AbstractsWomens Studies

Gender and Family Roles in George Lopez A Textual Analysis and Audience Study

by Margaret Jo Mccleland




Institution: University of Florida
Department: Latin American Studies
Year: 2007
Keywords: american, analysis, family, gender, george, latino, lopez, mexican, roles, textual, women; Latin American Studies
Record ID: 1797195
Full text PDF: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0021353


Abstract

The purpose of my study was to explore and analyze the gender and family roles encoded in a mainstream U.S. English-language television comedy, George Lopez; and to attempt to understand how young first-generation Mexican-American women negotiate their lived experience of traditional Mexican culture with the gender and family roles portrayed on a mainstream English-language Latino television show. My study was the first to explore how Mexican-American women negotiate George Lopez and whether they accepted, questioned, or resisted the dominant messages about gender/family roles and Latino culture encoded within the television text. This study contains two-parts: it uses qualitative methods to conduct an in-depth textual analysis of the gender roles portrayed on George Lopez; and it uses qualitative methods to collect data from three in-depth small group interviews from a Mexican-American viewing audience. A total of 10 self-identified Mexican-American women and regular viewers of George Lopez participated in this study. Findings suggest that certain stereotypical Latino women?s roles are indeed encoded into the text of George Lopez. Similarly, these stereotypical Mexican cultural codes and women?s roles also exist in the lives of this study's participants, and they influence how these women read the television text. This study uses a feminist perspective to examine women's gender roles in a mainstream media communication. Using McKee?s (2003) post-structuralist perspective of textual analysis, the first part of the study closely examines the gender and family roles of the three lead female characters in George Lopez. Findings suggest that two of the three lead characters fall into stereotypical portrayals of Latino women's roles, specifically highlighting the dichotomy between the saintly ideal of mother and wife and the promiscuous bad mother and hyper-sexualized attractive young Latina woman. However, one character's gender portrayal breaks this traditional mold. The audience study portion uses cultural studies and an encoding, decoding model to analyze and interpret the data, or readings, each woman gave. Using this model, the women's readings were most often negotiated, and resistant to the image of women, and Mexican-Americans/Latinos in particular, as portrayed on George Lopez. However, in one respect all women agreed: in their dominant reading of one strong, modern yet traditional female character, all women showed a propensity to incorporate both the traditional Mexican ideal of women and a more mainstream interpretation of a woman's independent role in the household.