Representation of gender relations in the Cypriot popular culture: the cases of the Cypriot Radio Sketch and Lifestyle Magazines

Abstract

Mass media concurrently shape and are shaped by social norms, in Cyprus as in all other cultures. Specific images, speech and/or actions are gendered in the media and such gendering is both linked to, and influential of, wider social and cultural norms, attitudes and practices. This chapter investigates gender and gender conflict as they are represented in two popular Cypriot media forms. The first, the Radio Sketches, is a radio entertainment programme that is unique in the media of Cyprus and which was one of the most popular media outputs in Cyprus from the 1950s until the late 1980s. The second mass medium considered in this chapter is lifestyle magazines, one of the most popular contemporary Cypriot mass culture forms. This chapter identifies and analyses specific features of the representations of gender relations that predominate in each of these media forms. As the entire spectrum of gender relations cannot be fully explored in a single project, we have chosen to focus our research to the investigation of how gendered images and characteristics manifest gender relations, and to explore the power relations conjured in and through these representations. Finally, we compare and contrast the findings from our studies of the Radio Sketches and lifestyle magazines. This enabled us to reflect on the changes in gendered images, and thereby gender relations, in popular Cypriot media over the period from the 1970s until today, and to consider how social change might relate to the alterations in these gendered media representations. We view this review as a first step in a larger investigation of the representations of gender relations in the most popular Cypriot media.