How can such an apparently trivial or even exploitative genre as soap opera be associated with the notion of empowerment for its viewers? Mary Ellen Brown argues that soap operas create and support a social network in which talk becomes a form of resistive pleasure.
Undertaken as an ethnographic study in which the author is a member of the group, a fan and also a researcher, this book shows that engagement with soap operas creates an opening for women to serve as wedges into the dominant culture. This exploration into how hegemonic notions of feminity and womanhood are developed at one cultural site and how they can be accepted, resisted and negotiated in the process of consumption not only claims that hegemony is leaky, bu
