Roles de género y salud: discurso articulado en la televisión mexicana

Abstract

This paper presents some results of an extensive content analysis of 672 hours of television in Mexico issued in 2011, specifically those that relate the health contents on television and the social role of women in prevention, maintenance and care health. It analyzes how is the televisión's health representation and what kind of roles they are assigned to women on the issue. The results show that health is showed mainly as a commodity, in the way of concrete products and services; and the responsibility to select that and consume it is assigned primarily to women –especially mothers-, but they are not those who possess health know. Instead, they are subordinate to the medical and scientific instructions provided by the males. These findings allow to contribute to the debate about how the unequal gender roles are key to the social reproduction of the media discourse of health and how they participate in the construction of social meanings on health, responsibility and consumption, contributing to a communicability hegemonic model in health that assigns social locations hierarchically differentiated, which we thought promotes gender inequality and hinders conception of health as a right.