YouTube as a New Culture in Indonesia: The Construction of Gender Role in the Lens of the Circuit of Culture

Abstract

This study explores the construction of gender roles performed in The Irvandi's YouTube channel. By deploying cultural studies approach and working within the framework of the circuit of culture by Stuart Hall, this study aims to show how gender role is regulated, produced, consumed, and represented, which then constructs Indonesian women's identity. The result shows that the gender role is regulated through religion by which Islamic teachings are applied in her daily life and the social construction rooted within the patriarchal ideology. Next, the video's content is produced as the content creator accepts the gender roles tightly related to the regulation. Further, the video is consumed by its viewer where power, ideology, gender, and social class have shaped each other. Within its consumption, the video reveals the gender stereotyping and brings the effect of empowering women. As an interrelated element, the circuit of culture represents Indonesian women as ideal Muslim women (shaleha). The identity of women in the video is constructed through representation. She constructs her identity as a religious woman and shaleha. Besides, showing viewers where she usually buys home furnishing products indicates that she shows her middle social class. In conclusion, YouTube has become a new culture in Indonesia and has created an Islamic cultural industry as the content is presenting a series of images, practices, and religious values which is marketed especially to Muslim women. Then, this kind of YouTube video is re-strengthening and re-emphasizing the role of women in the family. The differentiation of roles between men and women is reconstructed and reproduced within this online video sharing platform.

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“…In the context of our interest, other social media are mentioned less frequently. In particular, scholars investigate the effect of TikTok App on the transmission of cultural values (Dekhil, Sarnou, 2021), the process of re-strengthening and re-emphasizing the role of women in the family with the help of certain types of YouTube video (Rosida, Azwar, 2021), and try to decipher and analyze the peace message contained in MorshadMishu's Instagram image for The Global Happiness Challenge (Sari et al, 2022). Also of note are scholars' attempts to identify the role of media and information literacy in fostering students' ability to critically evaluate sources of information and use social media responsibly (Manabat, 2021), to evaluate social media interactivity among digital natives and digital immigrants (Ahmed, Zia, 2021), and to comprehend the meaningof humor in understanding the trolling behavior of social media users (UlHaq et al, 2021).…”

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“…The advertising reveals the creator's ideology and assumptions by representing the body goals of men that can be beneficial for the target marketing. Consumption of a single cultural product or practice will be empowering, degrading, rescinding suffrage, liberating, essentializing, and stereotyping (Rosida, 2021).…”

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