Women, Soap Opera and New Generations of Feminists

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CST 11.3 | DOSSIER | Geraghty and Weissmann

Women, Soap Opera and New Generations of Feminists

Edited by

Christine Geraghty

University of Glasgow, UK

Elke Weissmann

Edge Hill University, UK

Abstract

At a time when television studies was still an emerging subject, the soap opera attracted a number of high-profile studies, largely conducted by feminists, that also set the agenda for television studies as a whole. While the soap opera no longer finds the same level of attention, the scholarship of that time remains important to the work of feminist television researchers of different generations. In this dossier, five researchers, three of them emerging, two of them mid-career, reflect on the importance of the scholarship to their own work and careers, how their own work expands on it and what it tells us about problems that feminist television scholarship might encounter tomorrow.

Key words: feminism, soap opera, women viewers, masculinity, television studies

Introduction

Elke Weissmann

Edge Hill University, UK

This dossier was born out of a frustration. As editors and peer reviewers, some of my colleagues and I had read a number of articles by scholars who had recently discovered television as a legitimate object of study. In writing about television as the new cinema (in the words of TheNew Yorker, 2012), these scholars were celebrating some television as art, as ‘better than cinema’, and that of course also meant, as so often, as better than most television (e.g. Johnson, 2007; Leverette et al., 2008). What these scholars didn’t seem to realise was that there was a whole subject discipline that had already rescued television as a legitimate object of study – some 30-odd years before. More importantly, it had done this without denigrating the rest of television, but rather had highlighted how the medium’s devaluation was based on gendered hierarchies of taste (Bourdieu, 1984; Brunsdon, 1989, 2000). Instead of feeding the distinctions connected to these hierarchies, as some of these recent articles did, scholars in the late 1970s and 1980s made evident how the most reviled of all genres within television included complex narratives and characters (e.g. Geraghty, 1981; Feuer, 1984) and offered many pleasures to audiences, particularly to (otherwise under-served) female viewers (e.g. Hobson, 1982; Ang, 1985). This genre was, of course, the soap opera, a genre that remains one of the most watched globally and has influenced many other, newer genres, not least the so-called ‘quality drama’ (Donatelli and Alward, 2002; Akass and McCabe, 2002) celebrated as ‘the new cinema’. What was frustrating – and also somewhat ‘exhausting’ (Geraghty, 2010) – was that this radical and ground-breaking scholarship on soap opera seemed to have been forgotten and that, as so often in feminist media studies (Thornham and Weissmann, 2013), we had to do the whole work yet again.

However, within our discipline of television studies, we can perhaps tell a different story. Ten years ago, for the inaugural issue of Critical Studies in Television, Janet McCabe and Kim Akass laid out some of the contributions of feminist television studies to the discipline as a whole and concluded that ‘feminist television criticism has played a crucial role in setting an agenda for television studies’ (2006: 119). Aspects of (early) feminist television studies have continued to make an important contribution to this journal and few others dedicate so much space to those elements of television which engaged those early feminist scholars: the invisibility of some forms of television (Critical Studies in Television, 2010), issues of representation (Wilde, 2009), or the specifics of scheduling (Critical Studies in Television, 2014). In what follows, we too want look back in order to look forward and indicate some additional ways that the research into soap operas in particular has been and could be further developed. The aim is to highlight the diversity of responses to this early scholarship and the role it continues to have as an inspiration for our engagement with television as a whole.

That such a focus on television as a whole should arise is perhaps not surprising. Much of the early scholarship on soap opera was precisely interested in understanding how television as a medium might function differently from film. Indeed, Richard Dyer, in his introduction to the BFI Monograph on Coronation Street (1960-present), spells this out explicitly. ‘This set of essays on Coronation Street’, he writes, ‘is primarily concerned with wider issues in understanding television than its title might suggest. Coronation Street is an example, a point of departure and of reference. It represents one of broadcasting’s most typical forms, the continuous serial’ (1981: 1). There are several points to highlight. First, Dyer at this stage feels the need to emphasise that a study of Coronation Street itself needs to be about other things; the use of the word ‘primarily’ suggests that the focus on a British example of a ‘continuous serial’ would not be enough for an academic study. The programme is presented as ‘a point of departure’: a case study that can help open up our understanding of television as a whole. Secondly, there is the use of the term ‘continuous serial’. As others (see Brunsdon, 2000; Geraghty, 2013) have pointed out, there is a long and protracted story to the use of the term, including what was, in 1981, a strong British prejudice on the part of TV producers and critics against the use of the US term, soap opera; the national context was and remains important within a feminist agenda. Thirdly, there is the conceptualisation of the continuous serial/ soap opera as ‘one of broadcasting’s most typical forms’. Soap opera, in this understanding, could represent television as a whole because it functioned in production, form, content and reception in ways typical for television. This, in my eyes, continues to be true despite, or perhaps precisely because, of the significant cultural, social, economic and technical changes that television has seen since the early 1980s.

The BFI monograph was but one of the many responses that the soap opera elicited at the time, but indicates the breadth of the research conducted. Subsequent publications on the soap opera engaged with ideas that actually originated in film studies, such as spectator positioning (Modleski, 1979; and Brunsdon’s well-considered response to this, 1981) or women’s genres (e.g. Feuer, 1984; Kuhn, 1984). Another strand responded to the shift towards a greater understanding of audiences (e.g. Hobson, 1982; Ang, 1985; Seiter et al., 1989). Overall, researchers were driven by a recognition of the importance of the genre to television institutions and audiences, and a sense that the genre – and television as a whole – remained denigrated and dismissed by cultural commentators.

More than legitimating television as a whole, however, the research into soap opera needs to be understood as a political – a feminist – project. It was radical and subversive, precisely because it took women’s pleasures seriously and recognised that soap opera offered spaces of intersection into traditional discourses of gender. As such, the research had a deeply feminist agenda. Indeed, the BFI’s Women and Film group that worked on Coronation Street came together as a feminist group interested in film and not as film academics who happened to be feminists. When they presented their research at the Edinburgh Television Festival, they were greeted with hostility by a defensive industry (Geraghty, 2013). Similarly, as Charlotte Brunsdon (1996) highlights, the feminist groupings at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies were not only perceived as disruptive, but also experienced for themselves the animosity towards their feminist interceptions, indicating how marginalised – and unwelcome – their discourses were at that time. These experiences of antagonism highlight how much work had to be done to open up traditional discourses to considerations of women’s views, stories and tastes. Considering this hard work, as feminist television scholars, we should remain mindful of our own histories and recognise the continuation of discourses that have been played out and fought about since the mid-1970s.

This dossier aims to reflect further on how this early work on soap opera in particular remains important to scholars of various kinds. In what follows, five scholars discuss the role of the early feminist television scholarship in their own work. They are at different stages of their careers ranging from mid-career to PhD status, from internationally known to nationally networked. PhD student Mita Lad returns us to aspects of audience studies and women’s pleasures, but draws greater attention to aspects of diasporic and religious experiences. PhD students Molly McCourt and Bridget Kies discuss the continuation and expansion of feminist work into the area of masculinity studies, and the importance of understanding contemporary and 1980s ‘quality’ TV drama in the light of the representation of men in primetime soaps. Kristyn Gorton, reflecting on her research into emotions, considers the continued importance of melodrama and excess for our understanding of past and contemporary television drama. Finally, Deborah Jermyn reflects on her educational and teaching career and recognises that, with things being what they are, shifts in research agendas might undermine future generations’ ability to conduct the research that we have been able to do. Overall, then, the contributions find evidence to make us cheer whilst also recognising limitations of the past and considerable worries for our futures.

Acknowledgement

This dossier began as a result of a long conversation with the CST editors, Kim Akass, Janet McCabe, Stephen Lacey, Simone Knox and Sarah Cardwell, and has benefitted from a long dialogue with my ECREA blog co-editor David Levente Palatinus. Thanks to my co-editor Christine Geraghty for her feedback.

Feminist television scholarship and the consumption of television by Indian Hindu diasporic women in the UK

Mita Lad

Edge Hill University, UK

I was first introduced to feminist television criticism during my undergraduate degree. The degree was a combination of film, television and radio studies, and teaching in the first year included the work of Charlotte Brunsdon and Christine Geraghty. This was part of an introduction to the canon of key work in television studies. However, as I progressed through the degree, my focus fell more and more on film studies in particular feminist film theory. My interest in film followed me into my MA, as I slowly began to explore feminist film criticism in an Indian cinematic context. For my masters' thesis I took a literary approach to explore adaptation in British and Indian cinema and their depictions of the British Raj with a particular emphasis on the representation of women. As I wrote my MA thesis and began writing proposals for PhD studentships, my interests remained in film studies, Indian media, culture and society and women.

It is unclear to me still how the jump from film to television studies came about. It took me a long time to work my way back to television studies. The move came gradually via new media studies; the jump from film to new media studies happened as a result of my job at the time. I was teaching interactive media studies where I was introduced to new adaptations of Hindu myths that I thought was an ideal move forward from my MA thesis. But as I developed my PhD, I realised, before I could or should explore diasporic Indian women’s consumption of animation and computer games, perhaps I should address the gap in media scholarship in terms of diasporic Indian women’s consumption of television. And so now I am seeking to analyse the television viewing of Gujarati–speaking, Indian Hindu diasporic women in an attempt to establish whether there is a desirable look that is invoked when they watch television and if so whether this look is masked by devotion or darshan. Darshan is a way of looking that is practised by Hindus all over the world. The term comes from Sanskrit and means ‘to look and to be looked at,’ and is therefore a two-way ocular gesture. Darshan is largely directed towards deities, sacred places as well as to ‘holy persons, such as sants (‘saints’), sadhus (‘holy men’) and sannysins (‘renouncers’)’ (Eck, 1981:5).

The work of feminist scholars like Ien Ang, Brunsdon, Geraghty and Dorothy Hobson was integral to building a picture of television and its consumption by women in the 1980s. However there are groups of women, for example black and Asian women, whose consumption at this time was overlooked. Ang and Ellen Seiter later acknowledged that they did not take ethnicity into consideration in the studies they conducted in the 1980s (Brunsdon, 2000:206); while bell hooks and others have argued about the white middle-class perspective that second-wave feminism explored. Recent debates, such as the keynote address and discussion, with Roxane Gay and Erica Jong, at the Decatur Book Festival in September 2015, also highlight this blindness towards ethnicity or questioning of difference. This blindness towards ethnicity has led to an understanding that the studies conducted by the scholars named above were, by default, studies of white women (Brunsdon, 2000:206).

This assumption of ‘whiteness’ in feminist television audience studies helps me to see not only the differences between ethnic minority female audiences and white female audiences but also the similarities. I grew up in the 1980s, and I was well aware of my mother’s consumption of soap operas, particularly Dallas (1978-1991). More often than not, I would end up watching as well and, even though I did not always understand what was going on, I found these shows compelling. I predominantly enjoyed the early evening soap opera Neighbours (1985-) I watched with my brothers at our grandparent’s house; so habitual was our viewing of this Australian siao that it become known as ‘gaandi Neighbours’ (gaandi = crazy) because my grandparents thought it was silly and a little crazy. While conducting my pilot survey for my PhD research, I began talking to a respondent about her television consumption and found that in the early 1980s, when she first arrived in the UK, she too would avidly watch prime-time soaps like Dallas. But now her consumption of television is of a very different nature and she consumes mainly religious (Hindu) programming, be it sermons and religious recitals or religious dramas. My mother’s television-viewing habitshave also changed and she now watches more Indian language programming, namely serials, than British or American programming.

The television scholarship of the 1980s did not address the consumption of US prime-time soap operas by women like my mother, and so the television scholarship of the 1980s does not allow me to develop a full understanding of the complex consumption patterns of Indian diasporic women living in the UK. Some insight is given to us through Marie Gillespie’s’ 1995 ethnographic study of television and its links to the creation of new identities amongst South-Asian youth living in Southall, west London. Even though Gillespie focused on young people, there was some discussion into family viewing practices and the viewing habits of women. Similarly, Hobson (1991) observed the consumption of soap operas of one Asian woman in a group of office workers. Because of this gap in research I have turned to the work of feminist scholars who have explored Indian television audiences in India, in particular the work of Purnima Mankekar (1999). Mankekar’s ethnographic study of Indian women in Delhi and their consumption of television which was conducted around the same time as thoseundertaken by Brunsdon, Hobson et al. in the 1980s. All these studies gave me work to build upon and has proved transformative in ways they echo each other. In an interview, Ang talks about the responses she had to reading about Chippewa Indian by Gail Valaskakis. Ang said she ‘was moved because I identified with the subordinate position from which the narrative was told’ (1989:29). This response led Ang to think about her own ethnicity and experiential difference in her consumption and discussions of media. Ang’s response to Valaskakis is not dissimilar to my own reaction to Mankekar’s research. Her work led me to think about my own ethnicity, identity and how this may affect my experiences of media consumption. This questioning heavily influenced my research, which is an exploration and interrogation of the ‘look’ as it relates to the viewing position of Gujarati-speaking, Indian Hindu diasporic women (living in north west England) and their consumption of Indian language television serials. I am interested inthe differences, if any, they see between English and Indian language programming. How do they see themselves in relation to the (female) characters they encounter in Indian language serials?

My research allows me to bring together with that of feminist scholars in the 1980s, including those who explored the responses of Indian women but also examined female audiences here in the UK. I have established how Mankaker’s work has helped me but I need to acknowledge also the usefulness of that of Ang and Brunsdon. Despite the lack of an ethnic dimension in their work or that of other scholars like Hobson, Mary Ellen Brown or Janice Radway, these studies have helped me in a number of ways. First and foremost the studies have provided a blueprint for the methods that have been used to study women as consumers of media, including the kinds of questions Hobson (1991) used in her interviews with council workers. Secondly, the studies have provided me with what has proved to be acceptable approaches to the discussion of topics the women of my study find inappropriate and/or taboo. When I cite other scholarly work my participants understand that the questions I am asking are genuinely for academic purposes as opposed to informal prying or snooping. Citing and referencing established studies by other academics also helps me to create some distance between the participants of my research and me. This distance is beneficial in two ways; firstly it allows me to remain critical; and secondly it allows the participant to see me as a researcher as well as a member of the community they have known for years. By blending feminist television scholarship that examined Indian and British television audiences, I have been able to use them as a base for exploring female audiences that have not yet been explored, like women in the Indian diaspora in the UK.