SOC 0851 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Melodrama, Culture Industry, Machismo
10 Jun 2018
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• Soap Operas, Telenovelas, and Feminism
o Soap operas – generally day time programing, occasionally make it onto prime-
time TV; partially explains the low budget nature of most of these programs,
because the larger quantities of advertising time help to subsidize the more
expensive and prestigious shows produced by networks for prime time
▪ Soap operas began as 15-minute daily offerings in the 1930s on the radio
but like many other radio genres, they made the transition to TV in the
1950s and 1960s
▪ Produced on a grueling daily schedule, with little time for rehearsals,
writing, or production
▪ Simple products of the culture industry that propagate conservative
messages about home, family, and sexuality that are specially designed to
entertain their assumed audience of housewives
▪ Reflective of patriarchal ideology
▪ Feale haates ho deote too uh tie to jos at the epese of
their families are usually punished in soap operas
▪ Haig a a is defied ithi the soap opea gee as the sigle ost
importat thig i a oa’s life hile oe ithout hilde ae
perceived as incomplete
▪ Women are often treated like children by their male counterparts in the
soap opera world
▪ Soap operas can serve as a critique of existing patriarchal structures
▪ Although large and long-anticipated weddings are often important
staples of daytime soap opera plots, marriage as a happy ending for
oe is destailized the iee’s koledge that hadl a soap
opera marriage lasts
▪ Female soap opera fans often root for extramarital affairs and divorce,
taking pleasure in the disruption of the patriarchal status quo that the
world of soap operas represents
o Are You a Feminist if You Watch Soap Operas?
▪ Female viewers take pleasure in the ways in which soap operas challenge
the gender status quo, and especially in the ways in which deviant
ehaios of feale soap opea haate desto the ideologial
nucleus of the text – the saedess of the fail
▪ Women used soap operas as a vehicle to challenge a sexual double
standard legitimized by Confucian tradition and to create a forum in
hih to ealuate ad itiize a husad’s ehaio
▪ Soap operas serve as an internationally language for many viewers across
the world
o In Latin American countries, the telenovela serves as the ubiquitous soap opera
euialet, shaig soap opeas’ ephasis o seial elodaa as ell as the
simultaneous popular success and critical disdain of soap operas
▪ Differs from soap operas in the US in that it has a finite number of
episodes rather than running continuously for decades
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