Control over these spaces is constantly contested. Such feuds over these spaces have been a prominent theme in popular culture, the 2014 Tamil movie Madras being a notable effort in the recent times. In one section of this paper, we look at how the four female politicians under consideration go about constructing their identities in the public sphere through various forms of media. .
Mediation could be understood as the process by which a given social system produces and reproduces itself in and through a particular set of media (Mazzarella 2004). The recent discussions on culture in the backdrop of globalization have been characterized by a contradiction. While the fact that culture is mediated is obvious, certain groups of people are insistent on the authenticity, purity and reality of culture. These "culture-mongers", as Mazzarella calls them, reject the mediated aspect of culture because mediation implies distance, intervention, and displacement which in turn challenge the authenticity of the cultural product and the ideological guarantee that they serve the interests of the consumer-citizen and not the corporate-party. .
This could be seen as an attempt to create a reality that does not exist. Baudrillard argues that we have reached a stage of simulation where there is a liquidation of all referentials and the real is being substituted by the signs of the real producing a mere chain of signs with no signified (Baudrillard 1995). "The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true." This quote from Ecclesiastes (which actually is not from the Bible at all, but a sort of paraphrase) with which Baudrillard opens Simulacra and Simulation sums up the scenario. The world becomes the desert of real itself. In this state, insistence on culture as real and not mediated is an attempt to maintain a facade of reality.
