Semiotic Analysis of Tv Shows

When I was a child, growing up in West Africa Liberia, the traditional roles for men and women were totally different. Women were known to be: child bearers stay at home moms and the caregivers of the family. Also, women were responsible for taking care of everything in the household such as: cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping etc. Men on the other hand, were regarded as the sole provider for the family. This gave me the perception that women and men are expected to do certain things in accordance with the gender roles their society dictates. In Africa, I was able to see a lot of gender inequality that affected the majority of the women living in that country. However, because of my departure from Liberia to the United States, I was able to see the social difference of both countries. Since I arrived in the United States, my perception has shifted about the gender roles I was accustom to when I was in Liberia. I was surprised to find that America had two types of gender roles, traditional and non-traditional; and even more surprising was that America’s traditional gender roles closely mirrored Liberia’s gender roles. In traditional gender roles women were often subjected to various forms of gender inequality such as sexism and prejudice. A couple of decades ago, gender equality were more visible in society, and the media propitiated this idea on television, radio. This paper will analyze the gender roles by using two video clips from two of America’s popular television drama sitcoms. A semiotic analysis can be applied to these shows because of the symbols they carry.
A careful semiotic analysis of the popular television drama Bewitched and Jersey Shore, will show that women of this day and age are encouraged to be independent, career minded and are not submissive to their men like they used to be. The television drama Bewitched, which aired from 1965 to 1972, implied the ideal women is a women who: support her husband’s career, stayed at home, took