Youth Reception Analysis Of Gender-based Violence Victim In Prostitute Videos On Soft White Underbelly Youtube Channel

Abstract

Soft White Underbelly is a YouTube channel producing content of interviews with marginalized people in America. The creator of the channel, Mark Laita, try to uncover the story of stigmatized people and show the systemic inequality behind their presence. Out of many subjects, women prostitutes are one of the minority groups putting attention to in this channel. Women prostitutes who are often stigmatized and discriminated in the society were given the place to share their past and situation they are going through. Gender-based violence (GBV) become one prominence issue that can be find talked about in their interview. The channel convey how prostitutes are actually victim of gender-based violence. However, the meaning of a media could be varied. A message can be understood differently because audience take part in making the meaning. Therefore, an analysis to audience reception of gender-based violence victim in prostitute videos on Soft White Underbelly is conducted. The researcher employs two prostitute videos from the channel titled Prostitute Interview-Kelly and Prostitute Interview-Amber as the object. A purposive sampling technique is use to choose active international YouTube user at the age of 18-30 years old as the informants. Through online form and interview, the researcher gathered the data and with Stuart Hall’s audience reception theory the data is analyzed. From the analysis, it can be concluded that informants have different reading about the videos. From five informants, three informants are in dominant hegemonic reading and other in negotiated reading for Kelly’s interview. On Amber’s interview, two informants are in dominant hegemonic reading and three informants are in negotiated reading. The researcher found that informants’ social, economic, education, social media habit, and GBV’s experience background influencing their reading on both videos.