Symbolic Mediations of Female Labour: Tradition and Media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1974-4382/23380Keywords:
Invisible gendered labour, Greek folklore, Nikolaos G. Politis archive, Symbolic representation, Media systemsAbstract
This article examines the structural mechanisms by which women’s labour is rendered symbolically invisible or devalued within cultural narratives. Situated at the intersection of folklore, gender, and media studies, the study shifts the analytical focus from the depiction of female activities to the systematic denial of their recognition as work. Using a qualitative, discourse-oriented analysis of the complete corpus of 1,013 traditions compiled in Nikolaos G. Politis’s monumental archive, the text explores how traditional narrative structures organise social life around rigid gender roles. Quantitative and qualitative patterns reveal a marked asymmetry: male representations encompass diverse, highly specialised socio-economic vocations, while female characters are confined to domestic care and metaphysical displacement. The study shows that physical, reproductive, and emotional female work is systematically naturalised as an innate moral duty or an expression of feminine identity, rather than recognised as socially necessary labour. Through a comparative heuristic lens, the article connects these historical folkloric matrices to contemporary media systems, demonstrating how modern representations perpetuate the systematic silencing of female production. Ultimately, folklore and modern media are examined as homologous cultural channels that continually adapt and modernise deeply entrenched gender hierarchies.
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