Looking like a Woman: Some Reflections on the Hispanic Soap Opera and the Pleasures of Female Spectatorship

Abstract

In August 1994 issue of Harper s Bazaar, Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico's most outspoken female writers, delivers a slap in face to the women of Mexico's priviledged classes who dine at now-fashionable McDonald's in Mexico City and spend their days watch? ing soap (80). After praising political activism of a small group of seamstresses and guerrilleras who attempted to carve a place for themselves in Mexico's male-dominated society, Poniatowska scolds remainder of her female compatriots, reminding them that they have much to learn from classes they so despise (80). Leaving aside profound irony engendered by Poniatowska's choice of a North American fashion magazine as appropriate place for her report on feminism in Mexico and jarring effect of leftist dogma embedded in pages of a magazine whose lifeblood depends on Capitalist consumption in its most rampant form, fact that she closes her article with a reference to negative influence of soap operas on female viewing public provides us with an appropriate point of departure for disman? tling of some common assumptions about class, popular culture, gender, and politics which given rise to an elitist bias against telenovela as an art form in Latin America. Without a doubt, there are many people in Mexico who do not own a television and who do not watch soap operas, yet it is an oversimplication to equate soap opera genre with only priviledged classes. A visit to any neighborhood beauty parlor in Mexico City will reveal hair? dressers, shampoo girls, and customers alike glued to screen during broadcast of afternoon telenovelas. Commercial breaks provide an opportunity for animated chatter about what has motivated characters thus far and what might happen next, until program returns to screen and silence returns to shop. A stroll through one of mercados de artesan?a scattered around capital might reveal incongruous sight of peasant women from Chiapas weaving cloth by touch and memory as their eyes remained fixed on five-inch screen of their portable television. In working class restaurants and bars, a television is generally tuned into popular soaps in afternoon and early evening, as waitresses and cooks follow their stories on screen and discuss latest gossip about stars with regular customers. A drive through poor neigh? borhoods reveals television antennas in abundance; they appear on roofs of homes where plumbing may not work and electricity may depend on an extension cord run from a neighbor's outlet, but a television set has somehow miraculously been installed and kept in working order. Perhaps more than any other form of media, television, and soap operas in particular, cut across class lines and engage people of different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. Recent