‘Diaspora girls doing identities’: Creating ideal television programmes and narratives of the self

Abstract

This article reports on the results of a visual ethnographic case study with teenage diaspora girls living in Belgium. It analyses how second-generation girls of Turkish descent perform identities through the visualization of and reflection on their ideal television programme. This article starts from an intersectional and performance approach to identity, then explores what happens when diaspora girls ‘do television’; it contributes to the knowledge of what young females ‘do’ with media texts and moves beyond the conventional interview methods within audience research. Results show that when participants produce collages of their ideal television programmes, they reflexively engage in providing a narrative of the self and in performing identities. The cases identified with a broad spectrum of shifting subject-positions, often transgressing ethnicity, foregrounding age and gender. Visual ethnography complemented by traditional audience research techniques proved to be useful in approaching issues such as identity performance and the role of media.