conducted after the 1980s, on hero shows for children and on girl–oriented novels, suggest that media experience, with some momentum towards promoting changes of gender roles, still function dominantly in reproducing the existing gender system through construction of gender–specific identities. In the current era, new studies and activities of media literacy have emerged in order to raise audiences’ critical awareness of text readings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]