Kurdish women and TV journalism in Iraqi Kurdistan: Experiences and strategies

Abstract

Few studies on female TV journalists in the Middle East have been conducted. Neither have Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts been used to analyse women journalists’ experiences of their professional practice and their strategies for navigating a male-dominated media world in the Middle East. For this unique study, ten Kurdish women journalists that work for six different TV stations in Iraqi Kurdistan were interviewed. Informed by different forms of capital, the thematic analysis revealed four themes that capture the respondents’ experiences and strategies: coping with perceptions of pretty dolls and honorary men; coping with the threat of violence and a bad reputation; coping with the gendered distribution of news assignments; and tackling glass ceilings and unwritten rules. A particularly interesting result of the study was that while the strategies range from proclaiming any news hard news to openly defying orders from the managers, and to claiming that one’s ability to advance depends on having a strong personality, the focus is consistently on individualistic survival strategies. When masculinity and male norms still dominate the contents of symbolic capital, it may result in seemingly counterproductive practices such as the lack of a distinct ‘we’ feeling among women journalists. For women journalists, the cost of transforming their cultural and social capital into symbolic capital that is effective in the journalistic field is affected by both the journalistic field and the society at large, which creates contextually bound obstacles to women journalists in Iraqi Kurdistan.