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The data presented in this study come from a large-scale project, titled “Media in Everyday Life of the Poor”, aiming to analyze the dominant ways in which media contents are consumed by the urban poor in the city of Eskisehir. We are aiming to demonstrate how gender-based identities reflect on the ways in which the families, representing ethnical, denominational and political differences, consume the media technologies in their own private domains (i.e. home). To do this, we look at how conventional and new media technologies function in structuring, (re)producing, and strengthening the gender identities of family members, who are economically isolated, and socially marginalized in the society.

There are two data sets –combining qualitative and quantitative findings- which jointly cover a large amount of information on how urban poor families response to the media contents. We collected data from two discrete districts, representing the most diverse locations in Eskisehir, the sixth developed city, Turkey. The quantitative data was gathered from 200 families, while the qualitative data was obtained via long-term participant observations in 15 families. While the survey data helps us to map the basic media consumption preferences (e.g. TV programs, favorite & disliked TV personalities/idols, Internet sites/contents, etc.) of the family members, the rich ethnographic data (including visual materials) enables us to clearly demonstrate how media contents function in constructing family members’ gender-based identities and self-perceptions.
Sanders (2004) argue that viewers identified more strongly with heroes than with villains. Part of the data supports this argument: The male adolescents’ favorite TV personalities are, indeed, heroes, who are often lawless, able to reject legal authorities and challenge the hegemonic ideological positioning. A similar preference can also be seen in the most consumed computer games, constructed on stereotypical masculine rituals, phallogocentric language and male agendas (e.g. war, fight, violence, conflict, etc.). This is significant since “identification with media characters is a process that impacts our involvement with, and interpretation of, media texts” and it “is an important channel through which mediated messages affect our lives and the society in which we live in” (Cohen, 2006).

We also demonstrate that while the media plays essential role in delineating what is defined as male sphere (i.e. public/out of home) from female sphere (i.e. private/in-home) and strengthening mother-daughter and father-son relationships, it also place restrictions on male (father) authority and support female family members’ autonym at home. The females, for instance, who are having Internet connection at home and whose interaction with public place is considerably restricted because of dominant cultural norms, are able not only to utilize Internet to better cope with severe poverty (e.g. finding new marketable ideas, handcraft models) but also to use it as a hidden way/backdoor to communicate with the public world and challenge the male authority, deciding how and to what extend family members should access the outer world, at home.

Although the present analyses draw on data collected from a particular locality, the emphasis is on how urban poor family members of different genders communicate with mass mediated contents in their everyday life and how media technologies help them to (re)construct their gender identities.