Abstract
Nationalist discourses that set the stage for the formation of everyday meanings on womanhood provide gendered cultural capital for the production and reception of Sinhalese television soap operas. The interpretive and discursive nature of those meanings facilitates nuanced deconstructions and reconstructions of gender, womanhood and nation in everyday private and public spheres of leisure that include conformities and contestations. In transnational cultural flows of migration and mobility, the meanings and pleasures of soap operas translate to evoke connections to the home and distant value systems, enabling migrant women to understand their new national selves in a host society through the social act of watching mega teledramas. This chapter examines these themes that ethnographic research produced throughout this book in the national and transnational contexts of mega teledrama production and reception.
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Gamage, S. (2021). Gender, Media, Migration and Culture: An Intersectional Conclusion. In: Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6_5
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