Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora

Beschreibung

This book is a transnational ethnographic study of Sri Lankan women’s television soap opera cultures in Australia and Sri Lanka. Both Sri Lankan migrant women’s soap opera clubs in Melbourne, Australia, and female friendship groups watching soap operas in Colombo, Sri Lanka, are examined. Conducted in the sociopolitical backdrop of post-civil war Sri Lanka, this study examines how nationalist ideologies of womanhood shape meanings in Sri Lankan television soap operas that predominantly cater to female audiences. How women interpret, resist, deconstruct, and reconstruct good-bad binaries of women’s bodies, freedoms, and rights as represented in the soap operas are mapped, providing an ethnographic examination of how nationalist meanings translate into cultural capital in spaces of television production and reception, in national and diasporic everyday lives.

Shashini Gamage is Research Associate of the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, examining gender, media, and migration. She holds a PhD in Media and Communications from La Trobe University. She is a journalist and fi lmmaker, and has produced documentaries on women, peace, and security during the civil war in Sri Lanka. 

This book is a transnational ethnographic study of Sri Lankan women’s television soap opera cultures in Australia and Sri Lanka. Both Sri Lankan migrant women’s soap opera clubs in Melbourne, Australia, and female friendship groups watching soap operas in Colombo, Sri Lanka, are examined. Conducted in the sociopolitical backdrop of post-civil war Sri Lanka, this study examines how nationalist ideologies of womanhood shape meanings in Sri Lankan television soap operas that predominantly cater to female audiences. How women interpret, resist, deconstruct, and reconstruct good-bad binaries of women’s bodies, freedoms, and rights as represented in the soap operas are mapped, providing an ethnographic examination of how nationalist meanings translate into cultural capital in spaces of television production and reception, in national and diasporic everyday lives.

Provides a transnational ethnography that extends previous ethnographic research on media audiences into new epistemological terrains Traverses two social and cultural topographies, bringing a unique context of diversity to the predominantly Euro-American settings of media audience studies A valuable tool for industry-based media researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and higher degree research

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Shashini Gamage

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transnational media diasporic media audience research ethnography media anthropology teledrama soap opera immigrant media gender South Asia Australia

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