Life's little problems...and pleasures: Watching soap operas

This study uses ethnographic methods to investigate the pleasures and displeasures of watching television soap operas. The author interviewed over twenty-five women who watch daytime serials and spoke to them about their viewing experiences and their feelings about their practice. The dissertation offers a symptomatic reading of this polyphony of voices.;The first chapter, the theoretical matrix, looks at the history of how "soap opera audiences" have been constructed and explores the theoretical and political assumptions underlying those constructions. A model is offered that sees soap opera viewing as a dynamic and complex social process that involves both private as well as collective fantasies and compensations. It suggests that the viewer and the text exist in an interdiscursive and mutually constituting space with different viewers bringing shared cultural conventions and personal histories to the viewing event.;The second chapter discusses the narrative discourses of soap operas, the structures that provoke the viewer's imagination. The study is attentive to the genre's institutional framework and its intertextual resonance. It considers the common story motifs and rhetorical tropes, the spatial and temporal unfolding, and the characters and their characterizations as highly conventionalized, yet politically and metaphorically complex. It attempts to situate these discourses with the conflicts and "felicities" of home life, proposing that soap operas speak to the homemaker/caretaker's pleasure by both valorizing her service and offering her comfort in the enclosed world of the family.;The third chapter raises questions about the power of these pleasures. It explores the politics of emptiness and resilience: how and why soap operas are a significant part of women's lives. It looks at how women recognize themselves as soap opera "fans" and suggests that there is often both fulfillment and despair in this recognition. The study acknowledges that in family life, there is seldom a rigid opposition between duty and desire, and that fantasy and daily life are not opposed dualities, but co-exist in a dialectic, as differentiations that inform each other.