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ABSTRACT
This article examines contemporary women's voices mediated through Kenyan television drama while focusing on Mother-in-law and Tabasamu. It investigates how female characters’ revelation of self transforms their silence into visibility and action, in the process, showing how they move from the periphery to the centre of action. The theoretical framework combines Womanist and Interactionist theories. Womanist theory allows us to interrogate the female character's self while Interactionist theory gives us a chance to link women's interactions with processes of meaning construction and invention. A textual exegesis of purposively selected disparate episodes of the selected TV dramas was conducted with thematic content analysis used in interpreting findings. The findings show that local television drama not only attempts to define the nature of the contemporary Kenyan female voice but also invents women through distinctive choices of characters, language, conflict and union. The findings further show that women are at the vanguard in reconfiguring subjectivities and social complexities of sexuality in contemporary Kenya. Consequently, this article concludes that artistic sensibilities in local television drama crystallise in the characterisation of women as being at the forefront of and integral to the reconfiguration and visibilisation of emergent practices of feminine power and agency in Kenyan society.
Notes
1. Allen Bullock and Stephen Trombley (Citation2000, 414) have pointed out that the word ideology has been variously used to ‘characterise ideas, ideals, beliefs, passions, values, weltanschauungen, religious, political, philosophical and moral justifications. From a Marxist point of view, ideology may be employed ‘to deride the proposition that ideas are autonomous or the belief in the power of ideas to shape or determine reality; or to argue that all ideas are socially determined. Talcott Parsons (in Bullock and Trombley Citation2000, 414) defines ideology as ‘an interpretive scheme used by social groups to make the world more intelligible to themselves’. In this article, however, ideology is not approached as a system of ideas or a specific world view, but also in terms of the ways in which the workings of ideology determines the structure, interpretation and use of texts.
2. The intention here is not to suggest that this article deploys audience research but instead the content of local television drama is analysed in order to arrive at an understanding about meaning(s) and message(s) created by them and the possible influence(s) these messages may have on audiences.
3. Mother-in law airs every Sunday on Citizen TV from 7:30 pm to 8:00 pm and is replayed every Sunday afternoon.
4. Tabasamu, which loosely translates as ‘smile’, aired every Monday on Citizen TV from 9:45 pm to 10:30 pm and replayed every Sunday afternoon between 2:00 pm and 2:30 pm. The drama currently airs on the ‘Supersato banner’ on Citizen TV between 3:00 pm and 3:30 pm.