Women, soap opera and new generations of feminists

Abstract

At a time when television (TV) studies was still an emerging subject, the soap opera attracted a number of high-profile studies, largely conducted by feminists, that also set the agenda for TV studies as a whole. While the soap opera no longer finds the same level of attention, the scholarship of that time remains important to the work of feminist TV researchers of different generations. In this dossier, five researchers, three of them emerging and two of them mid-career, reflect on the importance of the scholarship to their own work and careers, how their own work expands on it and what it tells us about problems that feminist TV scholarship might encounter tomorrow.

Parasocial Interaction Among Young Female Devotees of Korean Dramas

“…Korean dramas are included in the classification of "soap opera", and are more enjoyed by female viewers (Geraghty & Weissmann, 2016), so that parasocial interaction with Korean dramas is also more prevalent with women. Cohen (as cited in Lather & Moyer-Guse, 2011) stated that women experience stronger parasocial relationships with the characters of the dramas more easily.…”

Stories about a Queen

“…I began this essay with reference to the dossier put together recently by Geraghty and Weissmann (2016), drawing attention to the relevance of the 1980s and 1090s spate of audience research around the soap opera. As the authors pointed out, this work was ‘radical and subversive, precisely because it took women’s pleasures seriously’ (2016: 367), its unpacking of the concept of melodrama remains critically important for the analysis of contemporary television, and, with the turn to the digital and the shift in research agendas and funding regimes, as Deborah Jermyn notes, today’s new wave of academics are far less able to do the kind of research that could be done in the 1980s and 1990s.…”

“…Christine Geraghty and Elke Weissmann in Critical Studies in Television put together a dossier, which asked five feminist TV researchers to reflect on how the now considered-dated history of research on soap opera audiences influences their work and ‘what it tells us about problems that feminist TV scholarship might encounter tomorrow’ (Geraghty and Weissmann, 2016: 365). In this essay, I return to the soap opera, but in a context hardly ever explored – an urban Indian city in the 21st century, as it gathered to watch a Bengali television ‘serial’ – made in a language that never reached national Indian screens.…”

“…Scholars studying Latina/o audiences similarly provide accounts of ethnic audiences, ‘mainstream’ media and identity production (Valdivia, 2004) and much work continues around diasporic audiences. Extending backwards in time, one reaches the cultural studies projects conducted by the Birmingham School, as well as sociological and cultural research conducted in the American academy (see Geraghty and Weissmann’s 2016 dossier on the soap opera), and Dorothy Hobson (1982), Ien Ang (1985), Andrea Press (1990), Janice Radway (1984, 1988), among others, exemplify this body of work. Those involved in reception projects firmly embed the ideas of intersectionality into their framework, for instance; as Andrea Press (1990) demonstrated findings at the intersections of social class, age and gender in the American television experience (see also Cavalcante et al, 2017 for a renewed and recent focus on feminist reception studies).…”

Serialidade: continuidade e ruptura no ambiente midiático e cultural contemporâneo

“…É certo que uma disposição semelhante não pode ser generalizada para os estudos de televisão, pois existem estudiosos (por exemplo, Creeber, 2005;Ford, De Kosnik, & Harrington, 2011;Kelleter, 2014;McPherson, 2007;Polan, 2009;Williams, 2014) que reconhecem abertamente os recursos formais e genéricos da soap opera no drama serializado do horário nobre e na chamada TV de qualidade. Outros estudiosos, em sintonia com Newman e Levine (por exemplo, Feuer, 2014;Weissmann, 2016), expressaram críticas abertas a processos de legitimação que implicam uma primordial desconexão entre o celebrado drama seriado de nossos dias e o gênero fundamental…”