Abstract
This chapter examines the audience practices of women watching soap operas in Colombo. An active audience watching soap operas in their homes, the women’s television viewing spaces are considerably shaped by the unpaid care work they perform in their homes, as this chapter shows. This chapter argues, for audiences of women, the contexts of the home and spaces of leisure are defined through gendered differences of unpaid care work and intersectional contours of class, ethnicity, income statuses, livelihoods and cultural obligations. Women’s viewing practices in the homes, watching soap operas in neighbourhood friendship groups, constructing support networks, silences and resistances that enable transgressing subjugation and the meanings and pleasures of watching soap operas are discussed. This chapter situates mega teledramas within everyday contexts of women in order to present complex and diverse ways megas produced meanings for participants to understand womanhood, the self and nation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See De Alwis 2010.
- 2.
See Chap. 1 for a detailed description of fieldwork and localities.
- 3.
See Chap. 2 for producers’ perspectives on the messages in Induwari.
- 4.
Despite Ahinsa’s eagerness to be part of this study, her husband’s blank reaction to my presence and her silence on the matter concerned me deeply about how it may impact her. After that night, I only visited her during day when she watches megas while working in her beauty salon at home in the presence of customers while her husband was away working at the spice shop.
References
Baldassar, Loretta, Cora Vallekoop Baldock, and Raelene Wilding. 2007. Families Caring Across Borders: Migration, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood.
Brown, Mary Ellen. 1994. Soap Opera and Women’s Talk: The Pleasure of Resistance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. 1981. Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera. Screen 22 (4): 32–37.
———. 1997. Screen Tastes. London: Routledge.
De Alwis, Malathi. 2010. The ‘China factor’ in Post-War Sri Lanka. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11 (3): 434–446.
Federici, Silvia. 2020. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press.
Finch, Janet. 1989. Family Obligations and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gamage, Shashini. 2018. Soap Operas, Women, and the Nation: Sri Lankan Women’s Interpretations of Homegrown Mega Teledramas. Feminist Media Studies 18 (5): 873–887.
———. 2019. Sri Lankan Migrant Women Watching Teledramas in Melbourne: A Social Act of Identity. In Handbook of Diaspora, Media and Culture, ed. Roza Tsagarousianou and Jessica Retis, 401–414. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell and IAMCR.
———. 2020. Migration, Identity, and Television Audiences: Sri Lankan Women’s Soap Opera Clubs and Diasporic Life in Melbourne. Media International Australia 176 (1): 93–106.
Geraghty, Christine. 1991. Women and Soap Opera. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gillespie, Marie. 1995. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. London: Routledge.
Hewamanne, Sandya. 2020. Re-Stitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Gender, Neo-Liberalism, and the Politics of Contentment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hobson, Dorothy. 1982. Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1997. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Hyndman, Jennifer, and Malathi De Alwis. 2003. Beyond Gender: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Humanitarianism and Development in Sri Lanka. Women’s Studies Quarterly 31: 212–226.
Jayawardena, Kumari, and Rachel Kurian. 2015. Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan.
Liebes, Tamar, and Elihu Katz. 1994. The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas. Cambridge: Polity.
Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation. Durham: Duke University Press.
McRobbie, Angela. 2002. Fashion Culture: Creative Work, Female Individualization. Feminist Review 71 (1): 52–62.
———. 2005. The Uses of Cultural Studies. London: Sage.
Morley, David. 1986. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. London: Comedia.
Mumford, Stempel Laura. 1995. Love and Ideology in the Afternoon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Oakley, Ann. 2018. The Sociology of Housework. Bristol: Policy Press.
Østbye, Truls, Angelique Chan, Rahul Malhotra, and Jinendra Kothalawala. 2010. Adult Children Caring for Their Elderly Parents. Asian Population Studies 6 (1): 83–97.
Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Capital Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Rich, Adrienne. 1995. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton.
Skeggs, Beverley. 2001. Feminist Ethnography. In Handbook of Ethnography, ed. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland, 426–442. London: Sage.
Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gamage, S. (2021). Soap Operas, Women and the Nation. In: Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-70631-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-70632-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)