Purple is the new me: Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera

The Bold and the Beautiful

Days of our Lives

Dynasty

DOL hourglass

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ratxU_z8uNM

This chapter narrows the focus to the production of fictions in soap opera affect our lives, the soap operas which were for female audiences in early 1st in 1930's.

Soap operas offer a fictional experience which intertwines with the audiences' everyday lives, a circulation between events of public debates we learn abt in the news become a subject in a soap opera episode and affect the public view of these events in their gender and social contradictions such as child abuses, domestic violence and so on.

Soap operas are considered to express intense feelings, thats why men dislike to acknowledge their place in it.

Soap opera producers and makers are accused of showing the stereotype woman instead of the image of real women, however the representation of man and woman, are also a construction instead of a reflection of our gender definitions, meanings and identities.

Media forms constitute a major site to define what is to be taken as "real", in an constant on-going struggle to win support for certain cultural values over others.

The gendering of cultural forms is divided to 2 categories: high culture that represents what is masculine and realism vs mass media that has feminizing characteristics and based on expressing feelings. however, gendering of genres is in a continuous struggle to define what counts as masculine and feminine in our societies.

The genre theory can be explained as number of concepts that together form a productive approach to the work of soap operas within the context of the media industries. When two products have the same genre they have recognizable similarities, which lead to predictability.

Filmmaking is very costly, and gendering not only helps standerize the production process but also stabilizes an audience through creating a bond a kind of "brand loyalty".

Soap operas are considered old fashioned if they are not driven by the social change.

Genres must be repetitive to ensure brand loyalty and different at the same time to ensure being involved with the social changes.

A Soap Opera is what we call a continuous serial whereby it promises a never-ending story,

In Soap Operas, women and men are presented as being total opposites. Women are associated with everything personal, home, talk, and community whereas men are associated with everything public, work, action and individualism

The pleasure we get from soap opera's fictional experience is when we relate lived experiences to them. the Soap Opera’s characters become the female viewers’ neighbors. They are aware of their problems, live with them everyday, grow old with them.

Soap opera is a women’s form, but with mass unemployment today, more and more men are watching them, two important changes have occurred: the increasing centrality of male characters and the increasing intrusion of features from male-oriented genres, more and more Soap Opera strategies and conventions are being used in male-oriented genres.

Soap opera, as part of its cultural work, extends the debate into the public scene beyond the fiction, while at the same time, getting inspired by real facts and stories to build its own fiction.