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Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
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Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
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I'm not going to deal here with the conventions of the soap genre. If you're looking for information on that, check out 
Daniel Chandler's site.
You may like to check out some of the soaps on-line
The first study we'll look at is by Mary Ellen Brown (1994).
Brown conducted an ethnographic study of the women's conversational networks which surround soap-opera viewing, building to an extent on the insights of de Certeau and Fiske into meaning production in everyday life. She takes the view, common to most researchers in this vein, that 'the sense-making that people engage in when they talk about television may be as important as their actual viewing of the television program.' (p.2)
Like many researchers before her, especially those of the CCCS, she is concerned with the operation of hegemony, in particular patriarchy. However, it is part of the definition of Gramsci's notion of hegemony that it can never be total. Society is the scene of a constant battle for
dominance by competing ideologies. Since hegemony can never be total, there will always be elements which
challenge the dominant culture. Brown's focus is this 'leaky hegemony' and the gaps in it which allow women to create counterhegemonic readings of popular culture:
...although hegemony is very powerful, there are always alternative politics or counterhegemonic consciousnesses struggling for recognition and thus for economic and political power. These may in various ways be mobilized in opposition to hegemonic culture. This is the basis for the notion that hegemony is leaky. It is this leaky hegemony that allows a cultural form that appears to reinforce dominant conceptualizations of women to create gaps to which women actually relate.
Brown (1994) p.5)
It is these tertiary texts in the gaps of hegemony which Brown investigates in her study. In common with Fiske, she sees this 'micropolitical' activity of women's conversations around soap operas as potentially emancipatory. She argues that social change is often the result of sharing their experiences and of members of oppressed groups realizing that others experience their oppression in a similar way to them.
Women can use their experience of soap operas, which the dominant discourse dismisses as trash, to rethink the rôle of women, generating resistive meanings through their networks of gossip about soap operas.
Brown's insistence on women's 'pleasure' in the consumption of soaps and their generation of resistive meanings using the tools of the dominant culture reveals to us the functioning of gender politics in everyday media use.
Links to soap sites on the Web
de Certeau's views
Hermes on women's magazines
Morley: The Nationwide Audience
Morley: Family Television
Criticisms of reception studies
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