Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora

Download or read book Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora written by Shashini Gamage and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.