Sentimental Education: Intimate Citizenships & Pedagogies of Melodrama in U.S. Daytime TV

Type of Presentation

Individual presentation

Brief Description of Presentation

This presentation contends that the media form of daytime drama serials in the U.S. shape conceptions of contemporary social issues and problems. Through the narrative tropes of melodrama, soap operas work pedagogically on viewers’ sensibilities through affect and emotion in the treatment of eight domains associated with civic education, including the family, community, and a pluralistic society. Drawing upon the work of Berlant, Warner, and other critical theorist of affect and feminism, I argue for including soap operas as a curricular text worthy of critical study through four themes I analyze with examples from three U.S. soap operas.

Abstract of Proposal

As a form of popular culture and as a mass media text, daytime dramas, or “soap operas” as they are commonly named, have played a unique role in the history of media literacy in the United States and in many other countries (although, for the purposes of this presentation, the focus is on serial dramas broadcast on network stations during weekday afternoons in the United States). At the height of their popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were over 30 different soap operas broadcast across four television networks. Today there are only four serial dramas. One might argue that such a drastic reduction in the prevalence of this media text renders it less relevant or timely for study. And yet the effects of “soap operas” are widely pronounced throughout many aspects of popular culture and mass media, from the critical acclaim of “prestige soaps” such as AMC’s “Mad Men” and the BBC/PBS cross-Atlantic historical soap “Downtown Abbey,” to the durable narrative tropes we associate with soap operas found in most forms of serial storytelling, from “The Jersey Shore” to melodramatic advertisements of presidential candidate debates (“Who will succeed? Who will fall? Tune in next time!”). In short, the soap opera is an indelible component of the DNA that binds U.S. popular culture narratives together, sharing genetic traits with the media modes of true crime, romance, mystery, procedurals, and even sci-fi/fantasy with supernatural storylines ranging from the vampire Barnabas Collins on “Dark Shadows” to a demonically possessed heroine, Dr. Marlena Evans, on “Days of Our Lives.”

However, critical study of soap opera flourished in the 1980s and 1990s but has been neglected and absent by critical media scholars over the past 15 years. My research in not an intervention into renewing the study of soap opera amongst critical media scholars proper (I am in a faculty of education, not communications or mass media); rather, my aim is to describe and analyze the expressive functions that soap operas wield as pedagogical agents. Within the narrative worlds created by long-lost children, murderous identical twins, adulterous husbands, and scheming vixens is a much more serious and profound didactics at work. Soap operas are pedagogical, not only in the way that most cultural texts engage in forms of cultural pedagogy, but in a conscious, intentional curriculum of class, society, family, community, and other features of a civic education. The argument I build in this presentation from my study of soap operas as pedagogical and curricular texts claims that soap operas as cultural pedagogy utilize various media literacies to enact a form of civic education that leverages affect and emotion as curricular means to inform and instruct the U.S. public, including the demographic target of women who reside domestically in homes during the day—historically prized by advertisers to sell laundry and detergent products, thus making these dramatic operas of everyday life “soap” operas—but also diverse publics of gays and lesbians, immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, people living with addiction and abuse, and other segments of the U.S. public shunned from traditional, conservative representations of “an American citizen.” How did soap operas accomplish such a feat? And how did soap operas manage to break social taboos on homosexuality, impotence & infertility, incest, infidelity, and other “intimate” aspects that critical feminist theorists such as Lauren Berlant (2011), Clare Hemmings (2011), Michael Warner (2005), and others locate in the affective realm of sentimental politics that fuels U.S. political thought at large?

I answer these questions through the analysis of four storylines from four different U.S. soap operas, with archival footage and clips that I will play for discussion and analysis during the presentation. The footage I curated from select storylines over the past five years of daytime serial dramas illustrate themes I propose as compelling ways to re-think and re-thorize what we in curriculum studies and social studies education mean by “civic education.” These themes include the following:

(1) Daytime dramas show how to seek a liberating truth and participate in a sense of civic belonging through the intensity of private feelings and public vulnerabilities. This is taught through a performance of private virtues and public dignity as foundational for civic belonging, seen in the 1992 storyline from “One Life To Live” in which teenaged Billy Douglas comes out as gay and brings the town of Llanfair, PA together to witness the arrival of the U.S. national AIDS memorial quilt on tour;

(2) Daytime dramas teach that what is personal ultimately becomes public yet our public valorizes personal “intimacy.” The narration of pain and suffering is universal, offering civic-minded ideals of compassion. This is taught through a performance of emotionally invested expectations of how to empathize as necessary for civic belonging, as seen in the 1974 storyline from “The Young and the Restless” in which wealthy social matron and tormented alcoholic Kay Chancellor receives divorce papers from her husband;

(3) Daytime dramas educate in how a more capacious, less fragile form of living might be structured – more than survival – and how to achieve the good life as a productive citizen. This is taught through a performance of pain and suffering and offers viewers-as-learners some civic-minded ideals of compassion, as seen in a 1987 storyline from “As the World Turns” in which teenaged Lilly Walsh engages in a heated argument with her horse trainer, Josh, which leads his ex-girlfriend Iva, overhearing the argument, to believe Lilly is being raped, intervening to proclaim she is Lilly’s heretofore unknown biological mother and that Josh is her biological father. Fragility and survival against the odds lead to Iva then becoming one of the town’s most respected citizens.

(4) Daytime dramas flatten the political in favor of the civic, showing how change comes from within (internal wounds, haunting memories, personal failings, social blockages). Such emotionally invested and patterned expectations of how to feel and interpret are taught through what Berlant (2011, p. 11) terms “cruel optimism.” This is a “cluster of promises” that, I argue, work in soap operas to use melodramatic affects of delight and desire, deferral and disavowal to create “promises of everyday life,” as seen in the 1980 storyline from “As The World Turns” in which Nancy and Chris Hughes’ former daughter-in-law, the villainous Joyce Coleman, long thought dead, returns to town one day seeking to reclaim her son, Teddy, who is now living with his father and his new wife.

What these three examples allow us to do is see the curricular logic of soap operas, a logic that teaches through lessons of intimacy in the service of civic education. Soaps pedagogically frame intimacy as a civic affective expectation that prioritizes lessons in private strength and public dignity as foundational for civic belonging. Thus, from a standpoint of critical media literacy, we must learn to see in soap operas a form of sentimental (and sentimentalizing) education at work.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Hemmings, C. (2011). Why stories matter: The political grammar of feminist theory. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Warner, M. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. New York, N.Y.: Zone Book.

Location

Coastal Georgia Center

Start Date

3-26-2016 12:50 PM

End Date

3-26-2016 2:20 PM

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Sentimental Education: Intimate Citizenships & Pedagogies of Melodrama in U.S. Daytime TV

Coastal Georgia Center

As a form of popular culture and as a mass media text, daytime dramas, or “soap operas” as they are commonly named, have played a unique role in the history of media literacy in the United States and in many other countries (although, for the purposes of this presentation, the focus is on serial dramas broadcast on network stations during weekday afternoons in the United States). At the height of their popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were over 30 different soap operas broadcast across four television networks. Today there are only four serial dramas. One might argue that such a drastic reduction in the prevalence of this media text renders it less relevant or timely for study. And yet the effects of “soap operas” are widely pronounced throughout many aspects of popular culture and mass media, from the critical acclaim of “prestige soaps” such as AMC’s “Mad Men” and the BBC/PBS cross-Atlantic historical soap “Downtown Abbey,” to the durable narrative tropes we associate with soap operas found in most forms of serial storytelling, from “The Jersey Shore” to melodramatic advertisements of presidential candidate debates (“Who will succeed? Who will fall? Tune in next time!”). In short, the soap opera is an indelible component of the DNA that binds U.S. popular culture narratives together, sharing genetic traits with the media modes of true crime, romance, mystery, procedurals, and even sci-fi/fantasy with supernatural storylines ranging from the vampire Barnabas Collins on “Dark Shadows” to a demonically possessed heroine, Dr. Marlena Evans, on “Days of Our Lives.”

However, critical study of soap opera flourished in the 1980s and 1990s but has been neglected and absent by critical media scholars over the past 15 years. My research in not an intervention into renewing the study of soap opera amongst critical media scholars proper (I am in a faculty of education, not communications or mass media); rather, my aim is to describe and analyze the expressive functions that soap operas wield as pedagogical agents. Within the narrative worlds created by long-lost children, murderous identical twins, adulterous husbands, and scheming vixens is a much more serious and profound didactics at work. Soap operas are pedagogical, not only in the way that most cultural texts engage in forms of cultural pedagogy, but in a conscious, intentional curriculum of class, society, family, community, and other features of a civic education. The argument I build in this presentation from my study of soap operas as pedagogical and curricular texts claims that soap operas as cultural pedagogy utilize various media literacies to enact a form of civic education that leverages affect and emotion as curricular means to inform and instruct the U.S. public, including the demographic target of women who reside domestically in homes during the day—historically prized by advertisers to sell laundry and detergent products, thus making these dramatic operas of everyday life “soap” operas—but also diverse publics of gays and lesbians, immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, people living with addiction and abuse, and other segments of the U.S. public shunned from traditional, conservative representations of “an American citizen.” How did soap operas accomplish such a feat? And how did soap operas manage to break social taboos on homosexuality, impotence & infertility, incest, infidelity, and other “intimate” aspects that critical feminist theorists such as Lauren Berlant (2011), Clare Hemmings (2011), Michael Warner (2005), and others locate in the affective realm of sentimental politics that fuels U.S. political thought at large?

I answer these questions through the analysis of four storylines from four different U.S. soap operas, with archival footage and clips that I will play for discussion and analysis during the presentation. The footage I curated from select storylines over the past five years of daytime serial dramas illustrate themes I propose as compelling ways to re-think and re-thorize what we in curriculum studies and social studies education mean by “civic education.” These themes include the following:

(1) Daytime dramas show how to seek a liberating truth and participate in a sense of civic belonging through the intensity of private feelings and public vulnerabilities. This is taught through a performance of private virtues and public dignity as foundational for civic belonging, seen in the 1992 storyline from “One Life To Live” in which teenaged Billy Douglas comes out as gay and brings the town of Llanfair, PA together to witness the arrival of the U.S. national AIDS memorial quilt on tour;

(2) Daytime dramas teach that what is personal ultimately becomes public yet our public valorizes personal “intimacy.” The narration of pain and suffering is universal, offering civic-minded ideals of compassion. This is taught through a performance of emotionally invested expectations of how to empathize as necessary for civic belonging, as seen in the 1974 storyline from “The Young and the Restless” in which wealthy social matron and tormented alcoholic Kay Chancellor receives divorce papers from her husband;

(3) Daytime dramas educate in how a more capacious, less fragile form of living might be structured – more than survival – and how to achieve the good life as a productive citizen. This is taught through a performance of pain and suffering and offers viewers-as-learners some civic-minded ideals of compassion, as seen in a 1987 storyline from “As the World Turns” in which teenaged Lilly Walsh engages in a heated argument with her horse trainer, Josh, which leads his ex-girlfriend Iva, overhearing the argument, to believe Lilly is being raped, intervening to proclaim she is Lilly’s heretofore unknown biological mother and that Josh is her biological father. Fragility and survival against the odds lead to Iva then becoming one of the town’s most respected citizens.

(4) Daytime dramas flatten the political in favor of the civic, showing how change comes from within (internal wounds, haunting memories, personal failings, social blockages). Such emotionally invested and patterned expectations of how to feel and interpret are taught through what Berlant (2011, p. 11) terms “cruel optimism.” This is a “cluster of promises” that, I argue, work in soap operas to use melodramatic affects of delight and desire, deferral and disavowal to create “promises of everyday life,” as seen in the 1980 storyline from “As The World Turns” in which Nancy and Chris Hughes’ former daughter-in-law, the villainous Joyce Coleman, long thought dead, returns to town one day seeking to reclaim her son, Teddy, who is now living with his father and his new wife.

What these three examples allow us to do is see the curricular logic of soap operas, a logic that teaches through lessons of intimacy in the service of civic education. Soaps pedagogically frame intimacy as a civic affective expectation that prioritizes lessons in private strength and public dignity as foundational for civic belonging. Thus, from a standpoint of critical media literacy, we must learn to see in soap operas a form of sentimental (and sentimentalizing) education at work.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Hemmings, C. (2011). Why stories matter: The political grammar of feminist theory. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Warner, M. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. New York, N.Y.: Zone Book.