Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora: A Transnational Ethnography in Australia and Sri Lanka

ISBN-13: 9783030706319 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 140 str.

Shashini Gamage

Spis treści

1: Introduction - Feminising Television.- 2: Producing meanings in soap opera.- 3: Soap operas, women and the nation.- 4: Soap operas and long distance audiences.- 5: Gender, media, migration and culture – an intersectional conclusion.

O autorze

Shashini Gamage is Research Associate of the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, examining gender, media, and migration. She holds a PhD in Media and Communications from La Trobe University. She is a journalist and fi lmmaker, and has produced documentaries on women, peace, and security during the civil war in Sri Lanka. 

Blurb

This book is a transnational ethnographic study of Sri Lankan women’s television soap opera cultures in Australia and Sri Lanka. Both Sri Lankan migrant women’s soap opera clubs in Melbourne, Australia, and female friendship groups watching soap operas in Colombo, Sri Lanka, are examined. Conducted in the sociopolitical backdrop of post-civil war Sri Lanka, this study examines how nationalist ideologies of womanhood shape meanings in Sri Lankan television soap operas that predominantly cater to female audiences. How women interpret, resist, deconstruct, and reconstruct good-bad binaries of women’s bodies, freedoms, and rights as represented in the soap operas are mapped, providing an ethnographic examination of how nationalist meanings translate into cultural capital in spaces of television production and reception, in national and diasporic everyday lives.

Shashini Gamage is Research Associate of the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, examining gender, media, and migration. She holds a PhD in Media and Communications from La Trobe University. She is a journalist and fi lmmaker, and has produced documentaries on women, peace, and security during the civil war in Sri Lanka.