Rethinking polysemy and negotiated reading of gender representation in television dramas

This article delves into the intricacies of audience reception, exploring how viewers engage with and interpret the diverse and conflicting meanings presented in television dramas. Building on encoding/decoding models, it examines negotiated reading during audience interaction with polysemic texts. Specifically, our current study analyzes the decoding process of the Turkish historical drama Resurrection: Ertugrul through textual analysis and in-depth interviews with 24 Turkish-Islamic conservatives living in Bursa. The drama’s dominant ideological framework, shaped by nationalistic and Islamic values, is contradicted by the portrayal of female characters in warrior and ruler roles, which are traditionally masculine traits. This contradiction creates textual polysemy, compelling Turkish-Islamic conservative viewers to undertake critical interpretative work to resolve the contradiction and fit the alternative representation into the dominant framework. Unveiling this process, this article discusses the negotiated reading as a process of critical reconciliation with the political ideology, continuously producing different interpretations during decoding.