| The study attempts to make a connection between cultural consumption and political citizenship. It accomplishes that by critiquing Jurgen Habermas' notions of "public sphere" and "power" from a feminist perspective. The study proposes "cultural citizenship" as a helpful concept to bridge the gap between politics and culture and broaden Habermas' concept of the "political" to include acts of "symbolic violence." The empirical study of a Turkish daytime talk show, "woman's voice" (WV), supports this theoretical argument. WV programs are analyzed from three perspectives: As televisual texts, from the production perspective and from the audience reception point-of-view. When the programs are analyzed as texts, it is found that WV guests' first-hand narrations of the domestic and symbolic violence in their lives reveal the patriarchal authority of the "honor code" under which many women live. WV provides a sphere where the needs and problems of these women are discussed on television for the first time in Turkish broadcasting history. From the audience reception perspective, it is found that viewers find political meanings in WV and therefore, viewing WV programs must be viewed as a political activity. However, the study also uncovers that production techniques render the public sphering potentials of the programs minimal since issues are not placed in social contexts and treated as individual scourges. The secular Turkish elite's distancing from the programs causes women's issues to remain low priority issues on the political agenda. This is explained with the structure of the field of power in Turkey and transformations therein since the 1980s. |
