Watching Turkish television dramas in Argentina: entangled proximities and resigned agency in global media flows

Abstract

For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development: the success of Turkish television dramas (dizi) in Latin America, the land where the telenovela was born. Drawing from 25 interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 in Argentina, we develop the notion of “entangled proximities” to explain different viewership positionalities. Moreover, we show that audiences adopt a “resigned agency”: they experience pleasure while recognizing the role of market forces. Finally, we build on the cultural proximity theory by arguing that these contemporary audiences are instead driven by a desired proximity with both the past genre of the telenovela and with the past society depicted in it.