Skip to main content

Budapest W9: Feminist Research - Class Notes

Soap Operas

 Metaphor - a figure of speech - moved from it's routine discourse to another one
Soap Opera - usage as a metaphor

Grammatical metaphor - rearticulating a verb that is associated with an activity that can function as a noun
Aesthetic state - noun that are not derived from verbs

What kind of ideological work is performed by using the metaphor 'soapy' systematically?

In what way does van Zoonenen argue the use of soap opera result in the defamation of politics which hinges on the defamation of the genre?

The soap opera is expected to be bad news if your activity is related to it
Criticising journalism that criticising a politician - a politician may then criticise the journalist as creating a soap opera
Politician shames other parties and takes away credibility
Distancing the politician from the public, and putting them above/bettering them more than the people
The means they use to patronise is the same means used to connect with the people

Alienation/distancing - soaping politics (undermining the value of politics) - creates a concern that beyond party political agenda there will be a disillusionment of the people with politics

Soap Operas are linked to the female subjects - soaping politics accuses a person of not being rational, serious and emasculates them.

Why is 'soap opera' such a frequently used metaphor? Because classed and racial viewers and content are universally known

Entertainment television does not position the viewer as a citizen
Developing cultural citizenship through connecting the soap to the political

Post-modernist flexibility of being able to flit between soap opera and politics, where the subject is the one who writes the article, moving between subject positions, knowing both worlds
The genre is expected to speak to the lower-class audience - the soap opera is a pattern that keeps repeating itself, it is circular/repetitive/not progressive
Modernist discourse - repetitive soap opera is the implied concern about progress
Narratives that are labelled as art are seen as progressive, taking us somewhere

How does Z discuss the soap opera genre? What is it like, how does it work, how is it different from how it is meant to be used as defamatory in political discourse?

Plot of a soap opera - repetitive, cyclical, every solution is temporary
In a narrative, there must be a surprise - the suspense is
The way the media criticism of opponents depict soap opera, no one would ever watch them. The soap opera that keeps you returning cannot consist of one kind of character, evil/insane characters. The world of a soap is populated by all kinds of characters because there is no source of conflict.

The politician is following a script that has been written for them

Z exposes how selective the features of the soap are taken explicitly in criticism
How without explicit acknowledgement soap is made use of in other party politic to the citizenry

What are the elements of the soap that politicians disagree with and voice? And what elements do they love and make use of but do not acknowledge? In our understanding of 'good politics'?

Preoblmatising the binarisation of the soap in elite politics
The genre is not one-sided, and there is an ideological purpose

Develops two ways of thinking about viewership - distance and cynical or relational and engaged
Journalists - soap as distance/cynical, they do not realise the potential of relational/engaged

Good politics - distinction between masculine/feminine
Soap Opera/politics binary - breaking down

If she exposes that there is not a binary but an ideologically motivated distinction between diff institutions of life (realms as not gendered) how does she problematise politics that is not to be believed/seen/expected to be a space of values and activities that are associated with manhood
If a woman can enter the space and do things that are expected of manhood then you are breaking down the binary

What is inferred about Z's stance good politics?

West Wing as a political soap - characteristics embodied by 'President' - care, intuition feminised aspects

If politicians embody the feminine characteristics, then the politics do not need women
Politics of the personal -

Reason and emotion are set up as a binary
As long as emotion are not seen to be done/accomplished (beyond any kind of doing) not to be made accountable, then the split between men as rational and women as emotional is maintained - naturally given roles are adhered to

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

B2 W5: Theory and Critical Research - Queerness as Horizon

José Esteban Muñoz (2009). “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Pragmatism” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York/London: New York University Press, 19-32. Do not dismiss the "we" of utopian visions and demands as "merely identitarian logic", but rather "The "we" speaks to a "we" that is "not yet conscious," the future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment." p.20 Links to Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and the way she addressed the queer future - where people of all races and sexualities are able to relate to each other equally - it is not naive, it is optimistic. "The particularities... are not things in and of themselves that format this "we"; indeed the statement's "we" is "regardless" of these markers, which is not to say that is beyond such distinctions or due to these differences, but, instead, that...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thesis reading: Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy

Pateman, Carole "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy" in  The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory . Stanford University Press: California. 1989 118-133 "Benn and Gaus’s account assumes that the reality of our social life is more or less adequately captured in liberal conceptions. They do not recognize that ‘liberalism’ is patriarchal-liberalism and that the separation and opposition of the public and private spheres is an unequal opposition between women and men." p.120 "One reason why the exclusion [of women] goes unnoticed is that the separation of the private and public is presented in liberal theory as if it applied to all individuals in the same way. It is often claimed - by anti-feminists today, but by feminists in the nineteenth century, most of whom accepted the doctrine of ‘separate spheres’- that the two spheres are separate, but equally important and valuable. The way in which women and men are differentiall...
Post a Comment
Read more

B2 W3: Somatechnics - Imagined futures

Alison Kafer: “Introduction: Imagined Futures”, in: Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 1-24. Upon seeing Alison Kafer uses a wheelchair and has been physically scarred by a fire, people imagine a bleak future of isolation and sadness for her. However other disabled people imagine a future for her where ableism, not disability, is the obstacle she must overcome. "What these two representations of the future share, however, is a strong link to the present." p.2 "If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future." p.2 "the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident" p.3...
Post a Comment
Read more