Week Two [Seminar Notes]

Soap Operas

Slipping down the slippery slope of popular culture
- Why study it then 
- Soap history
- Women's culture
- Soaps and women

What is the perception of soap
- Low brow
- Low quality
- Cheap
- Brunsden 1982 'used as a awful measure of the extremely awful'
- BUT, they are highly successful and have some of the longest running narratives that tackle difficult issues

Why Study Soap?
[use website known as barb to get television ratings]
ITVs top viewed shows are soaps e.g. Emmerdale and Coronation Street

Why is Soap denigrated?
- Entertainment and popular culture = emotional/pleasure orientated (think X Factor)
- Pleasure is of the body
- Fact/news/documentaries of the mind
- The mind is reified
- Part of aspiring to intellectualism
- but we are subject to our bodies and pleasure...

Soap's History
- Soap had its beginnings in the 1930s
- Radio advertisers looking for programming for women
- Advertisers and radio producers created soap as a new way of generating interest from women

Mass and Women's Culture
- Women's pages? women's hours?
- Women's magazines
- Men's magazines in a minority
- Chick flick? what is the chick flick's status?
- Where is the man's film? Exist's but not designated
- Why? is it taken for granted/central
- Gender in culture is invisible
- Central values in social claim universal status 

Feminists and the Women's genre
- Feminists have different conceptions of the women's genre
- Modelski broadly criticized women's culture or those producing it by suggesting it was vacuous

British Soaps/Realism
- Grittier, more 'urban' contexts
- Working-class in focus
- Films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
- Soap opera is drama but its is also positioned as 'realism'

Soaps as Liberating Texts
- Mis-carriages
- AIDs narrative
- Straight women with HIV
- Rape
- Post-natal depression

Analysing Soap
- If soap is a female genre, in what way is this evident in the text?
- Geraghty suggests that we look at the structure of oppositions and difference in soap
- What 'binaries' exists and what does this tell us about gender in soap opera
WOMEN
- personal/home
MEN
- Work, social

Narrative Structure for Women
- Soaps were there to keep women busy, they could iron and do the house work whilst watching

Never Ending Story
- Soap is a continous narrative
- Unlink popular drama having a beginning, middle and an end
- Narrative resolution is not possible

The Changing Soap
- Geraghty - Soaps are no longer a women's genre
- Brunsden - Suggests soaps are being corrupted, it should remain women orientated
- Soapy hybridisation - means less 'female' forms becoming soapy e.g. Dr Who, TOWIE
- No longer depict the nuclear traditional family




WEEK 7 PRESENTATION - CHILDREN'S TELEVISION