Ideological Analysis Of British Soap Opera

Soap Opera and Feminine Text: An Ideological Analysis Of British Soap Opera

There seems to be general agreement that such ‘feminine discourse’ operates most effectively in relation to soap opera.

Feminist critics have been so interested in soap opera because they are, essentially, women’s programmes, or so it is believed. The very extent of recent scholarship on soap opera, much of it influenced by feminist paradigms, provokes reflection.

Ann Kaplan, for instance, in her 1987 review of feminist television criticism, points to the centrality of feminists work on soap opera of the increased attention to the genre from the mid-1970’s.

Robert Allen traces the contours of research of soap opera in his 1985 book, Speaking Of Soap Operas, outlining the growth in social science research on the genre between 1972 and 1982.

Feminist interest in television programmes was from the beginning formulated through ideas about the audience. Several early analyses of soap opera make hypotheses about how women respond to soap opera, and many later studies attempt to test these ideas.

It is, however, important to note that the early work on soaps tended to come out of work concerned at a more general level with media directed at female audiences.

Early feminist approaches to the media were usually within a realist paradigm, comparing real women, or the reality of women’s lives, with the available images thereof.

Real women were found to be imperfectly formed, hard-working, multi-ethnic, and extremely various in contrast to the dominant ways in which they were represented.

These feminists wanted to argue that what we understand as real women, indeed, how we experience our selves as such, is inextricably bound up with these images of femininity. That is, they argue, it is not clear what ‘a woman’ is, except through representation.

Women have been investigated as the viewers of soap operas, and the genre is widely and popularly believed to be feminine, despite stubborn evidence that it is not only women who watch.

Early feminist writing on the media, which was strongly dependent on the idea of ‘stereotyping’, characterised the representation of women as dominated by two figures, the sex-object and the housewife. Thus, the early feminist responses to soap opera were simply hostile.

Terry Lovell defends both the watching and the study of the British soap opera “Coronation Street” in these terms:

“Coronation Street offers its women viewers certain ‘structures of feeling’ which are prevalent in our society, and which are only partially recognised in the normative patriarchal order.

It offers women a validation and celebration of those interests and concerns which are seen as properly theirs within the social world they inhabit.

Soap opera may be the opium of masses of women, but, like religion, it may also be, if not ‘the signs of the oppressed’, yet a context in which women can ambiguously express both good humoured acceptance of their oppression and recognition of that oppression and some equally good humoured protest against it ..”

This mild defence of soap opera comes after nine pages of closely argued theoretical writing about why the genre is worthy of notice.

Not only do soap operas deal with the subjects that have been of particular concern to women under patriarchy, i.e., domestic matters, kinship and sexuality, but they also do it in a way that ‘minister questions, and acknowledges the contradictions in women’s lives.

• E.Ann KAPLAN “Feminist Criticism and Television”, in Robert ALLEN [Ed.], (1987), “Channels Of Discourse”, Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, pp 211-253.
• Robert ALLEN (1983), “Speaking Of Soap Operas”, Chapel Hill, NC: University Of North Carolina
• See, for example, Josephine KING & Mary SCOTT [Eds] (1977), “Is This Your Life: Images Of Women In The Media”, London: Virago
• Terry LOVELL “Ideology And Coronation Street”, in R DYER et al (1981), “Coronation Street”, London : BFI pp 51.

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