Patrones socio-culturales de feminidad, comunicación mediática y representaciones de género en medios impresos orenses.

Abstract

This research is motivated by the acts of gender violence that have occurred in the country, which, according to various studies, have triggered an infinity of deaths, abuse and exploitation in women. According to the report of a study carried out in Ecuador and presented in the article "Sociocultural factors that influence women victims of intrafamily violence" by the authors Illescas, Tapia and Flores, (2018), it is evidenced that 6 out of 10 women have been exposed to some type of violence, which is manifested by different factors and which puts women in a state of vulnerability, being thus sometimes because they suffer from low resources or have a low level of education, they are considered more likely to suffer from violence physical, verbal or psychological. These data, for the authors of the study, show that women have become an easy target for abuse, denigration and devaluation that is given to them in society; thus creating certain sociocultural patterns that define women throughout life and that are also "a source of machismo, of stereotypes that denigrate women as sexual objects, the feminine is less valued and it is legitimized in the service of the traditionally constructed masculine ”. (Illescas, Tapia and Flores, 2018). Which are also replicated by the media, which act as agents of socialization of the values, opinions, representations and stereotypes present in society. The mass media are capable of influencing and reinforcing stereotypical beliefs or contributing to the eradication of these. Apreza (2020, p.30) mentions that stereotypes towards women can be seen in the mass media as a parameter of what they should be. Women are linked to "affective activities aimed at caring for children, the home and the partner, as well as the possession of characteristics such as submission, self-denial and dependence". These superficial representations create prejudices, discrimination and a negative assessment of the roles that women have in society. Therefore, this work revolves around the study of the relationship between the sociocultural patterns on femininity existing in Orense citizenship, media communication and gender violence. In addition to identifying the media representations and attributes issued by the provincial print media about women and violence against them. For the development of the research work, a qualitative methodology was used based on the documentary-bibliographic review of partial works carried out within the framework of the research macro-project “Analysis of gender representations in printed newspapers and gender violence against women in the province of El Oro ”, where in the first instance and to cover the first objective set, we worked with information matrices collected in investigative degree works (Sánchez, 2019 and Valarezo, 2019), where journalistic notes starring women are analyzed and identifies sociocultural patterns, stereotypes, representations of gender-femininity and the agenda of attributes present in publications and provincial media communication. For the second objective of this research, data from opinion polls carried out in the cantons of Machala, El Guabo, Huaquillas and Santa Rosa and collected through degree works on the subject of sociocultural patterns, media communication and gender violence were consolidated ( Armijos V., 2018; Gonzalez A., 2019 and Armijos E., 2019) and opinion polls carried out by the research group through the subjects of Public Opinion and Statistics. In the third objective, the consolidation and analysis of interviews on the same topic was carried out with 10 journalism specialists from the printed newspapers that are the object of the investigation and 7 specialists in social areas, collected in degree works and complex examinations developed within the framework of the same topic of the project, corresponding to the authors: Matamoros (2018) Telcan (2018), Sanchez (2019), Valarezo (2019), Romero (2019), Moreno (2019), Díaz (2019), Villamar (2019). The results of this research show that in the articles carried out by women that appear in the provincial printed media with the greatest circulation, publications that transmit macho sociocultural patterns predominate and that continue to generate stereotypes and unfavorable representations of the role that women play today in the society and that are directly related to the prevailing climate of gender violence. On the other hand, in opinion polls it is evident that women have positioned an image of an independent human being, however the egalitarian condition in front of men, despite being present in the social imaginary, appears timidly in the results, which suggests a resistance to the still prevailing macho pattern. In relation to violence against women, the machismo of men is still recognized as the main cause as they are considered more important than women themselves.