Cultured men, uncultured women : an exploration of the gendered hierarchy of taste governing Afghan radio

After years of strict bans on the media, local radio in post-Taliban Afghanistan is undergoing an intense period of reconstruction. This thesis uses a multi-sited ethnographic investigation to examine local Afghan radio's various relationships with women in Afghanistan. In examining both the production and consumption contexts of local radio, it pinpoints areas of disjuncture that can and do lead to breakdowns in communications with the Afghan woman audience. Societal constructions of "cultured" tastes in the production room tend to obstruct female-friendly radio in favour of elite, male-oriented textual encodings. Consequently, women's radio transmissions are often at odds with the genre preferences and high levels of illiteracy of women in Afghanistan, failing to communicate with large segments of their intended audience. Radio producers face real and perceived penalties for disrupting cultural rules on what is and is not done on the air, thus the current system propagating ineffective women's radio is highly resistant to change.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Comparative Media Studies.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Kamal, Sarah

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• William Uricchio.

• Comparative Media Studies.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39181
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39181

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39181