Home Thematic Issues 16 Contesting the Norm? Live-in Rela A recent trend in television advertisement of staging unconventional social constellations includes an advertisement released by the tea brand Red Label in featuring a live-in couple facing an awkward family situation that eventually dissolves into intergenerational harmony.
The one-minute commercial visualizes not only an alternative to the married couple but invites us to re-imagine the relationship between parents and children as well. Based on the assumption that society and media co-construct each other, this paper asks whether the act of rendering the unconventional visible is already a challenge to the idea of the Indian family. Further, it analyzes the conflictual online discourse evolving around the short film.
Cohabitation of unmarried couples has always existed but in the public imagination, it is mostly confined to the extravagant world of film celebrities 1 or the Hindu pantheon, which includes several extramarital, polygamous and other unconventional couple constellations Gudermuth Yadav and Yadav Despite a legal affirmation that such relationships are equal to marriage Firstpost , controversies in the Indian parliament as well as within society continue.
We thus observe an obvious contradiction between the legal framework and its social acceptance. Media discourses reflect this tension. The one-minute commercial visualizes not only an alternative to the married-couple situation but invites us to re-imagine the relationship between parents and children as well.
Based on the assumption that society and media co-construct each other, this article asks whether the act of rendering the unconventional visible is already a challenge to the idea of the Indian family. The term describes an increasing media influence on different social and cultural spheres Hepp ; Kim ; Bergmann The key argument is that increasing medialization and socio-economic change reciprocally impact each other and thus co-construct social, cultural, and economic dynamics.
