Gender, television and power in contemporary Argentina. The resemantization as a repositioning strategy

Abstract

This paper describes and analyzes the resemantization strategies in the contemporary Argentinean television field, which operates as vehicle for the reproduction of inequalities between men and women in that social space. We conceptualize the resemantization as the incorporation, by the subject, of signifiers belonging to opposite semantic fields. We will use three case studies, which will be analyzed from the socio-semiotic theory. These cases refer to the trajectories of men in mass media who embarked on the resemantization of their own figure in order to maintain their place of prominence on Argentinean television. From a comparative perspective, the analysis will show that: (i) resemantization constitutes a surreptitious strategy that must be attended when explaining the prevalence of gender inequalities in the media; (ii) the degree of success of such a strategy is correlated with the power held in the media system by the person undertaking it. Although the analysis is limited to a national scale, the proposed tool is capable of being extrapolated to other contexts.