CSP week2

I have never associated radio with gender and class before. But after the class, I reckon that there are indeed many connections among them. From my experience, the first impression of the radio can be date back to my childhood. It was the car broadcast that played music constantly. It was more like an entertainment that filled the plain and boring air with music.

But its function is very different from its original uses. Radios and broadcasts are mainly heard by household women. Radio serves more like an encyclopedia and newspaper to them. It includes many themes varying from household pieces of information to demonstration to the place that housewives would never have a chance to go.

Just as Hilmes mentioned in his article in 2012 that radio’s early period as a“local” medium, with stations owned and operated within a city or community, both preserved certain forms of social separation and threatened, by virtue of its diversity, per vasiveness, and escape from the usual physical mechanisms of control, many of those separations that maintained local social order.

It made me begin to reconsider the essence of the radio and broadcast because in old Chinese times, women were not allowed to be educated and have a chance to touch the world outside their home. Just like those trapped housewives, radio became more like a leisure but as well as a tool to bondage women to the home willingly.