Politics of Identity On/Through TV

Political science forays into the realm of television are thus far largely in the domain of International Relations (IR). As IR scholars acknowledge, pop culture content such as TV programming serves as a channel through which “power, ideology, and identity are constituted, produced, and/or materialized” to shape hostile beliefs that include interstate rivalries and other forms of conflict (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott Reference Grayson, Davies and Philpott2009, 156). Scholars of popular geopolitics illustrate that regimes often wage highly conflictual power struggles in competition over the production, organization, and inscription of political meaning onto space through cultural products (Saunders Reference Saunders2019; Tuathail and Toal Reference Tuathail and Toal1996). Yet comparativists can also find much to study in television’s role in constructing Us and Them dichotomies in the domestic sphere. Media studies scholars, sociologists, and anthropologists point to the role of drama series, news programs, and other TV genres in defining and disseminating specific understandings of national identity (Armbrust Reference Armbrust2000; Mankekar Reference Mankekar2000).

Ostensibly an entertainment platform, everyday television programming can serve as a seemingly innocuous extension of public sphere forms of regulation into the private (Kocamaner Reference Kocamaner2017; Ouellette and Hay Reference Ouellette and Hay2007; Pratt Reference Pratt2021). Viewers are supplied with “techniques to govern their own conduct” in ways that “normaliz[e] hegemonic discourses” while being entertained in the comfort of their own homes or via the convenience of their portable screens (Sayan-Cengiz Reference Sayan-Cengiz2020, 230). While television can contribute to the construction and dissemination of particular identities in all types of regimes, much of the nation-building-on-TV literature points to television as a media tool that is especially attractive for authoritarian regimes — what two of the few political scientists studying television term “soft propaganda” (Mattingly and Yao Reference Mattingly and Yao2022). Studies demonstrating that entertainment television can spark debates among viewers about the types of identities represented onscreen suggest that authoritarians’ patrolling of this content is crucial in controlling competing narratives (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2008; Kraidy Reference Kraidy2009; Schlesinger Reference Schlesinger1991). Indeed, comparative study demonstrates that, along with news media, authoritarians regulate the production and dissemination of programming from drama series to cartoons to reality competition shows (Bai and Song Reference Bai and Song2014; Qu Reference Qu2019; Ribke Reference Ribke2011). Intertwined with the normative motive of advancing authoritarians’ nation-building projects, the policing of television and other popular culture forms can also evince regime motives familiar to comparativists but not often studied by them.Footnote ² Studies outside political science examine, for example, strategies of bolstering regime durability by censoring content that threatens legitimacy and producing content that supports it (Bajoghli Reference Bajoghli2019; Li Reference Li2019; Tan Reference Tan2016; Van Zoonen Reference Van Zoonen2005).

By definition, authoritarians come well-equipped with the tools for engaging in such regulation. Political economy and institutional factors provide nation-building autocrats with greater access to and control over media outlets to encourage such normalization than their democratic counterparts. Although news production and journalism–state relations are more traditional objects of focus for comparative studies of media and regime type (Repnikova Reference Repnikova2017), in authoritarian regimes, clientelism frequently combines with formal censorship via state institutions to provide autocrats with outsize regulatory and productive power in the culture industry as well. Factors such as ownership of media outlets by actors with close ties to the government, interventions by state regulatory agencies, and anticipatory compliance by producers seeking the regime’s favor enable the policing of televised content that offends, contravenes, or threatens a leader’s vision for the nation, while also supporting the production of content in line with it (Anderson and Chakars Reference Anderson and Chakars2015; Nötzold Reference Nötzold2009; Yesil Reference Yesil2016).

Turning the spotlight on gender, women’s roles are central in televised nation-building projects and thus are heavily policed in authoritarian regimes as studies of drama serials, talk shows, and reality programs illustrate. Feminist scholars illustrate how women’s bodies and behaviors often serve as the “ultimate marker” of the nation, entailing that “every aspect of women who appear on screen is scrutinized for appropriateness” (Osman Reference Osman2020, 156). Work by scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughod (Reference Abu-Lughod2008) and Purnima Mankekar show how women are both the subject of and audience for regime messaging on patriotic ideals of developmentalism and of a particularly “Indian Womanhood” as a complement to militaristic nationalism, respectively (Mankekar Reference Mankekar2000, 40–1). Importantly, media scholars working on gender emphasize that it is not just government officials delivering these messages policing women’s actions and appearances, but also show characters, contestants, and even viewers. This takes on an added dimension in the reality TV genre, where women who participate as contestants face the prospect of becoming “icons of their nation” for better and worse, attaining the national spotlight but having their every move onscreen and off scrutinized in the media (Kraidy Reference Kraidy2009, 196). Also drawing on reality TV but in a democratic context of the United Kingdom, Angela McRobbie highlights the role of “wounding comments” in class-based policing and body-shaming by show hosts that the author finds reminiscent of boarding school “bitchiness” (2004, 102).Footnote ³ That bitchiness is not reserved for English schoolchildren, as the derogatory comments made toward Funda in our opening vignette and in YouTube responses briefly discussed below make clear.

On the Menu: (New) Turkey

Here I identify the institutional, political economy, and discursive connective tissues that tie media content to gender construction projects in authoritarian regimes using the context of “New Turkey.” The term can be defined as “the social and political order under the party’s rule [that] is maintained by a new set of norms and values” (Korkut and Eslen-Ziya Reference Korkut and Eslen-Ziya2016, 13). Ruling party members began using the term to articulate a vision for a stronger and more conservative Turkey between the AKP’s third electoral victory in 2011 and Erdoğan’s first presidential run in 2014. The combination of crony capitalist-fueled power consolidation and identity polarization that have transpired in the New Turkey era make the case particularly well-suited for studying the politics of mass-mediated gender construction.

Beginning with political institutions, Turkey’s ruling AKP has been in power for over 22 years at the time of writing. The party governed with a parliamentary majority in its first four terms and then via a highly consolidated executive presidency with Erdoğan at the helm (Esen and Gümüşçü Reference Esen and Gümüşçü2017). The duration of the party’s rule and the amount of political power the AKP has amassed are manifest in its significant control over the institutions implicated in the politics of defining Us and Them, including the military, the judiciary, and the education system (Hintz Reference Hintz2018). In the media sphere, this political control extends to institutions such as the state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), which broadcasts over a dozen channels in multiple languages at home and abroad, as well as to the state’s regulatory body in charge of media licensing and supervision, the Supreme Board of Radio and Television (RTÜK). Although RTÜK’s nine-member leadership structure entails that members are selected by parliament and that opposition parties are included, actual representation reflects party quotas, giving the AKP and its nationalist electoral alliance partner heavily weighted influence over decision-making (Interview with RTÜK board member 9 August 2022). This influence translates into media regulation that mimics political power patterns. Regulation includes frequent fines and broadcast bans on opposition-owned Halk TV, as well as the conservative policing of content themes such as morality, family values, and religion. In addition to RTÜK’s formal punitive power, Turkey’s Tax Ministry engages in selective punishment of private media outlets deemed by the government to be airing unacceptable or politically unflattering content (Yesil Reference Yesil2016). Gökhan Bacık demonstrates how RTÜK actions such as broadcast bans on a channel showing same-sex kissing scenes and blurring of references to alcohol contributes to “informal Islamization” (Reference Bacık2022). Notable for this paper’s focus on women’s roles, a highly popular TV drama serial with strong women protagonists became the target of a RTÜK broadcasting ban in the months leading up to the May 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections. The ban against Kızılcık Şerbeti (Cranberry Sorbet) purportedly was issued for a scene containing violence against women — head-scarved Nursema is assaulted and pushed out of a window by the conservative man she was forced to marry. The fact that on April 14, network executives were pressured into airing a documentary about Islamophobia that RTÜK had sent to Show TV instead of Episode 23 supports claims that government officials were sanctioning critical portrayals of conservative societal sectors rather than violence against women (Altınordu Reference Altınordu2023; Show TV’den Kızılcık Şerbeti açıklaması 2023); Nursema became a feminist icon for pious and secular opposition members alike (KAFA on Instagram 2023).Footnote ⁴

Turning to political economy factors, the clientelism that undergirds the party’s rule facilitates significant governmental influence over media content. Massive holding conglomerates such as Demirören, Doğuş, Kalyon, and Ciner possess assets that include media outlets, but locate their most profitable enterprises in the construction, mining, banking, and other sectors. These holding groups, many of which have ownership structures with personal and even familial ties to the AKP, regularly seek government favors such as low-interest loans, limited government oversight on development projects, and privileged tenders. Such groups thus have incentives to use their (sometimes even debt-incurring) media outlets to broadcast coverage of which the government approves (Esen and Gumuscu Reference Esen and Gumuscu2018; Tunç Reference Tunç2018; Yesil Reference Yesil2016). In turn, the government can reward conglomerates with regime-friendly media outlets such as Show, Star, aTV, and Kanal D by auctioning off the assets of other media companies seized due to (often politically induced) financial trouble at highly reduced rates and by purchasing advertising space (Tunç Reference Tunç2018; Yanatma Reference Yanatma2021).

The expansion of this crony capitalism had significant effects on the increasing alignment of entertainment TV programming with the AKP’s vision (Algan and Kaptan Reference Algan and Kaptan2023; Bulut and İleri Reference Bulut and İleri2019; Çevik Reference Çevik2020). In the cooking genre, of the 62 host and competition shows that aired during the AKP’s tenure from 2002 to 2022, 39 were aired on channels owned by pro-AKP holding companies or the state (including the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund, the institution that took over failing assets); in the post-Gezi era after 2013, 34 of 44 of these types of cooking shows were in regime-friendly hands (see Appendix 1). Providing the important link between TV content viewing and regime-driven “cultural engineering” (Algan and Kaptan Reference Algan and Kaptan2023), interdisciplinary research on the Turkish case compellingly documents the intense involvement of regime actors in the production, oversight, and censorship of entertainment television as well as news media (Bulut and İleri Reference Bulut and İleri2019; Çevik Reference Çevik2020; Emre Cetin Reference Emre Cetin2014). Whereas Kocamaner offers evidence of how Islamic conservatives in Turkey’s TV industry create content that supports the AKP’s “strengthening the family” narrative (Reference Esen and Gümüşçü2017), for example, Algan demonstrates how even “non-believers” among industry executives and production teams have adopted tactics to avoid censure (and remain profitably employed) by carefully managing programming content in response to, and in anticipation of, government demands (Reference Algan2020). These tactics by industry professionals producing content for private TV channels reflect a vast network of crony capitalism that further positions Turkey as a fruitful case for inquiry.

Finally, to draw the explicit link between the content of the identities portrayed favorably and unfavorably on the airwaves to regime politics (Bulut and İleri Reference Bulut and İleri2019; Çevik Reference Çevik2020), I present a brief overview of the AKP’s articulation of its vision of the ideal women. Whereas the party’s discourse on gender more broadly contains multiple dimensions that intersect with media — including hypermasculine prescriptions for men as protectors of the nation, embodied in Valley of the Wolves character Polat Alemdar’s “paramilitary hero” (Çetin Reference Çetin2015; Yanık Reference Yanık2009); and virulent proscription of LGBTQ+ identities, particularly following the AKP’s 2023 election victory and an AKP-adjacent conservative family platform’s campaign to brand queer identities in TV and film as “socio-cultural terrorism” (Sanatta Dayatma ve Sosyokültürel Teröre “DUR” diyoruz! | Büyük Aile Platformu 2023) — I limit my scope here to the party’s discourse on women.

As De Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak demonstrate (Reference De Cillia, Reisigl and Wodak1999), discourse can serve as a key governance tool for defining and disseminating national identity. Regarding gender as a component of that identity, analysis of AKP pro-natalist statements demonstrates how “discursive governance” enables political leaders to govern even “without introducing major policy changes” (Korkut and Eslen-Ziya Reference Korkut and Eslen-Ziya2016, 555). Whereas institutional moves such as cash transfers for new mothers and government support for reproductive technology (Kocamaner Reference Kocamaner2019) serve as formal enactments of the AKP gendered biopolitical agenda (Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti2016; Ongur Reference Ongur2015), leaders’ statements and politically curated media content also serve as discursive tools in defining and governing Us and Them. Synthesizing insights from work on identity politics and authoritarian populism under the AKP, we see that the discursively defined Us, or the part of the population acceptable to the rulers as “the people,” is comprised of pious Sunni Muslims who revere Ottoman legacies, respect patriarchal order, and welcome the firmly governing hand of Erdoğan himself (Fisher-Onar Reference Fisher-Onar, Raudvere and Onur2023; Hintz Reference Hintz2018). AKP rhetoric makes clear that the women within that Us are modest, motherhood-oriented women who uphold the “heteropatriarchal ideals” Erdoğan sought to promulgate (Yabancı and Sağlam Reference Yabancı and Sağlam2023). Indeed, motherhood constitutes a biopolitical prerequisite for the “pious generation” that AKP cofounder, prime minister, and now President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly stated he seeks to raise (Dindar nesil yetiştireceğiz 2016).

Turning to “Them,” in defining Erdoğan as the “man of the people/nation” (milletin adamı), AKP sloganeering sounds inclusive and representative but in good populist fashion presupposes a “Them” against whom the people are defined and protected (Aslan Reference Aslan2021). The identity of “Them” in the ruling party’s rhetoric has varied over time due to an intricate and mutually constitutive constellation of shifting threat perceptions and political opportunities. As a key inflection point in these developments, the 2013 Gezi Park protests provide useful insight into the role of gendered discourse in the AKP’s counter-mobilization tactics. As the initially pro-environment demonstrations began to spread into anti-government protests nation-wide, Erdoğan dismissed peaceful demonstrators as “a few hooligans” (Subasi94 2013) but later used more blatantly vilifying terms such as “terrorist” and foreign-sponsored “lobby” saboteur (Hintz Reference Hintz2016). Returning to the subject of Gezi protesters in a party speech in parliament in 2022, Erdoğan repeated a long-debunked claim that “these terrorists and bandits” trashed a mosque with beer cans (Erdoğan ‘camiye Içkiyle Girdiler’ Iddiasını Tekrarladı 2013), stating “They’re like this. They’re rotten. They’re sluts” (#ÖZGÜRÜZ 2022).

That last epithet provides insight into how the AKP’s Us versus Them discourse connects to the gender politics this paper investigates. In the regime’s characterization, women who protest against the government are sexually and therefore morally corrupt. In effect, those who are politically disloyal are also bad people. “They” embody precisely the qualities and behaviors the regime has proscribed, such as alcohol consumption and promiscuity. Another invented example of the AKP’s vilification of Gezi protesters similar to the beer-drinking-and-trashing-a-mosque claim further underscores this point with an explicitly gendered component. According to a narrative circulated in pro-government media, a large group of bare-chested, balaclava-clad men coming from Gezi Park attacked a young, head-scarved wife of an AKP local official waiting for a ferry with a baby carriage. For years after the supposed incident, Erdoğan claimed in multiple speeches that the attackers slapped the woman, beat her to the ground, swore at her, and urinated on her. As though scripting the actions of the ultimate villain against the consummate protagonist for a captive AKP audience, the alleged assault on a young pious mother married to a ruling party official seemed too heinous to be real. Indeed, just as the mosque story was a fabrication, that was the case here as camera footage proved (Sabah, “İşte 52 saniyede Kabataş tacizi” dedi, photoshoplu görsel yayımladı! 2015). These hero versus villain scenes played out in the seemingly innocuous forum of Turkey’s cooking shows, as the week-long face-off between headscarf-wearing, gracious winner Gönül and midriff-baring, sore loser Funda in the summer of 2022 exemplifies, and came infused with prescriptive and proscriptive gender lessons.

Indeed, the full version of the scene outlined above contained in condensed but lively form numerous critiques about women contestants’ appearance, speech, behavior, and life choices that mirror debates in everyday Turkish political discourse. As a reality show contestant, the producer-curated presentation of Funda personifies the type of woman government officials routinely condemn. Members of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have, for example, publicly chastised women for laughing out loud, challenging authority, dressing immodestly, and even crossing their legs (Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti2016; Korkut and Eslen-Ziya Reference Korkut and Eslen-Ziya2016). Erdoğan’s reference to women anti-government protesters as “sluts” fits neatly here, equating public demonstration of opposition to authority with sexual and moral impropriety (Criminal Complaints Against Erdoğan for Calling Gezi Protesters “Sluts” 2022). Funda’s skin-baring clothing and outspoken behavior map neatly onto the attributes of numerous women whom the ruling party has admonished with the phrase “know your place” (Erdoğan’dan gazeteciye ağır sözler: “Haddini bil edepsiz kadın” 2014). In stark contrast, the behavioral, discursive, and sartorial elements of Gönül uncannily reflect those that AKP members and supporters prescribe for women in speeches extolling Muslim piety, modesty in speech and dress, and homemaker skills (Çavdar and Yaşar Reference Çavdar and Yaşar2019; Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti2016; Korkut and Eslen-Ziya Reference Korkut and Eslen-Ziya2016). The overlap between AKP rhetoric and the Funda–Gönül juxtaposition here is striking. Not every competition episode contains such Manichean dimensions, but I selected this episode from my observation of over 600 hours of cooking shows as illustrative of the wider dynamics of gender politics analyzed in this paper.

Cooking Shows as Gender Edutainment: Concepts and Methods

Having outlined the politics of televised gender construction and the AKP’s vision of its ideal woman above, here I present tools for conceptualizing how the two elements link up onscreen in non-obvious ways via discussions ostensibly about cooking. From the regional provenance of a dish to the national or religious holidays on which specific dishes should be served and fasts should be broken, food and hospitality cultures are packed with norms of appropriate behavior. These norms surrounding who produces which dishes and how, when, and by whom they are consumed are embedded with symbolic meanings that can be politicized and polarized (Aksakal Reference Aksakal2015; Karaosmanoglu Reference Karaosmanoglu2020) and are often highly gendered (Prieto Piastro Reference Prieto Piastro2021). Questions of origin and tradition often overlap with discussions of women’s role in serving the nation as well as serving the family, and thus carry prescriptions for women’s behavior (Mankekar Reference Mankekar2000; Shepherd Reference Laura2012).

I argue the concept of conservative gender edutainment helps us understand how seemingly apolitical dialogue — like a TV host’s tips to moms for keeping their kids entertained while preparing a fast-breaking Ramadan meal, or reality show contestants throwing shade on a fellow competitor for using canned chickpeas in the stew she served them — connects to regime politics. Scholars traditionally conceive of edutainment as fun and engaging cultural products that provide instruction in academic or civic subjects to “players,” as much of the early literature on the concept focused on language and video games (Dondlinger Reference Dondlinger2007; Squire Reference Squire2005). Edutainment materials achieve their goal of imparting lessons by keeping the user engaged, entertained, and thus more open to the materials’ messaging for longer periods of time with a higher degree of focus. Applying concept of edutainment to television, we understand how information presented by lively hosts on relatable topics in a visually stimulating environment can keep viewers watching.

Importantly for this study on regime-led gender construction, producers and content-creators believe televised content can help audiences “absorb” the messages provided (Kocamaner Reference Kocamaner2017, 689). Unlike explicitly didactic shows seeking to provide religious education (Özçetin Reference Özçetin2019), humor-filled daytime talk shows (Burul and Eslen-Ziya Reference Burul and Eslen-Ziya2018) and drama-creating competition shows (Sayan-Cengiz Reference Sayan-Cengiz2020) can impart lessons that are more permanent as well as more easily and favorably recalled (Aksakal Reference Aksakal2015). In addition to memorizable facts, edutainment materials can also be effective in shaping feelings and attitudes toward the subject of focus (Argan, Sever, and Argan Reference Argan, Sever and Argan2009). In the food television context, these could range from strong feelings about adding cheese to a seafood dish to normative guidelines for raising children. Finally, as celebrity chef scholar Signe Rousseau demonstrates, media consumers increasingly rely on celebrity figures as sources of knowledge on a range of subjects, particularly given “limitless access to information” and a “bewildering ubiquity of choices” on offer in the digital age (Rousseau Reference Rousseau2013, 139). By virtue of their high-profile as public figures, and well as their (at least purported) culinary expertise, food celebrities serve as ready-made, appealingly packaged epistemic authorities from whom viewers can take pointers, for better or worse (Rousseau Reference Rousseau2013, xxix), on issues in the kitchen and beyond.Footnote ⁵

In examining how conservative gender edutainment functions in practice, I identify two pedagogies central to the format of two popular types of cooking shows: modeling in host shows and othering in competition shows. Footnote ⁶ Modeling — defined here as the prescription of particular beliefs, values, qualities, and behaviors deemed appropriate by the regime — is embodied in the format of host shows, a subgenre of food television in which an engaging host in a studio designed to look like a home kitchen provides lively commentary while walking step-by-step through recipe preparation. These hosts’ conversational mode of conveying lifestyle tips through personal anecdotes normalizes as natural gendered behaviors and qualities that are in fact highly contested. In contrast, othering — defined here as the ostracization and vilification of those who display regime-proscribed qualities and behaviors — lies at the heart of competition shows. These types of programs concomitantly present antagonists who deviate from the regime’s idealized woman and clash with protagonists. Producer-curated scenes that juxtapose “villains” with “heroes” allow for comparisons of right and wrong by audiences, particularly when villains meet with unhappy endings like losing a competition. In the somewhat crude form of a televised morality play, the villains receive the comeuppance the audience desires, while viewers receive edification for their own behavior in an entertaining manner.

To unpack the prescriptive and proscriptive gender content of these two types of shows, I apply a mixed-methods approach that includes quantitative content analysis, intertextual analysis of symbols and discourse, and interviews. I first use quantitative analysis to contrast levels of conservative gender norm content across three high-ranked host shows and three competition shows. This analysis serves to test the argument that host shows instruct by modeling behavior for “Us,” whereas competition shows instruct via othering — by vaunting “Us” and vilifying “Them.” I then apply intertextual analysis, which allows researchers to extract various internally coherent themes that emerge across a large body of texts from multiple actors (Fairclough Reference Fairclough1992), to a separate set of 15 randomly selected episodes from three of the most popular host shows, all starring food personality Nursel Ergin. This form of critical discourse analysis is particularly suited to studying how multimodal forms of discourse, such as audiovisual content, speak to each other by specifying common modes, methods, symbols, and themes across a wide corpus (Hart Reference Hart2017). Intertextual analysis also aids in identifying whether, when, and how these communicative factors transform — such as a TV host’s appearance, as discussed below (Henke Reference Henke2024). Using this method, I extract norms of behavior for the “ideal female citizen” that coalesce thematically, enabling me to identify how themes present in mass media content map onto discourse used by political elites. Interviews with 22 experts and practitioners in media and culinary industries serve to undergird the claims made about the politicization of media made here, while my viewing of over 600 hours of Turkish cooking show content between 2012 and 2024 provides support that the themes I extracted from randomly selected episodes represent broader content trends. My positionality as a scholar who previously trained as a pastry chef and worked in the restaurant industry for more than a decade created common ground that facilitated these interviews. My work in the food industry also led me to be an avid viewer of cooking shows produced in numerous international settings. Decades of viewing this type of content serve to tune me in not only to variations in ingredients and cooking methods, but also to performative techniques used to enhance audience appeal when discussing food’s meanings, preparation methods, and forms of service and hospitality.

Before proceeding, it is important to note that this paper’s examination of media-based tools of gender construction does not extend to testing the effects of these tools. Media anthropologists and sociologists such as Abu-Lughod and Hall rightly note that television’s messages are framed, inflected, and decoded in diverse ways by audiences based on multi-level factors that confound any “hypodermic needle” transmission effects and thus complicate assessments of how messages “land” (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2008; Hall Reference Hall2007). However, as ethnographic research on the production of Islamic-themed TV talk shows in Turkey demonstrates, creative teams on set often act as if their content were indeed being directly transmitted to, and “normalized” by, viewers (Kocamaner Reference Kocamaner2017, 689). This paper places focus on that content and on its mechanisms of delivery — here, pedagogies, to capture their instructional aesthetic — rather than on its receipt. As a first cut at 1) conceptualizing conservative gender edutainment and 2) identifying the regime-aligned gender construction properties of cooking shows as a well-suited genre, this paper thus delimits its scope to “how possible” rather than “to what extent” questions. An important next step in conservative gender edutainment research could be to test for any links between exposure to cooking shows and regime-aligned attitudinal and behavioral changes among viewers — using audience reception approaches, for example, and data from focus groups, participant observation, or survey experiments (Briandana and Azmawati Reference Briandana and Azmawati2020; Mattingly and Yao Reference Mattingly and Yao2022; Morley Reference Morley2013).

Constructing the Ideal Woman in New Turkey: Two Pedagogies

Host Shows: Modeling

Host shows have a regular TV personality who serves as instructor and take place either in a guest’s actual home kitchen or on a stage designed to look like a kitchen in someone’s home. The host is typically an engaging and relatable female home cook — male TV hosts are generally acclaimed professional chefs (Interview 18 August 2022) — whose conversational discourse models conservative behavioral norms viewers can absorb and replicate in their daily lives. Host shows have day-time slots and programming content, which implies that their viewers are largely women who do not work outside of the home. The content of advertising aired during these programs also suggests a gendered audience. Ads center around products for cooking, childcare, and housekeeping, and their frequent back-to-back repetition suggests a viewer who may have the television on in the background while engaging in housework.Footnote ⁸

Host shows’ behavioral prescriptions come in the form of lifestyle tips that hosts sprinkle into their conversation, often using personal anecdotes. These tips serve as a “storytelling” technique that enables the host to appear relatable to viewers and keep them engaged while a dish is cooking (Matwick and Matwick Reference Keri and Kelsi2014). In the AKP’s New Turkey context, gendered tips extend from wife and mother roles to women’s observation of Islam in family life. Pious Muslim cookbook author and TV host Emine Beder, for example, recommended in her show Kitchen Love (Mutfak Aşkı) that viewers consume halal food, replace wine with apple cider vinegar in their recipes, and use rose or basil syrup to ease discomfort experienced following a fast-breaking meal during Ramadan (Emre Cetin Reference Emre Cetin2017). Beder’s conservative clothing and Islamic head-covering, the references to the Quran that pepper her cookery lessons, and her frequent focus on Ottoman cuisine served as instructional conduits. Her show was broadcast on Beyaz TV, a conservative channel owned by the son of a former AKP mayor of Ankara.

Beder’s identity as a veiled TV host made her exceptional when her show aired between 2012 and 2014 (Emre Cetin Reference Emre Cetin2017, 466). In subsequent years as the AKP consolidated its hold over the media, televised media representations of head-scarved women have increased, spreading to more mainstream channels (e.g., Nermin Gül in Misafirim Var, I Have a Guest, 2018). At the same time, the lifestyle lessons she modeled have become increasingly part of the programming content of shows hosted by non-veiled women. Conversational recommendations for conservative gender norms prescribed in AKP discourse now dominate the content of mainstream daytime programming and are offered by women whose appearance and personal histories do not “fit the government-promoted image” (Burul and Eslen-Ziya Reference Burul and Eslen-Ziya2018, 190; Nüfusçu and Yilmaz Reference Nüfusçu and Yilmaz2012). Yet the great majority of these shows with “non-traditional” hosts air on channels owned by holding companies with political and financial ties to the AKP that allow the government to exercise control over content (see data on 78 shows in Appendix 1); each of the shows headed by the popular TV personality studied below, Nursel Ergin, fits this mold. See Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. “Yes” indicates the holding group has ties to the AKP at the time of the show’s airing. See Appendix for details. The title of Figure 1 is TV Shows with Nursel Ergin.

The host shows I examine using intertextual analysis provide insight into how this seeming contradiction between appearance and instructional messaging functions.Footnote ⁹ In examining content from 15 episodes of three different TV cooking programs aired between 2012 and 2019, it is readily apparent that divorced host Ergin does not cover her hair with an Islamic headscarf or wear modest clothing; to the contrary, she often wears slim-fitting, tea-length dresses that occasionally expose her shoulders. However, whereas in earlier programs, Ergin resembles American food TV celebrity Rachael Ray, with a “girl-next-door look” and down-to-earth personality similar to those with which Ray branded herself (Rousseau Reference Rousseau2013, xiii), she later adopted a more coiffed, beautified appearance that aligns with anthropologist Claudia Liebelt’s insight that “investments in feminine beauty are closely linked with imaginations of proper womanhood” in Turkey (Reference Liebelt2023, 110). Although not all aspects of her life and lifestyle adhere to the traditional AKP family norms — Ergin announced her second divorce in June 2023 (Nursel Ergin’den boşanma açıklaması 2023) — or more modest styles of dress and veiling displayed by the wives of leading AKP figures, the tips she provides and the subject matter she discusses with her guests do.

From data collected across 15 randomly selected episodes from three different Ergin-hosted programs, chosen for these shows’ high viewer ratings, I found prescribed gender norm content coalescing around five main themes: motherhood, marital/in-law relations, religious practices, kitchen and household duties, and physical appearance and dress. Through her conversational tips and “life-hacks” as host, Ergin provides viewers with advice on how wives can keep their husbands happy and familial relations amicable by asking cantankerous mothers-in-law for their favorite recipes (Nursel’le Evin Tadı, episode 116), and how Muslims can find the direction to pray toward Mecca (kıble) when visiting a friend’s house by figuring out which direction the sea is, rather than admitting they do not know (Nursel’le Evin Tadı, episode 6). She praises meticulously clean kitchens as those “of a woman’s dreams” (Mutfağım, episode 63), admires women who sew their own clothes (Nursel’in Konukları, episode 21), casts aspersions on the use of pre-prepared foods as time-savers (Mutfağım, episode 3), and advises women to learn to make multiple dishes quickly in case guests arrive unexpectedly (Nursel’in Konukları, episode 5).

It should be noted that the emphasis on cooking as a woman’s responsibility as a singular prescriptive norm is not at all new in “New” Turkey. Patriarchal norms prescribing traditional gendered tasks for women like household duties had persisted in many spaces before the AKP came to power. Founding father and first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk famously declared “any nation that sets women back will fall behind” in emphasizing the importance of women’s legal enfranchisement and education in economic modernization (Kandiyoti and Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti and Kandiyoti1987). However, the state feminism over which he presided — modeling the ideal woman, for example, through Türkiye Güzeli (“Beauty of Turkey”) competitions run by the national newspaper Cumhuriyet beginning in 1929 (Özdemir Reference Özdemir2016; Shissler Reference Shissler2004) — was limited to the secular elite and did not substantially transform societal expectations for women in terms of family responsibilities. As suggested in the introduction, cooking shows provide a useful empirical window onto these expectations. In a special episode on National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, Turkish drama actress and cooking show host Gülriz Sururi asks two young guests: “As girls, are you interested in what goes on in the kitchen? You can’t escape it, you’ll learn this” (Gülriz Sururi’nin Yemek Programında - 23 Nisan 1993 2021). The content that differs strikingly relates to the increased presence of discussions of Islam and Ottoman history in contemporary shows and the absence of any discussion of alcohol — all of which would have seemed markedly out of place in 1993.

In turning to the fifth theme of appearance, Ergin discursively links questions and comments about clothing and personal upkeep to women’s ability to excel in behavioral prescriptions for other themes as well. She asks a female guest who receives a mini-makeover who she will be beautiful for if she does not marry again; later in the episode she shows the same guest a dress and declares: “wear this, become a woman, then we’ll find you a boyfriend” (Nursel’le Evin Tadı, episode 4, emphasis added). The logic goes that appearing feminine and well-groomed (bakımlı) will allow an individual to realize her womanhood, attract a husband, keep him happy in the marriage, and help to produce children. This logic aligns with Liebelt’s findings from her ethnography of the politics of beauty in AKP-era Turkey that efforts toward achieving “feminine beauty are seen as a prerequisite to married life and marriage itself” (2023, 33). Further exemplifying these links, Ergin compliments guests who dress up after cooking to serve a meal to her family (Mutfağım, episode 32). The dialogue echoes prescriptions and proscriptions from a male business community leader interviewed by Liebelt who stated a woman “should dress up nicely, brush her hair, maybe put on some light make-up … it’s not nice if she opens the door to you in her apron, smelling of kitchen … It’s a women’s destiny (kısmet) to look nice!” (cited in Liebelt Reference Liebelt2023, 109). Further linking our themes, Ergin asks each female guest across three shows how many children they have and if they are married, encouraging single mothers to remarry (Nursel’in Konukları, episode 44). She speaks positively of women who work outside the home but emphasizes that she loves women who have multiple talents that cover family as well as household roles (Nursel’in Konukları, episode 21).

Recommendations for conservative, family-oriented behavior in line with Sunni Islam from an engagingly friendly young woman with a glossy ponytail and a swishy dress can help to smooth the government element of the messaging and make those behaviors more digestible to a wider audience. When Ergin calls herself a “persistent student” and smilingly agrees with the instructions of female Sufism expert and repeat guest Cemalnur Sargut on subjects such as how “we” should observe the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice (Kurban Bayramı), her endorsement adds a relatability factor that enables host shows to normalize particular forms of public piety (Nursel’le Evin Tadı, episode 16). When Ergin reacts to a lack of audience questions on the proposed topic of mothers-in-law by saying: “A lot of people wrote us questions about the [2019 municipal] election. Well, I don’t know anything about that. May it all be for the best … May no one fight … May our years pass in peace,” her circumvention deftly guides the discussion away from elections — in which the opposition made stunning gains — and back to women’s familial and household responsibilities that are deeply if not explicitly political (Nursel’in Konukları, episode 21).

Final Course, Closing Scene

This paper analyzed two edutainment mechanisms by which cooking shows serve as vernacular yet highly political platforms of gender construction, entertaining viewers while instructing them in behavioral norms prescribed by authoritarian regimes. The multi-method approach used here allows us to extract the gendered content of cooking shows, demonstrate how this content maps onto norms the AKP prescribes for women in New Turkey, and parse out the contrasting ways studio and competition shows disseminate these norms via modeling and othering, respectively.

Although the cultural content is specific to the case of contemporary Turkey, the political function of television programming in engagingly communicating regimes’ gendered Us versus Them rhetoric to viewers is not. The present study can thus serve as a springboard for scholars to examine the identity politics of cooking shows in other cultural and political contexts. Comparative studies of cooking shows could examine questions such as how the political economy of mass media in democratic regimes creates different opportunity structures. In the United States, for example, the popular host show The Pioneer Woman exemplifies very similar content themes, with Islam switched out for Christianity; host Ree Drummond publicly describes herself as: “Wife of cowboy. Mother of five! Lover of butter” (The Pioneer Woman – Recipes, Country Life and Style, Entertainment n.d.). Shows with conservative gender themes like Drummond’s may be on the rise in the US given the second election of Donald Trump. A proliferation of #tradwife (“traditional wife) content TikTok users with millions of followers like Nara Smith, an impeccably coiffed model-turned-housewife-and-mother who cooks meals from scratch while wearing Chanel, suggests (at least the spectacle of) conservative gender content is increasingly popular (Nara Smith (@naraazizasmith) Official | TikTok n.d.).

From a methods perspective, treating cooking shows as a data source opens up a number of fruitful research paths for political scientists. Longitudinal studies could trace shifts in regimes’ identity politics over time using cooking shows as an empirical window, as with the US example. Based on my observation of over 1,000 hours of Turkish cooking shows between 2011 and 2023, there has been a significant increase in the number of head-scarved women, Islamic expert guests, and religious speech references of the type I coded for this project. The lack of access to YouTube-generated transcripts for these shows prior to 2020 complicates quantitative analysis of this shift, but randomizing and hand-coding episodes, in addition to tracing shifts in channel ownership as I do in the Appendix, would prove useful in documenting this trend. Of the 12 MasterChef Türkiye female contestants in 2011, for example, none were head-scarved; of the 11 women who competed in the 2023–24 season, four wore a headscarf. Esra, a head-scarved, well-coiffed mother whose elderly father lives with her, won the competition (MasterChef Esra Tokelli evli mi, kaç çocuğu var? 2024). Here it is important to note that my argument is not that every New Turkey-era participant wearing a headscarf wins or is soft-spoken like Gönül, nor that all women who show their hair lose their competition and are vilified like Funda. Rather, I use that Yemekteyiz vignette as usefully illustrative of a broader trend I observed in which women demonstrating significant adherence to the five conservative gender norms I identified through qualitative analysis are 1) rewarded with praise and, occasionally, prizes; and 2) used as foils for critiquing non-conforming women. Future research could further tease out nuance here.

Moving to the effects of such shows, audience reception studies using focus groups and survey experiments can investigate the extent to which exposure to food television shapes public opinion and political behavior. These methods can also further develop the insights drawn through this paper’s brief analysis of YouTube comments about the emotion-laden phenomenon of viewers loving to “hate on” villains, and the extent to which viewing competition shows contributes to political polarization. Through interviews, scholars of authoritarianism may examine media dynamics of preference falsification (Kuran Reference Kuran1991) — that is, hosts and guests’ onstage “performance” of regime-prescribed behavior that conceals true beliefs, and hidden transcripts (Scott Reference Scott1990) — that is, offstage subversive behavior participants engage in once cameras stop rolling (or once regime-friendly producers are out of earshot). Moving away from traditional television programming, combining digital ethnography of user-generated content by home cooks with interviews can help identify the extent to which platforms such as YouTube offer vloggers any different incentives for curating their performances (Bagdogan Reference Bagdogan2023). Extending Yabancı and Sağlam’s concepts of negotiated conformism (2023), future research can also identify spaces in which cooking show participants exercise agency and subjectivity by creatively using their airtime to insert content in conflict with regime prescriptions to varying degrees (Hintz Reference Hintz2021). The case of host Nursel Ergin’s encouragement that women work outside the home to establish independence — a position likely shaped by her personal experiences as a young single mother, but one that creates tensions with the AKP’s pro-natalist policies — provides a useful place to start (Mutfağım, episode 56; Mutfağım, episode 48).