Heterotopias Created through Media Narratives and Manufacturing Consent for Women Empowerment in South Asia

Abstract

The argument of the paper is that media narratives serve the dual function of (de)legitimation. While manufacturing legitimizing consent for consumerism, media narratives delegitimize the old patterns of existence as well by penetrating deep in cognition and creating anomalous desires that refuse to take cultural rigidities as given. Media screens provide visual (re)presentation of real places and social arrangements; with the aim to overturn them with conceived mirror images of perfect. These narratives are endowed with the power to create new self, territorialized in heterotopias of the screen. The new personifications are contested by “pious” adherents of cultural continuity. By opting for the technique of Critical Discourse Analysis; paper aims to revisit the discourses of women empowerment and dependency, in a Hindi commercial movie “Badrinath Ki Dulhania” (Badrinath’s bride) (2017), and lifestyle advertisements of Fair & Lovely (Fairness Cream) (2002-2017) telecasted across South Asia, and an android phone Q Mobile (2016) in Pakistan.