Abstract
This article explores connections between construction of gender roles, family models and community-building processes in soap opera narratives. The underlying research hypothesis maintains that construction of gender roles and family models in soap operas influences values around which a sense of community is constructed. Using textual analysis as methodology and an intercultural approach, this study compares and contrasts British and American soap operas. This approach allows to set out two contrasting models and investigate whether and to what extent Catalan soap operas adhere to one of them by proposing an original analysis of selected characters and storylines from a corpus of Catalan drama serials. This article also queries in which ways Catalonia’s situation as a stateless nation influences a sense of community construction in Catalan soap operas.
Highlights
In the same way as numerous ethnographic studies of viewing practices have revealed the complexity of soap operas viewership (Ang 1985; Brown 1994; Brundson 1981; Buckingham 1987; Hobson 1982; Livingstone 1990; Modleski 1983; Seiter et al 1989), the study of soap operas informed by textual analysis can help us reveal the narrative diversity within this genre
The aim of this article is to examine how gender roles have been constructed in soap operas from three different cultural contexts
I will analyse how these representations of gender roles and family models highly influence the construction of a sense of community in soap operas’ narratives
Summary
In the same way as numerous ethnographic studies of viewing practices have revealed the complexity of soap operas viewership (Ang 1985; Brown 1994; Brundson 1981; Buckingham 1987; Hobson 1982; Livingstone 1990; Modleski 1983; Seiter et al 1989), the study of soap operas informed by textual analysis can help us reveal the narrative diversity within this genre. As the reader will notice, many bibliographical sources I employ in this article come from Anglo-Saxon contexts This choice is justified by the fact that soap operas have been analysed from a gender perspective predominantly by British and American scholars. Another important strand of work on this television genre comes from Latin America (Martín-Barbero 1987; 1995; 2001), but these studies focus more on other aspects, such. The attention given by feminist television criticism to the genre of soap opera is mainly concerned with the 1980s and 1990s, which explains why a significant component of the theoretical sources which inform this chapter dates from the late twentieth century period
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