Feminist television scholarship and the consumption of ...repository.edgehill.ac.uk/8346/1/VOL11ISSUE3dossierFIN… · Web viewThis dossier was born out of a frustration. As editors

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


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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 The New 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

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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

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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

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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

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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


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

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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

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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 habits

have 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

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the same time as those undertaken 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 in the 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

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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.

Melodrama and the masculine turn

Bridget Kies and Molly McCourt,

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

As researchers into American masculinities and as feminists, we root our studies of men and

masculinities in early feminist television scholarship. Though we find that our canon differs

somewhat from our British colleagues. We are currently postgraduate students and instructors

at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Since several of our faculty studied

under John Fiske, the impact of cultural studies is felt strongly here. UWM was once home to

Tania Modleski, now Patrice Petro and Elana Levine; thus, approaching television studies

from the perspective of gender is a significant part of our curriculum. Additional standard

readings from earlier television studies included Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch’s 1983

essay ‘Television as a Cultural Forum’ and Robert Allen’s collection Channels of Discourse,

first published in 1987. Many of the contributions to early scholarship on the soap opera,

particularly those exploring women’s pleasure, are not read as widely in courses as those that

take historical approaches, like Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV (1992). In our teaching, we

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find that an emphasis on the contemporary often prevents us from introducing students to

early feminist scholarship.

In our current research, however, we find ourselves returning to the ideas of early

scholarship on soap opera and melodrama. In particular, we are interested in how discourses

on American ‘quality TV’ encourage the privileging of masculinity in contemporary culture

(Clark, 2014; Martin, 2013, 4; McCabe and Akass, 2007; Newman and Levine, 2012). We

find it fascinating that the ‘quality TV’ of the American ‘Third Golden Age of Drama’ is in a

melodramatic mode like traditional soap operas. We see our work as a bridge between earlier

studies examining the correlation between women’s tastes and industrial practices, such as

those by Annette Kuhn (1984) and Jane Feuer (1984), and discourses on recent quality

drama. While Bridget’s work is historical in nature and Molly’s emphasizes the

contemporary, our combined research argues that dramas in the 1980s took a ‘masculine turn’

and that, currently, we are experiencing a return of the ‘quality’ label to serial dramas for and

about women.

Bridget’s research examines the origins of the masculine turn in American serial

dramas through industrial practices, generic evolutions and representations of masculinities

that addressed male audiences. This is the corollary to the many studies of network strategies

to court the quality audience of working women with disposable incomes, such as Julie

D’Acci’s comprehensive study of Cagney and Lacey (1994), and work examining women’s

taste and pleasure, such as Ang’s study of Dallas fans (1985). Bridget builds on extensive

previous research into prime-time serial melodramas, like Dallas and Dynasty (1981-89),

especially Christine Geraghty’s labelling of those series as ‘patriarchal soaps’ (1991: 62).

However, Bridget is equally interested in action series that have received less attention, such

as Magnum PI (198-1988) and The A-Team (1983-1987; Horace Newcomb, indeed,

described Magnum PI as a ‘cumulative narrative’ (1985), which Jason Mittell sees as a

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forerunner to the ‘narrative complexity’ in recent quality dramas (2006). In these series, the

central characters’ portrayals of masculinity are more sensitive and emotional than their

cinematic counterparts (see, for instance, Jeffords, 1993) and Magnum’s (played by Tom

Sellick) emotional expressivity and display of physique were designed to appeal to women

(Flitterman, 1985). Just as prime-time serial melodramas were ‘defeminised’ for the broader

primetime audience, including men, action series were ‘demasculinised’ to capture additional

female viewers. Bridget’s research is interested in the repercussions this evolution had on

traditionally masculine genres.

The masculine turn that began in the 1980s sees its echoes in recent ‘quality’ cable

dramas. In series like Mad Men (2007-2015), the protagonists are ‘difficult men’ who are

‘unhappy, morally compromised, complicated, and deeply human’ (Martin 2013, 4). These

characters are modelled on patriarchs like J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) of Dallas and Blake

Carrington (John Forsythe) of Dynasty and have the expressivity and emotional turmoil found

in action heroes like Magnum. 1980s primetime serials utilised patriarchal characters to

appeal to male viewers while maintaining a feminine address for the larger audience of

women. Recent quality dramas, by contrast, are more invested in smaller audiences mainly

composed of men (Lotz. 2014: 63).

Building on scholarship examining the masculinisation of recent serial dramas,

Molly’s research examines Scandal (2012-), a prime-time serial created by a woman and with

a female protagonist. Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), an African-American woman who

runs her own consulting business in Washington, D.C., is an insider to the myriad

controversies and secrets of the White House. As Olivia works alongside the fictional

president, their gender roles are reversed, so that she is the powerful figure while he is the

emotional dolt in need of her help. More importantly, Olivia is not exceptional within the

series narrative; there are consistently several other tough, resilient women characters.

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Through this deliberate gender role reversal, Scandal differs from ‘quality’ dramas with

‘difficult men’.

Drawing on what Ang calls ‘identification with the melodramatic imagination’ (1985,

135), Molly argues that female audiences identify aspirationally with Olivia through their

admiration of her business and political successes in addition to her fashion and makeup.

Thus, Olivia serves as a bridge between the patriarchal antiheroes and glamorous women of

1980s prime-time serials but also has likeability as a central character trait. Aesthetically

speaking, popular discourses on Olivia’s costumes recall the fanaticism for Alexis

Carrington’s (played by Joan Collins) wardrobe in Dynasty. As Feuer highlights, the love of

Dynasty’s female audiences for Alexis’ fashion sense led to the creation of the ‘Dynasty

Collection’ at the department store Bloomingdale’s (1995: 142). However, while audiences

admired Alexis’ pantsuits, they also found subversive pleasure in hating the character. Today,

the clothing boutique Limited’s ‘Scandal Line’ similarly offers fans the opportunity to don

ensembles inspired by Olivia’s wardrobe (Lawson, 2014). Olivia’s ability to battle corruption

in the American government while pulling off her polished look makes her someone

audiences can admire for both style and character. Shonda Rhimes’ creation of a character

like Olivia in a political (and typically masculine) setting, Molly argues, signals the close of

the ‘Golden Age’ of ‘difficult men’ and a return of the ‘quality’ label to female-centred

serials.

Another aspect that sets Scandal apart from the recent male-centred serials is creative

presence of Rhimes, the series’ remarkably successful showrunner. Brunsdon, writing in

2000, reflects on the ways ‘female agency’ has been examined in television studies: women

as producers, as image, as audience. The last two have been the most significant to research

on soap operas, leading Brunsdon to assert that feminist scholars must pay more attention to

women as producers of television. Within American television, the number of women

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showrunners is paltry enough that Rhimes’ success as the creator of several hit series for the

network ABC has garnered significant attention in the popular press, though more needs to be

done within academic circles. For instance, a piece on the cultural blog, Salon, celebrates

how Rhimes ‘takes all of the tropes of the soap opera that are so often dismissed as being

trivial and not coincidentally female and deposits them squarely, unabashedly, at times

ludicrously on a world historical stage, a move familiar to Leo Tolstoy and Cecil B. DeMille’

(Paskin, 2012). By comparing Rhimes to a respected novelist and Hollywood director, the

blog post refers to the series simultaneously as mass entertainment and art—or quality

television. As the creator and showrunner of Scandal, Rhimes functions as an extension of

Brunsdon’s concept of female agency, in contrast to the brooding men who created the

‘difficult men’ serials of television’s ‘Third Golden Age’.

Collectively, then, our research examines the relationship between masculinity and

melodrama. In particular, we are interested in how the ‘quality’ male dramas of the ‘Third

Golden Age’ evolved from 1980s prime-time serials for women and how in the present

moment the ‘quality’ label is making a return to television for women. As the example of the

masculine turn and feminine return in serial drama demonstrates, studies into men and

masculinities are central to feminist television scholarship. As we predict the end of the

masculine turn is heralded by series like Scandal, we see our work as part of the greater

feminist lineage that investigates and legitimates women’s taste and genres. It follows, then,

that television scholarship should return to ideas from the 1980s that first began to unpack the

significance of women’s representation and pleasures. We propose extending this scholarship

to greater consideration of women as producers and showrunners who significantly affect

what kinds of representations are seen on screen and for what kinds of audiences.

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Melodrama, vicarious pleasure and 1980s feminist television criticism

Kristyn Gorton,

University of York, UK

My initial interest in feminist television criticism was piqued by Tania Modleski’s Loving

with a Vengeance (1982), which I first encountered in Trinity College, Oxford while studying

Jane Austen. I can still feel the chair beneath me as I sat at my desk and read Modleski’s

potent analysis of mass-produced feminine narratives: Harlequin romance, female Gothics

and soaps. I quickly moved on to Janic Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) and Ien

Ang’s Watching Dallas (1985) and, in all respects, I remain enchanted and compelled by

these books. They informed the approach to television audiences I outlined in Media

Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion (2009) and, as I shall demonstrate, continue to

help me in my current research. So this early work remains as important to me now, as it was

decades ago. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also features heavily in my teaching on television

audiences and my students embrace the relevance of this work to their emotional engagement

with television.

Charolotte Brunsdon’s The Feminist, the Housewife, and the Soap Opera (2000)

reminds us that the 1980s saw feminist researchers take a renewed interest in romance fiction.

Modleski and Radway considered the place of romance fiction in women’s lives while

academics such as Dorothy Hobson (1982), Ang (1985) and Terry Lovell (1987) brought new

importance and significance to the soap genre. In the act of re-valuing soaps, as Brunsdon’s

work explores, two central characters emerged: ‘the feminist television critic and the

character in some ways produced as her other—the ordinary woman, or housewife’ (2000: 4)

and in the relationship between these two emerges what Brunsdon refers to as ‘the female

intellectual.’

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Ang argues that while watching soap operas women are allowed to pause their own

self-construction; she calls these moments, ‘moments of peace, of truth, of redemption, a

moment in which the complexity of the task of being a woman is fully realised and accepted’

(1997: 165). She further argues that ‘whilst indulgence in a melodramatic identity in real life

will only signify pathetic weakness . . . fantasy and fiction constitute a secure space in which

one can be excessively melodramatic without suffering the consequences’ (1997: 165). Ang’s

theorisation of the negotiation of self and other through melodrama is more relevant than ever

in today’s ‘complex television’ landscape (Mittell, 2015). Indeed, because of the ways in

which melodrama has entered into the fabric of contemporary television, 1980s feminist

television criticism of melodrama and pleasure is more timely than ever and yet this work is

often overlooked or neglected because of its association with soap opera.

Re-visiting Television Melodrama

An ongoing revaluation of melodrama within film and television studies can be evidenced

through recent publications such as Linda Williams’s On the Wire (2014), Michael Stewart’s

Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television (2014) and Jason Mittell’s Complex

Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (2015). In 1984 Jane Feuer

adeptly travelled through the criticism on melodrama from Peter Brooks’ now canonical The

Melodramatic Imagination (1974) through Douglas Sirk’s ‘distanciation’ to Chuck

Kleinham’s argument that ‘the raw material of any melodrama consists in exposing

contradictions of capitalism in the personal sphere’ (1984: 7). Excess is central to the

theoretical work that Feuer surveys, ‘not merely as aesthetic but as ideological‘ (1984: 7-8,

author’s italics). She argues that emotion is linked to the serial structure—as a means of

providing temporary closure—and that ‘serial form and multiple plot structure appear to give

television melodrama a greater potential for multiple and aberrant readings than do other

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forms of popular narrative’ (1984: 15). Sirk’s melodramas could not contain the narrative

excess, and the consequent eruptions paved the way for contradiction and critique to emerge

but television serials contain this excess and keep it in play. Thus, ‘the continuing

melodramatic serial seems to offer an especially active role for the spectator’ which leads

Feuer to conclude that the ‘emergence of the melodramatic serial in the 1980s represents a

radical response to and expression of cultural contradictions’ (1984: 15-16, author’s italics).

Feuer’s argument is particularly important for the way she situates the audience as active and

her recognition that excess provides a movement for emotion.

I have set out Feuer’s argument because excess becomes a key issue in Linda

Williams’ On the Wire (2014). Williams argues that, ‘There is such a thing as good, rich,

complex, socially relevant, and politically efficacious melodrama, and the case of The Wire

(2002-2008) offers an opportunity to grasp what American genre-driven television culture

can offer at its best’ (2014: 90). In part to contradict the critical emphasis on ‘excess,’ she

points out that there are ‘no set aesthetics of melodrama’ (2014: 83). This lack of set

aesthetics reminds us of Christin Geraghty’s questions about how we can articulate

judgments about the aesthetics of television drama when melodrama is often dismissed as

simply ‘stirring up emotions’. She suggests that value should be attributed to ‘certain kinds of

acting, visual style, writing style or narrative formulations which can broadly be recognized

as melodramatic’ (2003: 32-33).

Pleasure and Excess

Williams begins her critique as a ‘fan,’ a ‘convert,’ someone who fed her ‘“hunger for

fiction” via television’ (2014:1-2). And much of what is at stake here is the pleasure

audiences take in melodrama and the way feminists and postfeminists write about that

pleasure. In her work on postfeminism and domestic goddesses (Martha Stewart, Martha

17


Rosler and Nigella Lawson), Brunsdon describes an ‘Ur’ article that many feminist scholars,

including herself, wrote after the initial defence of soaps by feminist scholars mentioned

earlier. This exemplary article ‘explores a TV program or film that . . . is usually addressed to

a feminine audience within the vocabulary and concerns of feminism. This usually involves

setting up what is proposed as an "obvious" feminist reading of the text in which the text

itself—and the heroine—fail some sort of test’ (2005: 113). Rather than dismissing the

programme however, the ‘Ur’ article goes to rescue the text from ‘the harsh dismissal . . . on

"feminist" grounds’ (2005: 113). As Brunsdon argues, instead of dismantling a patriarchal

academy, scholars were now at odds with second-wave feminism that was perceived as

holding back the modern woman from articulating her pleasures (2005: 113). Feminist

television theorists now considered the ways in which television texts, from Ally McBeal

(1997-2002) to Girls (2012-), articulated contradiction and ambivalence about feminine

pleasures and, as Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read argue, highlight ‘the struggle, but not the

impossibility, of “having it Ally”’ (2002: 247).

In writing a defence of her pleasure in The Wire through a defence of melodrama,

Williams essentially writes an ‘Ur’ article on melodrama. She opposes the tendency amongst

academics and journalists to elevate The Wire by identifying it as realism, rather than

denigrating it through the label of melodrama. But Williams is also writing in defence of the

pleasure she has found in such a text and its relevance, along the lines of the defence of soap

operas in 1980s feminist television criticism. And yet, this research is noticeably absent.

Indeed, both Williams and Mittell distance melodrama as found in The Wire, and in ‘complex

television,’ from the kind of melodrama identified in prime-time soaps through the notion of

excess. Williams might argue that there is a ‘shared DNA’ between soaps and serial

melodrama but she sees the latter as having evolved differently, while Mittell opts for the

‘ubiquity of melodrama’ but argues that, ‘If we separate excess from melodrama, we can see

18


1980s programs such as Hill Street Blues and Dynasty as coexisting in a spectrum of affective

morality and serial storytelling, rather than as polar opposites’ (2015: 245). This enables

Mittell to break down, in a useful way, some dichotomies such as those between the ‘trashy

sensibility’ of prime-time soaps and the ‘aesthetically mature’ ‘quality drama,’ (2015: 245)

but in separating excess from melodrama, we risk losing both an understanding of the way in

which excess functions affectively—as something that allows for fantastical escapes,

moments of ‘peace and truth’ that flourish in contemporary drama—and of the intellectual

feminist force that powered such critiques. As Geraghty suggested, we need to return to the

aesthetics of melodrama in order to critically re-value the way excess functions, and in so

doing, begin another project of revaluing soaps, pleasure and 1980s feminist television

criticism in order to better understand modern serial melodrama.

Conclusion

Mike White’s Enlightened (2011-13) is a perfect example of the kind of melodrama Williams

applauds, and is evidence that her argument extends beyond The Wire. In Enlightened we

move past the domestic space, the previous locale of melodrama, into the workplace. In this

sense the series pushes the location of the melodramatic into the twenty-first century. As

women have entered into the public sphere, so has the claustrophobia and emotional

restriction that once characterised the domestic in melodrama. And this new site of restriction

is where excess becomes particularly important as a means of expressing the anxiety some

women experience. Indeed, one of my initial interests in thinking about affect and emotion

was in relation to the popular US series, Ally McBeal. Using Ang’s work on ‘melodramatic

identifications’ enabled me to consider moments of fantasy within the text (such as the

‘dancing baby’) as examples of the ambivalence women feel about balancing career with

19


motherhood (2009). In this instance, excess can be figured as the anxiety some women

experience when trying to consider what is important to them.

Ang links the pleasure audiences take from watching serialised television with the

‘ever changing emotions’ they experience (1985: 46; see also Gorton 2009: 83-84). As she

writes: ‘in life emotions are always being stirred up, . . . life is a question of falling down and

getting up again’ (1985: 46, author’s italics). This rhythm of getting up and falling down is

integral to the story in Nurse Jackie (2009-2015), for example. Viewers are taken on an

emotional journey through Jackie’s (played by Edie Falco) addiction and allowed a space in

which to reflect upon, experience and take pleasure in her destructive behaviour, her

rebellious approach and ultimately, her failure to cope with the demands of a neoliberal

workplace (Gorton, 2016b).

A similar movement of feeling can be found in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley

(2014-) and can indeed be figured, to some extent, as a Northern structure of feeling insofar

as Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) is seen to have a resiliency that comes in part from

the sense of place she finds in the North (Gorton, 2016a). The women in Happy Valley are far

from victims; rather they heroically resolve complex feelings and find a deeper connection to

the communities they live in. In the first series, Cawood is seen hallucinating the body of her

dead daughter at moments of high anxiety. The sequences are not flashbacks and we do not

return to the moment Cawood finds her daughter’s body hanging in her bedroom. Instead

these are spectres, ghosts haunting Cawood’s psyche. They are also gruesome; the sudden

camera shift to a dead body jars the viewer and creates significant discomfort. They are

examples of excess; they exceed the ‘real’ of the fictional world and create a space where

grief and anxiety can be explored.

Excess is an integral component of the emotional fabric of melodrama, not something

to eschew or dismiss because of its ‘trashy sensibility.’ The work of 1980s feminist television

20


theorists is crucial to an understanding of the pleasure audiences take in what they watch, the

emotional engagement they form with the text and a re-evaluation of excess in melodrama.

Risky business? doing feminist TV studies

Deborah Jermyn

University of Roehampton, UK

In 1989, when I proposed to apply for a Film/Lit degree at the University of Warwick, there

were still very few places in the UK where one could do a degree in Film. My choice

produced a lot of raised eyebrows; wasn’t this a dubious subject, a suspect pursuit, for a

‘proper’ student? To arrive there and find I could also study television within my degree felt

like I was making another leap. It is hard now to capture the sense of liberation and

anticipation that came with realising one could take this landscape ‘seriously’ in a university

at this time. Equally, however, I encountered endless cynicism for signing up to study it as

people pointed me gleefully to media reports about degrees dumbing down, a ‘story’ that

continues to be recycled with predictable regularity. At the same time, this was an era too

marked by media preoccupation both with ‘ladettes’ and the anti-feminist ‘backlash’ as Susan

Faludi (1991) put it, and I recall difficult soul-searching about how I could situate myself as a

feminist while also wearing lipstick, as we moved ever further into the third wave. But as an

undergraduate identifying both as a feminist and a TV student in this kind of anxious climate,

where both these identities were liable to be disparaged (and indeed still are), the realisation

that feminist scholarship on soap opera was a driving force in the burgeoning field we were

studying was hugely gratifying. To pay attention to this most derided yet ubiquitous

‘woman’s genre’ and to show why it mattered seemed a political act in itself, and making the

21


voices of women viewers central in many instances to that project felt to be verging on some

kind of insurrection.

I can still remember the delight that came with seeing the jacket of Christine

Geraghty’s 1991 book Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps, featuring

portrait photos of Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington (Joan Collins) and EastEnders’ Dot Cotton

(June Brown), and published in the same year as Faludi’s Backlash in fact. In a single cover

image the familiar ‘trashy’ TV shows and women stars of my teenage years, and the

enjoyment they had brought, were transformed into something else – the subject of

worthwhile critical enquiry – and with it the pleasure I took in ‘feminine’ popular culture

brought a whole new set of rewards. Not only was it the case that enjoying soaps and other

‘women’s genres’ didn’t make you witless, as much of the media would have it; exploring the

sundry different reasons why it was this presumption that was arguably witless was both a

legitimate scholarly occupation and a feminist enterprise. Feminist research was setting

agendas, carving out spaces for what we’d now call ‘blue sky thinking’. I felt instinctively

that I had found my ‘academic home’, and by the end of my third year, I knew I wasn’t ready

to stop here.

Two decades on, and I am still not ready to stop, albeit with new foci and from the

other side of a desk in a university office. And what strikes me as I try to reflect on this

history, is both how much has been achieved since then and yet how little things have

changed in many respects. Increasingly I find myself contemplating how vigilant we have to

remain, even though our subject area is much more vastly populated than it once was. Even

though feminist TV Studies can now claim both the kind of weight that comes with being

able to chart a disciplinary history and, should it wish, ‘a canon’ of work, there is still a

strong feeling in the academy and the public domain which suggests that our work is

something less than respectable, not academic in the worthiest sense. And while all scholars

22


of TV or popular culture face this argument to some degree, it seems to be intensified when

what you do is ‘women’s stuff’.

My experience of writing a few years ago about Sex and the City (1998-2004)—a TV

show that proved groundbreaking for women’s television—brings this into sharp relief. The

contempt that news of my research prompted in some quarters (simply for being about Sex

and the City in and of itself, and not in relation to any specific discussion I might proffer) was

sometimes bewildering. Perhaps it was predictable that the 1990s undergraduate who said she

was a feminist but still liked wearing lipstick would end up finding SATC such a fertile and

gratifying text, even while seeing that its privileged milieu and enchantment with

consumerism made it messy and inconstant, pleasurable and maddening. I was deluded

though, if I thought that by this time in my academic life, it would be a given that I could just

get on with this work. Instead, I’ve had the finer points of postfeminism ‘mansplained’ to me

in case I didn’t realise that feminism is still needed today, along with the advice that SATC is

simply a pointless and rather shameful waste of energy. (Interestingly, this came from older

white male academics seemingly able to see the problematic operation of privilege at stake in

SATC, but not their own sense of privilege in telling me how to spend my time as an

academic). And it’s not just me of course. The publication of Kim Akass and Janet McCabe’s

landmark collection Reading Sex and the City in 2004 was greeted by vitriol in certain

quarters of the press, a response which, as Rachel Moseley noted, indicated a media made

nervous by how ‘the serious attention to a popular media text that this collection represents

might constitute an equally serious threat to the institutions which produce it’ (2005: 127).

What concerns me about all this, apart from the tedious work of having to ward off

patronising commentary, is the impact this kind of discourse could have on the research that

our next generation of feminist TV scholars feel able to pursue. In a climate in which British

academics must think continually about research ‘impact’, Research Excellence Framework

23


scores and grant applications, research on popular contemporary ‘women’s TV’, and

particularly work which focuses on examining texts rather than being empirical or policy-

driven, risks being seen as a reckless choice, less respectable and thus less ‘bankable’ than

more historical or industrial, or just less obviously gendered TV research. It may seem at one

level that we live in an era sympathetic to feminist TV Studies, as the media seemingly

become increasingly alert and answerable to the need to address their dreadful track record of

marginalising women both on- and off-screen (for example, in the BBC’s recent pledge to fill

half of on-air roles with women by 2020). Academic commentary has importantly informed

some of this debate and shift in policy. But this is not to be taken as evidence that feminist

media studies no longer need to be mindful about its place in the academy. Add to this the

broader context in the UK in 2015 of the proposed elision of examples from women’s history

in the A-level Politics examination (reversed by Education Secretary and Equalities Minister

Nicky Morgan only after public protests), and we have to ask will the potential feminist TV

scholars of tomorrow look around them and think it’s simply smarter, if they want to progress

in the academy, to forget about working on ‘women’s stuff’?

Neither is it just within feminist TV Studies that one has to remain alert to these

hierarchies. I say this as someone who has moved on from Sex and the City to writing a book

about . . . Nancy Meyers. If you are uncertain as to who she is and reaching for Google, you

might instead recall her as ‘The Queen of Rom-com’, a moniker assigned to her by numerous

reviewers as the director behind such films as What Women Want (2000), The Holiday (2003)

and It’s Complicated (2009) (Jermyn, forthcoming 2017). I have more than once presented

work on this research to an assembled body of film students and academics who have

collectively admitted to having no idea who ‘Nancy Meyers’ is, most of them being generally

happy to concede that this is because Hollywood ‘chick flicks’ don’t register on their radar.

But a prominent scholar also asked me whether, since no one had yet researched Meyers

24


extensively, it wasn’t the case that the project had already shown itself to be uncalled for,

with the implication that it was therefore redundant and unnecessary? Certainly, it is hard to

see an ‘impact’ narrative emerging from this project in the way we have come to understand

impact. But the question was asked specifically, I think, because the project was seen as

more ‘women’s stuff’ drawn from contemporary popular culture. Would it also have been

posed if I had been introducing new work about an under-explored male director of ‘serious’

genre films drawn from another filmmaking context? Maybe.

Seeing this on the page, it is easy to feel anxiety, to be despondent, angry or

frustrated. But when I take a look around me, I breathe just a little more easily. Because

every year, when I teach my undergraduate ‘Screen Women’ module there is at least one

woman student who unknowingly prompts déjà vu when, struggling to situate herself in the

landscape she is learning about, she apprehensively says something along the lines of, ‘The

thing is, I believe in feminism . . . and I like to wear lipstick and stuff too’. Indeed, in the last

two or three years particularly, increasingly I see students ready (once more) to less

ambiguously prefix this statement with the declaration: ‘I am a feminist’. It would be

erroneous to elide the social and political differences between then and now, just as it would

be wrong not to acknowledge the many intersectional differences at work in our classrooms

and in the ways we watch TV. But at these moments, in a climate where postfeminism has

supposedly had two decades to bed down, I see students still grappling with what they find to

be the enduring tensions at work in that messy matrix of feminism and women and femininity

and popular culture, still looking around them and pondering their TV screens as they try to

make sense of it all, and starting to become the next generation who won’t stop here. The

pressing issue is: how do we continue to ensure the increasingly neoliberal academy

continues to facilitate a space for them?

25


Acknowledgements

With thanks to Caroline Bainbridge, Christine Geraghty, Su Holmes, Janet McCabe and Elke

Weissmann for their helpful thoughts in the writing of this piece.

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Author biographies

Elke Weissmann is Reader in Television and Film at Edge Hill University. Her previous

publications include Renewing Feminisms (edited with Helen Thornham; 2013) and

‘Women, Television, and Feelings: Theorising Emotional Difference of Gender in

32


SouthLAnd and Mad Man’ (in Emotions in Contemporary TV Series, 2016). She is vice-

chair of the TV Studies Section of the European Communication Research and Education

Association (ECREA).

Christine Geraghty is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Glasgow. Her

publications include Now a Major Motion Picture Film Adaptations of Literature and

Drama (2008) and individual studies of My Beautiful Laundrette (2004) and Bleak House

(2012). She is on the editorial board of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and

on the advisory boards of Adaptation, CST and Screen.

Mita Lad is a third year PhD candidate at Edge Hill University. Her PhD is an audience

study of women from Indian Diasporic community and their daily viewings of Hindi

serials. She gained a BA (Hons) degree in Film, Television and Radio Studies from

Staffordshire University and an MA in Film Studies from the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Bridget Kies is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she

teaches courses for the film studies and LGBT Studies programs. Her research has been

published in Transformative Works and Cultures, International Journal of the Book,

Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, Science Fiction Film and Television, and the

Journal of Popular Romance Studies, as well as in several edited collections.

Molly McCourt is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she

teaches courses for the English, Film Studies and Art History programmes. Her research

interests included representations of American masculinity in film, television and

33


narratives of national identity and collective memory. In 2015, she published essays in

collections on Mad Men and The Rocky Horror Show.

Kristyn Gorton is Reader in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the

University of York. Her publications include Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and

Emotion (2009) and Emotion Online: Theorising Affect on the Internet (2013) and she is

currently writing a book titled, Inheriting British Television: Memories, Archives and

Industries (forthcoming). She has published in a range of journals, including Feminist

Theory, Studies in European Cinema, Feminist Review, Journal of British Cinema and

Television and CST.

Deborah Jermyn is Reader in Film & Television at the University of Roehampton. Her

books include Sex and the City (2009) and Prime Suspect (2010) and she has edited or co-

edited numerous collections, most recently, Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing:

Freeze Frame (Palgrave, 2015). Her essay on The Fall and Prime Suspect USA was

published by Crime, Media, Culture earlier in 2016. She is currently writing a book about

the director Nancy Meyers.

34

Documents

Feminist television scholarship and the consumption of ...repository.edgehill.ac.uk/8346/1/VOL11ISSUE3dossierFIN… · Web viewThis dossier was born out of a frustration. As editors