Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora: A Transnational Ethnography in Australia and Sri Lanka 3030706311, 9783030706319

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

Shashini Gamage

Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora

Shashini Gamage

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

Shashini Gamage Department of Social Inquiry La Trobe University Bundoora, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-70631-9    ISBN 978-3-030-70632-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Transnational mobility and migration poses important questions about media practices in diasporic contexts. Migration and cross-border movement has generated complex social and cultural spaces that shape media practices beyond the processes of production, texts and reception. This study is about Sri Lankan women’s soap opera cultures in national and transnational contexts in Sri Lanka and Australia. I grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka, during the height of its civil conflict that lasted from 1983 to 2009. During this time, I am humbled to have received opportunities to work as a television journalist, producing documentaries on women, peace and security, interacting first-hand with women in conflict zones. I received opportunities to train in feminist media productions, developing particularly a feminist gaze and sensibilities towards women’s rights. My professional associations with television made me develop interest in home-grown genres like ‘mega teledramas’—a lengthy Sri Lankan soap opera genre at the heart of this study. More or less, I watched them at home with my parents, often having dinner in front of the television with our plates on our laps, and hence I have a fanatic association with them since childhood. Television was an important national medium for a country at war. Not only did television enable the dissemination of news and security information, it also played a role in tapping into majoritarian nationalist notions of people entangled in a conflict that worked to solidify ethnic divisions. The teledramas, usually broadcast following the news, provided us an opportunity to imagine a society without war, largely discussing instead a different kind of conflict, class and familial differences. This research emerges from the engagements I had with television at both the personal and v

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PREFACE

professional levels. When I first came to Australia in 2009, after the war ended in Sri Lanka, it was to study for my Master’s degree at La Trobe University. I was inspired to discover the place soap operas had in the scholarship of audience reception research following the second-wave feminist movement and ethnographic media research that engaged with audiences through sociological and anthropological analyses informed by cultural studies. I also experienced the place mega teledramas had in the lives of diasporic Sri Lankan women in Australia, where the home-grown genre had acquired new meanings in transnational cultural flows of migration and mobility. When I returned to Australia to conduct my higher degree research, I ceased the opportunity to integrate my professional engagements with television, feminist sensibilities of media production and observations of Sri Lankan diasporic women’s media cultures to examine the contours of transnational cultural flows, using ethnography. Since then, this study has developed further to include fieldwork in diverse localities. Living in Sri Lanka and Australia, at different times of this study, made me realise that the exploration of diasporic media cultures can benefit from locating them in the production contexts of its origins and national audience perspectives as much as in the diasporic settings where they are consumed. In Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora, I examine Sri Lankan soap operas and their audiences of women through a transnational ethnographic inquiry of women’s lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Melbourne, Australia. Bundoora, VIC, Australia

Shashini Gamage

Acknowledgements

Writing this book about the intersections of gender, media and migration emerges from my own journey of living in two countries—Sri Lanka and Australia. Movement became a trajectory so vital to the ethnographic research of this book as well as to my lived experiences as a researcher and a woman. I am grateful and indebted to many people and organisations who made this transnational journey possible. Firstly, I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land where this research is conducted, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, and pay my respects to the Elders, past, present and emerging. This study was conducted with the support of an Australia Awards scholarship of the Australian government as my higher degree research at La Trobe University in Melbourne (2012–2016). To be part of the Australia Awards programme as a South and West Asia scholar, and then as an alumna, has been a motivating opportunity to learn, build networks and grow. The encouragement and support of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia Awards—South and West Asia, Sri Lanka country programme, the Australian High Commission in Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka Association of Australia Awards Alumni and Australia Awards Women in Leadership Network is much appreciated. The principal supervisor of my higher degree research Professor Lawrie Zion and co-­supervisor Associate Professor Raelene Wilding of La Trobe University continue to be inspirational mentors, immense sources of brilliance and wisdom, pillars of encouragement, compassion and kindness, and I am truly thankful for the many opportunities they have extended to me to grow as a researcher. I truly appreciate the support of Professor Ramón Spaaij, extending co-supervision and much-needed guidance during the initial vii

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two years of this study. Illuminating discussions, helpful assistance and the inclusive culture of my colleagues at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, and Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University were invaluable in developing this research. I have to mention that I owe my interest in transnational media to the brilliance of Professor Sue Turnbull, who planted the seeds of examining global cultural flows and Sri Lankan soap operas as a research topic in my mind in 2009. Without the kindness of my participants in Colombo and Melbourne, this study would not have been possible. I am thankful to all participants and their families in Colombo, Sri Lankan cultural associations in Melbourne and teledrama professionals in Colombo for graciously welcoming me into their homes and organisations. I express my sincere gratitude to Channa Deshapriya, Chandani Dias, Dhammika Samarathunga, Dilini Wilathgamuwa, Harshini Ranasinghe, Jagath Chamila, Prageeth Rathnayake, Sasanka Sanjeewa and Thilinee Silva in Colombo, and Nishani Rathnayake and Roshani Mayadunne in Melbourne for their assistance during fieldwork. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to publish this book with Palgrave Macmillan. I am much thankful for the guidance of the editorial board, Commissioning Editor Mala Sanghera-Warren, Jasper Asir, Emily Wood and the entire team at Palgrave Macmillan for all their hard work and encouraging support throughout the publishing process, including valued feedback from anonymous reviewers of this book. On a more personal note, I am ever so thankful to my mother Deepthi Gamage and father Gunadasa Gamage for being part of my transnational journey while they continue to feel most at home in Colombo, waiting for my return, someday. And, to my partner Amal Alvis for living and breathing this study, continuing to live with me our itinerant lives this study lent to produce.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Producing Meanings in a Soap Opera: Making Appropriate Femininities 47 3 Soap Operas, Women and the Nation 71 4 Soap Operas and Long-Distance Audiences 95 5 Gender, Media, Migration and Culture: An Intersectional Conclusion123 Index135

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About the Author

Shashini  Gamage  is a research associate in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research examines how transnational social fields are shaped by diasporic media, gender and popular culture, utilising ethnography, video and photography methods. Her most recent work at La Trobe University includes research about older Sri Lankan migrants and their digital media practices, as part of the Ageing and New Media project. She is the recipient of an Australia Awards scholarship and conducted her PhD at La Trobe University, producing an ethnography on Sri Lankan women’s television soap opera cultures (2012–2016). She is a journalist and filmmaker, and her work in journalism includes producing documentaries about women, peace and security during the civil war in Sri Lanka (2004–2010). She is also the founder of Women Talk (2017), a digital archive of multimedia journalism that documents feminist activism in Sri Lanka. Her short-fiction filmography includes Kali’s Daughter (2018) and My Family (2007), discussing issues of violence against women.

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List of Images

Image 2.1 Image 2.2 Image 3.1 Image 3.2 Image 3.3 Image 4.1 Image 4.2 Image 4.3 Image 4.4

Apeksha on a television screen in Colombo. In this scene of Episode 1, Nathalia is reprimanded by her family for going to night clubs, 2013 60 Neighbour women watch mega teledramas together in a suburban household in Colombo, 2013 64 Women conduct micro businesses (i.e. sewing, catering, food packaging and assembling items) while watching television in Colombo, 2015 81 Neighbour women and child watch megas in Colombo, 2014 85 Mother and daughter watch megas in Colombo while providing child care, 2014 85 Sri Lankan women participating in the Australia Day multicultural parade in Melbourne, 2014 96 Women sorting DVDs to commence the teledrama club at a diasporic association in Melbourne, 2014 102 Traditional games at the annual Sri Lankan New Year celebrations at the Dandenong Show Ground in Melbourne, 2014106 Watching megas in the homes in Melbourne is often a solitary act for women and transforms into a social act at the teledrama club, 2015 108

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  A body of research on soap operas and audiences of women set stage for feminist scholarship on television in the backdrop of the second-­ wave feminist movement in the 1970s. Since then, this scholarship has continued to grow with diverse studies of soap operas and audiences of women across the world. This chapter in Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora situates a home-grown Sri Lankan soap opera genre known as ‘mega-teledramas’ and their female audiences across global cultural flows of migration and mobility. The production, reception and circulation of mega teledramas are examined, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Melbourne, Australia, with audiences of women in national and diasporic contexts. This chapter traverses the intersections of gender, media and migration by particularly examining how gendered nationalist meanings act as cultural capital for the construction of female characters in soap operas and their audience interpretations. Keywords  Media ethnography • Soap operas • Gender • Diaspora • Sri Lanka • Australia ‘The woman has gone out in the night and the man is at home without his dinner—what an ugly thing that is?’ 70-year-old Violet scolds at her pixelated second-hand television. Hunched on a plastic chair, squinting her © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gamage, Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6_1

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eyes at the barely visible analogue picture on the screen, Violet is sharing her television space with her daughter, niece and granddaughter. Violet’s home is in an urban squatter settlement in Colombo, in the commercial capital city of Sri Lanka. The house built on a typical ‘two-perch piece’ amounts to about 50 square metres. Violet has no deed for this land, and the ever-present danger of eviction is an everyday reality in her life. The anxiety of possibly losing their homes has increased for residents like Violet in 2013 when I was conducting fieldwork for this study in Colombo. Following the end of the three-decade civil war1 in 2009, the state has undertaken to implement intense development and city beautification projects, requiring the accumulation of government land where families like Violet’s are living. During weekdays, every night at eight, Violet watches Apeksha (Hope),2 a long-running local Sinhalese soap opera on the state channel ITN. The woman in question is Nathalia, the lead female role in the soap opera—a young Sinhalese middle-class widow. Violet’s daughter Latha peeks from the adjoining kitchen. ‘She, drunk?’ Latha asks, referring to Nathalia. Violet responds immediately and understands well the context of Latha’s two-worded question. ‘She will be. She went dancing again,’ Violet updates Latha about Nathalia’s status from the hall. Latha sneers in derision and returns to the vegetable mixes she is preparing to make local snacks, known as short-eats, which will be delivered the following day early morning to a school canteen. The women communicate swiftly, shouting between the kitchen and the hall, about the soap opera they are watching and listening to while they operate their micro business from the private sphere of their home in Colombo. The following year, in 2014, I meet another group of women, discussing Nathalia’s character in a very different communal context to Violet’s home. They are Sinhalese migrant women living in Melbourne, Australia. At a soap opera club of a diasporic cultural association, the women exchange DVDs of reproduced soap operas bought from Sri Lankan 1  The civil war lasted between 1983 and 2009 in Sri Lanka. Ethnocentric tensions between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils transformed into violent civic acts through ethnic riots against the Tamils and retaliations against government military. The Tamil liberation fighters Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) demanded a separate state along the north-east part of the island, while the government forces fought to sustain a unitary state. In 2009, a government military offensive crushed the rebels, killing their leader, marking the end of the conflict. The 21 million population in Sri Lanka contains 75 per cent Sinhalese, 11 per cent Tamil and 9 per cent Muslim composition. 2  Transliterations of Sinhalese soap opera titles.

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grocery shops in Melbourne. ‘She cannot make the tea and the [coconut] milk curry. What is her use to the new husband?’ Pramila, a woman 20 years younger than Violet, raises this question about Nathalia. Pramila migrated to Australia with her children in the 1990s, during the civil war in Sri Lanka. Australia’s points-based skilled migration system facilitated the migration of Sinhalese professionals like Pramila. In Sri Lanka, Pramila was a scientist and her husband, an accountant, qualified to migrate as their qualifications were in high demand in Australia. Membership at one of the oldest diasporic associations in Melbourne enables a continued sense of relationships to the home country for women like Pramila. The women’s role in forming the soap opera club and the predominantly female membership makes this a gendered space at the association where female friendships and power relations support connections to home. Nathalia is the central thread of discussion among Pramila and these women at the teledrama club. They have all seen episodes at home. One woman tells the group how she was ‘appalled’ to see a ‘young Sinhalese woman with no husband’ behaving in the manner of Nathalia. Nevertheless, not all women in the group agree. It takes courage for Amali to admit that she relates to Nathalia’s character. ‘Nathalia reminds me of myself. I was just like her,’ says Amali. These vignettes from Sri Lanka and Australia offer us a narrative to begin this book about the intersections of popular culture, gender and migration. The soap operas women watch in Colombo and Melbourne are known as ‘mega teledramas’ or ‘megas’, a lengthy episodic home-grown Sri Lankan genre that developed through the 2000s for a predominantly female audience, influenced by Indian soap operas of the neighbouring cultural giant (Gamage 2018). The narratives contain central female heroines and characters, often using female names to title the dramas. The dissemination of messages validating particular behaviours for women based on Sinhalese nationalist meanings is prevalent in Sinhalese soap operas (Gamage 2018, 2019, 2020; Hewamanne 2016; Silva 2003). In contexts where television is a national medium, as in Sri Lanka, the interplay between gender and nationalism is a fundamental aesthetic of narrative television genres, and this has also been a central inquiry in ethnographic works of others (Abu-Lughod 2002; Mankekar 1993). The financial, social, cultural, constructive and interpretive nature of television broadcasts across nations and national boundaries supersedes its ‘apparent banality’, forcing us to question how systems of meanings and ways of

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lives are particularly constructed in television by cultural workers for audiences (Abu-Lughod 1997: 121). This book is an inquiry about such television meanings and is the result of ethnographic research conducted in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Melbourne, Australia, over the course of 2012–2016. The first of the audiences observed are located in urban squatter settlements and suburban neighbourhoods of Colombo, where women watch megas in the company of their friendship groups. The second audience comprise Sri Lankan migrant women in Melbourne, Australia, consuming megas at a soap opera club of a diasporic Sinhalese cultural association. I also conduct in-depth interviews with mega teledrama producers in Colombo to understand the basis on which the narratives are created. An analysis of the ethnographic research in this book shows the quotidian nature of nationalist discourses in influencing perceptions about women’s behaviour, bodies and choices, and how these meanings act as a cultural capital for deconstructing television messages. The ethnographic turn of media research aided by cultural studies audience research is fundamental to the shaping of this study. It was as far back as the 1970s that Stuart Hall’s (1980) seminal work on the encoding/ decoding model of communication was applied in the study of news media consumption by the Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS) of the Birmingham University, producing The Nationwide audience study on news reception (Brunsdon and Morley 2005). The work of media and cultural studies scholars in the 1980s contested the view that the audience existed in a static homogenous form, positioning audiences as interpretive, discursive and contextual formations (Allor 1988; Ang 1985; Fiske 1987; Hall 1981; Lull 1988; Radway 1988). Such studies departed from the critical media studies tradition of behavioural effects that positioned media, in particular television, as contributing to dysfunctional societies, producing oppressive and manipulative messages (Ang 2007: 19; Morley 2015: 23–24). The theorisation of the ‘active audience’ emerged from these empirical analyses of media audiences in the cultural studies scholarship. Following these analyses, audiences could no longer be positioned as a ‘conceptually nonproblematic category’, unaware of the economic and social structures that were instrumental in the production of media messages (Ang 2006: 9). This book builds on these insights to examine the production, reception and circulation of mega teledramas in national and transnational contexts.

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The works of others have examined the significance of nationalist discourses for situating the role of television in gendered, social, cultural and economic spaces (Abu-Lughod 2002; Appadurai 1990; Mankekar 1999, 2015; Georgiou 2012a). Particularly in Sri Lanka, majoritarian Sinhalese nationalist discourses are solidifying with the three-decade long ethnic civil conflict ending in 2009, contributing to an expansion of the formation of new national selves constructed on the narrative of a war victory against decades of minority uprising.3 Women’s roles as reproducers, nurturers, cultural preservers and biological advancers of the nation are increasingly being defined along majoritarian sensibilities of ethno-­ religious nationalism. What role did television soap operas play in driving the ubiquities of gendered Sinhalese nationalist discourses? What shape and form does nationalism take in women’s homes, workplaces and spheres of leisure? What role did television play in influencing and contesting women’s imaginaries and embodiment of nationhood? What subject positions are created for women within these discourses? And, how do nationalist sensibilities act as gendered cultural capital to produce meanings of womanhood in television? These are some of the questions this book examines. This book is organised into five chapters, based on transnational fieldwork about the production and reception of mega teledramas. Chapter 2, ‘Producing Meanings in a Soap Opera: Making Appropriate Femininities’, discusses in-depth interviews with mega teledrama producers in Sri Lanka. This chapter finds how the Sinhalese nationalist majoritarian sensibilities of the producers influence the meanings of the megas they create. Scriptwriters and directors of the megas talk about how they decide on appropriate femininities for women and set good-bad binaries for the female characters in the megas. This chapter shows how the political ideologies of Sinhalese nationalism translate to produce ubiquitous messages on women’s bodies, freedoms and rights in the mega teledramas. Creative processes do not exist in a vacuum. The role of cultural workers in disseminating the nationalist messaging, in particular for audiences of women, is vital. The glamour of working in television and the appeal of popular culture make artistic spaces particularly susceptible for supporting majoritarian meanings that cater to mass audiences. In such a discourse, soft entertainment becomes serious platforms for embedding those ideals where women are assigned particular behaviours, roles and autonomies. In 3

 See De Votta (2017); Haniffa (2019).

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Chapter 3, ‘Soap Operas, Women and the Nation’, ethnographic observations of women watching megas in Colombo’s underserved neighbourhoods intersect with gender, media and culture. Women’s viewing environments and spaces of leisure are shaped with the demands of unpaid care work in the home, and this chapter situates women’s soap opera viewing within the gendered dynamics of labour in the home. Becoming an active audience thus constitutes reshaping and appropriating unpaid care work in women’s spaces of leisure observed in Colombo. The settings of women’s diverse households and how soap operas provide interaction at neighbourhood friendship groups are discussed in this chapter. This chapter provides first-hand accounts of the significance of watching mega teledramas for driving support networks among women. Women’s friendships and oral cultures are at the heart of their experiences of collectively watching mega teledramas. Chapter 4, ‘Soap Operas and Long-Distance Audiences’, examines how Sri Lankan migrant women in Melbourne consume mega teledramas. A teledrama club, initiated by women of a diasporic association, as an archival project of teledrama DVDs and a social space to recreate interactions about teledramas, is central to the observations in Melbourne. This chapter situates observations made at the teledrama club within nationalist discourses of Sri Lanka and how long-distance nationalism had a way of shaping meanings and pleasures of the mega teledramas Sri Lankan migrant women watch in Melbourne, in their diasporic space. The diasporic Sri Lankan women’s teledrama club provides a space for women to construct a symbolic cultural identity in Australia. Chapter 5, ‘Gender, Media, Migration and Culture: An Intersectional Conclusion’, outlines the key findings of this study. Challenging assumptions about women’s consumption of soap operas as a passive audience, this study finds that the women were analytical viewers of mega teledramas and the texts offered the women nuanced meanings. The domestic contexts in Colombo observed in this study reshape the conceptualisations of the active audience. The unequal distribution of unpaid care work becomes a crucial determinant necessitating appropriation of viewing environments for women to experience the meanings and pleasures of soap operas. In the diasporic space, the social act of watching soap operas translates into a symbolic cultural act, producing a sense of community, identities and connections to distant pasts. The contexts in which women engaged with mega teledramas, in the national and transnational settings, shaped the meanings megas produced for them. The broader discourses of Sinhalese nationalism that had been creating national and sociocultural meanings of

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Sri Lankan moralities and womanhood act as cultural capital for the construction of the messages in the narratives and for interpreting them.

Soap Operas and Audiences of Women The study of a television space that is specific to women is steeped in the traditions of feminist audience reception studies that emerged following the second-wave feminist movement in the 1970s, and cultural forms that were popular among women became a central inquiry of this scholarship (Brunsdon 2000: 3–4, 213). These include soap operas (Brown 1994; Gray 1987; Hobson 1982; Press 1991; Seiter et al. 2013), romance novels (Radway 1984, 2008), films (Gledhill 1987; Mulvey 1981) and fashion (McRobbie 1991). Second-wave feminism, with the slogan the personal is political, contributed to a shift in media research from news and current affairs to ‘softer programs’, such as soap operas, and women watching them in domestic settings (Brunsdon 1997: 39). Feminists, from the early 1970s, argued that the home, the private sphere and the community were significant spaces for political analyses, and that these spaces were ‘formative of political mobilisations outside the remit of classical class analysis’ (McRobbie 2005: 43). The ‘repudiation, investigation and defence’ of soap operas as a significant women’s television genre was influenced by this backdrop of feminist politics (Brunsdon 1997: 39). Terminology like the ‘women’s space’ was used to refer to women’s domestic contexts in these studies, which signified feminist political intentions and mobilisation (Geraghty 2010: 318). Such studies centering on ‘feminisms, gender and women’ are intrinsically linked by the ‘illusory category of women/woman’, which is foundational to all feminist research and methodology (Wickramasinghe 2010: 31). Feminist analyses validated the study of soap operas that was perceived as a devalued form of feminine low-brow entertainment (Geraghty 2010: 308). Feminist scholars regarded soap operas and daytime broadcasting as a ‘subaltern feminine sphere with a debased status in the culture’ and identified soap operas as an important object to study in the exploration of women’s lives (Cassidy 2005: 7). Such analyses on soap operas and television consumption adopted a range of methodologies, including historical and content analysis examining representations of women in soap operas (Blumenthal 1997; Lovell 1981; Matelski 1988; Modleski 1982; Mumford 1995), comparative analysis of diverse texts (Geraghty 1991) and ethnographic research (Brown 1994; Gray 1987; Hobson 1982; Press

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1991; Seiter et  al. 2013). In particular, ethnographic research on soap opera audiences aimed to locate soap operas within the everyday lives of viewers and explore the meanings and pleasures they produced for women. While much of this research was conducted with mainly Euro-American English-language audiences and was set in a different milieu, diverse responses to this early scholarship have been produced (Geraghty and Weissmann 2016: 366). Ethnographic analyses contributed to enriching our understandings of the distinct local and global sociocultural contexts in which media is consumed (Abu-Lughod 1993, 1997, 2002; Ginsburg et al. 2002; Mankekar 1999, 2015). Decades later, writing about her 1985 study Watching Dallas, which examined audience engagement with the American serial in the Netherlands through an analysis of fan letters, Ien Ang (2007: 21) argues that ‘what is more important, theoretically and empirically, is to analyse precisely how audiences make sense of the soap operas they watch, in which contexts, and with what kinds of social and cultural implications’ in a ‘global culture that is radically different’ today. The ‘disjuncture’ of ‘mediascapes’ that Arjun Appadurai (2001: 4–5) identifies as an implicit part of today’s global cultures intensified by globalisation and migration demands transnational approaches to studying media audiences. Whether it is ‘following the thing’ (Marcus 1998: 86) or ‘transnational anthropology’ (Appadurai 1996: 48), soap operas and their audiences, too, require methodological situation in global currents of cultural flows, as reflected in the works of others (Abu-Lughod 2002; Georgiou 2012b; Mankekar 2015). Informed by these insights, this book therefore examines Sri Lankan soap opera consumption in both national and transnational contexts in Sri Lanka and Australia.

Gender, Nationalism, Diasporas and Soap Operas Examining the intersections of gender, nationalism and soap operas have enabled the positioning of this predominantly women’s genre within broader sociocultural and political contexts of their production, reception and circulation (Abu-Lughod 2000; Georgiou 2012b; Mankekar 1993, 2015). The relationship between nation and nationalism is prominently reflected in earlier understandings of nationalism. Nationalism is defined as an ideological movement (Smith 2010: 9) that contributes to the invention of nations (Gellner 1964: 7) and particularly for postcolonial contexts a reaction against colonisation (Kedourie 1970: 2). Benedict Anderson’s (1991) classic insights of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ suggests

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that the nation is imagined because ‘members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. Anderson’s definition of the nation highlights the ‘social processes’ of constructing modern communities, departing from earlier classifications of the nation as a ‘set of abstract and external criteria’ (Chatterjee 1993: 21). Then, specifically, in a social and cultural context of media, Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (2002: 11) point out that the nation is the ‘primary context for the everyday lives and imaginations’ of media producers and audiences, contributing to shaping ‘national imaginaries’. In the same way, David Morley points out (1992: 225) that television links the domestic sphere of the family to an ‘image of the unified nation’ constructed around the experiences audiences share as members of private ‘viewing families’ watching television in the home, providing a sense of connection between the home and the nation. As Appadurai (1990: 35; 2001: 4–5) argues, the relationship between the nation and state has increasingly become disjunctive in global cultural social fields where disjunctured landscapes, such as ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes, have caused continual increase in ideas about nationhood. The term diaspora itself can only be understood more complexly along this disjuncture of transnational landscapes, intersecting variables such as social, emotional, cultural and imaginative contextualities of migration and mobility (Tsagarousianou and Retis 2019: 3). This means that the ‘multifaceted complexities of identity formation in the contemporary globalised world’ is increasingly becoming difficult to be ‘contained within the cultural and geographical confines of the nation-state’ (Ang 2011: 83). However, the ‘national’ in the ‘transnational’ should not be underestimated, and national meanings and interests are salient everyday features of a globalised world (Athique 2014: 6). In diasporic spaces, nationalism thrives as the idea of community and homelands intensify with politics of inclusion and exclusion in host societies, and diasporic mediascapes enable the circulation of these national meanings, blurring distance, space and time. As a result, diasporic practices of media consumption have challenged the ‘three-step process’ of the media research tradition that focused on production, texts and audience aspects of media (Georgiou 2007: 22). The community role of diasporic media among migrant groups is a significant contribution towards the development of local and transnational communication spaces among its users embedded in national imaginaries

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from their distant pasts and home countries. Diasporic settings thus become important sites of cultural production where media consumption from home countries enables in creating proximate relationships with distant cultures and homelands, as a growing body of diasporic media studies has shown. Soap operas receive scholarly attention for examining migrants’ everyday lives and articulations of nations and value systems (Abu-Lughod 2002; Gamage 2019, 2020; Georgiou 2012b; Mankekar 2015). Banal transnationalism (Aksoy and Robins 2003; Georgiou 2012a), digital citizenship (Diminescu 2008; Lim and Pham 2016; Martin and Rizvi 2014; Metykova 2010; Midden and Ponzanesi 2013; Wilding and Baldassar 2018), transnational familyhood (Cabalquinto 2018; Ong 2009; Ponzanesi and Leurs 2014; Wilding et  al. 2020; Winarnita 2019; Witteborn 2018), mobility and everyday life (Kim 2017; Mankekar 2002; Smets et  al. 2016), politics of inclusion and exclusion (Budarick 2015; Slade 2014; Tsagarousianou 2016), and emotions and affect (Ahmed 2014; Boccagni and Baldassar 2015; Madianou and Miller 2012; Ponzanesi 2020) have been important inquiries into migration, media and culture. The proliferation of digital media and mobile technologies means that relationships with cultural, national, familial and community landscapes of homelands have strengthened, making transgressing distance, affect and spatial boundaries an everyday possibility in the digital era. Perspectives on gender relations have been absent from many early dominant theorisations of nationalism (i.e. Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Kedourie 1993; Smith 1986, 1995 cited in Yuval-Davis 1997: 1). In both national and diasporic spaces, women’s subject positions need particular inquiry and distinction (Chatterjee 1990; Enloe 1989; Jayawardena 1986, 2000; Kandiyoti 1991; Mankekar 2015; Pateman 1988; Yuval-Davis 1993; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989) to understand the gendered dimensions of the intersections between media, migration, culture and the nation. Purnima Mankekar (1999: 104–107) discusses, in her work on Indian soap operas, womanhood and nation, the dichotomy of the depiction of women’s emancipation and female heroines who safeguard morality, culture and chastity. This is because, as Gayatri Spivak (2009: 86) argues, ‘woman is the most primitive instrument of nationalism’, as nationalism is predicated on ‘reproductive heteronormativity’ or the birth right to a nation. In that sense, Nira Yuval-Davis (1997: 21) proposes three major dimensions of nationalist projects that articulate gender relations—the myth of common origin or shared blood, cultural dimensions of the symbolic heritage and

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citizenship. Women’s biological reproduction of the nation, cultural reproduction and women’s role as preservers of culture, location of women in private and public domains in relation to active/passive citizenship and gendered wars are examined as vital strands of these dimensions, projecting the need to explore nation and nationalism particularly through a gendered lens. These dimensions also relate to the construction of women in Sinhalese nationalist rhetoric and their representations in the female-­ centred mega teledrama narratives, and therefore will be applied to analyse the production and reception of mega teledramas. In the next section, I situate womanhood more specifically within Sinhalese nationalist discourses and Sri Lankan historical subjectivities to contextualise female-­ centric narratives of mega teledramas.

Sri Lankan Women, Gender and Nation After the civil war ended in 2009, keeping women in their place, as symbols of cultural purity, has gained new national importance in Sri Lankan society. When in 2015, at a concert of American pop singer Enrique Iglesias in Colombo a bra was thrown at the singer on stage, supposedly by a female fan in the audience, the President of Sri Lanka reacted. The BBC (2015) reports how the President had been ‘shocked to hear that during the gig, local women removed their bras in public, threw their underwear at the pop star, or rushed on stage to hug and kiss him’.4 He further comments that while he did not advocate that the ‘uncivilised women who removed their brassieres should be beaten with toxic stingray tails’, he called for the organisers of the event to be subjected to such capital punishment. This national tantrum of stipulating a submissive womanhood on Sinhalese women also fit within the messages in the narratives of Sinhalese soap operas. The post-war decade in Sri Lanka also saw rising sentiments of ethno-­ religious nationalism and ethnocentric divisions, turning into acts of violence in several parts of the country (De Votta 2017; Haniffa 2019). Since 2012, an organisation of Buddhist monks called the Bodhu Bala Sena (BBS), which translates as the Buddhist Power Force, had spearheaded vocalising hate messages against the Muslim minority and demanding the boycott of their businesses, creating new tensions between the Sinhalese 4  BBC News. 2015. Organisers of Iglesias Sri Lanka gig ‘should be whipped’. BBC. https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35186892. Accessed 22 October 2019.

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majority and the Muslim minority in the country. In a prominent incident of mob violence against Muslim homes and shops in Dharga Town in 2014, 3 were left dead and 70 injured after a BBS rally fuelled ethnic tensions.5 Women’s roles as reproducers of the race and nation have a notable place in these discourses. At a convention of the BBS in July 2012, the monks passed a resolution to call for the ban of birth control methods in the country that they deemed had resulted in a rapid decline in the birth rate of the island’s Buddhist population.6 Women’s undergarments once again were placed at the centre of a nationalist campaign in March 2018 that swept social media platforms in Sri Lanka, accusing the clothes shop owners of the Sri Lankan Muslim community as hiding infertility tablets (wanda pethi) in women’s underwear to make Sinhalese women sterile and expunge the Sinhalese race.7 These ethno-religious moral panics constituted on women’s positions as biological advancers, or to use Spivak’s (2009: 76) term ‘reproductive heteronormativity’, built up to a deadly mob attack against the Muslim minority who lived in the central parts of the island in March 2018. As social media had been increasingly used for mobilisation, the government initiated a short internet ban in Sri Lanka. Media messages intrinsically intertwine with hegemonic gender norms to influence women’s spheres of leisure (Morley 1986: 147). Then, it is necessary to examine the kinds of gendered norms that shape the Sri Lankan society and in turn its mass media. One of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated feminist activists Sunila Abeysekera (1989) points out that dominant Sinhalese cinematic narratives provide only four alternatives to a woman who transgresses the community taboos surrounding sex: ‘she can go mad, she can commit suicide, she can be killed, or she can join religious orders.’ Using her analysis of Sinhalese cinema and female sexuality, Abeysekera calls the Sri Lankan women’s movement to embrace different types of female sexuality and women who live lives of sexual nonconformity. 5  Ruwanpathirana, Thyagi. 2017. Three years since Aluthgama: hopes for co-existence remain more elusive than ever. Groundviews. https://groundviews.org/2017/06/15/ three-years-since-aluthgama-hopes-for-co-existence-remain-more-elusive-than-ever/. Accessed 22 October 2019. 6  See Schonthal and Walton (2016). 7  Jeyaraj, DBS. 2018. ‘Wanda pethi’, ‘Digakalliya’ and the violence in Amapara. Daily FT. http://www.ft.lk/columns/Wanda-Pethi-Digakalliya-and-the-violence-in-­Ampara/ 4-651431. Accessed 24 October 2020.

1 INTRODUCTION 

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Female infanticide, honour killings, dowry deaths and sathi, which has plagued women in neighbouring India and other countries in South Asia, are not prevalent in Sri Lankan society (Hyndman and De Alwis 2003: 219). With Buddhism developing in the island in the third century BC, as the major religion, the role of women in society was reformed through Buddhist teachings, unlike the caste-based Brahmin practices of India (Jayawardena 1986: 109–113). Women were able to enter the ranks of the Buddhist clergy, and many women from different social strata became Buddhist nuns, and the practice of non-violence in Buddhism prevented customs such as sathi from entering Sri Lankan society (ibid.). Nevertheless, situations of subordination have continued to confront Sri Lankan women in various ways. Victorian moralities that were inflicted on the Sinhalese society during British colonial rule from 1815 to 1948 continue to suppress women even today (De Mel 2001; Hewamanne 2008; Risseeuw 1991). In 1858, new laws relating to marriage and property rights were introduced to Sri Lanka, and this had a lasting, if not devastating, impact on women’s rights to property and freedom of choice, leading the way to developing notions of women as the creator and protector of the domestic space (Hewamanne 2008: 25). While the monogamous Christian marriage law replaced all other forms of bigamy, polyandry and agrarian marriage customs in Sri Lanka, requiring formal registration of marriage (Risseeuw 1991: 17–25), British laws demanded the appointment of a distinct owner of land for each family, usually resulting in a male family member being appointed to own land (Hewamanne 2008: 25–26). As a requirement of court proceedings to dissolve a marriage was introduced along with these land laws, women were less likely to leave their marriages to return to parental homes, and British missionaries and officials could restore stability to the institution of marriage (ibid.). The plantation economy of the British rule gave way to the creation of a rising bourgeoisie and working class, during the latter years of the nineteenth century (Jayawardena 2000; Jayawardena and Kurian 2015). The education of girls became an important trajectory in the formation of the modern woman’s identity. The curriculum that was largely borrowed from the British education system was designed in a way that boys and girls were given equal opportunity at education through examinations although girls’ education included distinct components and training in needlework and home sciences (Jayawardena 1986: 120). This reflects that part of the ideology of institutional education was to keep bourgeoisie women in

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their place at the home, as housewives (ibid.). While women’s education led to professional opportunities, with teaching jobs being among the first of its kind, and education played the role in socialising women, the roles women accumulated were only ‘superficially different from those of the traditional society’ (ibid.). Eight years after independence from the British, the election of a Sinhalese nationalist government in 1956 became a significant juncture in the development of women’s identities in Sri Lanka. The government moved forward the statutory declaration of Sinhalese as the state language of the country, which was progressed with a Sinhalese nationalism campaign that focused on strong imagery of tradition, which included the construction of gender norms (De Mel 2001; Jayawardena 2000). These nationalist ideals were particularly championed by village elites who played influential roles in communities (Brow 1999). Women themselves were actively involved in the nationalism campaigns, despite the re-inscription of the allegorical values of motherhood (De Mel 2001: 2). Sinhalese theatre of the early twentieth century was instrumental in popularising this image of the Sinhalese woman that was dire to the time of the nationalism drive. The intention of nationalist plays that were written by local playwrights, such as John De Silva, was to build the imagined community of a postcolonial nation state that was constructed on its traditions (ibid.: 93).8 In a time without television, theatre served the purpose of the current mega teledramas in reaching out to a mass audience. Highlighting and glorifying the ancient indigenous pre-colonial past of Sinhalese kingdoms where the good Arya Sinhalese women were emblematic of this history was the objective of the plays (ibid.). Annie Boteju, the first stage actress to replace female impersonation in Sinhalese theatre, played the roles of these ‘dutiful, chaste, devout, dignified’ Sinhalese women in the nationalist plays (ibid.). The more modern history of violence in Sri Lanka in the last three decades re-introduced and contested these traditional roles of women in complex ways. The state suppression and armed  youth uprisings of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) movement in 1987/1989, the 1983 Black July communal riots and violence against Tamil minorities and the three-decade civil war have been focal historical events that impacted the role of women in Sri Lankan society (see De Alwis 1998; Hyndman and 8  Sri Lanka was colonised by the Portuguese from 1505 to 1656, the Dutch from 1656 to 1802 and the British from 1815 to 1948.

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

De Alwis 2003, 2004; Silva 2010). Women engaged, resisted and appropriated these violent histories, operating within and in exception to the dominant norms of gender roles in Sri Lankan society. Women also found agency to counter this violence in the form of political mobilisation. For instance, motherhood acted as the primary premise in the influential Mothers’ Front movement in Sri Lanka that protested the forced disappearances of over 60,000 men, alleged to have taken part in youth uprisings (De Alwis 1998: 683–685). Women combatants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) movement were executors of violence themselves, fighting in the front lines and carrying out suicide attacks throughout the civil war (De Mel 2001: 6). Over 80,000 women have been estimated to be war widows in Sri Lanka, which gave way to a rising number of female-headed households (De Mel et al. 2012: 100). Women were susceptible to gendered violence during the conflict. High-profile court cases of military rape and murder testify to the vulnerability of women’s subject positions during the war, in particular, in the war zones (ibid.). The impact of the war on the economy created military jobs as the last resort of employment for the sons and husbands of women in rural communities (ibid.: 110). The civil war contributed to expanding the already feminised economy in Sri Lanka that heavily depended on remittances of female migrant workers working in precarious conditions in places like the Middle East, and women workers continue to play a central role in garment factories in the apparel sector, a major export industry of Sri Lanka (Handapangoda 2012). Despite such contested identities of women’s roles in contemporary Sri Lankan society, the primary premise of womanhood continues to focus on their traditional gender roles (De Alwis 2002: 675–676). These notions have intensified with the messages driven by rising sentiments of ethno-­ religious nationalism in post-war Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan women be they Sinhala, Tamil, or Muslim, continue to be constructed as the reproducers, nurturers and disseminators of tradition, culture, community and nation. Such perceptions have not only legitimized the surveillance and disciplining of women’s bodies and minds in the name of communal and national “morality” and “honour” but have also re-inscribed the expectation that whatever women may do, they are primarily mothers and wives … (Hyndman and De Alwis 2003: 221).

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Such discourses have a subtle, overt and complex way of finding themselves into media representations and popular forms of television. Mega teledramas that cater to a predominantly female audience provide a significant vantage to examine how women have been constructed in storylines and how audiences of women interpret their selfhoods. As the intervention of people and dialogues are central to the resolution of events in soap operas, most social and political explanations tend to be omitted from the narratives. While this is a common approach in the mega teledramas, with erasure of the civil war as well as ethno-religious-cultural diversity, the gendered nature of the messages that prescribe good and bad binaries for female heroines brings to light their significance in terms of shaping people’s imaginaries about Sinhalese women’s positions.

Soap Operas and Cultural Capital In her analysis on the audiences of the British soap Crossroads, Charlotte Brunsdon (1997: 17; 1981: 36) examines how soap operas necessitate specific cultural capital that enables the production of meanings and pleasure. Brunsdon introduces three vital competences of soap opera audiences: (1) generic knowledge—familiarity with the conventions of soap operas as a genre, (2) serial-specific knowledge—such as familiarity of discontinuous and cliff-hanging narrative structures and (3) cultural knowledge—socially acceptable codes and conventions for the conduct of personal life. Brunsdon draws attention here to the so-called high- and low-brow separation of culture that act to situate soap operas in a debased status and argues against such classifications, stating that in similar ways to a Godard film this cultural capital becomes a necessary condition for watching soap operas.9 In her study, also of audiences of Crossroads, Dorothy Hobson (1982: 125) shows how this cultural capital works to easily exclude others who are not part of this knowledge base, drawing attention to the significance of decentering women’s soap opera cultures from their dismissals as low-brow forms of entertainment. 9  See Brunsdon (1997: 9–11) for a discussion on how the ‘metaphorical significance’ of Crossroads in the 1970s, deemed as low-brow television in British culture, made way to the defence of soap operas in her essay, along with Hobson (1982). Brunsdon discusses why she chose Godard films as an example to point out about the importance of cultural capital in soap operas, mainly responding to critical film appreciations of avant-garde cinema in Screen magazine.

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

Sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986, 1991) seminal work on the forms of capital is helpful to locate Brunsdon and Hobson’s examination of cultural capital in soap operas. Introducing a form of capital beyond economic theory, Bourdieu examines cultural capital as existing in three states—embodied, objectified and institutionalised. The embodied state exists in the form of consciously acquired and inherited social dispositions of the ‘conditions of existence, habitus and lifestyle’, the objectified state encompasses cultural goods (i.e. media) and the institutionalised state recognises cultural capital as a qualification (i.e. education). Indeed, Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of cultural capital is constructed on his research into the structural inequalities of education, as tied to class, which is translated in Brunsdon and Hobson’s analyses in the defence of soap operas. Then, in relation to the Sinhalese soap operas and its transnational audiences of women in this study, discussions with producers of megas and ethnographic observations with women will examine the Sinhalese nationalist meanings on womanhood in the narratives acting as a kind of cultural capital that produces interpretations, resistances, understandings and pleasure. Bourdieu also discusses ‘connections’ as vital to the accumulation of ‘social capital’, where through ‘indissolubly material and symbolic exchanges’ social groups function in sharing relationships and memberships to particular networks, instituting mutual acknowledgement. Social connections, such as women’s neighbourhood friendship groups and the diasporic teledrama club examined in this study, are important sites for the circulation of soap operas. In that sense, mapping how nationalist sensibilities and historical subjectivities on womanhood acted as a form of gendered cultural capital for producers to create soap operas and for audiences to consume and interpret their messages enable the analysis of the production and reception of Sinhalese soap operas.

Field Sites: Sri Lanka and Australia The civil war that lasted between 1983 and 2009 in Sri Lanka forms the backgrounds of the transnational field sites and participants of this study. Ethnic identities and ethno-religious nationalist politics were instrumental for the armed conflict in Sri Lanka with a series of riots against Tamils in 1983 becoming a pivotal moment of triggering the civil war (De Mel et al. 2012; De Votta 2017). The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) fought to establish an independent state in the North and East border of

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the island. In 2009, a government-backed military offensive against the rebels ended the war. The escalation of violence produced large-scale internal displacement, and estimates show that about 800,000 people in the country were displaced with many moving into refugee camps (Jayatilaka et  al. 2018). Some of them migrated to the Colombo city, remaining as squatters in underserved neighbourhoods, which then gradually developed into generational housing over the decades (Lakshman et al. 2019). The war also produced dire consequences for the economy with many seeking to voluntarily migrate in search of employment to places like the Middle East, Europe, Australia, Canada, and USA with others migrating internally from rural areas of the country to the Colombo city. Sri Lankans were given passage to Australia under the Special Humanitarian Program for asylum seekers and the Family Reunion Program to bring their families to Australia during the civil war from 1983 to 2009.10 After the civil war, Sri Lankan asylum seekers arriving in Australia via maritime routes have been a significant issue in Australian border protection policies. Incidents of Sri Lankan asylum seekers in intercepted boats close to Australia being subjected to an enhanced screening process at sea and subsequently being returned to Sri Lanka have been reported in the media, spurring debates about Australia’s asylum seeker policy, mandatory detention and offshore processing.11 However, since 2009, when the war ended in Sri Lanka, 70 per cent of Sri Lankan-born arrivals occurred as skilled migrants and 17 per cent as accompanying family members (ABS 2015). Australia has also grown in popularity in Sri Lanka as a destination for higher education and for seeking migration after following tertiary education in Australian universities. Today, despite the disproportionality of land dimensions, Sri Lanka being an island of 65,000 km2 and Australia a continent sized 7 million km2, Sri Lanka and Australia share a similar population size of 21 million and 23 million, respectively (ABS 2015; Census and Statistics 2012). The estimated Sri Lankan resident population in Australia is 124,000 with half of them living in the state of Victoria (ABS 2017).

10  Museum Victoria. 2013. History of immigration from Sri Lanka. http://museumvictoria.com.au/origins/history.aspx?pid=58. Accessed 4 April 2015. 11  Cooper, Hayden. 2013. Asylum seeker ‘enhanced screenings’ dangerous: former official’. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-10/asylum-seeker-enhanced-screeningsdangerous-­former-official-says/4744628. Accessed 17 November 2020.

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Such migration was only made possible in Australia after the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, more commonly known as the White Australia policy, that prevented people of colour from settling in Australia was abolished in 1966 (Jupp 2002: 6–10). Although Australia is termed as one of the most multicultural nations in the world, remnants of the White Australia policy exists as anti-immigration sentiments, in particular popularised through political parties such as One Nation (see Ang 2017; Gamage 2020). Nevertheless, as an immigrant nation, Australia sought ‘conscious social engineering to create a particular kind of society’ where the role of the state was instrumental in this process (Jupp 2002: 5, 85). Multiculturalism was first introduced as an official policy by the Fraser government after the release of the Australian Ethnic Affairs Council report in 1977, and Melbourne remained at the ‘heart of multiculturalism’ for many years with bipartisan support in Victoria for multicultural policy. The Special Broadcast Service (SBS) television and radio were initiated by the state in 1975 to promote multiculturalism through their programmes, as a public broadcaster of cultural diversity (Ang et al. 2008). Colombo In Colombo, fieldwork was conducted in three main constituencies. Two of these are settlements with concentrations of urban migrants who flocked to the city from rural and war-affected areas in the country for employment, schooling children and accessing amenities (see Lakshman et  al. 2019). Wanathamulla, situated along the major highway known as the Baseline Road, has a reputation for issues surrounding overcrowding, drugs, alcoholism, theft and violence. Similarly, a settlement in Peliyagoda about 8 km further along the Baseline Road is the second constituency of this study. The characterisation of housing in Colombo, according to the Ministry of Housing and Construction, is useful for understanding the structure of these neighbourhoods but does seem to contribute to the further stereotyping of these settlements. Key characteristics of slums according to these definition are ‘old deteriorating tenements or subdivided derelict houses, built mostly of permanent materials, very often single-roomed and compactly arranged in back-to-back rows, the occupants have a legal status of occupancy’ and for shanties ‘improvised and unauthorised shelters built by urban squatters on state or privately owned land, squatters do not have any legal rights of occupancy, the areas are badly serviced and very often

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unsanitary’ (Samaratunga 2013: 44). Nevertheless, the phrase ‘underserved neighbourhoods’ is better used for examining these settlements in Colombo in a way that does not typify their residents (Lakshman et  al. 2019) and will also be used in this study. It is estimated that around 68,000 households in Colombo are located in 1500 underserved areas, which amounts to around half of the city’s population (Niriella 2017: 44), occupying about 900 acres of government land in Colombo, such as unused railway land, canal banks and low-lying swamps (Jayatilaka et al. 2018: 82). Houses in Wanathamulla and Peliyagoda settlements are also constructed around such unused rail tracks, waterways and swamps in the areas. Houses in both settlements adjoin each other and are constructed on ‘two-perches pieces’ of land, amounting to about 50 sqm, with access to public toilets and taps. Participants of the study did not have rights or deeds to their houses and possessed ‘T-Cards’ or temporary cards that recognised them as residents with the threat of eviction or relocation at any time. The third and final constituency was situated in the fast-populating residential suburb of Athurugiriya, in the periphery of Colombo. The landmark clock tower in the town is surrounded by small businesses such as eateries and clothing stores that had mushroomed in the area with a population boom. Towards the hinterland from the town are clusters of one-­ storey houses that are spacious with front and backyards. Unlike congestion caused by lack of land in the Colombo city, this suburb has spacious paddy fields and unused land, generating a rural village atmosphere. The neighbourhood observed could not be classified as an underserved community but contain mixed housing and levels of working and middle-class incomes. These houses have private toilets and tap lines with home gardens and livestock as well as vehicles such as three-wheelers and small lorries. Some participants live on rent while others live in inherited or constructed houses. In all three constituencies, participants received remittances from family members and relatives who had migrated to work in the Middle East. Having access to electricity also facilitated every household owning a television for watching teledramas with mostly second-hand CRT televisions with some flat screens sent by family members working abroad. A few micro-entrepreneurial families had bought their own television sets. The close-knit communal relationships in the neighbouring households provided opportunities for women to watch teledramas together and talk about what they watch.

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The construction of a roster enabled me to watch megas across 15 households with 25 women in Colombo. For example, I start watching megas with Nanda at her household in Peliyagoda. The next day I visit her neighbours Imali, Violet and Dinusha’s household, watching megas with them. The following day I visit their neighbour Iranthi’s household. In this way, I rotate across the different households, returning to Nanda’s when I had completed the roster. I could only observe one household during any given day, as the megas women watched were mostly on during prime time with some exceptions during the day. Melbourne The diasporic association of the teledrama club in Melbourne is situated in Dandenong. Dandenong’s appeal as an early industrial suburb made migrants settle in the area with the prospect of finding employment (Jupp 2002: 28). Victoria and New South Wales, the most populated states of Australia with about six to eight million people living in each state, have been the major hosting states of migrants in Australia (ABS 2020). Situated about 35 kilometres from Melbourne’s Central Business District (CBD), Dandenong lends to this multi-diversity of migrant cultures in Australia, blending its industrial roots and settlement histories to form a complex landscape of cultural identities. Dandenong is home to migrants of over 132 countries, making it a noticeably culturally diverse suburb in Melbourne, and about 30,000 Sri Lankans live in Dandenong (City of Greater Dandenong 2015). For a minority non-dominant migrant community like the Sri Lankans in Melbourne that is little represented in mainstream media imagery of Australian multiculturalism, Dandenong provides visibility for their cultural identity, offering diasporic-specific experiences and places like shops, temples, clubs, associations and events. The town facilitates collective cultural engagements for the Sinhalese community who live across Victoria. Sri Lankan grocery shops are popular shopping locations with diasporic appeal for Sri Lankans living in Melbourne. The attraction these shops have for the Sri Lankan diasporic community does not end with groceries and culinary items from Sri Lanka. The shops also function as mini media hubs, providing access to a range of media products from the home country, such as DVDs of Sinhalese teledramas, television programmes, music CDs, community newspapers, tickets to entertainment events and religious content. Diasporic grocery shops have become points of circulation

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of cultural goods for migrant communities living across the world, and media goods from home countries available at these shops have a particular place in diasporic consumption (Aksoy and Robins 2003; Athique 2006; Mankekar 2002, 2015). Diasporic grocery shops function as a space of belonging and cultural currency also for the Sri Lankan migrants in Melbourne, and two of these major shops—Colombo Impex and MKS Spices—being situated in Dandenong make them a prominent place for diasporic consumerism, a reputation that had been consistent with Dandenong’s history, as a market town. Having myself photographed the event, it is fair to say that the Sinhalese New Year held in April every year at the Dandenong Show Grounds is the largest gathering of the Sri Lankan diaspora in Melbourne. The event organised by the alumni of the German Technical Training Institute of Sri Lanka, also based in Dandenong, presents a day of traditional New Year games, contests, food stalls, music events, prize draws and children’s events. Situated in Dandenong and adjoining Keysborough are the Sri Lankan Buddhist temples. These are two key religious centres for Sinhalese migrants in Melbourne, largely of the Buddhist faith. This is another reason that draws Sinhalese Sri Lankans to Dandenong. However, Dandenong that has gained a reputation as a cultural hub in Melbourne had grappled with socioeconomic conditions, as a suburb, raising questions about the challenges of enabling positive and healthy settlement of migrants in Australia. The area had produced unfavourable educational outcomes with 20 per cent of its young adults between the ages of 20 and 24 leaving school before completing year 11, and this is higher than both the municipal average of 13 per cent or the metropolitan average of 10 per cent (City of Greater Dandenong 2015). A new trend of Sri Lankan migrant families moving to Glen Waverly from Dandenong to send their children to school is prevalent. As shown in the 2016 census, the local government area of Casey, containing the suburbs Berwick, Endeavour Hills, Hampton Park, Narre Warren South and Cranbourne North, is ranked as containing the top suburbs with Sri Lankan migrants (Victoria State Government 2018). The local government area of Monash with the suburbs of Glen Waverley, Mount Waverley, Mulgrave, Wheelers Hill and Clayton is the second choice for Sri Lankan migrants. Greater Dandenong, containing the suburbs of Dandenong, Dandenong North, Noble Park, Keysborough and Springvale, has been ranked third. There are also considerable Sri Lankan communities forming in the Northern suburbs. These statistics show that the community is fast fragmenting

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across areas in Victoria and is no longer concentrated and limited to a particular locality. However, Dandenong’s cultural appeal and centrality as a Sri Lankan diasporic hub continues to allow this dispersed community a collective identity, as Sri Lankans in Melbourne.

The Participants The constituencies researched were introduced by the participants who volunteered for the study. In Colombo, a call of interest was generated through a development organisation, and a snowball approach was followed. I was hesitant to use a public advertising process, such as a newspaper advert (i.e. Ang 1985; Stacey 1994). A form of recommendation had to occur at an introductory level to access participant homes through consecutive days during the evening hours of mega teledrama times. Approaching participants in an unsolicited manner is impractical in this context and could have cultivated mistrust (Tsagarousianou 2001: 161). The first to volunteer was the participant I call Himani. She resided in the Peliyagoda settlement and introduced me to Seetha from Wanathamulla and Nalini from Athurugiriya. These participants referred me to their neighbours in the community. A total of 25 women from the neighbourhoods, aged between 19 and 77, volunteered for the project, and 15 households were observed. The women are from Sinhalese-Buddhist cultural backgrounds. Participants aged 34 and above have children, with the elderly participant Violet (77) having grandchildren. Extended families of four to six live together in the households. Their education is in secondary levels. The participants are mostly working-class women with casual employment in aged care, office assisting, sewing and factory jobs, and/or conducted micro businesses from home, such as catering, food packaging, assembling vehicle parts, farming and agriculture. In Peliyagoda, some women operated small businesses such as beauty salons, agriculture and gas cylinder centres, and these generated steadier incomes than for those in the underserved neighbourhoods in Colombo. Interviews with producers of mega teledramas were also conducted in Colombo. Ten producers participated for interviews, which include five script writers, two directors and three producers. I was only able to recruit one of the few female script writers working in the industry. A snowball approach was followed for recruiting participants with a limited number of producers agreeing to be interviewed due to prohibitions in workplace contracts and organisational policies. Interviews were conducted in their

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homes and workplaces, lasting for over an hour. Producers are graduates of Sri Lankan universities with industry training, aged between 30 and 45, from Sinhalese-Buddhist backgrounds. Their experience in the field ranges from 10 to 15 years, and they are currently affiliated with television channels and independent production companies. Unlike the women viewers of this study, the producers, coming from media backgrounds, had prior experience with interview situations. Some of them have conducted such interviews themselves as part of their media work. However, their insights were helpful to locate what they intended to create as dominant meanings in the mega teledramas, which sometimes were disguised in their attempts at self-promotion.12 The Sri Lankan migrant women in Melbourne had starkly different backgrounds to the participant women in Colombo. I first met them at the Australia Day celebrations in Melbourne that is marked with a multicultural pageant in the city. The women represented Sri Lanka in the parade, and I approached them for leads about if they watch Sri Lankan teledramas in Melbourne. It is then that Chandani, a founding member of the teledrama club, informed me about their association and invited me to join the next gathering. Melbourne participants, also from Sinhalese-­ Buddhist cultural backgrounds, had migrated to Australia between 1980 and 2009 during the civil war as skilled professionals. They utilised the points-based permanent residency pathways to Australia, applying for jobs that were in high demand. In Australia, they work (or worked) as accountants, scientists, mechanics, doctors, dentists, teachers, hair dressers, nurses and aged care workers. They had benefited from the public university education system in Sri Lanka as well as trade and university courses in Australia, and are competent in written and spoken English. A key migration pathway for some of their spouses was to qualify through the German Technical Training Institute (German-Tech) in Sri Lanka to migrate as mechanics. Participants of the study had migrated from both Colombo and rural towns in Sri Lanka to Australia. A major reason stated for migration is the violence and economic downturn during the civil war as well as the armed youth uprisings (see De Alwis 1998) that escalated through the 1980s in Sri Lanka. Participants of the teledrama club at the diasporic association are mostly seniors, aged 50 and above with a few women in the age group 30–50. Some older participants live with their children’s 12  See McRobbie (2000: 259–260) for a discussion on interviewing cultural workers and how their attempts for self-promotion are important forms of analysis.

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families in Melbourne with some living in units or flats by themselves or with a partner. Women in the 30–50 age group had parents living with them or relatives who had migrated from Sri Lanka.

Strangely Familiar: Positionalities in the Field and Power Relations In this section, I focus on three aspects of positionality that shape my ethnographic identity in the field to situate myself within the fieldwork of this study. Firstly, I examine the ‘trope of return’, a term I borrow from Mankekar (1999: 30), to position my dual-identity as a researcher, working in field sites based at home and host countries. Secondly, I discuss my position as a feminist media maker conducting audience research at the opposite end of the production stratum. Thirdly, I situate my position as a fan of mega teledramas and how my own consumption of the genre shapes the fieldwork process. These positions have a recurring and non-linear presence in the field during this study. They synthesise, overlap, compete and at times one position dominates the other. These positionalities also create complex power relations in the field of this study between me and my participants, which require negotiation and embracing. Trope of Return A return to their own societies has continued to produce ethnographic field sites and an analytical gaze for bicultural scholars (Abu-Lughod 1988; Bolak 1996; Mankekar 1999, 2015; Visweswaran 1994). Scholars returning as ‘natives’ to social and cultural fields of their roots resurface issues surrounding the troubling historical colonial origins of ethnography, the insider-outsider perspectives on the production of cultural knowledge and the interwoven hybrid identities of such returning native scholars (Parameswaran 2001: 72). Nevertheless, this trope of return is inseparable from my ethnographic identity and a complicated juncture in the fieldwork process. The ethnographic research in this study made it necessary for me to live itinerantly in the two field sites, Colombo and Melbourne, during the four years where fieldwork took place. Translocating between the sites with a ‘halfie’ identity (Abu-Lughod 1990: 26) contributed to a concurrent insider-outsider status for me as the researcher.

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My own displacement and deterritorialisation as an international student commencing higher degree research created both recurring disconnection and engagement with the field sites. I left Sri Lanka to do my Master’s degree in Melbourne when the civil war ended in 2009, returning to Colombo, for a year, upon completion. I travelled back to Melbourne in 2012 to commence my PhD, spending another year away from home in Melbourne before returning to Colombo for fieldwork. Having completed research in Colombo, I returned to Melbourne and lived there for another two years, doing fieldwork, analysis and writing up the text. In 2015, I returned to Sri Lanka for two more years, to fulfil a requirement of my higher degree scholarship that was intended to apply the knowledge I gathered in Australia in my home country. During this time, I undertook research and professional media activities in Sri Lanka. After three years, in 2019, I have, once again, returned to live in Melbourne. It thus shows that movement and translocation between Colombo and Melbourne had very much been a part of my everyday life as well as my ethnography, for the past ten years. With such continuous trajectories of movement emerge complex engagements with cultural currents and itinerant selfhoods. Living in Melbourne exposed me to a cultural vantage point in a developed country, an intellectual experience and a newfound socioeconomic freedom from living in a largely collective Sri Lankan society. Educational migration has become a basis for the formation of identities for female students (Kim 2011: 5) of the developing world, like me. Our identities circulate within transnational desires, individualisation, experiences of freedom, personal accountability and countering surveillance of our bodies (ibid.). Living in a developed country like Australia and returning to do fieldwork in Sri Lanka opened different interpretations of my roles in the field. I easily became an ‘outsider within’ (Bolak 1996: 111) in Colombo. Participants often compared my transnational educational identity to their own situations. As a result, they saw me as a privileged person outside their class, and I am aware of the implication of this interpretation on the projection of inadvertent hierarchies of power relations in the field. However, they were sympathetic towards my ‘lonely life abroad’, ‘away from family’ and missing out on the kinships of a collective society, which they saw as more favourable than the life that I had. Returning home as a researcher to conduct fieldwork in a familiar site would mean that the limitations of access and acceptance (Alexander 2010), or the ‘malarial and diffident’ (Geertz 1973: 412) nature of the exotic that greeted the early

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anthropologist, could not produce such an impact on me in Colombo. However, being an insider in a field site has its own limitations, something that has been made clear in the ethnographic research of others (Altorki and El-Solh 1988). Studying outside one’s ‘own class’ is likely to create a disparity and an imbalance in power structures between ethnographers and participants (Abu-Lughod 1988: 143–144). Participants often draw comparisons according to their own proximity to power and relationships they have with dominant social groups. Nanda and Seetha, participants from Peliyagoda and Wanathamulla underserved settlements, kept apologising to me for their ‘small homes’. Kumari, from the suburban neighbourhood of Athurugiriya, assumed that I might not have had ‘cheap salaya fish’ before, as she served me a plate of rice for dinner. Nalini from Athurugiriya said that I had more good karma in my account than her own daughter who may never be able to afford tertiary education in Sri Lanka, let alone abroad. They reminded me of my Sri Lankan middle-classness, as a status that clashed with theirs, which was mainly interpreted from my access to a life abroad. The altering insider-outsider within status is common to both field sites, which includes Melbourne. I knew only a few Sinhalese migrant families in Melbourne. My social circle largely remained among Sri Lankan students. Developing relationships with members of the Sinhalese diaspora and engaging with symbolic Sinhalese cultural activities in Melbourne were first-time experiences for me. Unlike the participants who were permanent residents of Australia, living at the time as a temporary international student in Melbourne and my inexperience in taking part in diasporic activities made me feel like an outsider during fieldwork. However, my ethnic Sinhalese background made me an insider in the diasporic circles. My status as a Sri Lankan student created positive impressions to gain access to a closed diasporic group and subsequently the teledrama club of that association. As a Feminist Media Maker My next position to be considered in the context of this ethnographic research is of a feminist media maker conducting audience research. My work in alternative media in Sri Lanka also opened avenues for me to engage with feminist media projects. Before I left for Australia to do my studies, I worked in journalism and television production that took a deliberate approach to representing the stories of women who were

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overlooked in mainstream media’s conflict reporting. I was privileged to have worked with and be trained by eminent Sri Lankan feminist filmmakers, Sharmini Boyle and Anomaa Rajakaruna, during my time as a full-time television producer in Sri Lanka from 2003 to 2009. While pioneering women ethnographers like Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, Jean Briggs, Elizabeth Fernea, Hortense Powdermaker and Laura Bohannon wrote ethnographic narratives about women (Visweswaran 1994: 23), telling stories about women for me began as an audiovisual feminist media cause, encompassing feminist activism, journalism and documentary filmmaking, before my involvement with this study. In this study, too, I was drawn to examining women’s lives and this time by exploring their engagements with media cultures. Jane Singer (2009: 192–194) examines ethnographic research as the ‘closest method to journalistic work’ because of its emphasis on observations and interviews. This often makes ethnographic research an appealing choice of methodology for scholars from journalism backgrounds (ibid.). However, the two are different. Ethnographic research is concerned with thick description, reflexivity, interpretation, contextualisation, long-term research, theoretical frameworks and the everyday life, while journalism highlights primary descriptions, objectivity, breaking news, use of quotations and focuses on the immediate (ibid.). However, my journalistic work in Sri Lanka also included a feminist perspective to storytelling. We deliberately sought women’s points of view when creating messages of peace, unsettling paradigmatic practices of objective mainstream journalism. Our programmes contested militarisation and addressed the absence of women’s voices in the media.13 This feminist journalism approach to storytelling was constructed subjectively as opposed to conventional forms of objective journalistic storytelling (i.e. peace journalism discussed in Lynch 2008). Before commencing this study, my exposure to ‘unconventional’ journalism, which required a sense of reflexive storytelling, and in my case included a feminist agenda, provided an early training in engaging with rather than distancing from reflexivity. This engagement with reflexivity is also essential in ethnography, particularly, as feminist ethnographers have argued in their work (Abu-­ Lughod 1993; Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Bolak 1996).

13  See my latter work on digital journalism and feminism in the project Women Talk https://womentalksl.wordpress.com/. (Gamage 2017). Accessed 13 January 2021.

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My association with the media was a basis for some assumptions that participants made about me, which remained throughout the fieldwork process in both sites. Their interpretations were not related to the media work I did. For them, my background in television work appealed as something exotic with links to stardom. It worked in my favour at times, as this appeal made women eager to become part of this project. Some of them asked me if I associated with any ‘famous’ teledrama actors and if I could get them a role in a mega. A participant vouched that she saw me on television presenting a musical chart show even though I assured her I had not. She kept introducing me to women from her neighbourhood, calling out loudly from one door to the other and parading me off as ‘the girl from TV’. A few of them agreed that they saw me on the chart show. Throughout fieldwork, participants adhered to their own interpretations of me including that I was writing a book, I was someone who had access to star contacts or I was simply the ‘girl from TV’. These remained even after my explanations and clarifications. The roles they assigned to me as a media maker set me apart from their everyday lives, as someone who was doing an unconventional job, associating with stars and getting access to a world they could not see. This made me an outsider within their homes. This world of television production that was unfamiliar to the participant women had been consistent in my everyday life, and this was helpful to initiate contact with mega teledrama producers for interviews with the producers interpreting my media identity as that of an insider. Some of the producers were well known to me from prior work in the field. This insider status helped to facilitate a rapport during interviews, and producers treated my project seriously because of my own status as a television producer. They showed keenness to be part of the project, and they assisted with recruiting other producers in their networks. Unlike the women who found my status as a media maker appealing, the producers and I shared a professional interest in mega teledramas. The producers did not treat me as a fan of mega teledramas, but rather they treated me as a colleague or a researcher with professional interests. However, it was more important for the women that I was able to connect with them as a fan of mega teledramas, which brings me to my next positionality—being a conscious fan of mega teledramas.

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Being a Conscious Fan of Megas The common interest and conversations I shared with participant women as mega teledrama fans was a coping mechanism that eased tensions rising from imbalanced power relations. The women found it enjoyable to talk about megas, and the conversations created bonding opportunities between them and me. This common ground of fandom I shared with women complemented my native ethnic Sinhalese roots. This elevated me to the status of insider at times. Watching soap operas require certain competencies, like generic, serial-specific and cultural knowledge (Brunsdon 1997: 17), which are also significant to consuming a narrative genre like Sri Lankan megas. This knowledge was crucial to getting accepted as a member of the viewing circles in the homes of participants. My alternating positionalities and renegotiated dual-sited identities as the ethnographer also shaped power relations in the field. The different identities of the researcher caused by intersectional variables, such as my work in the media, a life abroad, academic ventures, the literature that has informed me, my income, class and photographic skills, created a fractured terrain of power between the women and me. Feminist ethnographers have sought to embrace and negotiate these power relations as explicit to the research process rather than treating them as problems that need to be remedied (Abu-Lughod 1993; Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Bolak 1996). In this study, the mutual interest in mega teledramas that I shared with the women helped mitigate some of these differences and allowed common ground. The cultural capital that the women and I possessed about megas enabled us to share a mutual television viewing experience. They knew more about megas than me, and I took their insights seriously. The women were critical viewers, and I facilitated an environment that made it possible for them to share their views without being judged. They were overwhelmed that I was conducting academic research about women watching megas, and some found this hard to believe at first. Being featured in ‘the book’ I was writing was an intriguing aspect of participation for the women in Colombo. They regarded it as a significant status. The women referred to being selected for ‘the book’ with a sense of pride. They told me that ‘the book’ affiliated seriousness to their mega teledrama viewing experience that was often ‘joked about’. The women at the teledrama club in Melbourne appreciated the light being shed on their archival project and the diasporic association. This also meant that the

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women in both field sites possessed knowledge that I saw as valuable and I actively sought this knowledge. Nevertheless, observing people in their leisure time can be a significant invasion of privacy (Stokes 2003: 141). Audience researchers intruding on concealed spaces, such as domesticities, and the changes that occur in that situation have been a criticism against ethnographic audience research of this nature (Hobson 1982: 107). In her study of viewers of British soap Crossroads, Hobson points out that her presence did not ‘inhibit’ women’s comments on soap operas but rather contributed to ‘sharpen’ their critical consciousness of the stories. The women’s homes and the closed diasporic group are both private domains that I accessed to witness the lived experiences of mega teledrama viewers. I also relate to the women being attuned to my presence in their television space. However, like the many social members who shared their viewing experiences, I, too, had a place in their viewing family. Like them, I, too, was a fan of what they were watching. I was caught up in the exchanges of ideas and debates about the megas they watched. I found these conversations insightful to explore the meanings megas produced for the women. Talking about what we watched also contributed to building a rapport with participants rather than being an unobtrusive researcher.

Trust and Fieldwork with Women ‘So, what are you really going to put in your book about us?’ Himani asks me while we travel together in a three-wheeler (tuk-tuk). This question raises two points. Firstly, the likelihood of this exercise ending as a constructed and narrated end product (Wheatley 1994: 408) is of something she is aware through my explanations. Secondly, Himani is concerned with my intentions because she is the referral for this project in her neighbourhood. Despite her enthusiasm to play a part in my ‘book’, Himani demonstrates a concern about, what Judith Stacey (1988: 23) refers to as, the ‘manipulation, betrayal, and abandonment’ that I may cause in her social circle. That is why the exchange of information about the project formed a major part of groundwork in this study. This included explaining about aspects of the research process, such as informed consent, observations, interviews, using pseudonyms, the privacy of data, the autonomy of participants, researcher’s ethical obligations and the ethnographic text. Most academic jargon has ‘no currency’ (Visweswaran 1994: 49) among participants like Himani, and answering her question means providing a detailed

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explanation about this project. It was also important to create, as Ann Oakley (2005: 225) argues, a ‘nonhierarchical’ research environment where participants like Himani are able to question the project. The women asked me numerous questions about the study during fieldwork, and I welcomed these questions. This meant that I could provide them adequate information about any qualms they may have had about associating with this research. During observations, interviews and conversations, further opportunities emerged to address trust and develop rapport with women. Many women in participants’ social circles joined our conversations without invitation, as they visited homes to watch megas with their friends, came to drop their children for babysitting, shared food and delicacies, and paid visits to simply inquire. I allowed them to carry out these conversations rather than taking an interrogative approach, as these conversations provided valuable insights about the meanings of megas. I also relate to Ellen Seiter’s (1999: 53–54) point about separating women from the male members of the households to conduct interviews. Incorporating men as interview subjects or even conducting interviews in their presence could ‘threaten a loss of information about women’. In Chap. 3, I will highlight the viewing experiences of Ahinsa, a participant from the suburban neighbourhood, who lived in a constrained domestic setting. The mere presence of her husband silenced her, and she retreated to other parts of the house to listen to the megas, instead of watching, when her husband came home. Also, Imali, Violet and Dinusha’s viewing environment was altered by the presence of an alcoholic male. It is unlikely that the women would have opened up to me during interview sessions in the presence of these men. Seiter cites notable cultural studies audience research (Gray 1992; Morley 1986; Schlesinger et al. 1992 cited in ibid.), arguing that the presence or absence of men in interview settings could have greatly altered the findings of these studies. Ethnographers have reciprocated informants for their contributions to fieldwork in various ways, such as through teaching (Gillespie 1995), sharing maternal information (Oakley 2005) and offering childcare (Seiter 1999). In these instances, ‘reciprocation itself becomes part of the research process’ (Skeggs 2001: 434). The fieldwork in Melbourne was built on a reciprocal photographic activity at the diasporic association. Committee members of the association told me that they did not possess photographs of their recent cultural activities to be used in promotional material. Therefore, I volunteered to photograph their events. I freely distributed

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the soft copies of the photos among members of the association. Members also approached me for their individual photographs. I was able to provide the committee members with a large collection of photos that featured their cultural activities. This exchange helped me to establish relationships with members of the diasporic association. Photographs constitute partial representations of cultures (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 148). It is a complex task to use photographs in an ethnographic ‘discipline of words’ (Ball and Smith 2001). Anthropologist Margaret Mead was a key experimenter of ethnographic visuals and film. Mead and Gregory Bateson extensively used visual methods in their work with Balinese communities, setting an important directive for ethnographic work, and photographs became increasingly used as data repositories and analytical tools (ibid.). Taking pictures was also a more practical method of capturing the setting of diasporic activities at the association. I became the ‘unofficial official’ photographer of the association’s events throughout the fieldwork period, and photography created bonding moments between participants and myself. The women at the teledrama club were delighted to find me photographing them at diasporic events. They took me aside at times and asked me to take their lone profile shots. Some of them intended to send these photos to their relatives in Sri Lanka. This exchange of photographs helped me to be accepted into their social circles and facilitated a rapport. However, I explicitly sought their permission and informed consent to use the photographs for this project. No members objected to the use of their photos in the project. Divulging accurate information about the project and intentions of photographing was important despite the participants’ eagerness to become photographic subjects (Skeggs 2001: 433).

Writing the Ethnographic Text Writing up the chapters of this study occurred mostly in Melbourne, away from the field in Colombo. The trope of return that was explicit to my ethnographic identity also shaped writing this book. As Marie Gillespie (1995: 74) points out, one way of overcoming the disengagement from the field at the end of fieldwork is to maintain social relationships with participants. In Melbourne, I continued to take part in the events of the diasporic association even when the fieldwork period ended. However, there was the imminent reality of leaving Melbourne to return to Colombo with the completion of fieldwork.

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My distance from the field in Colombo made it difficult to physically engage with the women there throughout the project while living in Melbourne. Nevertheless, my short visits home were opportunities to maintain social relationships with them. They invited me to their social functions, and I took part willingly. Both localities were ‘personal’ and ‘shared’ spaces that had homes where I had lived (Coffey 1999: 106). A certain ‘migratory’, ‘intellectual instinct’ (Ang 2009: 25) in both localities shaped my research experience. This brings us to the problematic of exiting the field at the ‘end’ of fieldwork (Kondo 1990: 23), as the researcher translocates between sites. One of the coping mechanisms of mitigating the disengagement from the field, as a lone researcher, was writing the ethnographic text of this study. As Mankekar (1999: 30–31) points out, working in field sites that entail ‘longstanding emotional and political ties’, such as homelands, does not occur in a ‘linear trajectory, beginning with arrival in the field and ending with the publication of the book or the monograph’. I found the writing helpful to stay connected to the field in both localities. Writing provided an opportunity to reminisce and reflect, as I spent long hours with consolidated notes, interviews and photographs. Another challenge of writing the ethnographic text was to make decisions about expressions and style. Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon (1995: 429) argue that women ‘as writers of culture’ reverse emphasise ‘cultural inscription’. Women Writing Culture, their well-known rejoinder to James Clifford and George Marcus’s (1986) Writing Culture, emphasised the significance of appreciating the uniqueness of women’s writing styles. Women ethnographers like Hurston, Deloria, Briggs, Fernea, Powdermaker and Bohannon deployed first-person narratives of the societies they studied (Behar and Gordon 1995: 429). These narratives were ‘part of an implicit critique of positivist assumptions’ and a ‘strategy of communication and self-­ discovery’ (Visweswaran 1994: 22–23). Kamala Visweswaran contests the dismissal of these texts as ‘confessional field literature’ in anthropology debates. She argues that this work is experimental feminist ethnography, which generates ‘tales of distance or alienation as empathic fables of rapport’. Judith Okely (1996, 1992), as well as Okely and Helen Callaway (1992), has highlighted the significance of ‘autobiography’ in ethnographic writing. Feminist ethnographers have championed reflexivity and autobiography in their work over more rigid approaches to objectivity and scientific inquiry (Abu-Lughod 1988; Bird 2009; Bolak 1996; Kondo 1990; Malkki 1995; Mankekar 1999; Oakley 2005; Okely 1996;

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Parameswaran 2001; Visweswaran 1994). Examining these studies closely, I had to decide how my ethnographic text could convey the ‘significance of television’s existence as a ubiquitous presence in the lives and imaginaries of people in the contemporary world’ (Abu-Lughod 1997: 110). The television-viewing environment of women is the nucleus for writing about their lives in this study. The analysis builds on a grounded theory approach (see Glaser and Strauss 2017).  It was necessary to reveal the first-hand experiences I had with women in the field in order to problematise and interpret the engagements women had with mega teledramas. As Amanda Coffey (1999: 22) points out, ‘an over-simplified model’ of the ethnographic researcher as an ‘ignorant outsider or stranger may be misleading’ and could lead to the silencing of an ethnographic presence in the text. The narrative nature of the ethnographic accounts aims to examine how participant observation can provide insights in the study of media audiences (Murphy 1999: 481). I use pseudonyms throughout the writing process to protect the privacy of participant women. Common Sri Lankan names are assigned to the women. As Dorinne Kondo (1990: 8, 46) points out, the names assisted in creating a text where they could be followed as characters throughout the narratives. I refer to the producers with their designations, and this helps to locate their answers within their professional roles, as most of them requested to remain anonymous. I use a mix of first-person and third-person points of view in presenting accounts of fieldwork through the eyes of the participants and the researcher (Fig. 1.1). Illustrating the ‘individualistic and personal confrontation’ I had with women who are ‘living data’ (Okely 1996: 27), a synthesis of present and past tenses will be used in the text to create an ‘ethnographic present’ (Halstead et al. 2008). In this process, reflexivity is an explicit part (Okely 1996: 27) of the written text of this study. I have created narratives to articulate women’s engagements with mega teledramas and my position within the fieldwork experience. The text presents participants’ voices through quotations, conversations, descriptions and stories. In the following chapters, I examine the themes and concepts that were identified through analysis and interpretation of data gathered during fieldwork in relation to both the production and reception of mega teledramas. I make a distinction between the ‘lived’, ‘experienced’ and ‘told’ understandings of the participants and mine as the researcher, however, certainly not without overlapping moments (Bird 2003: 20). The study acknowledges the ‘epistemological recognition that all knowledge is situated, partial, contingent and interpretative’ (Skeggs 2001: 435). It does not wish to attribute to a holistic understanding of the women or media producers of this study.

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Fig. 1.1  Researcher (at centre; looking at the camera) with participants—a participant who held on to my camera while we danced to conclude the gathering at a diasporic association in Melbourne took this photo of me, 2014

Tracing the connection between television, culture, meanings, pleasure and the social identity of viewers (Seiter et al. 2013: 227), as well as the intentions of mega teledrama producers, is a major focus of the study and reflects the research questions that this study set out to examine.

Conclusion This study examines the complex intersections of class, ethnicity and gender that result in interpretations and circulations of nationalist meanings in everyday ubiquities like homes and spaces of leisure through national television narratives and imagery. Researching Sri Lankan soap operas and their transnational audiences of women in this study emerged from an itinerant ethnographic process of mobility and migration. The ethnographic effort of this study shows how migrant media cultures can be studied by following the cross-border currents of transnational cultural flows in national and diasporic contexts. Following feminist ethnography,

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attention to reflexivity, creating non-hierarchical research processes, building trust, addressing concerns and respecting participants as knowledge holders provided opportunities for this study to develop a process of researching with women. Such a process is vital to understanding women’s media cultures through their own lived experiences and for eliminating the dismissal and vilification of women’s consumption of popular cultural forms such as soap operas.

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CHAPTER 2

Producing Meanings in a Soap Opera: Making Appropriate Femininities

Abstract  Cultural workers do not operate in a vacuum when they design media messages. Sri Lankan soap operas known as mega teledramas are targeted at a predominantly female audience and embed messages of womanhood that are constructed on nationalist sensibilities of media producers. In this chapter, semi-structured in-depth interviews with Sri Lankan soap opera scriptwriters, directors and producers are analysed to understand how they construct meanings in mega teledrama narratives. The economic, cultural and social purposes that shape the production of the narratives are discussed to situate the technical, financial, artistic and ideological processes that influence the products of cultural workers. As women are the primary audience of soap operas and female heroines take priority in the narratives, this chapter shows the gendered nature of creative decision-making processes for producing certain kinds of female bodies, freedoms and expressions on television. This chapter provides a basis to locate the interpretations, resistances and pleasures of the audiences of women watching soap operas in Colombo and Melbourne discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4. Keywords  Soap operas • Media production • Nationalism • Womanhood • Television • Sri Lanka

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gamage, Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6_2

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The Development of Sri Lankan Mega Teledramas Television was introduced to Sri Lanka in 1979, and the government maintained a monopoly with the two state channels Rupavahini and Independent Television Network (ITN) broadcasting island-wide television (see Mahendra 1996). Few years later, veteran Sri Lankan filmmaker D. B. Nihalsinghe directed Dimuthu Muthu (Bright Pearls), a slow-paced melodramatic limited-episode narrative, featuring a story in a rural village and the barriers of income-class differences in obtaining parental approval for the marriage of a young couple, which pioneering playwright/actor Dhamma Jagoda coined as ‘teledramas’ (Kumara 2012: 488). Since then, the popularity of teledramas made them a primetime genre on local television. With the advent of commercial television channels in the 1990s in Sri Lanka, an influx of Indian soap operas introduced audiences to a lengthy and ongoing narrative genre, contrasting with local teledramas. Indian soap operas established female protagonists who led the narratives and around whom the stories revolved. The commercial television channel Sirasa TV spearheaded these importations in 1997 by broadcasting the Sinhalese-dubbed Indian soap opera Shanthi, named after the main female protagonist of the story, a journalist.1 India’s state channel Doordarshan broadcast Shanthi in 1994, and it was well received in India (Rao 1999: 26). Shanthi also gained unprecedented popularity in Sri Lanka. For instance, thousands of fans gathered in Colombo to meet Mandira Bedi who played Shanthi’s role when she visited the island to coincide with the 500th episode. Corresponding to this popularity of Shanthi, Sirasa locally produced a 500-episode teledrama named Damini, featuring local actress Yashodha Wimaladharma in the lead role of Damini, also a journalist, like Shanthi. The similarities in the plot lines point to the spinoff nature of Damini, which had borrowed structure and storylines from Shanthi. Damini was produced in partnership with the Indian production company Sri-Adhikari Brothers, who were well known for their music programmes, serials and sitcoms on India’s satellite channel Zee TV.2 The 1  Hindustan Times. 2010. Mandira Bedi still ‘Shanti’ for Sri Lankans. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/tv/mandira-bedi-still-shanti-for-sri-lankans/story-­ KUdyQW0mMAV3xPbhHtDQPJ.html. Accessed 15 November 2020. 2   The Economic Times. 2006. Now playing: ‘Shriman Shrimati’ in Sinhalese. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/now-playing-shriman-shrimatiin sinhalese/articleshow/1513281.cms. Accessed 26 October 2020.

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involvement of such Indian television companies introduced elements of production and post-production techniques in Indian soap operas to local teledramas. Indian technical professionals accompanied the production team for Damini in Sri Lanka. Vivid colour tones, extravagant set design, intense makeup, fast-cut editing styles, female-centric storylines and melodrama can be seen prominently present in Damini. These characteristics that were influenced by Indian soap operas made Damini different from early teledramas. Sirasa continued importing Indian serials like Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because a Mother-in-law was Once a Daughter-in-law Too), which was produced by Balaji Telefilms for India’s Star Plus channel.3 Its Sinhalese-dubbed version was retitled as Mahagedara (Ancestral Home) in Sri Lanka. Kyunki had already launched a soap opera trend in India now known as ‘saas-baahu sagas’ (Munshi 2012: 21). These soaps, widely popular in India and among the Indian diaspora, featured mother-in-law and daughter-in-law stories, highlighting conflicts of in-laws, reflecting class, caste and dowry issues. Critics denounced these saas-baahu soaps in Sri Lanka, as contributing to negative social and cultural developments, accusing them of influencing the breakup of family structures, rising number of divorce cases, body image issues and fashion consciousness (Ruwandeepa 2011: 31). Despite this opposition, Sirasa also dubbed Star Plus’s soap Kasautii Zindagii Kay (Criterion of Life), another product of Balaji Telefilms, which was broadcast as Praveena, naming it after the main female character of the drama.4 Praveena was broadcast immediately after Mahagedara. Following Mahagedara and Praveena, Sirasa also went on to broadcast two local spinoffs named Wasuda and Kavya, both named after the female protagonists in the stories. Sirasa named these two hours, consisting four half-hour episodes of Mahagedara, Praveena, Wasuda and Kavya, as Ran Depaya, meaning the two golden hours (Abeykoon 2010: 5). Similar to the scheduling of the Indian soap operas in India, which were aired every day (Munshi 2012: 359), so were the dramas on Ran Depaya. They broadcast for a prolong period of time in Sri Lanka, exceeding well over 500 episodes. 3  Sunday Times. 2003. Mahagedara: new tele series on Sirasa TV. Sunday Times. http:// www.sundaytimes.lk/030914/tv/6.htm. Accessed 17 November 2020. 4  Sunday Observer. 2006. Upclose and personal Praveena. Sunday Observer. http:// archives.sundayobserver.lk/2006/03/26/fea23.html. Accessed 11 November 2020.

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The popularity of Indian soap operas in Sri Lanka comes as no surprise. Sri Lanka was already a significant player in the Bollywood export market and shares a cultural ethos as well as an attraction to Hindi films (Ray and Jacka 1996: 95). Hindi and South Indian commercial cinema heavily influenced the Sinhalese cinema when it began in 1947 with the black and white film Kadawuna Poronduwa (Broken Promise), and this became a trendsetter for many romantic musical Sinhalese films that followed during this era (Dissanayake 2010: 177). Subtitled Hindi films are shown in cinemas across the island and are also regularly broadcast on Sri Lankan television, particularly as daytime television. The government intervened to regulate this growth of Indian soap opera importations, imposing the Teledrama, Film, and Commercials Levy in 2006.5 The Finance Act, No. 11 of 2006 (3–4), which introduced the tax, was designed to curb imported content on cultural grounds. The Act states its objective as ‘improving and regulating the quality and standard of tele dramas, films and commercials produced in Sri Lanka and thereby ensuring the propagation of Sri Lankan values through such tele dramas, films and commercials’. Thus the tax, too, invested on the fear of cultural absorption and unsettlement of traditional values. The levy made the Indian soap operas more expensive to import. Exploiting a loophole in this restriction on soap opera importations, local television channels began producing serials similar to Indian soap operas that were shown in Sri Lanka during the two golden hours. The initial local productions were Indianised and glamorised, following closely the narrative structure, presentation, music and editing styles of the Indian soap operas. For instance, commercial channel Swarnavahini produced Gauthami, continuing to name the drama after the main female protagonist and retaining the characteristics of Indian soap operas. The involvement of Indian production professionals in producing Gauthami could have further lent to maintaining the qualities of Indian soap operas in the Sri Lankan production.6 While the commercial channels went on to get active in producing Indian-style local dramas, the state broadcaster ITN, too, produced Batti (female name), featuring a rural storyline, and 5  Parliament of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. 2006. Inland Revenue Department. http://www.ird.gov.lk/en/publications/Acts_Other%20Levies%20%20Taxes/ FActNo.11[E]2006.pdf. Accessed 17 November 2020. 6  Rodrigo, Lakmini. 2006. Lucky streak—two decades of success. Daily News. http:// archives.dailynews.lk/2006/03/25/fea14.asp. Accessed 10 November 2020.

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­subsequently Paba (female name), using local production professionals and artists.7 Most these locally produced narratives exploited the formula of the star-crossed lovers, parental objection to marriage, the lovers’ struggle and the happily ever after. Gradually, the Indian glamour was replaced with localised content and cultural contexts. For instance, Batti was set in a rural village and featured the love-struggle between a village elite and his domestic helper Batti. Batti was among the first of these dramas to deviate from the standard images of Indian glamour, choosing instead to depict poverty-related class differences between the elite class of the village and working-class families, central to the postcolonial bourgeoisie conditions in rural Sri Lanka.8 The term mega teledramas or megas (mega hence lengthy) became common parlance in the Sri Lankan television industry to refer to the Indian-influenced local dramas. The generic term of teledrama remained for the Sri Lankan home-grown narrative genre, and the new genre emerged as mega teledramas. They are now more popularly known as megas in Sri Lanka although many still refer to them as teledramas. The influence of Indian soap operas on Sri Lankan teledramas was not well received by pioneering teledrama professionals who regularly protested against the lengthy megas that were replacing the early limited-episode teledrama genre, as harmful to familial, cultural and aesthetic values, also highlighting job losses and ethical issues emerging with television channels monopolising the teledrama industry.9

The Funding Model of the Mega Teledramas Private television production companies and sponsors have been central in the production of teledramas as early as the 1980s, and this has also remained the funding model of mega teledramas, as interviews with producers show. The local private production company Tele-cine produced the inaugural teledrama Dimuthu Muthu for the national channel Rupavahini, and the Jinasena Group, the company credited for importing 7  Thilakarathne, Indeewara. 2007. Batti passes 150th milestone. Sunday Observer. http:// archives.sundayobserver.lk/2007/10/14/spe08.asp. Accessed 10 November 2020. 8  See Jayawardene 2000 for a detailed historical analysis of the development of the postcolonial bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka. 9  Sri Lanka Guardian. 2008. Religious leaders and artists protest against ‘Mega Teledramas’. Sri Lanka Guardian. http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2008/09/religious-leaders-and-­ artistes-protest.html. Accessed 1 November 2020.

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water pumping equipment to Sri Lanka, sponsored Dimuthu Muthu (Kumara 2012: 488). The production of both the early teledramas and the current mega teledramas in Sri Lanka differs from other postcolonial contexts, such as India, where national broadcaster Doordarshan and soap operas of Egypt’s modernist project were state-sponsored interventions central to disseminating messages of national consolidation and modernism (Abu-Lughod 2002; Gokulsing 2004). Commercial sponsoring of soap operas has a long history indeed, as the emergence of radio soap operas in the US in 1930s served the purpose of selling soap and detergent products to women with companies like Proctor and Gamble playing influential roles, resulting in the term ‘soap operas’ (Hobson 1982: 26). However, the British production model of soap operas significantly differed from its US counterparts because British television was closely regulated, and advertisers were prevented from directly impacting programmes at the time (Geraghty 1991: 4). In Sri Lanka, advertisers have been instrumental in shaping textual messages, even in some early teledramas. Since the 1990s, Sri Lankan insurance company Ceylinco sponsored well-known long-running teledramas like Doo Daruwo (Siblings), Nedayo (Relatives), Sathpura Wasiyo (Honourable Citizens) and later, the mega, Tharu Kumari (Star Princess).10 The company introduced teledrama-themed insurance products during advertising breaks, placing subtle and overt messages outlining the uncertainties of the everyday, such as sickness, old age, death and accidents that needed protection with insurance were established in the storylines. Telecommunications service provider Dialog is a major sponsor of mega teledramas in Sri Lanka and features both direct and indirect messages in stories, in the form of logos, product placements, theme music and characters using telecommunication services. At the time of observations in 2013, state channel ITN usually showed three commercial breaks with about four minutes of advertising for each slot in their mega teledramas. Apart from commercial breaks, a continuous ticker (or crawler) at the bottom of the screen showed text ads throughout megas. The advertisements are in Sinhalese. A range of products and services such as consumer goods, telecommunications, government projects, finance companies, leasing companies, tuition classes, 10  Daily News. 2006. Tharu Kumari on Rupavahini. Daily News. http://archives.dailynews.lk/2006/03/27/PrintPage.asp?REF=/2006/03/27/fea08.asp. Accessed 12 November 2020.

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banks, supermarkets, lotteries and electrical goods could be observed among these advertisements. These advertisements reflect the comments of interviewed producers about the target audience of megas being middle-­class families with disposable incomes. Similar to Australia, the channels perform the functions of marketing the mega teledramas and recruiting advertisers through specialist in-house and outsourced marketing units. As a result, the advertising revenue generated from megas is not passed down to producers, as interviews show. Instead, the producers are paid a sum for each episode within which the production budget, including the profit, is managed. According to producers, channels paid them around 150,000 rupees (AUD 1500) for an episode. Interviewed professionals pointed that a few dominant production companies exercised a monopoly in the mega teledrama market. As a result of their dominance and access to primetime broadcasts on many channels, producing megas have become profitable for these companies, making it difficult for independent producers to survive in the industry. Producers said that these production companies had backchannel contractual arrangements with the television channels. Independent producers, who did not have such arrangements, took risks. They were compelled to create megas through private investors with the hope of selling their finished products to the channels. These independent producers have become vulnerable, on most occasions, as they have been unable to get access to airtime, with channels rejecting their dramas, at times, even after approving synopses prior to production. Producers said that the process was not standardised or transparent, depended on preferences, bribes, the decisions of a few people in television channels and to a great extent on middlemen. The commercial realities of television production can clearly have a significant influence on the textual output of television programmes (Ganti 2012; Hobson 1982). The mega teledrama producers treated these conditions as a ‘reality’ of the production process of mega teledramas. In order to manage low budgets and maintain profits, the producers apply strategies that enable quick turnarounds, such as filming several episodes within a day, simultaneous execution of production and post-production activities, utilising minimum technical equipment (i.e. one camera), minimising movement between filming locations and scheduling filming according to the availability of artists. The formulisation of mega teledrama narratives is a notable tactic they used.

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The Mega Formula and Class Distinctions of the Lovers Class-divided star-crossed lovers, parental objection to marriage, their schemes to prevent the union of the lovers, the lovers’ struggle and the happily ever after are repetitively used in the megas as a formulaic narrative. The mega formula serves the purpose of constructing cultural meanings and also allows for the sustenance of the genre amidst financial constraints. In his seminal encoding/decoding thesis, Hall (1980: 128–129) suggests that encoding, or the moment of constructing media messages, involves ‘institutional structures of broadcasting’, such as networks, organisational factors and technicalities. Hall also argues that the production of media messages is a ‘discursive’ process that is framed through ‘meanings and ideas’. The ‘material instruments’ of production as well as sociocultural imperatives influence such processes. Main characteristics of Western soap operas, such as endless middles of the story, multiple sub-plots, the depiction of a community in the narrative, selective storytelling, reflections of the private life of characters, melodrama, use of a large cast, presentation of the everyday lives of characters, interlocking narratives and the use of cliff-hangers (Ang 1985: 56–68; Livingstone 1990: 53–54), can also be found in the structure of mega narratives. Apart from these, female protagonists who refuse to give up the ‘traditional values and attributes’ of the ideal woman that is characteristic of the Indian soap operas (Ranganathan and Rodrigues 2010: 209) are a central feature of mega teledrama narratives, making them different from female characters in Western soap operas. Particularly, as with many dramas from the Asian region, the focus on preserving familial relationships (Dissanayake 2012: 194) is a convention in the mega teledrama narratives. Written around a main female character, mega stories develop across the everyday lives and social relationships of a dominant and a subordinate family. The dominant family is portrayed as the privileged and possessed adequate economic means. The subordinate family represents the underprivileged, living in poverty and usually working for the dominant family as labourers or domestic workers. The female and male protagonists who become lovers belong to either family in different megas. According to the producers, positioning the dominant and subordinate families in two main households was also economical, as this enabled filming to be undertaken in two fixed domestic contexts, where most of the scenes were filmed, and in many cases, these were rented houses.

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The Sinhalese audience include viewers who have migrated from rural areas to the city, making the depiction of rural life in the mega teledramas vital. According to the producers, creating a scenic signification of the village was considered, as these images related to people’s memories of their lives in the village, especially for those who migrated to Colombo. The producers sought to construct dialects, agriculture, customs, behaviour, habits, dress codes, close-knit communities, ancient religious practices and indigenous medicine that signified the rural villages of the country. The rural stories, in particular, contain harsh representations of poverty, which the producers saw as a significant aspect of rural life that differentiated it from the consumer culture in the city. The mega teledrama producers differed from the creators of Egypt’s modernist soap operas, discussed by Abu-Lughod (2002: 122), who refrained from creating rural representations in the narratives. While many mega teledrama producers placed a significant emphasis on creating rural plot lines and imagery, not all megas contained rural settings. Megas also represented urban and suburban contexts although ‘ruralisation’ took place even in these contexts. Representations of the Sinhalese village were created through characters, sub-plots, customs, festivals, food, visits to hometowns and memories. By adopting a social class formula and creating divisions between the rich and the poor, both in rural and urban contexts, the producers appeared to have minimised or erased the more controversial and sensitive topics of ethnocentric divisions and the civil conflict from the megas. While the megas developed through the 2000s, during the height of the civil conflict, the stories detached themselves from ethno-centrism. Indeed, this was a time of restraint on the many basic freedoms of people in Sri Lanka (De Mel et  al. 2012), including expression, particularly on a national medium like television. Talking about any aspect of ethnic divisions and the civil conflict could have itself created repercussions for the television producers, channels and advertisers. To examine narrative strategies of mega teledrama producers further, discussions with producers that centred on three mega teledramas set in suburban contexts are analysed below. These megas illustrate how the producers had created class distinctions between the main couples in the narratives—Asini (female) and Kusal (male) in Thurya (Music), Nimsara (female) and Megha (male) in Induwari (Heavenly Flower), and Nathalia (female) and Sudhara (male) in Apeksha (Hope). Both Thurya and Induwari followed the mega teledrama formula while Apeksha had given a twist to the conventional storyline. As a scriptwriter said, situating the

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lovers, Asini and Kusal in Thurya, within different income classes was a strategy for sustaining conflict throughout the plot and for constructing representations of Sri Lanka’s class conditions: The classes of Asini and Kusal were made to clash in an obvious way in this story. They meet in the same university. Kusal is a talented, educated boy, and Asini’s father recruits Kusal to work for him. Asini’s father appoints Kusal to a higher post while his own son is appointed to a subordinate post. This is because of Kusal’s education. Kusal works impressively at the office. But Asini’s father does not wish to give his daughter to Kusal. He cannot stand the idea of his daughter falling in love with Kusal. When he finds out that Kusal and Asini are in love, he opposes the affair. This story represents the conflict between social classes and the complexity of the class system in Sri Lanka. (Scriptwriter 3, Colombo, 2013)

A writer of Induwari and Apeksha also echoed these views. She said that creating the star-crossed couple Nimsara and Megha with class distinctions enabled her to sustain conflict throughout the story in Induwari: ‘if there is no conflict there is no mega.’ Megha’s entrepreneurial family opposes his affair with Nimsara, a poor orphan girl, who works as a domestic labourer at their home. She lives with her sister in her uncle and aunt’s home. They face discrimination and acts of cruelty from their guardians. The writer said that Nimsara was able to ‘build’ Megha into a ‘responsible’, ‘caring’ person and ‘salvage’ him from the carefree lifestyle he lived with his family’s wealth. This characteristic of the female protagonist salvaging the male is reversed in the same writer’s mega, Apeksha, but the convention of the star-crossed lovers has undergone change. In Apeksha, Nathalia is the carefree, irresponsible, Westernised woman in the story, who gets ‘salvaged’ by her ‘good husband’ Sudhara. Sudhara turns Nathalia into a ‘good woman’ in the end. Working in Nathalia’s father’s office, Sudhara lives in debt, taking care of his brother and two sisters, when he receives Nathalia’s father’s proposal. Nathalia’s father approaches Sudhara and offers to help him with his financial plight and in return Sudhara is to marry his daughter, Nathalia, a young widow, leading a life that is portrayed as decadent. However, soon after the marriage, Sudhara’s class stands against him, and he and his family are discriminated against when they move into Nathalia’s parents’ home. In all three megas, as the stories end, the lead characters are accepted into the same class that rejected them as a result of their roles in

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transforming their partners into moral human beings. In Induwari, Nimsara becomes the ideal wife and, in Apeksha, Sudhara becomes the ideal husband in the households that first objected to their classes because they were able to ‘salvage’ their partners from decadent lifestyles that were impacting the dominant families. The producers considered closure as an important part of the mega narratives, as this was where the two classes resolved their differences, towards the climax of the story. The unification of the classes was achieved when the lovers received blessings for marriage in the end. This raises the question as to whether there was a certain cultural vision that the producers intended to achieve with narrative closure in the megas, which will be examined next.

Closure in the Megas In literary theorist Roland Barthes’s (2002: 76) classic analysis of French playwright Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, Barthes refers to the ‘hermeneutic code’ as the basis of constructing expectation in the narrative. According to Barthes, ‘expectation thus becomes the basic condition for truth: truth, these narratives tell us, is what is at the end of expectation.’ Examining this concept in relation to soap operas, Tania Modleski (2008: 29) argues that the ‘hermeneutic code predominates’ in soap opera. This means that constant expectation of narrative closure is constructed in the texts, however, only to ‘defer the resolutions and introduce new questions’ (ibid.). Barthes’s reference to the hermeneutic code suggests a ‘return to order’, however, as soap operas do not end ‘truth for women is seen to lie not ‘at the end of expectation’, but in expectation, not in the ‘return to order’, but in (familial) disorder’ (ibid.). Soap operas are produced with a ‘continuous’ and ‘infinite’ sense of time, without an indication of a definite ending, continuing for many years before anything ‘final’ could happen in the stories (Hobson 1982: 32). However, like the Latin American telenovelas with their closed narratives (La Pastina et al. 2014), the resolved ending is an important structural characteristic in the megas. Mega teledramas still end, after a long time, and the ending—the unification of the lovers—is anticipated from the outset by producers as well as audiences (see Gamage 2018). As the lovers unite in the end, viewers’ expectations are met and the narrative is resolved in the megas. In this sense, in the megas, there is a ‘return to order’. As Robert Allen (2002: 20) discusses, open narrative serials are considered to constitute a ‘poor vehicle for the inculcations of particular values’,

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as the ‘absence of a final moment of narrative closure also indefinitely postpones any moment of final ideological or moral closure’. The interpretation of soap operas as a feminine genre is partly based on their lack of narrative closure (Mumford 1995: 91). John Fiske (1987: 181–183) proposes to interpret soap operas as a ‘feminine narrative’ because their open narrative structure is seen as constituting a ‘feminine aesthetic’. Writing about romance and ideology in American daytime soap operas, Laura Mumford (1995: 91) begs to differ from this view and argues that ‘moments of closure’ that are extended across open soap opera narratives are likely to reaffirm the ‘correctness of the patriarchal status quo and women’s position within it’. Discussing the genesis of melodrama, Jesús Martin-Barbero (1993: 118–119), too, points out that it was characteristic of melodramatic narratives to sustain ‘truth’ and ‘morality’ in the end, reaffirming ideological values. The responses of the mega teledrama producers reveal that they sought to use the endings of the stories to construct broader messages. For them, the endings of megas signified something more than the lovers uniting. For instance, the mega teledrama producers referred to these endings of megas in terms of creating the couple as being able to ‘set a good example to the society’. According to the producers, the fact that one of them had to ‘rise from zero’ or, in other words, struggle against poverty was seen as one way of creating this example. Evil characters were held accountable for their actions and often received punishment, encountering gruesome fates. Family hierarchies were established and the couple receiving the ‘blessing’ of parents in the end was highlighted. Female characters, in particular, were made to safeguard familial relationships by showing respect to the elders who initially objected to the union. Familial relationships and the ‘insignificance of the individual life’ (Modleski 2008: 30) largely shape the narratives of mega teledramas, as common in soap operas. The ‘family is the dominant trope’ in most television drama produced in Asia, and this is based on the family centredness of the communication relationships in this region (Dissanayake 2012: 194). Thus, the main female character that drives the plot in the mega teledramas had been created as preserving these familial relationships as the mega finds closure. There are ‘multiple identifications’ with the female protagonist (Modleski 2008: 30) although she is the ‘controlling figure’ (Mulvey 1981: 210) in the mega teledrama. This deprives the main female character of power, and instead, she is compelled to embrace various hegemonic,

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cultural and moral positions imposed in the resolved ending of the mega. According to the producers, the women in the megas were ‘victorious’, meaning they succeed in receiving familial blessing for marriage. For this reason, producers say they create ‘happy endings’ in the megas. However, it is not hard to miss that these ‘happy endings’ have also been constructed to reflect female characters’ positions as women. Nathalia becomes a good wife in Apeksha, Nimsara becomes the better sister in her family in Induwari and Asini becomes a good daughter who saves her family from an evil fate in Thurya. Their roles of the wife, sister and daughter are reaffirmed, and they become role models as the megas end. However, the producers did not necessarily interpret the mega heroines in this way. For them, the characters of women have already made a mark in the male-­ dominated, class-divided society, uniting with their lover. Paradoxically, women’s emancipation in the megas is also firmly grounded in safeguarding gender and familial norms. The woman writer I interviewed interpreted her own role in the industry as ‘unconventional’, which could be located within her responses about the images of femininity she created in the mega teledramas. However, reaffirming the traditional gender roles of the female protagonist in the mega teledramas was important to this writer. Binaries of good and bad womanhood were set and distinctions were made between women who conform and transgress, which were endorsed with closure: Nimsara carves wood in the mega teledrama Induwari. I wonder whether there are women like that? Although wood carving is a subtle art, it is manly. As far as I know there isn’t anyone like that … But if a woman sets her mind to do it, she can do it. Even me, I am engaged in an unconventional career, outside the mainstream, and so are my characters. This is not easy. So, in Induwari, what I expected to show most was how two poor young orphan girls achieved their goals in life. One of them tries to escape from the problems in life. The other one fights with her problems and tries to move forward. In the end, the woman who wins is the woman who fights and faces life courageously. The one who takes the easy way out entangles in a vast web of problems. (Scriptwriter 1, Colombo, 2013)

The other writers I interviewed also echoed these views. They interpreted female protagonists in the megas as unconventional characters and struggling heroines, but their views return to endorsing women’s conformity to motherhood, cultural preservation, chastity and the ideal

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Sinhalese-Buddhist womanhood. The creators said that the female characters they chose were ‘very strong characters’ but also importance was given to preserving the role of the mother figure because of its ‘strong place within the Sri Lankan society since ancient days’. Some of their views emphasised that the ‘women’s sacredness must be protected in the megas’, a woman must ‘become good and set an example to the society’ and that ‘showing a woman rising from zero and going towards her victory in megas can inspire the society’. Their creative decisions are situated within this framework of the strong woman reaffirming gender roles that also provided a basis for Sinhalese nationalist discourses on womanhood. Mumford’s (1995: 91) argument that ‘moments of closure’ in narratives can reaffirm patriarchal values, and women’s positions within it, discussed at the start of this section, is exemplified in the following quote from a director on Nathalia in Apeksha (Image 2.1). Moral closure of women protagonists in the megas endorsed ideologies about surveillance of women’s bodies and behaviour as well as instilling cultural correctness through male counterparts in their lives:

Image 2.1  Apeksha on a television screen in Colombo. In this scene of Episode 1, Nathalia is reprimanded by her family for going to night clubs, 2013

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Nathalia goes to nightclubs. She associates with bad people in the society. She has no empathy for the society, her husband, her parents or her siblings. She is living inside her own world. She is not a considerate woman … There is a reason why Nathalia is doing this. Nathalia does not go clubbing on her own will. Nathalia is taken to the clubs by this society. That is the most important thing. The society has created this negative version of Nathalia … Sudhara [Nathalia’s husband] corrects Nathalia in a very subtle way. The message we are trying to give to the society is that the society should not reject such women. There are characters like Nathalia in our society who can be shown the correct path. (Director 1, Colombo, 2013)

The producers also claimed a commercial reason for their moral decisions in the megas, which was predicated on the anticipation that the audience might reject the mega teledramas if traditional gender roles are disregarded. If the messages were not made to fit into prevalent cultural norms, there was also the potential of advertisers withdrawing from the projects. An example discussed was Rala Bindena Thana (Breakwater), a drama that departed from the conventional familial relationships and frameworks of the megas. According to the writer, this resulted in creating a cult following while the mainstream audience did not engage with it. Creating a story for Sri Lankan prime time outside the conventions and cultural meanings of the dominant mega teledramas is challenging, and the survival of such stories could be problematic, as the below quote emphasises: In this drama the mother is entirely different. She is not the everyday woman you see. In the plot she is depressed with her married life, and she has an affair. It is not the accepted behaviour. As a result, the audience for this drama became very limited … In mega teledramas, most work has to be done within a frame of expectation. Audiences could reject dramas that cross that line. The channels, producers and advertisers get scared to go ahead with controversial themes … So, megas are set within portraying the stereotypical images of women—in this case the role that was in question was that of the mother. Rala Bindena Thana was an alternative to these common representations and could not survive in the mainstream. (Scriptwriter 2, Colombo, 2013)

The producers consulted audience feedback through market research of the television channels. As a result of these marketing teams being employed by the television channels, the channels often made

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recommendations to the producers on the types of meanings that needed to be created. For example, as some writers point out, the channels have a say in how scripts were written on some occasions: The television channel recommends the entire storyline of some megas. They believe that showing something like that, during that particular time, will work. In such instances, they expect us to stay in their plot. Market research might say some star couples will work better in a drama. Then the channels make the plot, based on the couple. However, on other instances there are opportunities for us to develop our own stories. (Scriptwriter 4, Colombo, 2013)

The global paradigm of television channels’ reliance on market research in creative decision-making processes (Ang 2006: 46) was also common to the Sri Lankan context. As the producers outlined, the television channels contributed to creating the messages in megas and were actively monitoring audience feedback and market research. In this sense, the decisions that the producers made in the megas were also based on audience demands. However, in some instances the producers disregarded these inputs from marketing teams in order to construct moral closure. The convention of the megas was to unite the lovers in the end and bring closure to audience expectation. However, the mega teledrama Amanda (female name) deviated from this convention to avoid representations of divorce. Amanda illustrates how producers prioritised preserving familial relationships and women’s positions as wives. With the disappearance of the lead role of Amanda in the middle of the series, the plot took a sudden turn. Amanda’s sister, Cathy, was compelled to marry Amanda’s boyfriend, Thejan, in episode 207. Amanda leaves her home and isolates herself because of threats from Thejan’s father. In the wake of her sister’s disappearance, Thejan’s entrepreneurial family arranges his marriage to another woman, according to Thejan’s father, from their ‘own class’. Cathy intervenes and marries Thejan with the hope of reuniting her sister with him. The mega explicitly showed the couple sleeping separately, one of them on the bed and the other on the floor, assuring the audience the marriage was never consummated—a fact that only the viewers knew, besides Thejan and Cathy. According to the producers, this justified Amanda’s return to the story, in order to break off her sister’s marriage and reunite with Thejan. The audience was kept in suspense for the remaining 100 episodes about Amanda’s return. The cultural implications

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of closure in the mega have significantly been considered during the creative process. More importantly, audience feedback received through marketing teams had shown that the audiences preferred to see Amanda and Thejan uniting. However, the producers decided to disregard this in order to avoid divorcing Cathy and Thejan, which they interpreted as a negative social message: The expectation of the audience was to see Amanda and Thejan getting together. We could have brought her back in the end. But we could not do that because then we would have to divorce Cathy and Thejan. That is a greater destruction than getting scolded by the audience for shattering their expectations. It is a bad message to give to the society—to divorce a married couple, even a fake marriage. Therefore, we were prepared to take the negative feedback from the audience, and we had to follow the decision of showing a message that would cause no harm to the society. (Scriptwriter 1, Colombo, 2013)

The Imagined Audience and Self-Censorship In her ethnographic work with Hindi film producers, Tejaswini Ganti (2012: 24) points to the relationship between producers and the audience in India as one of ‘othering’. The Hindi film producers’ imagination of the audience was based on the ‘articulation of difference’. This ‘production/reception divide is an important dichotomy’, which reveals how ‘social difference is produced, managed, and experienced’ in Hindi films. In contrast to this, the mega teledrama professionals drew parallels between the audiences and their own middle-class statuses. Their conception of the audience includes positioning their own families within that audience. In Hall and Tony Jefferson’s (2006: 5–7) study of youth subcultures in post-war Britain, they point to this dominance of the middle-class culture as forming a ‘dominant social-cultural order’ and that this ‘dominant culture represents itself as the culture’. Thus, the subordinate culture ‘experiences itself in terms prescribed by the dominant culture’, and the ‘dominant culture’ also becomes ‘the basis of a dominant ideology’ (ibid.). Hall (1980: 134) later refers to the conventional meanings that represent a dominant culture in texts as ‘dominant or preferred meanings’, in his encoding/decoding thesis. Hall argues that preferred meanings have the ‘whole social order embedded in them as a set of meanings, practices and beliefs’ and constitute the ‘dominant cultural order’ in texts. The cultural

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meanings of mega teledramas aimed at middle-class audiences illustrate a common thread of preferred meanings constructed in the mega teledramas although these meanings are also individualised according to the producers’ interpretations of what constitutes acceptable cultural behaviour (Image 2.2). Indeed, the middle-classing of the audience is also a strategy of global commercial television, as middle-class viewers possess ‘disposable income’ that particularly appeal to advertisers, and television messages that target the middle-class audience tend to produce meanings that are less likely to ‘offend’ these viewers (Louw 2001: 49). While the mega teledrama producers consulted market research and audience feedback commissioned through television channels, their understandings of their own middle-­ class families watching television were highlighted in the interviews, as providing the backdrop for some creative decisions. Even in the case of Amanda, the producers draw from their own experiences of the middle-­ class family watching television together. The diasporic audience (Gamage 2019, 2020) is not a target audience of the megas. The producers did not

Image 2.2  Neighbour women watch mega teledramas together in a suburban household in Colombo, 2013

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emphasise the upper and working-class audiences in their responses relating to the target audiences. The producers’ imagined audience was based to a great extent on their own middle-class consciousness. The producers also interpreted their positions as creative workers through a social responsibility framework. The self-censorships that they exercised during the creative process of mega teledrama production were justified by their sense of social responsibility. They interpreted television as a ‘cultural object’, a ‘mass medium’ and a ‘middle-class object’. According to the producers, this created a ‘responsibility’ for them as television professionals. This interpretation of their roles as socially responsible media makers surpassed their positions as creative workers. Self-censorship became a determinant for shaping messages in the megas, as television was seen as a national disseminator of culture. However, as outlined before, the process of constructing representations in the megas also considered the implications of losing audiences and the financial support of channels and advertisers if the messages were not consistent with cultural norms. According to Bourdieu (1991: 137–159, 168), social dispositions of the ‘conditions of existence, habitus and lifestyle’ shape the everyday formations and concepts of cultural practices. Cultural meanings ‘become sign systems that are socially qualified (as ‘distinguished’, ‘vulgar’ etc.)’ through the ‘mutual relations’ and ‘schemes’ of social conventions (ibid.). Censorship thus becomes a ‘structural’ necessity in social systems for ‘imposing’ and ‘respecting’ conventions (ibid.). In his essay Television, Bourdieu (2001: 246–247) returns to censorship and examines the concept particularly in the context of television production. According to Bourdieu, the ‘anonymous and invisible mechanism’ of censorship in television makes the medium such a ‘formidable instrument for maintaining the symbolic order’ (ibid.). Hegemonic and contextual cultural meanings also shape common-sense understandings of the producers in deciding what needs to be omitted during the creative process of mega teledramas. This also shows how their individual cultural interpretations shape the meanings of narratives in mega teledramas: I never show murder. I don’t show divorce. I don’t try at all to show domestic violence and violence against women. We have to consider such things, and we must agree to the code of ethics of the television channel as well as our personal view … When we say the audience in Sri Lanka, this include the people at our home; that is the middle-class home. If I cannot sit with

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s­omeone else and watch one of my dramas there is no use from that. (Scriptwriter 1, Colombo, 2013)

Mega teledrama producers were, then, attempting to create versions of culture in the narratives that they deemed to be ‘correct’. While there were broader guidelines and codes on representations provided to the producers from television channels, the individual notions of culture that the producers constructed in the megas also have an important place in narrative strategies and were consistent with all their productions. The previous comment of the writer on not showing divorce and failed marriages was reflected in all her productions, according to her, although this was not a guideline of the television channels. It should be noted that there were other writers who were not opposed to showing marriages breaking down in their mega teledramas, which in some of their work had been a central thread in the plot. This means that the producers’ views on representations were nuanced and open to individual interpretations. For example, one of the writers emphasised that they were able to create the character Panchali in the 500-episode mega Ruwan Maliga (Golden Castles) as a ‘strong woman’ because she divorced her cheating husband Jehan. According to the writer, Panchali was earlier portrayed as a ‘weak character’, firstly subjugated by her grandmother, who influences her in selecting marriage partners, and then by Jehan, the husband her parents chose for her. Panchali’s release from the ties of the home and her marriage was seen as vital for her representation of a ‘strong’ character. ‘Self-censorship’ can create a ‘tension between the thoughts of the self-­ censor’ and the ‘instrument of the censorship’, which can lead into ‘moral ambivalence’ (Horton 2011: 91), as these different versions of representations in the megas illustrate. These moments of stricture needs situating within the ‘time and space co-ordinates’ of television professionals in order to make sense of the way they produce meanings, and the intricate ‘negotiation between professional and other rhetoric’ that surpasses the ‘determining moment’ of the text (Tulloch 1999: 152), as the discussion of morality among mega teledrama professionals reveal. Roger Silverstone (2007: 7) defines morals as ‘judgment and elucidation of thought and action that is oriented towards the other’. The moral decisions that the producers made about mega teledramas were dependent on their ‘own claims to be a moral, human, being’, as socially responsible media workers, which also rested on the fear of audience backlash creating commercial

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repercussions. Undoubtedly, the differences in global media content and form emerge as part of media’s implicit roots in their ‘own society’ and culture of origin (Grossberg et al. 2006: 69): We must set a boundary when we create mega teledramas. More than the fear of the audience breaking away, it is more important to understand that we have a responsibility in a medium like television. I work within a certain boundary. Of course, we are targeting the middle-class family. That is the family we know. If we show something that children and parents cannot watch together, something that the middle-class family cannot watch together, we can feel that too. As a writer, it is important to self-censor in a medium like television. The television has become a cultural object for us. We must be careful when we create messages in mega teledramas. (Scriptwriter 4, Colombo, 2013)

Conclusion The producers’ interpretations of mega teledramas show how moral and cultural perspectives intersected with, sometimes prevailing over, aesthetic and creative decisions in the messages and representations of mega teledramas. The good-bad binaries and acceptable representations of female protagonists that producers constructed in the megas suggest that they were informed by Sinhalese nationalist sensibilities of womanhood. Based on ‘reproductive heteronormativity’ (Spivak 2009), women’s biological reproduction of the nation, cultural reproduction and women’s role as preservers of culture (Yuval-Davis 1997) were significant denominators of creating female protagonists in the megas. While the producers do not interpret their work as directly linked to the advancement of a nationalist cause, it is clear that their cultural capital aligns with women’s positions in the Sinhalese nationalist discourse (see Chap. 1). It is this everyday translations and ubiquitous circulations of nationalist sensibilities in relation to women’s bodies, freedoms and choices disseminated through national cultural mediums like television that the producers foreground in their discussion (see Chap. 5 for further discussion). Meanings that are ‘structured in dominance’ are ‘not closed’ or ‘determined’, and they are open to interpretation (Hall 1980: 134), as the following ethnographic chapters (Chaps. 3 and 4) with women watching mega teledramas will explore. Those chapters provide understandings on how the women’s

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interpretations of the megas reworked, aligned and contradicted with the way the producers envisioned their creations.

References Abeykoon, Achala. 2010. Glocalizing Power of Indian Soap Operas Over Sri Lankan Audiences: A Case Study of Indian Soap Operas. Paper Presented at the International Conference of Media and Culture: Global Homogeneity and Local Identity. School of Communication Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, October, 28–30. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. Egyptian Melodrama—Technology of the Modern Subject? In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 115–133. Berkley: University of California Press. Allen, Robert C. 2002. Introduction. In To Be Continued: Soap Operas Around the World, ed. Robert C. Allen, 1–26. New York: Routledge. Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas. London: Methuen. ———. 2006. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Barthes, Roland. 2002. S/Z. Trans. R. Miller. Oxford: Blackwell. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. J.B.  Thompson. Cambridge: Polity Press and Basil Blackwell. ———. 2001. Television. European Review 9 (3): 245–256. De, Mel, Kumudini Samuel Neloufer, and Champika K. Soysa. 2012. Ethnopolitical Conflict in Sri Lanka: Trajectories and Transformations. In The Handbook of Ethnic Conflict, ed. Dan Landis and Rosita D.  Albert, 93–118. New York: Springer. Dissanayake, Wimal. 2010. Working Notes: Melodrama and Sinhalese Cinema. South Asian Popular Culture 1 (2): 175–182. ———. 2012. Asian Television Dramas and Asian Theories of Communication. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 7 (2): 191–196. Fiske, John. 1987. Television Culture. London: Routledge. Gamage, Shashini. 2018. Soap Operas, Women, and the Nation: Sri Lankan Women’s Interpretations of Homegrown Mega Teledramas. Feminist Media Studies 18 (5): 873–887. ———. 2019. Sri Lankan Migrant Women Watching Teledramas in Melbourne: A Social Act of Identity. In Handbook of Diaspora, Media and Culture, ed. Roza Tsagarousianou and Jessica Retis, 401–414. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell and IAMCR. ———. 2020. Migration, Identity, and Television Audiences: Sri Lankan Women’s Soap Opera Clubs and Diasporic Life in Melbourne. Media International Australia 176 (1): 93–106.

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Ganti, Tejaswini. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham: Duke University Press. Geraghty, Christine. 1991. Women and Soap Opera. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gokulsing, Moti K. 2004. Soft-Soaping India: The World of Indian Televised Soap Operas. Staffordshire: Trentham Books Limited. Grossberg, Lawrence, Ellen Wartella, D. Charles Whitney, and J. Macgregor Wise. 2006. Media Making: Mass Media in a Popular Culture. Thousand Oakes: Sage. Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/Decoding. In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–138. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 2006. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Sub-Cultures in Post-War Britain. Oxon: Routledge. Hobson, Dorothy. 1982. Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen. Horton, John. 2011. Self-Censorship. Res Publica 17: 91–106. Kumara, Nuwan. 2012. Nihalsinghe: The Pioneering Third Eye. Colombo: Fast Publication. La, Pastina, C. Antonio, Joseph D. Straubhaar, and Lirian Sifuentes. 2014. Why Do I Feel I Don’t Belong to the Brazil on TV? Popular Communication 12 (2): 104–116. Livingstone, Sonia. 1990. Making Sense of Television: The Psychology of Audience Interpretation. London: Routledge. Louw, Eric. 2001. The Media and Cultural Production. London: Sage. Mahendra, Sunanda. 1996. A Note on Television in Sri Lanka. In Contemporary Television: Eastern Perspectives, ed. David French and Michael Richards, 221–227. New Delhi: Sage. Martin-Barbero, Jesús. 1993. Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From Media to Mediations. London: Sage. Modleski, Tania. 2008. The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas. In Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel, 29–40. Berkshire: Open University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1981. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Popular Television and Films, ed. Tony Bennett, Susan Boyd-Bowman, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott, 206–215. London: BFI Publishing. Mumford, Laura Stempel. 1995. Love and Ideology in the Afternoon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Munshi, Shoma. 2012. Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television. London: Routledge. Ranganathan, Maya, and Usha M. Rodrigues. 2010. Indian Media in a Globalised World. New Delhi: Sage. Rao, Sandhya. 1999. The Rural-Urban Dichotomy of Doordarshan’s Programming in India: An Empirical Analysis. Gazette 61 (1): 23–37.

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Ray, Manas, and Elizabeth Jacka. 1996. Indian Television: An Emerging Regional Force. In Global Television: Peripheral Vision, ed. John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka, and Stuart Cunningham, 83–100. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruwandeepa, Veronika. 2011. Impact of Indian Tele-Dramas on Women’s Behaviour in Sri Lanka. International Journal of Communicology 1 (1): 31–40. Silverstone, Roger. 2007. Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2009. Nationalism and the Imagination. Lectora 15: 75–98. Tulloch, John. 1999. The Implied Audience in Soap Opera Production: Everyday Rhetorical Strategies Among Television Professionals. In Rethinking the Media Audience, ed. Pertti Alasuutari, 151–178. London: Sage. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender & Nation. London: Sage.

CHAPTER 3

Soap Operas, Women and the Nation

Abstract  This chapter examines the audience practices of women watching soap operas in Colombo. An active audience watching soap operas in their homes, the women’s television viewing spaces are considerably shaped by the unpaid care work they perform in their homes, as this chapter shows. This chapter argues, for audiences of women, the contexts of the home and spaces of leisure are defined through gendered differences of unpaid care work and intersectional contours of class, ethnicity, income statuses, livelihoods and cultural obligations. Women’s viewing practices in the homes, watching soap operas in neighbourhood friendship groups, constructing support networks, silences and resistances that enable transgressing subjugation and the meanings and pleasures of watching soap operas are discussed. This chapter situates mega teledramas within everyday contexts of women in order to present complex and diverse ways megas produced meanings for participants to understand womanhood, the self and nation. Keywords  Soap operas • Television • Gender • Sri Lanka • Unpaid care work • Women audiences When fieldwork commenced in 2013 in Colombo, three years had passed since the civil war ended in Sri Lanka. Rapid city beautification projects are being implemented by the Ministry of Defence, utilising military © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gamage, Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6_3

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personnel who had been freed from their deployments. Military in khaki shorts and camouflage t-shirts were restoring colonial buildings intended to house luxury shopping malls. Barricades and barbed wire preventing attacks on economic landmarks are being taken down suddenly making visible buildings in Colombo that were hidden behind protective cordons during the war. Rapid construction of flyover bridges (guvan paalam) intended to ease traffic at several intersections in Colombo’s highways was symbolic and synonymous with this accelerated city development project, mainly constructed by engineers and workers from China.1 The first of its kind was being constructed on a stretch of a highway known as the Baseline Road, a significant motorway in Colombo’s transportation network, linking routes to the international airport. Several railway crossings halted the continuous flow of traffic along the Baseline Road, as vehicles stopped for trains to pass, creating incessant congestion along this motorway. The flyovers were meant to remedy this issue by allowing the vehicles to drive over the railways. More importantly for this study, about eight kilometres of the Baseline Road connects a stretch from the landmark Borella Junction to the Peliyagoda Junction where two of the constituencies of this research are situated. These are two underserved neighbourhoods in Wanathamulla and Peliyagoda. The third constituency of this project where participants resided was in the periphery of Colombo in a suburban town called Athurugiriya, where similar work on highways and road networks was taking place (see also Gamage 2018). Three women I call Himani, Seetha and Nalini became vital to this project as first volunteers. Following a call of interest through a development organisation, Himani contacts me to help me with the project, as friends in her neighbourhood are, according to her, ‘huge teledrama fans’. She also introduces me to her colleagues Seetha who lives in Wanathamulla and Nalini from Athurugiriya.2 Himani’s house is on the side of the highway and part of her land has been accumulated by the government for the motorway. Receiving compensation for the land, Himani has begun to add an upper floor to her house to supplement the land she lost from motorway expansions. Her neighbours, too, are busily constructing, adding upper floors to their houses, and the air is filled with fumes, cement dust and noises of grinding and tile-cutting work.

1 2

 See De Alwis 2010.  See Chap. 1 for a detailed description of fieldwork and localities.

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Himani apologises to me for the house being a ‘mess’ because of construction activities. Her family is in a rush, she tells me, to finish the upper floor because they fear that any other emergencies may require them to spend their lump sum of compensation money. Himani has also been able to tile her previously cemented floors. She shows me the new floor proudly, saying that finally she was able to ‘improve’ her house from the compensation she received, demonstrating a sense of upward mobility and social achievement. While Himani’s entire hall has been cleared for construction work, two things remain in the hall—the television and her grandmother’s bed where an elderly woman is laying. I learn that Himani’s grandmother is bedridden and is cared for in the home. The television remains on, conveniently situated in the direction of the bed for Himani’s grandmother to watch. This is the emergency that Himani is so worried will cause her family to spend their compensation. With her grandmother’s health deteriorating, Himani is eager to finish the constructions. Himani’s family reflects the insecurities of a casualised workforce and the absence of social security, a reality of many families working in the informal economy in Sri Lanka (see Hewamanne 2020; Jayawardena and Kurian 2015). While I watch megas with Himani and women from the underserved neighbourhoods, it becomes clear to me that most of their experiences of watching television are shaped by the demands of this informal economy doubled as gender roles and cultural obligations. Ever since the second-­ wave feminist movement brought to light with their slogan that the personal is political, the home, the private sphere and the community became significant spaces for political analysis and engagement (McRobbie 2005: 43). This theorisation was vital for research that emerged on soap operas and audiences of women (Brunsdon 1997: 39). In Colombo, too, women’s roles in caregiving are then significant to shaping how, when and why they watch mega teledramas and in what ways. In her seminal work on housework and women, Oakely (2018: 2) argues of the importance of interpreting housework as a ‘work role’. She argues that notions of housework as a feminine role in family and marriage have resulted in a ‘sexist’ sociological outlook towards housework. Similarly, the blurring divide between women’s work in the homes and the necessity of recognising women’s household labour as economic conditions has been at the centre of feminist debate on class, labour and gender (Federici 2020; Hochschild 1997; McRobbie 2002; Skeggs 2001). Women’s work role in the house is then also a vital denominator to understand them as a television audience in those homes.

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Clearly, women’s roles as carers in the home cause disruptions to watching mega teledramas, and they cannot simply be observed as watching television in a space of leisure. However, in order to watch mega teledramas in this disruptive viewing style require a cultural capital that Brunsdon (1981: 36) examines with viewers of the British soap Crossroads. Unlike Radway’s (1984) romance readers, who were able to carve out a space that allowed them to be free from the obligations of household work during reading time, watching megas entails creatively appropriating women’s household labour to derive a pleasurable viewing experience. The nature of the medium, genre and viewing arrangements partly enable this ‘rational strategy’ (Morley 1986: 37) of transgressing women’s normative gender roles to engage with mega teledramas. While the home constituted a workplace that subjected the women to interrupted viewing, they negotiated ways in which a sphere of leisure could be constructed to watch megas. In the following sections, I examine women’s television viewing spaces as spaces of care rather than as leisure because their contributions to the household as unpaid care workers were inseparable from their audience experiences of watching mega teledramas. Carving out time and space to watch mega teledramas primarily rested on the ways care work intervened with their everyday lives as women. The interplay between the three kinds of competencies that Brunsdon identified in her work, building on Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of cultural capital (see Chap. 1), as vital to watching soap operas, can be seen as enabling women to watch mega teledramas while engaging in their roles as carers in the home. These kinds of gender roles, as portrayed in the mega teledramas, encourage Sinhalese nationalist imagery of women as primary carers of family and home, constituting women’s roles of performing unpaid care work as collating with the image of a nation cared for by women, where family members and elders are left in the care of their daughters and granddaughters rather than systemic mechanisms of social security, healthcare and pensions (see also Gamage 2019, 2020).

Care and Women’s Television Spaces Examining specifically transnational care in migrant communities, Baldassar et  al. (2007: 15) argue that care in cultural contexts is about capacity and cultural obligation. They extend Finch’s (1989) conceptualisations on care in British families that propose two kinds of mutual support—‘normative obligation’ and ‘negotiated commitment’. Normative

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obligations include caregiving as a result of demands emanating from moral and familial contexts. On the other hand, negotiated commitment forms as a ‘working it out’ practicality of caregiving, exceeding moral responsibility and whether it is the ‘proper thing to do’. The women’s television spaces that I observed in Colombo are particularly shaped by caregiving obligations at all three levels of normative, negotiated and capacity, as a mutuality of moral, practical and cultural demands. The primary premise of nationalist debates on Sri Lankan women positioning them as ‘reproducers, nurturers, and disseminators of tradition, culture, community, and nation’ (Hyndman and De Alwis 2003: 221) feeds a gendered solution to the lack of institutionalised care for elders in Sri Lanka (Østbye et al. 2010: 83–84), placing care of the ageing as a normative, negotiated and cultural responsibility primarily of women. And, this national image of women as carers places an onus on them to translate such imagery and expectations at household levels. The socioeconomic statuses of their families in the informal economy also require women to take on unpaid care of the elderly, as their families are unable to afford any means of paid care. Women’s care work in the households is unpaid and accumulates a fulltime role, even for working women and women conducting micro businesses. In Himani’s household, caring for her grandmother is a central responsibility of Himani and her mother, the women in the family. Himani’s father and brother work during the day and return in the evening, providing important economic contributions to the family. Unlike the men in the family who mainly have roles in workplaces, the women in Himani’s family also work fulltime in the home. Himani has occasional shifts as an aged care worker in the homes of patients, assigned to her by the government programme with which she is affiliated. When Himani is at work, her mother takes care of Himani’s grandmother, cooking and feeding her, changing clothes, cleaning the bed pan, giving medicine, disinfecting surfaces and attending to her religious needs by arranging worship and religious customs. Both Himani’s and her mother’s television space is occupied by their roles as primary carers of the older relative in their house. While the television has been placed in the direction of the bed for the convenience of Himani’s grandmother, both Himani and her mother are able to watch teledramas as they spend time in the hall tending to the grandmother. This did not mean that the women are able to watch continuously, as cooking and cleaning in the kitchen require their attention. However, this

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arrangement allows them to watch the megas intermittently. For instance, Himani, sitting on the side of the bed, talks to her grandmother and her mother in the kitchen about a scene from Apeksha, the long-running mega about the young widow Nathalia. ‘Remember she learned to cook the milk curry last time? But her curry has no salt!’ she exclaims to the women. ‘Poor husband,’ says Himani’s mother from the kitchen while her grandmother laughs. The gendered messaging in the mega about the expectation of women to excel at cooking is picked up by the women, and they find it amusing to see Nathalia struggling to cook. While their sporadic watching due to care work in the home creates a discontinued sense of the story, they are able to piece together the meanings and messages of the narrative through long-term accumulation of cultural capital on womanhood, as projected through nationalist discourses. ‘Why is she cooking anyway? They can afford a helper,’ Himani also disputes the expectation of Nathalia’s role in housework by drawing attention to Nathalia’s socioeconomic privileges that enable affording of paid care. Himani later takes me to her friend Nanda’s house situated in the interior of the neighbourhood. Spending time throughout observations in Colombo in these homes, I further observe how care particularly shapes women’s television spaces. Unlike Himani’s land that was taken over by the government for the motorway, Nanda’s house remains untouched because it is situated well away from the highway. When I visit Nanda’s house, I see a striking resemblance to Himani’s situation. Nanda cares for her elderly mother who had fractured her leg from a fall. Similarly, the television is positioned to face the mother’s bed in the hall. Nanda’s house is much smaller and is built on a two-perch (50sqm) land that has been allocated to her temporarily by the government. While Himani has a deed for her house through years of accumulating residence since her grandmother moved to the area in the 1990s, Nanda has a ‘T-Card’ (Temporary Card) that says she is still a temporary resident there. Nanda tells me that her family uses this enumeration card as proof of their length of stay to get access to water and enrol children in school although they can be evicted or relocated if the need arises as they have no legitimacy to land. Nanda is getting ready to bathe her mother and her husband helps her to carry the patient outside of the house to a tap where a basin and soap have been kept ready. Nanda then begins to bathe her mother using a small bucket, taking water from the basin under the tap. With help from her husband, Nanda carries her mother back inside. Nanda’s husband’s role of care is an important one where he assists Nanda with tasks like

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lifting and carrying her mother, buying medicine, assisting the mother with exercise and providing for the mother. However, he has the choice of when to execute and exit these roles. For instance, that day, placing the mother on the bed, he leaves home to visit his neighbours in the area while Nanda’s work continues in the home. After the mother has been dressed in clean clothes and laid on her bed in the hallway, Nanda makes tea for us in the adjoining open kitchen. Nanda has a son in primary school and her husband is a security guard in a factory, working at night. She also begins making lunch for the family and must pick up her son from school at 1.30. While she works, the television remains on, and she peaks and listens to a number of mega teledramas with her mother who watches from the bed, updating Nanda on things she misses. Sometimes Nanda’s mother alerts her to interesting parts, and Nanda stops her cooking to watch a few scenes from the teledrama. ‘Come, see, the girl is arguing with the mother,’ Nanda’s mother says pointing to the screen, watching an episode of the mega Chaya (female name). Nanda stops cutting her carrots and watches the scene standing. After absorbing a few scenes, she returns to her cooking. Despite this arrangement Nanda remains an avid fan of teledramas: I watch even while working. The TV is here in the hall because mother is here [on the bed]. If not, she is bored. It is easy for me because I can watch while cooking. I can watch while walking across the hall. If I have some other work in the kitchen, I keep listening. I ask mother, ‘What happened, I didn’t see.’ I ask those at home for what happened.

Himani and Nanda’s households with primary caregiving environments show us how unpaid care work plays a pivotal role in the way they consume and experience television. Himani and my two key referrals from the other two constituencies also work in the care economy, as caregivers to elderly middle-class patients in homes. All three of them have training with a government programme of home-based aged care services. Their skills are useful to them to provide unpaid care for elderly mothers and grandmothers in their own homes as well as to access informal employment in aged care. They also assist their neighbours to look after elders in the community and share their knowledge, building important support networks of care. Furthermore, Himani has bought her new flat-screen television from collecting her salary as an aged care worker that she now shares with her bedridden grandmother.

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Cooking in the Television Space In all households observed in the three constituencies, cooking is the primary responsibility of women. The centrality of the television to the rest of the household makes it the nucleus around which participants arrange their cooking activities in ways that make leisure accessible to them. Three meals are cooked in the households—breakfast, lunch and dinner. The working-class status of families and their work in the informal economy makes it cost-effective to eat home-cooked meals, thus creating responsibilities for women to cook for the family to take away to work and eat at home. They rise early in the morning to cook and pack rice and curry for breakfast and lunch, for children going to work, for their husbands going to work and for themselves who go to work, leaving food for family members remaining in the household as well. The dinner time, in particular, that coincides with primetime mega teledramas demands women to cook and manage watching television simultaneously. Two participants from the suburban neighbourhood of Athurugiriya, Kumari and Ahinsa, can be examined in this sense. Kumari, a 52-year-old widow and mother of a teenage daughter and adult son, residing in the suburban neighbourhood of Athurugiriya, works as an office assistant at an advertising agency in Colombo. Her commute in the buses takes close to two hours to travel in traffic a distance of 25 kilometres. ‘I can’t stay in the slums in Colombo. It is no place to raise daughter. I manage travelling the distance somehow. She is safe here,’ says Kumari. Cooking dinner in Kumari’s household is her role. While her daughter helps her sometimes, she is busy studying for her Advanced Level examination for a second time, hoping to obtain cut-off marks to enter the public university system, which she missed by a few marks last year. Kumari and her family live on rent, and the one-storey house is spacious than the homes in the underserved neighbourhoods, but she keeps apologising to me for the ‘derelict status’ of her home. Clearly, she hints at a difference between our lives but insists I stay for dinner with a willingness to share her meals with me. It is a stormy day with heavy winds, rain and thunder, and the three-­ wheeler I take with Kumari to get to her house has to wade through flood water, falling into pot holes along the hinterland roads in Athurugiriya that lead to Kumari’s house. Her house is the third in a row of three that belongs to the same landlord. Like Kumari, her neighbours live on rent and they have close-knit relationships. Kumari’s daughter stays with her

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neighbours in the evening until her mother returns, as Kumari feels it is still not safe for a young girl to be alone at the house the whole day, even in the suburbs. The low-lying area brings water into the hall from outside, and Kumari jams the gap between the wooden door in the entrance and the cemented floor with some old clothes. As soon as Kumari comes home she begins to make dinner, cooking rice and a fish curry. Her son who is working as an attendant in a hospital will soon be joining them. Her daughter switches their second-hand television and complains the rain is causing havoc on the signals. Medalling with the antennas, they begin to watch the mega Induwari (female name) about a rich girl and a poor boy who cannot get their parents’ approval for marriage.3 While Kumari cooks in the kitchen, Hiruni, her daughter, updates her from the hall and Kumari makes occasional visits to watch while standing and rushes back to the kitchen to attend to the curry. ‘Asini is crying because she is about to lose him,’ shouts Hiruni to her mother and Kumari listens to her daughter’s commentary from the kitchen. Ahinsa, another participant in her early 40s living a few blocks from Kumari’s house in Athurugiriya, is also a mother of a daughter. Her husband runs a spice packing business, operating a small-scale warehouse with five workers. Kumari manages a beauty salon from her home. Their house is larger with garden spaces, a large flat-screen television, electronic goods and a three-wheeler, signifying upward mobility while operating in the informal economy. It becomes clear to me that Ahinsa is in a constrained environment at home and fears her husband. In the evening, she leaves our conversation suddenly and begins to sweep the house, telling me that having sand on the floors makes her husband ‘scold’ her. So, she sweeps the house about half an hour before her husband comes home around 7.30 in the night. Having just shared this with me she also adds, ‘he does excellent service to the community and to us,’ and I sense that Ahinsa is worried that she may have spoken ill of her husband to me, confirming Visweswaran’s (1994: 30) point that the willingness of women to talk openly about subjugation is not a given. As Ahinsa’s husband’s three-wheeler horns outside, Ahinsa runs to open the gate for him. She returns to the house carrying bags of groceries he has bought to make dinner. Ahinsa heads straight away to the kitchen and asks me to come with her that day. Ahinsa’s husband sits before the 3

 See Chap. 2 for producers’ perspectives on the messages in Induwari.

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television, as if by habit, and continues to watch a mega that has been broadcasting. Apart from offering a casual greeting, he ignores my presence. His daughter watches with him, but they hardly speak, and the house is silent without much talking among family members. Ahinsa prepares dinner in the kitchen, and it takes more than an hour for her to cook. Mainly using traditional utensils like the grinding stone and mortar and pestle, she does not use her electronic blender and grinder, which would have made the task of grinding chillies and spices and making the coconut milk easier for her. When I ask her why, she says that it is because ‘no one will be able to hear the drama’ and it will ‘add to our electricity costs’. I also begin to realise that less noise in the kitchen allows Ahinsa to listen to the mega teledramas from the kitchen. The kitchen is separated by a thin wall from the hall and this takes some effort on Ahinsa’s part to listen to the dialogues, unlike in the other homes that have open plan kitchens. ‘It is disrespectable to watch teledramas without cooking a hot meal for him,’ she tells me. ‘So, I listen.’ She plates up the rice and curries and serves her husband and daughter watching television in the hall and returns to the kitchen. She does not join them. ‘He needs his peace. He is tired from working all day. He is doing this for us,’ she tells me, attending to cleaning the utensils. Ahinsa only returns to serve her husband water and clear the plate. After her husband has eaten, he returns to his room to have a wash and get ready to sleep. It is only then that Ahinsa comes to the hall and watches some mega teledramas. However, she is knowledgeable about the drama Chaya, which she says is her favourite one, while listening to it from the kitchen. Silence is a vital strategy of resistance for many women in constraining situations (Visweswaran 1994: 30), and while it is not clear to me if Ahinsa would interpret listening silently to the megas from the kitchen as a form of resistance to unpaid care work and a controlling husband who is denying her the pleasure of watching mega teledramas, she is able to appropriate the situation to find pleasure from listening to the megas.4

4  Despite Ahinsa’s eagerness to be part of this study, her husband’s blank reaction to my presence and her silence on the matter concerned me deeply about how it may impact her. After that night, I only visited her during day when she watches megas while working in her beauty salon at home in the presence of customers while her husband was away working at the spice shop.

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Working from Home For many women in the three constituencies, their homes are also places to operate micro businesses in the informal economy, requiring their fulltime attention to unpaid care work and running these micro businesses in the home. Watching mega teledramas in these work spaces of the home is another significant viewing pattern that could be observed (Image 3.1). The vignette about Violet’s home in the Peliyagoda neighbourhood that begins this book is one such narrative. In Violet’s home, her daughter Latha, granddaughter Dinusha and niece Imali engage in preparing snacks for a school canteen. The kitchen and their micro business is a gendered space. While the men in the family, Latha’s husband and brother, work in the night as security guards, the women, too, work in the home running their food business. The women’s roles as unpaid cooks in the home are transferred in this space to generate an income. In the night, they make the fillings for pastries and fried food, and watching mega teledramas while working is as organised as their micro business. Elderly Violet is respected as the grandmother in the house, and

Image 3.1  Women conduct micro businesses (i.e. sewing, catering, food packaging and assembling items) while watching television in Colombo, 2015

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she is free to watch the teledramas while the younger women work in the kitchen. At the end of each advertising break when the dramas resume, Violet shouts, ‘Started!’ While watching Apeksha, the story about young widow Nathalia, Violet calls out to the kitchen, ‘She is getting scolded from the father—come, watch,’ and one of the women would come out to glance at the scene for a few seconds. In this case, Imali comes out of the kitchen. Listening to a few dialogues is sufficient for her to understand the scene and she reports to the women in the kitchen making filling mixes for pastries. They use short statements to signal developments, such as ‘Pahandi is crying because the proposal is going ahead,’ ‘that boy is tricking the grandmother,’ ‘that girl is drunk again’ and ‘nothing new happened, same place.’ They are sufficiently aware of the overall story to be able to position these short references of developments in relation to the larger plot of the mega. Imali and Violet tell me: Imali:

We work but when the drama is playing we come and watch it. We watch until another advertisement plays. I ask grandmother what happened. We can’t leave what is on the stove. It will burn. Violet: Because these people make food, I keep watch. Imali: It is necessary to do the job. Violet: We must look after our economy as well. Imali: We tell each other about what happens [in the drama]. In a neighbouring home, Piyawathi, a woman of 44, assembles nuts and bolts for a bicycle company. She spends around eight hours a day doing this activity from her home in the Peliyagoda neighbourhood. Her friend and neighbour Iranthi also joins her to work in the business. The two women have children in primary school and are able to work while the children are at school. Their television remains on and they watch reruns of megas during the day while they work. The women have practice in what they were doing and work swiftly to assemble small nuts and bolts, sitting cross-legged on the floor on a woven mat. Glancing occasionally at the television, Piyawathi and Iranthi are able to watch the megas sitting stationary on the floor before the television. However, like women who miss out on watching megas while cooking dinner, Piyawathi and Iranthi also have to juggle cooking and watching megas during prime time. During prime time they have more space to swap channels and watch ‘bits’ of different dramas, using the remote control, unlike when they work during day. As Iranthi says:

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We haven’t set aside a channel. If we find out that a nice drama is going in a channel, we watch that. If we find out that there is another drama in another channel, then we watch that. There are many episodes in a drama to watch, no? We switch between dramas. There is no set channel.

Another participant, Samanthi, from the Wanathamulla neighbourhood, operates a sewing business from home, and her sewing machine is located conveniently turned towards the television, similarly to other women I observed sewing. Every morning, as she begins to sew she arranges the machine to face the television. She dismantles her workplace in the evening when her family returns from work to make the hall more spacious by tucking away the machine in the one bedroom in her home. Ahinsa, from the Athurugiriya neighbourhood, whose account of listening to megas from the kitchen I describe in the earlier section, also sews sari jackets and bridal wear during the day, as part of the work in her beauty salon. Ahinsa, too, has her sewing machine in the hall and has the television on, watching reruns of megas in the daytime. Both Samanthi and Ahinsa concentrate on their sewing while taking occasional glances at the television to follow the megas. Similarly, close to Ahinsa’s home, Shanthini, who manages a gas cylinder rental shop from one side of her house in the Athurugiriya neighbourhood, has a small television in the shop. Watching mega teledramas, news and Hindi films, Shanthini keeps the television switched on throughout the day. Her customers are mostly friends from the neighbourhood and they stop to watch some dramas with her in the shop. Nalini, also from Ahinsa and Shanthini’s neighbourhood in Athurugiriya, runs multiple micro businesses from her home. She has a small-scale livestock farm and a vegetable garden that provide food for their family. She also grows Anthurium flowers and plants in her garden for sale. The suburban home has spacious land around the house with a natural water well in the front yard that gives Nalini free water for the garden. Excessive crops and harvest are sold at the Sunday village fair. Nalini’s work mostly takes place in the farm attending to livestock and plants in the garden. She works all morning in the gardens and returns to have lunch at home that she cooks early morning for her two daughters to take to school and her husband to take to work. Since returning home for lunch, Nalini switches the television on to watch reruns of mega teledramas in the afternoon. Because Nalini’s work in the farm is over by lunch, she is able to attend to housework and watch the teledramas during the afternoon. After lunch,

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she begins packaging dried food items and spices she buys from a wholesale seller in the village to distribute to boutique shops in the village. Similar to Piyawathi and Iranthi who work from their hall, assembling nuts and bolts for bicycles, Nalini, too, brings her dried food into the hall. Laying the items on the teapau and sitting on her sofa, she begins work facing the television while watching mega teledramas. ‘I work alone. The teledramas are good company. I can work fast. I don’t watch all the time. I listen sometimes. The work is more important,’ she says.

Meanings of Womanhood in Megas Talking about soap operas produces pleasure through conversation, as much as watching them does, and a number of early studies argue of the significance of talking about soap operas as a necessary condition of viewer pleasure (Brown 1994; Geraghty 1991; Hobson 1982; Liebes and Katz 1994; Mankekar 1999). In her study about young Panjabi Londoners, watching Australian soap operas, Gillespie (1995: 56) discusses soap operas as ‘ritual social events’ because of their role as a ‘shared cultural resource’. In her study about women watching soap operas, Mary Ellen Brown (1994: 14) found out that talking about what women watch could produce resistive readings that conceptualise ‘gendered viewing’ beyond ‘feminine viewing practices’ and the typification of ‘one’s biological or essential position in the world’. As Mumford (1995: 89) argues, viewers’ association with the ‘message’ in the soap operas provides a stronger affiliation with the narratives beyond recognising formulaic conventions of the stories or even family trees of the characters. Watching mega teledramas in the homes also produces spaces of shared viewing for women (Images 3.2 and 3.3). In the three close-knit neighbourhoods observed for this study, there are opportunities for friendships that enable collective watching of the megas. Women’s exchanges of meanings in the mega teledramas reveal how they interpret the central female characters in the narratives, providing insights about their understandings of gender roles, women’s rights and positions in the society. Women Who Transgress Nathalia, the young widow from the mega teledrama Apeksha, is a central thread of discussion in this sense. As all women watch the mega in their households, conversations about Nathalia’s role in the narrative can be

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Image 3.2  Neighbour women and child watch megas in Colombo, 2014

Image 3.3  Mother and daughter watch megas in Colombo while providing child care, 2014

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particularly examined in relation to women’s interpretations about her. Nathalia’s extravert lifestyle that include male friendships and going to night clubs, her inability to cook, and disregard for her husband are main themes in these conversations that support her as a woman who transgresses and rejects morality. The vignette that opens this book reflects Violet’s references to Nathalia. In similar ways, Nathalia’s role as a woman and wife is regularly discussed in this household while watching Apeskha. Violet sees Nathalia going out in the night to a club as an ‘ugly thing’ because ‘the woman has gone out in the night and the man is at home without his dinner’. When I later ask from Violet about what she means as an ‘ugly thing’, she tells me that since Nathalia is a widow, she is ‘lucky to get a second husband’ and she should be ‘taking extra care’ of this man who ‘made a sacrifice’ to marry a widow. Dinusha, Violet’s granddaughter agrees, saying that it is ‘unsuitable’ for a woman to be ‘interested in going dancing in the night’. Violet’s niece Imali adds, ‘She goes to a party and says “this is my driver” when the husband comes to pick her up. This is wrong.’ While the women in this household have grown up across three generations, the message about Nathalia’s behaviour being unacceptable is clear to them. As days pass by the women begin to develop a liking towards her when Nathalia comes to a moral epiphany and abandons her club-hopping carefree life, following her husband Sudhara’s plan to rehabilitate her. They tell me: Violet: Imali: Violet:

At first we didn’t like her. We didn’t like her at first. Now, she is becoming good. Now, she worshipped her mother and father after getting well and coming home. Now, she is becoming good like that. Imali: When we first watched we didn’t even want to see her. Dinusha: Now she has realised and is living well with Sudhara … It is because of Sudhara that she became good. He saw at first that she went off to clubs. He got to know about this. He made her understand on her own. He knew that she was incorrigible. So, he made her understand. She understood and corrected herself. Now, she is good. Imali: When we first watched we didn’t even want to see her, remember?

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Similarly, Iranthi also talks about Nathalia with her friend Piyawathi while working on their micro business, assembling bicycle nuts and bolts in their hallway. The conversations are triggered by advertisements and trailers of Apeksha broadcast during the day while they work. Iranthi says, ‘What goes is not what parents and children can watch together. We are ashamed to watch in front of a mother. When they show Nathalia we look at the ground. It is difficult to watch these [dramas] with school going children. These are not moralistic.’ Piyawathi feels different, ‘It is not her fault that she is going to night clubs. That was how her first husband was. She went with him [to night clubs] and got into the habit.’ Turning to me Piyawathi says that she likes Nathalia’s character because she is ‘colourful’ and ‘brave’. Sepali, a 64-year-old participant from the neighbourhood, also watches Apeksha with an older aunt from her village taken care of in her home. The company provides an opportunity to talk to each other about Nathalia. Like Imali, Sepali, too, is angry about the incident of Nathalia referring to her husband as her driver when he goes to the night club to pick her up, demanding she returns home. She says, ‘When Sudhara went to bring her back, she said this is the driver. Unbelievable!’ Sepali’s aunt says, ‘These things will only happen in the city.’ To Sepali’s aunt, Nathalia’s ways relate to a consumer lifestyle, as she affiliates a purity towards women in the village by othering the women in the city. However, the 19-year-old participant Eshani tells me that she would have done the same, as Sudhara was not wearing ‘nice clothes’ when he came to pick up Nathalia. She also justifies Nathalia’s actions in a scene where she meets some friends in the beach and refers to her husband again as her driver. She agrees that Sudhara needs ‘tips’ about ‘fashion’, and he is not someone suitable for Nathalia who she considers a ‘fashionable’ character. Eshani’s neighbour Thilaka who sometimes watches the drama in Eshani’s home disputes this attitude towards Nathalia. Thilaka does not find Eshani’s view acceptable, and she says: In that episode [Nathalia] goes to the party. She tries to dress her husband and make him appropriate to her society, saying that he is not posh. The clothes her friends were wearing were revealing [their bodies]. She tries to dress her husband saying that it is inappropriate to wear the sarong. That is the national dress according to the Sri Lankan way, right? … Sudhara is strict. So, I think he will correct her. She has stopped associating with friends

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much because he has made it so. With time he will correct her towards the right side.

Nathalia’s extrovert lifestyle is at the centre of many of the conversations of women watching Apeksha. In the Wanathamulla neighbourhood, Seetha questions a scene showing Nathalia returning home intoxicated in the early hours of morning. ‘Not suitable. Not suitable. Anyway it is not suitable to go clubbing. It is not good to show things like that. It is not good for the society who watches that. If there is another girl like that watching she will get used to that.’ Seetha’s 21-year-old niece agrees but attributes Nathalia’s ways to parenting, ‘It is not a suitable character for a girl. The mother and father spoil her too much. The mother and father allow their children to do whatever they want and just stay quiet. Her younger sister is also like that.’ However, Seetha’s sister Samanthi says she ‘loves’ Nathalia’s character. While she advises her daughter not to follow Nathalia’s way of life, Samanthi argues that Nathalia is a ‘modern’ woman who is educated and expects her to be independent. This is unlike Nanda who says, ‘I felt depressed [watching Nathalia]. Is this the way? It’s not right, to show like that, a woman’s character’. Good Mothers and Sacrifices Motherhood is a central theme of mega teledramas the women watching them discuss. Central female characters in the megas epitomise as they say ‘good’, ‘sacrificing’, ‘decent’ mothers who are ‘dressed in non-revealing clothes’, ‘putting children’s interests first’ and ‘remaining widows after the death of their husbands’. Feminist poet and scholar Adrienne Rich’s (1995: 13) conceptualisations on motherhood as an experience and institution propose two meanings of motherhood, ‘one superimposed on the other’. Rich argues that motherhood is experienced and institutionalised in relation to ‘the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that the potential–and all women–shall remain under male control’. The intersection of these motherhoods creates two strands of power that Rich suggests as the biological power and a ‘power invested in women by men’ that legitimises both the reverence of that power (i.e. in the form of Goddess-worship) and controlling of that power because of the fear of being ‘overwhelmed by women’.

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The two widows and mothers in the mega teledrama Chaya provide a case to understand the interplay of the experiential and institutional nature of motherhood. Listening silently to the mega from her kitchen, Ahinsa tells me: They took a good decision on behalf of the children not to remarry as widows. I married my husband as a girl, even then he shouts for the smallest error I make. Nevertheless, he understands that this is the wife I married as a girl. When we go to someone else, we are no longer girls; we are women. I might even have children from the previous marriage. That mother [in Chaya] has children from the previous marriage. Those children will be discriminated, in a new marriage. No matter how young they may be, if their husbands died, living alone and looking after their children is the best decision that those mothers in Chaya made … Chaya and Asanka’s mothers are better than everyone.

For Ahinsa, her husband’s abusive behaviour has been normalised in the home and nevertheless marrying him as a virgin is the ultimate mark of her chastity, which earns his loyalty to her, and this is what she means by marrying as a girl. She suggests that since the mothers in Chaya are no longer ‘girls’, they do not have a safety net of that chastity when they marry another man. In Ahinsa’s interpretation of motherhood, mothers are those who bear children of and remain with one man, even after his death. In that sense, Ahinsa sees the mothers of the two characters Chaya and Asanka as ‘better than everyone’ for deciding to live as widows, ‘looking after their children’. Ahinsa further discusses Asanka’s mother as the ‘most beautiful’ woman in the dramas and Chaya’s mother as possessing ‘all the qualities that a mother should’, like ‘patience’, ‘raising the daughter well and facing life’. Ahinsa admires Chaya’s mother for selling rice packets to raise her daughter to ‘live beautifully without showing their problems to the outside [society]’. Ahinsa says that after the death of her husband, Asanka’s mother ‘lives making the son her entire world’. ‘So, she is a good mother. Both of them [Chaya and Asanka’s mothers] are two very good mothers,’ she says. Ahinsa considers Asanka’s mother a good mother for not allowing her entrepreneurial success and independence as an owner of a fashion chain to remarry or have affairs. ‘She is a young woman. She can turn towards unnecessary things. She doesn’t get involved in any such thing. She lives for the child. Asanka’s mother has money and is very beautiful.’ Ahinsa

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says that she draws ‘morals’ from the two mothers and compares her own role with the mothers in Chaya, ‘I am very similar. My whole world is my daughter.’ Ahinsa finds the appearances and clothes of the two mothers as reifying their roles as good mothers, representing a larger image of motherhood. ‘[Asanka’s] mother wears the sari and behaves well. [Chaya’s] mother wears skirts and blouse to home and lives beautifully. [She] wears beautifully a sari, when going out. Both of them don’t have husbands, both of them are young. There is nothing that Asanka’s mother cannot do with money. But she doesn’t do anything like that; she sacrifices for the son.’ Similarly, the image of the bad mother is explicitly central to the megas. As Rich (1995: 13) argues, ‘motherhood as institution has ghettoized and degraded female potentialities’. Mothers who dressed in Westernised clothing (i.e. tight jeans and skinny t-shirts) are seen by some participants as wearing inappropriate clothes for a mother. With this image of the Westernised mother, some participants see them as culturally nonconforming. For instance, an urban mother similarly depicted in the mega Ammawarune (Mothers) is Nalini and some women critique her ways of pushing her daughter to marry a rich man. Her vengeful plans to marry her daughter to the rich man are seen as contradicting the role of a mother. ‘Nalini is pushing her daughter to marriage because of property,’ says Sepali. Participant Mallika says crossly that Nalini encourages her daughter to go out with the rich man unsupervised by an adult. Later when Nalini’s daughter misses out on the fortune because the man leaves her, participants find themselves vindicated and Nalini is punished for her transgressions. Some participants justify the actions of Nalini’s character by acknowledging that as a mother she intends to do the best for her child, according to them, even though her methods did not conform to the expectations of good mothers. ‘She is evil because she wants to do something for her child. Everyone is like that. In the whole world, every mother wants to do good for her children,’ says Hiruni. Nevertheless, women also contest these representations. For Samanthi, Nalini is a courageous mother for attempting to make her daughter’s life successful. She argues passionately with her sister Seetha in Nalini’s defence, saying that Nalini is ‘a woman of guts’, reminding Seetha how they all needed to ‘become like Nalini’ to shape their lives in the underserved neighbourhoods. ‘If we didn’t have our mouths even the dogs would have dragged us,’ Samanthi tells me, referring to the Sinhalese adage. ‘I will do the same for my daughter if I can see she will get property

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and money so she could come out of this poverty,’ she tells me. Seetha agrees at this point and reflects how living in the underserved neighbourhoods has required them to ‘be tough like Nalini’. Rameshi, Samanthi’s 21-year-old daughter, says that Nalini does remind her of her mother’s courage. She agrees that despite her aunt’s critique of Nalini, the character represents a ‘modern’ woman who ‘dresses according to her society’ and has the interest of her daughter at heart. It seems like Rameshi is aware of the class differences in Nalini’s and her own everyday life, but she relates to the character through her own mother. To Rameshi, Nalini symbolises a different kind of motherhood outside the ideal mothers in Chaya that Ahinsa values. The multiplicity of women’s interpretations of female heroines in the mega teledramas shows that their deconstructions and reconstructions of womanhood are simply not a given. Nuanced conformities and contestations of gender roles represented in the megas can be located as informed by a cultural capital based on Sinhalese nationalist discourses that have been setting good-bad binaries of womanhood for Sinhalese women in Sri Lankan society. The expectations and norms of women as mothers, nurturers and preservers of culture are reaffirmed in the representations of womanhood in the megas and understood by women in diverse forms. In the everyday domestic spaces of leisure that also constitute workplaces for women, these binaries of womanhood solidify, are broken down, remodelled and challenged.

Conclusion Women’s engagements with mega teledramas and their interpretations point to two key themes. Firstly, their viewing environments and practices that are shaped by unpaid care work in the home show that to become an active audience women are compelled to appropriate gendered dynamics of household labour to construct a television space of meanings and pleasure. The mega teledramas produced characters and messages that supported the gendered nature of unpaid care work in the home, constructing female heroines as excelling in domestic duties, in-charge of familial care and with those who transgress returning to and embracing positions of household labour. Such roles of women in unpaid care work thrive in the Sinhalese nationalist discourse, projecting cultural expectations of women’s roles as carers of homes, families and the nation (see further discussion in Chap. 5). Secondly, women’s interpretations on norms of

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womanhood are shaped in that everyday space of the home. The good-­ bad binaries of womanhood discussed in living rooms, kitchens and workplaces in the home show how Sinhalese nationalist discourses translated and acted as a cultural capital to invoke nuanced sensibilities on women’s positions and selves that include conformities and contestations through a narrative television genre.

References Baldassar, Loretta, Cora Vallekoop Baldock, and Raelene Wilding. 2007. Families Caring Across Borders: Migration, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G.  Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood. Brown, Mary Ellen. 1994. Soap Opera and Women’s Talk: The Pleasure of Resistance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brunsdon, Charlotte. 1981. Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera. Screen 22 (4): 32–37. ———. 1997. Screen Tastes. London: Routledge. De Alwis, Malathi. 2010. The ‘China factor’ in Post-War Sri Lanka. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11 (3): 434–446. Federici, Silvia. 2020. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press. Finch, Janet. 1989. Family Obligations and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gamage, Shashini. 2018. Soap Operas, Women, and the Nation: Sri Lankan Women’s Interpretations of Homegrown Mega Teledramas. Feminist Media Studies 18 (5): 873–887. ———. 2019. Sri Lankan Migrant Women Watching Teledramas in Melbourne: A Social Act of Identity. In Handbook of Diaspora, Media and Culture, ed. Roza Tsagarousianou and Jessica Retis, 401–414. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell and IAMCR. ———. 2020. Migration, Identity, and Television Audiences: Sri Lankan Women’s Soap Opera Clubs and Diasporic Life in Melbourne. Media International Australia 176 (1): 93–106. Geraghty, Christine. 1991. Women and Soap Opera. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gillespie, Marie. 1995. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. London: Routledge. Hewamanne, Sandya. 2020. Re-Stitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Gender, Neo-Liberalism, and the Politics of Contentment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Hobson, Dorothy. 1982. Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen. Hochschild, Arlie. 1997. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan Books. Hyndman, Jennifer, and Malathi De Alwis. 2003. Beyond Gender: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Humanitarianism and Development in Sri Lanka. Women’s Studies Quarterly 31: 212–226. Jayawardena, Kumari, and Rachel Kurian. 2015. Class, Patriarchy and Ethnicity on Sri Lankan Plantations: Two Centuries of Power and Protest. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. Liebes, Tamar, and Elihu Katz. 1994. The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas. Cambridge: Polity. Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation. Durham: Duke University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 2002. Fashion Culture: Creative Work, Female Individualization. Feminist Review 71 (1): 52–62. ———. 2005. The Uses of Cultural Studies. London: Sage. Morley, David. 1986. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. London: Comedia. Mumford, Stempel Laura. 1995. Love and Ideology in the Afternoon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Oakley, Ann. 2018. The Sociology of Housework. Bristol: Policy Press. Østbye, Truls, Angelique Chan, Rahul Malhotra, and Jinendra Kothalawala. 2010. Adult Children Caring for Their Elderly Parents. Asian Population Studies 6 (1): 83–97. Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Capital Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1995. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton. Skeggs, Beverley. 2001. Feminist Ethnography. In Handbook of Ethnography, ed. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland, 426–442. London: Sage. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 4

Soap Operas and Long-Distance Audiences

Abstract  This chapter is based on fieldwork with Sri Lankan migrant women at a diasporic soap opera club of a Sinhalese cultural association in Melbourne, Australia. The transnational nature of nationalist discourses on womanhood and the quotidian interpretations of those meanings in diasporic spaces are examined in this chapter through analyses of women’s conversations of mega teledrama narratives at the teledrama club. This chapter shows how the women extended watching soap operas in the homes to a social act of talking about the narratives and exchanging DVDs in the diasporic cultural space of the teledrama club. It discusses how the women’s teledrama club enabled the construction of emotional support networks in the diasporic space, also facilitating a space to practise their home country media cultures where they seek a symbolic cultural identity as a television audience in Australia. Keywords  Diaspora • Soap operas • Nationalism • Migration • Australia • Sri Lanka In close proximity to the Dandenong town is one of the oldest Sinhalese diasporic associations in Melbourne that had been founded in 1988. It is here at this association that a ‘teledrama club’ had been formed and is managed by women. The diasporic association provided coherence to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gamage, Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6_4

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dispersed and fragmented Sinhalese migrants in Melbourne.1 Salient features of a diasporic condition, such as transnationality, the sense of ethnic commonality, the memoirs of a common homeland, both imaginary and real (Georgiou 2005: 36), are also common characteristics associated with the diasporic contexts of participants observed in this study. Here I could begin to observe the lived realities in the Sri Lankan migrant context of what Hall (1990: 224–225) suggested about cultural identity, existing as a matter of becoming and being, belonging to the future and the past, not as something which already exists but as something that transcends time and space. The ‘production’ of identity and the ‘re-telling’ of the past accumulate various shapes, positions, objects and nuances in this diasporic space (Image 4.1). Historical subjectivities that have always tended to shape the ethnocentric Sri Lankan society can also be traced at the heart of the setting up of this association. Newsletters of the association state that it is the absence

Image 4.1  Sri Lankan women participating in the Australia Day multicultural parade in Melbourne, 2014 1  Members did not only reside in Dandenong but those from Northern and other South Eastern suburbs also attended the meetings.

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of particularly a diasporic collective for the Sinhalese community in Melbourne that prompted the establishment of the association.2 The ethnic nature of diasporic associations or clubs creates a space for members to accommodate feelings of belonging even if it means that its members only spoke a common language (Kolar-Panov 1997: 77), in this case Sinhalese. This all too important ethnic diversity of the Sri Lankan identity may not be immediately visible within statistics relating to the Sri Lankan migrant communities or in the homogenous media representations and notions of Sri Lankanness in Australia. Hall (1990: 223–224) points out that shared cultural codes and historical commonalities have been at the centre of creating representations of migrant communities in artistic mediums, mainly cinema. While the demands for the recognition of this essential identity was crucial, as Hall says, during many postcolonial struggles that influenced the world, this ‘oneness’ also often provides a collective identity for dispersed migrants groups. In the case of the Sri Lankan migrants in Australia, this oneness is also a rather ethnically fragmented one that separated them into distinct identity pockets, as Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher communities.

A Sense of Community As I walk towards the community centre where the association conducts their fortnightly meetings on Sundays, I can already hear and observe how the commonality of language and symbolism shape this association from the entry point itself.3 People’s conversations in Sinhalese that flow on to the street and the noticeable Sri Lankan flag hanging from the doors confirm that I have arrived at the right place. After meeting the women of the association, marching at the Australia Day parade, I contacted the member I call Chandani. The women’s voluntary participation at this public display of a ‘one’ identity at the multicultural parade of the Australia Day suggested to me that the expression of a Sri Lankan self matters to them in Australia. Chandani invited me to attend this meeting of the association and take part in today’s activities of the teledrama club. I am also delighted 2  The existence of Sri Lankan Tamil, Muslim and Burgher associations in Melbourne prior to this time and the absence of a Sinhalese collective presence in Melbourne is stated as a ‘problem’ that was addressed by this association in their inaugural newsletters. 3  Many Sinhalese diasporic association gatherings in Melbourne are held in council-run community centres.

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to find out from her that the teledrama club is an initiative by the women of the association and largely rely on women’s friendships. This means that the teledrama club has the capacity to facilitate observations of how the meanings and pleasures of watching teledramas from the home country translate in the gendered diasporic space. The focus on reflexive fieldwork with women that this study entailed in the context of the fieldwork in Colombo could continue in this women’s space of the teledrama club (see Chap. 3 for an analysis of fieldwork in Colombo). Thus Chandani’s identification with the club as an activity of ‘us women’ is an intriguing point to commencing fieldwork in Melbourne. Chandani is a well-known figure in the diasporic association. I only have to mention her name to the members at the entrance to the community centre, and they direct me straight to the kitchen where Chandani and a few other women are preparing a rice- and curry-based Sri Lankan meal in the kitchen. Food acquires a distinctive place among diasporic communities, and gastronomic practices enmesh to create contested and negotiated identities of gender, community and kinship within migrant groups (Mankekar 2002: 83). This recreation of the Sri Lankan culinary experience is given prominence at the association gatherings, and the activity is noticeably a rather gendered one. The environment in the kitchen at the association resembles the gendered distribution of household chores I observed in Colombo where solely women took charge of domestic duties like cooking and cleaning. In the kitchen of the community centre, about six women are preparing dishes for the gathering of over 200 members. One of the women is frying a large quantity of papadum (crispy crackers), another preparing cutlets (fried balls of fish) and others attending to a green salad. The women converse while conducting their chores in a lively and cheerful manner. The notion of women’s work in the kitchen is normalised, even in the diasporic space. Many other women come into the kitchen, having prepared their own dishes at home, helping the women making lunch by contributing curries and desserts. This is not to say that the women in the kitchen are submissive and are deprived of any agency. Leading the task of this operation and fulfilling it to the very end so that their community members are fed for the day gives the women a certain power within the organisation, as many depend on these women’s labour in the kitchen. However, some of them are also missing out on the leisure time and activities at the association because of their roles in the kitchen. ‘We get merits for feeding this many people,’ Chandani tells me, referring

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to the Buddhist practice of seeking merits by providing alms in the form of food to the hungry. Chandani takes me out of the kitchen and into the adjoining meeting hall where members have gathered and are sharing tea and biscuits. Although many did not know me, they encourage me to have tea and biscuits in a typical display of Sri Lankan hospitality. I join several women who are knitting in a corner of the hall. The women are intrigued by my presence and inquire about my reasons for being here. Many are older women, well past their 50s. While there are younger women and men, including children, present at the gathering, they say they are delighted to have a young person join their club. According to the women, many of their children are busy and unable to attend the association regularly. The environment is a fun-filled atmosphere with relaxed people having cheerful conversations in Sinhalese. The setting is likely to support my inquiries on teledramas. However, I go on to discuss later the complexities, power relations and politics embedded in even such a jovial environment. The older members at the association play the leading role in organising activities for the gathering. This meeting does not have a particular theme or an occasion to celebrate. It includes announcements, group singings, skits and games. Office-bearers of the association convene these activities with both men and women in the committee taking charge of activities. The intuitive separation of men and women into gendered socialising groups can be observed, as men occupy half of the meeting hall while the women sit in the other half. In that sense, it is not surprising that certain roles, such as in the kitchen, have been assigned solely to women in this gathering, as clear separations have been made in the way women and men conduct themselves in the social space. As Chandani tells me on my first encounter with her, the teledrama club indeed is likely to be an activity of ‘us women’ in this gendered environment. Chandani confirms my assumption when she introduces me to the women who initiated the teledrama club. They are seated in this ‘women’s half’ of the hall. Chandani’s position as a respected active member of the association helps me to establish relationships with women of the teledrama club. Her role as a referral in this project is vital to recruit participants who became long-term informants during my observations at the association. The six women who initiated the teledrama club usually sit in a group together, forming a clique, spending most of their time in each other’s company. They talk and act like a group of friends who have known

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each other for a long time, joking, laughing, exchanging niceties and inquiring about their families. I spend the first half of the meeting sitting with them in the meeting hall and talking about the teledrama club and their everyday lives. They take an interest in my recent travels to Sri Lanka and inquire about Sri Lankan politics, fashion, celebrities and post-war development. They are well-versed of the political situation in the home country and keep up-to-­ date by consuming news sources like websites and community papers. My presence among the clique of these women attracts several inquiries from members who approach the group to ask them about me. They refer to me as a ‘first-timer’ at the diasporic association, and my outsider-within status begins to surface during these introductions. While I talk with the six women, some members of the association approach us with packs of DVDs and return them to the initiators of the teledrama club. Before long, a small pile of DVDs in untidy shopping bags is forming at the centre of the table. The women make remarks about the megas to the group like ‘this was good’, ‘this was boring’ and even ask ‘why did you recommend this to me, it was terrible’. I am beginning to observe how the teledramas have a recurring presence in the conversations of these women and how discussions suddenly divert to teledramas they have seen. At times these are about the actors in the megas. That day the women are talking about a recent marriage between two mega teledrama actors who have played the roles of lovers in the dramas. One woman tells the group that her daughter showed her a Facebook post of the wedding. Many women agree that they have seen the wedding photos on social media and news websites. More importantly, the women comment about the narratives of megas and share critique with each other. Later in this chapter, I look in detail at these conversations to position them within the women’s everyday lives, gender, ethnicity and migrant selves. The ‘light’ conversations about television situate well within the friendships of the women and mingle with the relaxed atmosphere of the association.

The Teledrama Club: A Place to Talk When I first heard from Chandani about the teledrama club, I thought of a formal gathering, operating in a particular place, possibly with an agenda, facilitating viewing sessions. My expectations are soon subverted. One of the women from the group of six friends excuses herself from the group to ‘commence the club’. I follow her out of the meeting hall, intrigued to

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observe how the club is being set up. In the dining hall, a steel cupboard is opened and inside are stacks of hundreds of DVDs. There is no organisational method for shelving the DVDs and the stacks are crammed, one on top of the other. On most DVDs the names of the dramas and the episode numbers have been handwritten by markers. Soon, the other women from the group of six join us in the dining hall. They begin to take out the DVDs from the cupboard and arrange them on the nearby table. The women begin picking the DVDs that members have requested from them. As they come across each DVD, they often exchange recommendations about the drama as well as discussing the narratives. While the women get busy sorting the pile of DVDs on the dining table, they attract attention of passers-by members who then flow into the dining room. Members return DVDs that they have borrowed and demand the megas they have requested. The setting transforms into an informal gathering of diasporic women, dropping in and out of the dining hall to exchange DVDs of teledramas. Unstructured conversations about the megas they had seen reveal details of the meanings and pleasures of watching narratives from the homeland (see also Gamage 2019, 2020). The women borrow DVDs from the collection and watch them at home, in their own time. However, the dispersed nature of their lives in Melbourne and work commitments do not permit a collective viewing environment that facilitates discussions about the narratives. Instead, long casual conversations about the megas and their viewing experiences take place when they come together at the teledrama club to exchange DVDs. The teledrama club becomes a temporary communal and interactive space (Image 4.2). The teledrama club, at the time of fieldwork, has a collection of about 150 complete sets of DVDs of megas and early teledramas. The women buy DVDs from Sri Lankan grocery shops. These DVDs are copies, made from on-air recordings of teledrama broadcasts in Sri Lanka, reproduced by shop owners and small-scale suppliers. Each DVD costs around a dollar and contains about ten episodes from a mega teledrama. A mega teledrama of 100 episodes is likely to have 10 DVDs. The women who initiated the club have previously shared DVDs among themselves as a small group of friends before extending the activity to include others at the diasporic association. The expansion of the library to include complete sets of mega teledramas has now made it possible for members to borrow past megas as complete series, instead of as a few episodes. Members themselves have donated megas as well as early teledramas to the library.

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Image 4.2  Women sorting DVDs to commence the teledrama club at a diasporic association in Melbourne, 2014

The women collect DVDs as they come out of the grocery shops, ten episodes at a time. When the story ends, the library has gradually generated a complete set of DVDs for each mega teledrama. It should also be noted that the participant women referred to megas by their generic name, as teledramas. Unlike the women in Colombo, who used the terms interchangeably, megas or mega teledramas were not common terms among the diasporic women of this study. This ‘messy’ space of the teledrama club is vital for the women to interact about the megas they watch at home while archiving and sharing DVDs is the central agenda of the club. The women in-charge are particularly dedicated to maintaining the library and passionately show ownership, as something they are ‘proud of’. They perform a voluntary role since initiating the activity a few years ago, which now benefits all members of the association. The women watching megas in this diasporic setting bring us to the question of conceptualising the form of media they are consuming. Naficy’s (2003) definitions of ethnic television and diasporic television refer to content made in the host countries while transnational television

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indicates programmes imported from home countries. In this respect, Sri Lankan megas cannot be characterised either as ethnic or as diasporic television. They do not originate in the host country. The DVDs that are available in grocery shops have been reproduced from broadcasts in Sri Lanka. The megas do not represent the commercial success or scale of transnational media, such as Korean, Indian and Latin American content that are imported for vast diasporic markets, using broadcast mediums like satellite television. Most programmes that specifically target larger diasporas, such as the Chinese or Indians, are made in large-scale production centres in their home countries (Cunningham and Nguyen 2003: 120). Megas originate in Sri Lanka and are intended for the local audience based in the country. As discussed during interviews with mega teledrama producers in Colombo, they do not have an import objective or a revenue stream from exporting mega teledramas (see Chap. 2). The diasporic audience is not a target audience of the product. Borrowing Skrbiš’s (1999: 6) concept of ‘long-distance nationalism’, I refer to the diasporic audience as a ‘long-distance audience’ for their use of megas from the home country. Skrbiš defines long-distance nationalism as ‘nationalism which crosses neighbouring states and/or continents’, transcending a ‘relatively strictly limited locality’ (ibid.). While the megas originate in the home country, their audience has crossed borders and transcended localities. In Melbourne, the megas are more fittingly ‘home country television’ and the women who watch them share a long-distance relationship with the texts and their meanings. This means that the women have an audiovisual interaction with the value systems of their home country culture that also cross borders through the narratives and representations of the mega teledramas. The conversations I have with the women and observations I make of their discussions on the megas reveal to me how the meanings and pleasures of the mega teledramas translate and reshape in the diasporic space where they have acquired currency and symbolic value as a national cultural commodity. Writing about his forms of capital, Bourdieu (1986: 249) points out how ‘connections’ are an inherent part of the ‘social capital’ that accumulates at social associations that are ‘based on indissolubly material and symbolic exchanges, the establishment and maintenance of which presupposes reacknowledgement of proximity’. The collective identity of the participants that made them belong to the teledrama club as a long-distance audience also formed the basis of their identity as a national television audience that was proximate to the symbols and codes of a particular culture of

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familiarity and commonality. For a moment, the women could recreate the proximity to their value systems by traversing into their distant pasts through the mega teledrama narratives. Their female friendships and social connections played a crucial role in the formation of the club, facilitating talk and interpretations about the messages of the mega teledramas, enabling the negotiation of distance, time and space between the past and the present.

Cultural Cacophony in the Diasporic Space Sinhalese participants of this study see Australia as a progressive country that has given them opportunities to grow. In the ethnographic interviews and conversations, they say they are all grateful for the opportunities they receive in the host society. They identify health, education, employment, housing, vehicles, pensions and transportation systems as positive experiences of migration, contributing to their achievements in the new country. Being able to peacefully and publicly celebrate diversity through diasporic cultural activities and associations is seen as particularly encouraging, and they are thankful for receiving those opportunities in Australia. They also say they are grateful for being able to live in a peaceful country, free from war or violence. They emphasise that they are determined to contribute to Australia, providing skills and cultural knowledge. Therefore, it is important to understand their constructions of Sinhalese selves in Australia through diasporic activities as a form of expression rather than as conflict or rupture. Nevertheless, the non-dominant position of migrant communities is a defining characteristic of their status as a diaspora (Karim 2003: 2) that facilitates desires and survival strategies for constructing identities (Ang 2001). This status is reversed for the Sinhalese community in Melbourne from the position of their home country where they are the dominant ethnicity, forming the majority. Fifteen million people out of the twentyone million in Sri Lanka are Sinhalese-Buddhists, which amounts to 74 per cent of the total population (Census and Statistics 2012). This dominant position of the Sinhalese community in their home nation is significantly altered in their host country. In Australia, the 124,000 Sri Lankan migrants (ABS 2017), which include the ethnic Sinhalese community, form a small proportion of the Australian population. This is about 0.4 per cent of the total population.

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While in Australia Sri Lankans are generally absorbed into common South Asian media representations of Indianness or left out entirely from representations of multiculturalism, even as stereotypes, Sinhalese language media has a dominance in their home country. Electronic and print media in Sri Lanka operates in Sinhalese, Tamil and English, while Sinhalese remains the critical mass (Muppidi 2012: 367). The early teledramas as well as the mega teledramas are produced in the Sinhalese language, and the stories mainly revolve around the everyday lives of Sinhalese families. The term ‘minority’ that is often applied in an ethnic and racially defined way to other ethnicities like Tamils, Muslims and Burghers in Sri Lanka has become a denominator for the Sinhalese community in Australia, who were known as the ‘majority’ in Sri Lanka. Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robins (2003: 95) propose to examine the media cultures of migrants as being on a continuum of diasporic symbolic cultural activities of banality and transnationality. Mega teledramas are not the only form of media from the home country that the diasporic members at the association consumed. Several Sinhalese community newspapers published in Melbourne are freely circulated via Sri Lankan grocery stores. The newspapers Pahana (Lamp), Sannasa (Letter) and Hiru Kirana (Ray of Sunshine) contain Sri Lankan news, essays, poems, advertisements, events announcements and editorials. Participants also consume Sri Lankan Sinhalese news websites to browse news from the home country and find out about diasporic events in Melbourne. Sharing news from the homeland is a topic of interest at participant households. Naficy (1993: 107) refers to this popularity of home country news among diasporic communities as illustrating an ‘epistephilic’ desire or a longing for information. Websites are also used interchangeably with DVDs to watch mega teledrama episodes. The most commonly used website is col3.neg (referred to by participants as col3). Since the establishment of col3, several websites using different versions of the name have popped up on the internet, making it difficult to locate the original website. These teledrama websites depend on and are cluttered with internet advertising. Advertisements include astrological services, matrimonial services and consumer goods for diasporic Sri Lankans. The websites upload episodes of megas that are recorded off airings from television broadcasts in Sri Lanka, providing fast access to episodes than the DVD releases of grocery shops. However, many members of the teledrama club prefer to watch DVDs. Ethnic gatherings and cultural events in Melbourne also play important roles in the

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Image 4.3  Traditional games at the annual Sri Lankan New Year celebrations at the Dandenong Show Ground in Melbourne, 2014

everyday life of the Sinhalese community, particularly those affiliated to the diasporic organisation (Image 4.3). Music events featuring singers, bands and dance troupes from Sri Lanka, touring Sinhalese theatre productions, communal parties, sporting events, events of alumni associations affiliated to Sri Lankan schools and universities, and religious events at Buddhist temples in Melbourne are regularly advertised on events websites. These are mostly ticketed events. Trips to the Sri Lankan grocery shops also constitute an important diasporic activity for the participants of this study. As discussed, these shops sell various forms of media, such as DVDs of mega teledramas, Sinhalese musical programmes, films, reality shows as well as newspapers, apart from spices, food, consumer goods, ornaments, utensils, ointments, herbal medicine, religious goods and astrological items. Mankekar (2002) points to the significance of Indian grocery shops in San Francisco for the ‘transnational circulation of texts, images, and commodities’ among the Indian community in the US and the importance of gender as a ‘lens’ to examine social practices that these stores facilitate. For

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the Sri Lankan women in this study, the availability of mega teledrama DVDs from their home country is a major attraction of these grocery shops. The Sri Lankan grocery store constitutes an important diasporic space for the participants of this study, and as women they lead diasporic consumerism, being in-charge of cooking and managing households. Goods available at the shops have an everyday presence in the lives of the participants. The regular desire to purchase these goods from the diasporic store rests on a desire to generate a tangible connection with their pasts and a continuous collective consumerism that illustrated a national identity of commodification. ‘It is like we are holding a piece of Sri Lanka,’ one woman said. ‘The scent of the shop reminds me of the local shop in my village,’ said another. In her long-term ethnographic work in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mankekar (2015: 80) suggests that the Indian diasporic grocery store acts as a ‘sensorium’ where her interviewees, too, commented on the smells of the grocery store, having a distinctive olfactory experience that appealed to their temporality, as Indian migrants. Also for the Sinhalese women of this study, the Sri Lankan grocery store represents a connection to their past, contributing tangible and emotive experiences for shaping their selves as migrants in Australia.

Women’s Friendships and the Teledrama Club As observed in Colombo, viewing families and friendship networks form an integral part of the mega teledrama viewing experience in Sri Lanka (see Chap. 3). Talking about teledramas while watching is enhanced and thrives in the presence of families and friends. These viewing families do not remain static and alter with the entry and exit of unexpected guests from the neighbourhoods. The viewers are compelled to follow a broadcasting schedule. Women’s viewing is disrupted and fluctuate between viewing and listening when gendered dynamics of household chores and unpaid care work coincide with mega teledrama times (see also Gamage 2018). The women in the teledrama club living in Melbourne have different experiences to these viewing conditions. They live among smaller nuclear families. Some elderly participants live with their children’s families but are often alone in the house after the children go to work and their grandchildren go to school. All participants are skilled migrants, and they engage in some form of work, fulltime or part-time, and are economically sustained. They do not have the constant presence of a viewing family, and their

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Image 4.4  Watching megas in the homes in Melbourne is often a solitary act for women and transforms into a social act at the teledrama club, 2015

viewing experiences often tend to be solitary (Image 4.4). As viewing times are not dependent on a broadcast schedule, viewing does not depend on a routine. Advertising breaks that are invaluable to women in Colombo to attend chores or engage in simultaneous viewing are not necessary for women in Melbourne. In Melbourne, women consume recorded material, such as DVDs or internet episodes. They are in control of when they view the content and can stop, pause, rewind and fast-forward, as they pleased. The ‘social act’ of watching television (Livingstone 1990: 37) is recreated at the teledrama club, extending from diasporic Sinhalese women’s homes. This includes interactive negotiations about the meanings in mega narratives. Although they do not watch the megas at the teledrama club, it is as important as a viewing space to complete the process of watching by facilitating the formation of dialogue, discussion and critique on the stories that they have watched in solitude at home. More importantly, the female friendships that flourish in this space contribute to these conversations about megas, whereas many male members of the association, who are women’s family members or partners, would go on to trivialise the

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women’s pleasure of talking about soap operas. The women say that the club provides the opportunity to ‘talk to each other’, ‘share views about teledramas’, ‘complain about how terrible the story was’ and ‘gossip about stars’. Not only has the teledrama club carved out a shared space for women within the diasporic association to take ownership of an activity they described as ‘our thing’ but also create an informal, unstructured and a messy social forum for women’s interactions. During these DVD exchanges, the women do not limit themselves to conversations about megas. They discuss about events, parties, language classes for children, Sinhalese theatre productions touring Melbourne, fashion, people they know, rivalry with other diasporic associations, news from the homeland and engage in matchmaking. The ‘serial form’ and ‘abrupt segmentation’, two major characteristics of soap operas, share a common ethos with women’s oral cultures and pleasures (Brown 1990, 1994, 2004). The extended middles and open narratives of soap operas bear a close resemblance to women’s talk (Mumford 1995: 88–89), as is with the mega teledramas and women’s discussions at the teledrama club. As Brown (2004: 18) points out, the ‘active pleasure’ in women’s groups stems from the freedom of being able to express themselves without being subjected to ‘censure’. In the backdrop where women’s consumption of megas is devalued as a mode of entertainment, the women could easily be vilified for consuming this cultural form. In both Colombo and Melbourne, the women’s social groups provide a space for them to be analytical and critical viewers of mega teledramas simply by allowing to talk about the messages of the narratives. The significance of women’s friendships in allowing freedom of talk and expression brings to mind a particular incident at the teledrama club. At one meeting, an office-bearer storms into the dining hall and orders the women to clear out the DVDs off the tables, as the association have ‘more important things to do’. He asks the women to make room to serve a gratitude lunch to children who had participated at an event at the association. The women are clearly deeply embarrassed by this dismissal of their activity. They look at each other and glance at me apologetically. The conversations we are having about megas halt awkwardly. The office-bearer who does not notice me initially sees me helping the women to clear the table. He apologises to me several times for the intrusion and tells me in a kind tone of voice that they need to serve lunch early that day as the children are hungry, and we can ‘do this anywhere else’. He does not apologise to the women.

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The office-bearer’s attitude towards the women’s teledrama club being an ‘unimportant’ activity emanates partly from the connotation that mega teledramas are a women’s genre. The devaluation of gossip and talk among women is reflected in the office-bearer’s attitude towards female friendships. The popular Sinhalese interpretation of women’s groups as a ‘society by the well’, referring to women’s social circles that form at village water wells, has lent to this debased status of women’s oral cultures in Sri Lankan society—a reference that the male members often use to refer to the gathering of women at the soap opera club in the diasporic space. In the newsletters and banners of the association, the teledrama club has accumulated a significant place in the agenda of the association. At this meeting, members have adorned the hall with banners stating these various activities of the organisation, such as the day-care programme for elders and Sinhalese language classes. There is also a banner set aside for the teledrama club. Nevertheless, the women clear the dining hall swiftly, mimicking the office-bearer, making verbal remarks among themselves, rolling their eyes and putting back the DVDs into the cupboard angrily. As other members begin enquiring why the women were putting away the DVDs so early, they would say crossly, ‘We were told to leave and we are going.’ In situations of oppression, women’s agency and resistance tend to be often overlooked. Women’s silences are important strategies of resistance (Visweswaran 1994: 30–31). When a space like the teledrama club that is meant as a social space for women experiences sudden strictures, the women react using their body language to counter the authority of the office-bearer. Their use of mimicry, gestures, passing hints, storming off and silence are resistive reactions to the intrusion on their social space that is vilified as ‘unimportant’. The space of the teledrama club at the diasporic association is an important forum to translate women’s social experience into oral interactions, facilitating the expression of self, identity and pleasure. There is a space here to share interactions and resist strictures through collective female friendships. The teledrama club is not only about the teledramas; it is also very much about the women themselves. Woolf’s (2000) celebrated essay A Room of One’s Own based on her lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1928 is one of the earliest feminist writings that bring to attention the significance of female friendships in understanding the complexities and nuances of women’s cultures. Woolf argues that the tendency of literary classics to undermine female friendships, portraying negative relationships between women, in

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order to present male-oriented narratives, has created simple and limited cultural representations of women’s vibrant social selves. Indeed, while the dynamics of power within closely associated networks of friendships cannot be ignored, women’s cultures can thrive in the close-knit female social circles. In this case, the teledrama club allows the women to be complex beings, demystifying the notion of female mega teledrama viewers as passive and uncritical consumers of the messages at the same time resisting those notions that act to ground them within the systemic understandings of women’s pleasure.

Belonging at Home The women’s conversations at the teledrama club about megas reveal the everyday nuances of place-making informed by the audiovisual narratives of soap operas from the home country. Paolo Boccagni (2017: 4–17) terms place-making as ‘homing’, drawing particular attention to the home as a ‘social experience’ and ‘process through which people negotiate a sense of home’, and this enables the examination of migrants’ material, emotional and relational interpretation as tied to a particular place. In contexts of migration and mobility, media consumption from home countries enables the construction of spaces where migrants can ‘feel at home’ (Tsagarousianou 2001: 170). Connectivity and mobility through digital media and information technologies have intensified proximate relationships and continuous engagements with distant homes, giving rise to ‘connected migrants’ mitigating dispersal (Diminescu 2008: 568) where media situates across social and emotional fields as an ‘environment of affordances’ (Madianou and Miller 2012). In such contexts, emotions and affect become a significant capital to ‘surface’ and shape ‘individual and collective bodies’ for the articulation of feelings towards nations (Ahmed 2004, 2014). Participants state their reasons for watching megas from the home country as follows: ‘When we watch a teledrama we feel like we are in our country,’ ‘We feel that we are in Sri Lanka,’ ‘The way they talk, the food they eat, everything [in the megas] … we feel it,’ ‘We feel like we have gone home,’ ‘It is fun to watch our own things’ and ‘We feel that we are associating with Sri Lankans.’ These answers traverse emotive and affective relationships to the home, enabling a sense of belonging to a home that is different from their present in Australia. For instance, the below comment

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from Shriyani refers to missing the organised chaos of her distant past in Sri Lanka, differentiating between here (Melbourne) and there (Colombo): What matters most to me are the characters [in the megas]. Everything is different here. Here, every dialogue is polite. When we are there, we talk like there. When you go in a bus, we must crawl through the crowds. Here, we wait for others. It is not like that there. There is disorderliness. I miss that sometimes. We remember that when we watch teledramas. Weren’t we like this?

Yuval-Davis (2011: 69) reflects on the question of how does one belong to a nation, in her work on gender and citizenship. She examines ‘diasporism’ as an ‘alternative discourse of belonging’ that is a ‘political project … differentially experienced by various members of the same national and ethnic collections’. Yuval-Davis encourages us to situate belonging within the multi-layered contexts of migrants’ affiliations to both their home and host countries. As she further notes, the ‘spatial/temporal shortcuts’ between diasporas and their homelands have been intensified with advancements in communication and technology, which complicates their identities of belonging. The Sri Lankan women’s references to the content of mega narratives, as personifying a feeling of being home when watching and talking about the texts on television, bring to light how, to use Yuval-Davis’s words, ‘national membership’ exists in a more ‘ephemeral’ status than citizenship. This contextual and transient nature of the ‘social articulation of difference’ by minority groups is examined in Hommi Bhabha’s (1994: 3) extensive work on hybridity. Bhabha examines hybridity as developing from continuous negotiations of identity that is embedded in moments of historical transformation. This ‘feeling’ of Sri Lankanness that the participants are experiencing through the megas they watch signals to an ‘othering’ of Australian media content that could not suffice their emotive notions to the home. When Amali tells me that it is fun to watch ‘our own’ things, she is indicating that, to her, this ‘ourness’ is signified by imagery such as people, dress codes, food, customs and language in the megas that represented her Sinhalese self. In the megas, female heroines themselves embody the home through representations of value systems and morality as tied to womanhood and gender performativity. Borrowing DVDs from the club, Amali watches Apeksha, the mega that is also at the centre of discussion in women’s households in Colombo. While for some women

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the main female character Nathalia’s Westernised and independent lifestyle collided with their imaginations of Sinhalese womanhood, Amali says: I tell my husband that Nathalia is a lot like me during those [youthful] days. I was incorrigible just like her. I keep telling my husband that she is just like how I used to be. I had no care in the world just like her. But after I had children it changed. Some people don’t like this in a woman.

For Amali to not only disclose that Nathalia resembles her own past and also to admit to her husband about being ‘just like’ Nathalia when she was young show how contestation is also a vital part of belonging. This does not mean that Amali rejects the embodiment of tradition and culture so often executed through the female characters in the megas. For instance, she sees the two mothers in the mega Chaya who continue to live as widows, looking after their grown-up children, as ‘doing the right thing’ for not remarrying after the death of their husbands. In one way, while Amali rejects subjugation by situating her own young self within that of Nathalia’s rebellious actions, she also validates the mothers in Chaya for remaining loyal to their first husbands, even in death, and for their life-long commitment to raising children. She sees this as a unique quality in women of the Sinhalese society—‘not like here,’ she says, referring to her Australian society. She goes on to position her own self within the imagery of motherhood and would often talk to me about how her life has now been taken over by the ‘responsibilities’ of raising children. In that sense, Amali’s interpretations of selfhood are to exit and enter the nuances of good-bad binaries of womanhood at the same time. For a moment she belongs to the value system of the Westernised woman who Nathalia is and also others the Westernised woman through the mothers in Chaya. The feeling of belonging that the participants are experiencing through watching and talking about the mega teledrama narratives is also grounded in the romanticising of the rural nation and the nation in poverty, a central thread explored in the storylines and lifestyles of the characters. The magnetic pull of the village, as reminding the participants of their roots in Sri Lanka and a simpler life, could be observed in the conversations women share about the megas at the teledrama club. Shriyani tells her friends at the teledrama club how scenes from the village in Ammawarune (Mothers) remind her of her own rural hometown. ‘I remember how we went to school, how we played. This is how it is in the village. We ran in the paddy field. I feel that. Even the way people behave is what we are used to. That

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is why I watch [the mega].’ Catherine says that she likes to see the ‘environment’ shown in the megas. In a mega about a bus driver and conductor called Issarahata Yanna (Go Forward), Catherine has been able to spot many different locations along the route of the bus. As she had not visited Sri Lanka for many years, Catherine found it difficult to identify the exact locations. She has spotted the iconic Colombo Town Hall and the Gangaramaya Temple area. Catherine has asked her son to show her these places on the internet so that she could update her fading memory of Colombo. ‘I feel an urge to go to Sri Lanka at once … but because we can’t go like that we wait,’ she tells me. Indira, too, adds to this comment by saying, ‘When you see the houses, the roads and places [in the megas], we go there.’ Participant Shriyani describes the scenes depicting Sarojini cooking jackfruit and cassava from the garden and the village ways of offering food to visitors in Ammawarune (Mothers), as a practice absent in the city. Shriyani’s comments refer to the hospitality traditions of the village, as represented in the megas, which makes her reminisce about her own life in the Sinhalese rural community. Indeed, as discussed before, at the diasporic association, Sinhalese women’s culinary cultural roles are validated with the traditional lunches of rice and curry they prepare and serve acquiring a significant place in the agenda of the fortnightly gatherings. Thus women’s roles in sustaining gastronomic cultures and hospitality traditions accumulate central roles in the mega narratives, in women’s own interpretations of the messages in the megas as well as in the collective diasporic space of the association. This multiplicity of ideas of the nation and how they worked and reworked in the gendered diasporic space can be traced along interpretations of women’s place in the rural mega narratives. These interpretations help us to observe how women’s television-infused understandings of the rural womanhood reconstruct their ideas about the home. While discussing the mega Ammawarune, the women talk about Sarojini, the main female character, a middle-aged mother, who takes care of her university-­ going daughter and ageing mother in her ancestral home of the village. Sarojini is a widow, and once again the women’s conversations bring to light the embodiment of nation and village through the female characters in the megas. Shriyani’s interpretation of Sarojini can be examined in relation to her notions of womanhood, more specifically of village women, as well as the village as a whole. By referring to Sarojini as the ‘biggest role model’ in the

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drama, a good cook, caring for her elderly mother and daughter, Shriyani puts village women in their place—the home. ‘One thing is sure, that daughter is brought-up well,’ she says. ‘She doesn’t befriend every [boy] she sees. She is very careful … even the way she dresses; she dresses decently,’ Shriyani tells her friends, referring to Sarojini’s young daughter. Sarojini’s ability to raise a daughter who does not initiate affairs and dresses in ‘decent’ clothing produces the idea of village women as subjects of purity, as opposed to the woman in the city. Even more, Sarojini becomes a good mother in the eyes of Shriyani for raising a daughter with introvert qualities. In line with the hegemonic Sinhalese-Buddhist image of village women as ‘passive and subordinate beings who should be protected within the confines of the home’ (Hewamanne 2008: 6), Shriyani sees the domesticated lives of Sarojini, her mother, and daughter in the village as markers of a good rural womanhood. Shriyani’s commendation on Sarojini as a ‘real village woman’ validates the notion of the village as pure as the women who live in them.

‘I Don’t Understand Australian’ Two decades ago, when Gillespie (1995) conducted her ethnographic study on second-generation Punjabi Londoners watching Australian soap operas, her work contributed to positioning diasporas and their media consumption within the contexts of their everyday life. She moved beyond the parameters of conventional conceptualising of migration, as a question connected to issues of employment, development and settlement (King and Wood 2001: 3). Her study is an early example of the global appeal of Australian soap operas like Neighbours and Home and Away, outside the predominantly Australian audience. Gillespie (1995: 143–144) finds out that second-generation children of Punjabi migrants of her study drew on Neighbours as a ‘cultural resource’ that contributed to the construction of ‘new modes of identity’ when they interacted about the soap with peers, parents and adults of their community. Young Punjabi Londoners in Gillespie’s study engage in discussing Neighbours ‘as a socially shared act’, and young viewers collectively drew on the representations in the soap to ‘make sense of their own lives’. For the Sinhalese migrant women in this study, the home country megas also enabled to develop sensibilities about negotiating meanings of Australian soap operas. For instance, Pramila (62) says she does not ‘understand’ Australian soap operas in the same way she does the Sinhalese

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megas. Here, she is not referring to English, but rather the complexities in genre, according to her, include ‘too many stories’ and ‘no endings’. Another participant Chandima (38) agrees and says that she does not watch Australian soap operas because it is ‘difficult to watch with children’. For Chandima, the ‘sensual scenes, extramarital relationships, and failed marriages’ in the Australian soap operas contradict with the value systems of her home country, and she says the messages could be ‘harmful’ to the minds of her children. However, migrants’ rejection of mainstream media of the host country cannot be simply interpreted as an exit, but rather this indicates that they have developed sensibilities for the active deconstruction and reconstruction of their positions as migrant audiences (Tsagarousianou 2012: 293). In that sense, the Sinhalese women did not merely dismiss the Australian texts, but they could choose between the value systems of their home and host cultures, as represented on television, by negotiating the meanings in both kinds of soap operas from Sri Lanka and Australia. In similar ways to Sri Lankan women in this study, research with Malay women elsewhere shows that they, too, use ‘personal interpretations of the cultural ideologies and expectations of the Malay world’ as a filtering system of foreign soap operas (Syed and Runnel 2014: 310). For the Sri Lankan diasporic women of this study, the mainstream Australian soap operas did not transform into their existing cultural context whereas the megas fulfilled this purpose. It should also be noted that the participants had not seen the Australian soap operas in context when they made the decisions about selecting what texts to watch. They tell me that it is mainly through trailers and their general perceptions of Hollywood films that had made them to distance themselves from these Australian counterparts. Like the young second-­ generation members of the Punjabi community in Gillespie’s study, the Sinhalese women are also using soap operas to understand and construct their identities. However, these understandings also depended on choosing what and what not to watch. Rather than rejecting the Australianness in the soap operas of their host country, the women were distancing themselves from the Westernness in the representations of those narratives. The open depiction of romance and erotica in the narratives made the women more aware of their Sinhalese consciousness that was constructed on reserved public expressions of such feelings. Similar to the ways in which cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986; Brunsdon 1981) worked to exclude the women from the Australian soap operas, their knowledge of the Sinhalese

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contexts and cultural codes could easily work to exclude those who could not make sense of the meanings in megas. For Samitha, living in isolation in Melton, a far western suburb with less Sri Lankan presence, watching mega teledramas with her mother, she tells me, makes her feel connected to the outside world. This world she describes is essentially a Sri Lankan one. Her mother who travels constantly on visitor visas from Sri Lanka to spend time with their family and her grandchildren provides kinship to Samitha when watching her favourite mega teledramas. While her children born in Australia are unable to fully deconstruct the messages in the megas, watching with her mother provides Samitha a setting to share the meanings of the megas with greater fluidity. At times, she and her mother ‘only have to laugh or nod’ because they both understand the humour and references in the dialogues. She tells me that it is at times tiring to explain the context in detail to her children. When she sees the villages and rural towns in the megas, she identifies the surroundings with her mother. However, her children have no knowledge of this geography. When another participant Dilani (64) says, ‘I don’t anyway get any feelings from Australian soap operas,’ she is referring once again to the feeling of being home. She goes on to tell me that when Sri Lankan actors from the megas make visits to Melbourne for musical shows, she participates at the events. However, she does not ‘feel’ like that about the actors in the Australian soaps. For Dilani, the Australian soap operas ‘feel outside’, and as a result she says she is not motivated to watch them. Dilani has been in Australia for 22 years, but she still watches Sri Lankan teledramas and megas. She tells me that she is ‘not used to Australian stories’ while the Sinhalese megas are ‘about things I know’. While she has lived in the host society for so long, her selfhood still relates to the Sinhaleseness as represented in the Sri Lankan soap operas. As Hall (1992: 301–302) argues, ‘changes in time-space relationships within different systems of representation have profound effects on how identities are located and represented’. The megas in the diasporic context became a vital disturber of monolithic notions of time and space. Sinhalese migrant women, like Dilani, who have spent years living in Australia could instantly dismantle their long-term presence in the Australian society by accessing a distant past through the imagery and sounds in the Sinhalese soap operas. Fiske’s (1987: 15) explanation of cultural competence from a semiotics aspect in his book Television Culture links pleasure from media texts with control of meaning. Fiske points out that cultural competence is a central

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dynamic in ‘people’s ability to make socially pertinent and pleasurable meanings from the semiotic resources of the text’: ‘pleasure requires a sense of control over meanings and an active participation in the cultural process.’ Participants possessed sufficient cultural capital to negotiate meanings in Australian mainstream reality television programmes, such as MasterChef, Hot Seat, My Kitchen Rules, Australia’s Got Talent and X-Factor, included in their media diets. They appreciate these programmes featuring contestants with a Sri Lankan background, for example the vocalist Andrew De Silva in Australia’s Got Talent 2012 and Kumar Pereira in MasterChef for whom they even voted. Participants also consume Sri Lankan reality shows like the Idol local versions Super Star and Dream Star on the internet and through grocery shop DVDs. While participants find Australian reality shows pleasurable to watch, they do not interpret their engagements with Australian and Euro-American soap operas in the same way, often situating those as different to the parameters of their cultural imagination. The Sinhalese megas signified the home and stronger connections to distant pasts.

Conclusion In the diasporic context, Sinhalese nationalist meanings of womanhood (see Chap. 1) in the megas circulate to shape place-making, identity and belonging. In one way, the megas offered access to the value systems and moralities of the home country that enabled participants to understand their selves and positions as Sinhalese migrants and women in the host society. Meanings of mega narratives evoked sensibilities for constructing hybrid historical subjectivities and cultural meanings to produce new national selves as migrant women, contesting politics of exclusion and inclusion in the host society. Sustaining, maintaining, resisting and embracing the Sinhalese nationalist depictions of messages and good-bad binaries of womanhood in megas came together in nuanced ways at the gendered diasporic space of the teledrama club (see Chap. 5 for further discussion). The female characters in the megas themselves embodied a sense of the home for participants, tapping into rural cultural imaginations of being village women. While the Sinhalese nationalist meanings in the narratives created a cultural capital for making sense of the texts, the diasporic women also interpreted the meanings of megas in diverse ways. The teledrama club created such a space for the dispersed women to belong to a national television culture as an audience, albeit through a long-distance relationship to that culture.

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CHAPTER 5

Gender, Media, Migration and Culture: An Intersectional Conclusion

Abstract  Nationalist discourses that set the stage for the formation of everyday meanings on womanhood provide gendered cultural capital for the production and reception of Sinhalese television soap operas. The interpretive and discursive nature of those meanings facilitates nuanced deconstructions and reconstructions of gender, womanhood and nation in everyday private and public spheres of leisure that include conformities and contestations. In transnational cultural flows of migration and mobility, the meanings and pleasures of soap operas translate to evoke connections to the home and distant value systems, enabling migrant women to understand their new national selves in a host society through the social act of watching mega teledramas. This chapter examines these themes that ethnographic research produced throughout this book in the national and transnational contexts of mega teledrama production and reception. Keywords  Gender • Nationalism • Cultural capital • Soap operas • Diaspora • Active audience The inquiry of this study entailed examining the intersections of gender, media, migration and culture. The study built on several research questions: What role did television soap operas play in driving the ubiquities of gendered Sinhalese nationalist discourses? What shape and form does nationalism take in women’s homes, workplaces and spheres of leisure? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gamage, Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6_5

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What role did television play in influencing and contesting women’s imaginaries and embodiment of nationhood? What subject positions are created for women within these discourses? And, how do nationalist sensibilities act as gendered cultural capital to produce meanings of womanhood in television? Examining the national and diasporic audiences of women of Sri Lankan soap operas, their interpretations of the messages in the narratives and discussions with producers making the soap operas, several intersectional themes have emerged in relation to these questions, which are presented as four final remarks in the following sections.

Nationalist Meanings and Cultural Capital Female heroines playing central roles in mega teledramas epitomise the binaries of good and bad womanhood for Sinhalese women. In the production and audience contexts, this imagery becomes vital for making sense of the mega teledramas as well as to contest those meanings. For producers and audiences, what these nationalist constructions of womanhood provide is a kind of gendered cultural capital to create and understand the soap opera narratives. I revert here to Brunsdon (1997) and Hobson’s (1982) studies on female viewers of the British soap Crossroads, applying Bourdieu’s (1986) theorisation of cultural capital for understanding the circulation of television meanings (see Chap. 1). In a postcolonial post-war context where soap operas are made and watched in Sri Lanka, the play of nationalist meanings has become central to the representations of socially acceptable codes and conventions for women’s personal lives. In such a context, this gendered cultural capital becomes nation-bound where the woman itself is constructed to embody the nation. Currents of migration and mobility facilitate the circulation of this cultural capital across borders. The ‘reproductive heteronormativity’ and the birthright conceptualisations of nationalist projects (Spivak 2009—see Chap. 1) prevail in the mega teledrama narratives in setting good-bad binaries for women, as nurturers, reproducers and symbols of cultural purity of the nation in both national and diasporic settings. Nathalia, the young widow in the mega Apeksha, examined in the production and reception contexts of this study shows how such nationalist ideals that set conventions for women’s bodies, behaviours and freedoms translate in ubiquitous spaces of women’s everyday lives in national and transnational spaces.

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In Chap. 2, I discuss how the producers lend their nationalist sensibilities to the narratives of megas, projecting cultural and moral values for female characters, equating the behaviour of female heroines in the stories as reflecting the image of the Sinhalese nation. A central thread of this messaging is, as interviewed writers expressed, unconventional female protagonists endorsing women’s gender roles in paradigms of motherhood, chastity, culture and the image of the ideal Sinhalese-Buddhist woman. As I discuss in previous chapters these messages are interpreted, in Colombo, in women’s private spheres in homes, kitchens, informal economic spaces and neighbourhoods, and in Melbourne, at women’s public, social and symbolic cultural spaces of the diasporic association and teledrama club. Translations of nationalist discourses in both private and public spaces in everyday lives of women watching soap operas demonstrate the quotidian positions such ideologies accumulate when transmitted through popular cultural modes such as soap operas and television. In the national and transnational contexts of watching, some women’s interpretations of Nathalia identify the good-bad binaries that producers say they construct as messages in the narratives. These interpretations revolve around Nathalia’s extrovert lifestyle, going to night clubs, travelling unaccompanied at night, neglect of her husband, inability to cook, disregard for familial values, talking back at parents, setting a bad example for her sister and clothing choices as unacceptable behaviour for women, favouring a more submissive womanhood. Her moral epiphany, her husband’s intervention to ‘correct’ her and her development into a traditional woman who gives up on the ‘unsuitable’ life are justified in some of their interpretations. In Chap. 1, I discuss how such meanings of womanhood have been produced through historical trajectories, dating back to anti-­ colonial struggles and the Sinhalese nationalist revival of 1956 and present demands of building new national identities in a post-war context in Sri Lanka. Women’s interpretations of these ideologies then show how such meanings circulate in their everyday private and public spheres transforming into gendered cultural capital. Nevertheless, a nation-bound cultural capital that defines womanhood in the soap operas is also contested in these everyday spaces, acquiring new meanings. In both national and transnational contexts, women’s interpretations include acceptance of Nathalia and validations of her actions. Some participants compared her to their own engagements in younger lives, demonstrating a desire for the past freedoms they experienced as younger women. Some justified her neglect of her husband as a necessary condition

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for her social life. Some found her clothing choices appealing and others found her economic freedom, ability to drive, managing a business and supervising staff as traits of an acceptable modern womanhood. In the diasporic context, interpretations of female characters in the mega teledramas from the home country, like Nathalia, include a desire to other Westernisation and the everyday demands of negotiating Western meanings resulting from their bicultural lives, as migrants in Australian society. As Hall (1990: 225, 1996: 247) argues, examining identity beyond ‘epochal stages’ enables us to deconstruct the ‘traumatic character’ of colonial pasts, and this becomes significant in the formation of a national sense of selfhood for migrants in host societies. While British-Victorian values integrated through colonisation has produced some of these very binaries of postcolonial Sinhalese womanhood (see Chap. 1) reflected in the megas, a sense of decolonisation and othering of Westernisation is important for participant’s interpretation of teledrama heroines in the diasporic space (see also Gamage 2020). This departure from Westernisation but an acceptance of Victorian values in their interpretations of womanhood in the soap operas thus constitutes a paradox. Disjunctive mediascapes in diasporic spaces (Appadurai 1990, 1996) entail negotiating such intersectional, historical, contesting and symbolic cultural expressions (see also Gamage 2018, 2019).

Women’s Care Spaces of Leisure The conceptualisation of the active television audience is reshaped in this book when television viewing is examined specifically as existing in gendered spaces of leisure. Applying a feminist gaze towards ethnographic research, as championed in feminist ethnography (Abu-Lughod 1988; Bolak 1996; Kondo 1990; Oakley 2005; Okely 1996; Parameswaran 2001; Visweswaran 1994), enabled this audience study to examine more specifically gendered dynamics that make way to the formation of active audiences of women, bringing to light the inequalities and social conditions of being women in spaces of leisure and entertainment as well as the silences and resistances allowing women to reclaim these spaces as their own. The discursive and interpretive experiences of audiences of women in this study largely emerge from appropriating and negotiating the boundaries of unpaid care work in their homes. In the light of the second-­ wave feminist movement, considering the personal is political and the home, the private sphere and the community as spaces of political

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formations was vital to a boom in feminist research on soap operas and audiences of women (Brunsdon 1997: 39; McRobbie 2005: 43). Many years later, ethnographic accounts of women’s viewing environments and social spaces in this study reaffirm this and demand us furthermore to understand women’s spaces of leisure as spaces of care. These spaces contain unpaid and continuous labour in the shape of domestic, familial and cultural obligations. The intersectionality of class is a factor that cannot be missed as contributing to such unpaid care work of women with working and upward-mobile middle-class families depending on women’s free labour to mitigate the absence of systemic mechanisms for social security and universal incomes. In Chaps. 3 and 4, I analyse participant observations conducted in these spaces of care. In Colombo, homes in the underserved and suburban neighbourhoods intensely demand women’s unpaid care where participants watch soap operas while nursing elderly patients in home care, cooking, washing, cleaning, attending to children and partners, conducting micro businesses and maintaining community relationships. Watching megas entails creatively appropriating women’s unpaid care work to derive a pleasurable viewing experience. In a particular case that I discussed, Ahinsa who listens to megas entirely from the kitchen while her space of leisure is shaped by a controlling partner contests the limits of her freedom in her own home. Similarly, Nanda and Himani who attend to elderly patients in their homes have created an environment to also engage with the megas while providing care. The nation-bound gendered cultural capital provided the women competence to negotiate sporadic and intermittent viewing of mega narratives that occurred while engaging in unpaid care work. In the transnational space of the women’s teledrama club, I discuss in Chap. 4 how creating gastronomic experiences for the diasporic association is a primary contribution of women. In one account, I discuss how the women’s teledrama club is subject to vilification by a male office-bearer and dismissed as insignificant. Many male members of the association held the view of women watching teledramas as a mediocre activity of feminine pleasure. In that sense, it is not a given that women’s popular cultural practices are accepted as the norm. Even in the diasporic space, they exist as the exception. Nevertheless, the teledrama club provided an important space for the women to analyse and critique Sinhalese nationalist constructions of womanhood in the teledramas as well as to construct vital care networks that produced emotional support for each other in the diasporic

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space. This was particularly the case for older migrant women with limited mobility and social circles (see also Wilding et al. 2020). Sinhalese nationalist meanings on womanhood and the female heroines of soap operas reaffirm the notions of unpaid care work as characteristic of a good Sinhalese womanhood. Women like Nathalia in the soap operas are critiqued for their lack of gender performativity in household and familial spaces, eventually her male counterparts subordinating her towards such gender roles. Women’s interpretations of these representations in the soap operas provide them an opportunity to reflexively engage with their own selfhoods, but class conditions and cultural obligations act to normalise women’s roles in unpaid care work. It is also important to note that even in such conditions women acquired and appropriated agency and mobilisation in these spaces with women’s friendships and resistances providing vital contestations of inequalities. Women’s oral cultures of soap operas are particularly significant and formative of diverse kinds of agency and autonomy in private and public spheres of their everyday lives.

Soap Opera Cultures in the Digital Era Clearly, the world has undergone much technological and paradigm shifts since Ang’s classic audience study about letter writers of the American serial Dallas examined the tragic structure of feeling in 1985. Many years later, Ang (2007: 21) points out that a global culture that is profoundly different today warrants theoretical, empirical, contextual, social and cultural analyses of soap opera audiences. What seems to be the appeal of watching television, archiving DVDs and talking about soap operas for women in the diverse national and transnational localities in a time that is increasingly shifting to personalised media experiences, such as video-on-­ demand and streaming? A ‘polymedia’ perspective to understanding media as an ‘environment of affordances’ and the ‘social and emotional’ realms of media consumption is suggested in the work of Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller (2012: 170–171) in their theory of polymedia. Such a perspective enables us to examine media beyond their ‘ever proliferating’ and ‘discrete’ status as a technology. Madianou and Miller argue that when the responsibilities of choosing a particular kind of media is shifted from the technical and economic standpoint to the ‘moral, social and emotional concerns’, it helps to ‘re-socialize’ the technology. This study, too, shows that watching television soap operas and talking about them remain a vital television culture for some audiences despite the

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increasing shift of digital and personalised media. In Colombo, women’s neighbourhood friendship groups and in Melbourne the women’s diasporic teledrama club position television viewing as a social act that extends well beyond the realms of production, texts and reception. In Melbourne, women’s commitment to buying DVDs from grocery stores, exchanging at the club and talking about the teledramas they watch show that watching soap operas is also a symbolic cultural act that defines them as an audience, conducted in the space of the diasporic association that particularly functions as a space of shared and collective identity. Thus the changing technological landscapes and viewership cannot ignore the significance of media as a social and cultural experience. In Colombo, women’s friendship groups in the neighbourhood provided vital support networks for conducting micro businesses and unpaid care work in the households, and watching mega teledramas together supported the growth of those friendships in a social act of commonality. In Melbourne, a friendship group who is part of a diasporic network initiated the teledrama club. The women extended their social practice of sharing DVDs and watching megas to include women of the larger diasporic association until it reached the stage of an archival project. Consuming the narratives served to create a sense of commonality, place-making and togetherness, but most importantly, the meanings and pleasures of megas thrive on kinships that are already vital to women’s social experiences. The mega teledramas have assumed a social and cultural role in the lives of women in this study beyond its capacity as a television genre.

The Ethnographic Effort Finally, a few points need to be made about the ethnographic effort of this study. The transnational nature of the ethnographic field and the gendered nature of participants are two distinct characteristics of the epistemological and analytical gaze of this study. By ‘following the thing’ (Marcus 1998, 2011) and building on a transnational approach to conducting ethnographic research (Appadurai 1996), this study was able to situate a diasporic media culture within its locale of origins and cross-border flows of global culture. The itinerancy of fieldwork and multi-site examinations of women watching Sri Lankan mega teledramas enabled this study to deploy a transnational vantage to examine the complex, multiple and interrelated patterns of the production, reception and circulation of local and global flows of a media practice.

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The application of a female and feminist gaze for conducting research with women and the focus on women as knowledge holders of their own lives facilitated uncovering the gendered patterns of media cultures embedded in those local and transnational media flows. For decades, feminist ethnographers have contributed vital insights about conducting research with women (Behar and Gordon 1995; Couillard 1995; Harding 1987, 2004; Oakley 2005) in politically and ethically accountable ways (Harding and Norberg 2005), and this study shows how these insights continue to set directions for researching women in ways that identify inequalities, resistances, oppression and the many voices of representation that form subject positions for women in patriarchal spaces that have also become transnational and embedded in cross-border value systems. While being an ethnographic media study that particularly examined women’s media culture, the desire to apply a feminist gaze and a gender lens supported this study to more closely examine how media production, reception and circulation take shape in women’s everyday lives. Indeed, this is a challenging process and limits exist; as I discuss in Chap. 1, complex negotiations of positionalities and power relations in the field were necessary, but like many feminist ethnographers have done before me, reflexive approaches to conducting, analysing and writing up research helped understand these challenges as an explicit part of a process of research with women rather than as limitations. Inclusion of women’s silences, conversations, friendships, oppression, cultural constructions, familial ties, unpaid care work, interpretations, resistances, selfhood and identities to understand their subject positions in social, cultural and economic contexts is the foundation for any account of media ethnography on audiences of women, as I have learned in the field while this study progressed. The need for contextual understandings of media audiences that cultural studies scholars have championed for so long since the ethnographic turn in audience studies, then, requires a rigorous unpacking of such conditions of women in diverse audience contexts. The transnationalisation of culture, value systems, nationalism and patriarchal ideologies, as much as cultural flows and media practices, intensely crossing borders with flows of globalisation and migration, warrants epistemological inquiries that pay attention to diverse feminisms and intersectionality of questions on race, class and gender in inquiries about media and audiences, as this study brings to light. The findings of this study in relation to soap operas and audiences of women can be expanded in future research to include diverse field sites and television genres. This

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study invites further ethnographic research with diasporic, cultural and gender diverse communities engaging with television soap operas in national and transnational contexts where television is likely to acquire new meanings and purposes for many kinds of voices.

Conclusion This book, Soap operas, Gender and the Sri Lanka Diaspora, invites the examination of diverse diasporic media cultures, locating them in national and transnational cultural flows. Explorations of the origins of home-­ grown television genres, the ethos of cultural workers in constructing television meanings and gendered dynamics of audiences can lend to extending our understandings of diasporic media cultures and the cultural production of diasporas, as situated in transnational social fields. In particular, to locate diasporic women’s media cultures and active audience engagements, their everyday interpretations of selfhood and womanhood, drawing on the transnational circulation of historical subjectivities, cultural hybridities and affective relationships with nations, provide important frameworks of analysing intersections of gender, media, migration and culture through feminist inquiry.

References Ang, Ien. 2007. Television Fictions around the World: Melodrama and Irony in Global Perspective. Critical Studies in Television 2 (2): 18–30. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1988. Fieldwork of a Dutiful Daughter. In Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society, ed. Soraya Altorki and Camilla Fawzi El-Solh, 139–162. New York: Syracuse University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Theory, Culture & Society 7 (2): 295–310. ———. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dynamics of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A.  Gordon, eds. 1995. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bolak, Hale C. 1996. Studying One’s Own in the Middle East: Negotiating Gender and Self-Other Dynamics in the Field. Qualitative Sociology 19 (1): 107–130. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G.  Richardson, 241–258. New  York: Greenwood.

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Brunsdon, Charlotte. 1997. Screen Tastes. London: Routledge. Couillard, Marie-Andrée. 1995. From Women’s Point of View: Practising Feminist Anthropology in a World of Difference. In Ethnographic Feminisms, ed. Sally Cole and Lynne Phillips, 53–74. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Gamage, Shashini. 2018. Soap Operas, Women, and the Nation: Sri Lankan Women’s Interpretations of Homegrown Mega Teledramas. Feminist Media Studies 18 (5): 873–887. ———. 2019. Sri Lankan Migrant Women Watching Teledramas in Melbourne: A Social Act of Identity. In Handbook of Diaspora, Media and Culture, ed. Roza Tsagarousianou and Jessica Retis, 401–414. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell and IAMCR. ———. 2020. Migration, Identity, and Television Audiences: Sri Lankan Women’s Soap Opera Clubs and Diasporic Life in Melbourne. Media International Australia 176 (1): 93–106. Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1996. ‘When was ‘the post-colonial’? thinking of the limit’. In The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, 242–260. London: Routledge. Harding, Sandra. 1987. Feminism and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2004. Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate. In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding, 1–15. New York: Routledge. Harding, Sandra, and Kathryn Norberg. 2005. New Feminist Approaches to Social Science Methodologies: An Introduction. Journal of Woman in Culture and Society 30 (4): 2009–2015. Hobson, Dorothy. 1982. Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera. London: Methuen. Kondo, Dorinne. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. 2012. Polymedia: Towards a New Theory of Digital Media in Interpersonal Communication. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2): 169–187. Marcus, George E. 2011. Multi-sited Ethnography: Five or Six Things I Know About It Now. In Multi-sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods, ed. Simon Coleman and Pauline Von Hellermann, 16–32. New York: Routledge. Marcus, E.  George. 1998. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 2005. The Uses of Cultural Studies. London: Sage. Oakley, Ann. 2005. The Ann Oakley Reader. Bristol: Policy Press.

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Okely, Judith. 1996. Own or Other Culture. London: Routledge. Parameswaran, Radhika. 2001. Feminist Media Ethnography in India: Exploring Power, Gender, and Culture in the Field. Qualitative Inquiry 7 (1): 69–103. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2009. Nationalism and the Imagination. Lectora 15: 75–98. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wilding, Raelene, Loretta Baldassar, Shashini Gamage, Shane Worrel, and Samiro Mohamud. 2020. Digital Media and the Affective Economies of Transnational Families. International Journal of Cultural Studies 23 (5): 639–655.

Index1

A Abeysekera, Sunila, 12 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 3–5, 8, 10, 25, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 52, 55, 126 Active audience, 4, 6, 126 Affect/affective, 10, 111 Affordance(s), 111, 128 Agency, 15, 98, 110, 128 Ahmed, Sara, 10, 111 Anderson, Benedict, 8 Ang, Ien, 4, 8, 9, 19, 23, 34, 54, 62, 104, 128 Appadurai, Arjun, 5, 8, 9, 126, 129 Asylum, 18, 18n11 Audience research(ers), 4, 25, 27, 31, 32 Audience(s), 3, 4, 6–9, 14, 16, 17, 35, 48, 53, 55, 61, 63, 65, 66, 73, 74, 103, 115, 116, 124, 126, 128, 129 Audiences of women, 5, 16, 17, 36, 73, 124, 126, 127, 130

Australia(n), 2–4, 6, 8, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26, 97, 104, 107, 116, 117, 126 Australian soap operas, 84, 115–117 Autobiography, 34 B Banal transnationalism, 10 Becoming and being, 96 Behavioural effects, 4 Belonging, 22, 96, 97, 111–113 Bhabha, Hommi, 112 Bodies, 4, 5, 15, 26, 60, 124 Bollywood, 50 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17, 65, 74, 103, 116, 124 Britain/British, 13, 16, 31, 52, 63, 74, 124, 126 Brown, Mary Ellen, 7, 84, 109 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 4, 7, 16, 30, 73, 74, 116, 124, 127

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Gamage, Soap Operas, Gender and the Sri Lankan Diaspora, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70632-6

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INDEX

C Chaste/chastity, 10, 14, 59, 89, 125 China/Chinese, 72, 103 Civil conflict/civil war, 2, 3, 5, 11, 14–18, 24, 26, 55, 71 Class/classes, 2, 7, 13, 17, 23, 26, 30, 48, 49, 51, 53–57, 59, 62–65, 73, 77, 78, 91, 127, 130 Closure, 57–59, 62 Colombo, 2–4, 6, 11, 18–21, 23, 24, 26, 30, 33, 55, 71, 72, 76, 109, 112 Colonial/colonise/colonisation, 8, 13, 25, 72, 126 Communication, 4, 9, 34, 58, 112 Community, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 20–22, 54, 73, 75, 77, 79, 98, 115, 116, 126 Connected migrant(s), 111 Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS), 4 Contest/contestation(s)/contested/ contesting, 4, 5, 14, 28, 34, 90, 91, 98, 113, 124, 126, 128 Contextuality(ies)/contextual/ contextualisation, 4, 9, 11, 28, 65, 112, 128, 130 Cooking/cook/cooks, 75–78, 80, 82, 86, 98, 107, 127 Cross-border, 36, 129, 130 Crossroads, 16, 31, 74, 124 Culinary, 21, 98, 114 Cultural capital, 4, 5, 16, 17, 30, 74, 76, 91, 116, 118, 124, 125, 127 Cultural flows, 8, 36, 130 Cultural studies, 4, 5, 32, 130 Cultural workers, 4, 5, 24n12 Culture, 6–8, 10, 15, 34, 36, 55, 63, 65, 66, 75, 103, 113, 123, 125, 128–130

D Dandenong, 21, 22, 95 De Alwis, Malathi, 13–15, 24, 75 Diaspora(s), 9, 22, 27, 49, 103, 104, 112, 115 Diasporic, 2, 3, 6, 9, 17, 21, 27, 31, 33, 36, 95, 101, 103, 107, 126, 129 Diasporic audience(s), 64, 103 Diasporic media, 9, 10 Diminescu, Dana, 10, 111 Discourse(s), 4–6, 11, 16, 60, 76, 112, 123, 125 Discursive, 4, 54, 126 Disjunctive/disjuncture, 8, 9, 126 Doordarshan, 48, 52 DVD(s), 6, 21, 100, 101, 105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 118, 128 E Embodied/embodiment/embody, 5, 17, 112, 114, 124 Emotional/emotions, 9, 10, 34, 111, 127 Encoding/decoding, 4, 54, 63 Epochal, 126 Ethnographic/ethnography, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33, 35, 63, 104, 107, 126 Ethno-religious, 5, 11, 12, 15, 17 Everyday (lives), 10, 26, 28, 29, 36, 52, 54, 65, 91, 100, 105, 107, 111, 115, 125 F Female audience(s), 16 Female friendships, 3, 104, 108, 110 Feminism(s), 7, 130 Feminist ethnography/feminist ethnographers, 28, 30, 34, 36, 130

 INDEX 

Feminist(s), 7, 12, 25, 27, 28, 73, 88, 110, 126, 127, 130 Fieldwork, 2, 19, 25, 26, 29, 32, 33, 35, 71, 101, 129 Following the thing, 8, 129 G Gamage, Shashini, 3, 10, 19, 28n13, 126 Gastronomic/gastronomy, 114, 127 Geertz, Clifford, 26 Gender, 10, 59, 73, 98, 100, 106, 112, 123, 130 Gendered, 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 16, 76, 81, 84, 98, 99, 107, 114, 123, 124, 129 Gender performativity, 112, 128 Gender roles, 15, 59, 60, 73, 74, 84, 91, 125, 128 Genre, 3, 7, 8, 16, 25, 30, 48, 51, 54, 58, 74, 110, 116, 129, 130 Georgiou, Myria, 5, 8, 9, 96 Geraghty, Christine, 7, 8, 52, 84 Gillespie, Marie, 32, 33, 84, 115, 116 Global/globalisation/globalised, 8, 9, 62, 64, 67, 115, 128–130 Good-bad binary/good-bad binaries, 5, 91, 113, 124, 125 Grocery store(s), 105, 107, 129 H Hall, Stuart, 4, 54, 63, 96, 117, 126 Harding, Sandra, 130 Hermeneutic code, 57 Historical subjectivities, 11, 17, 96 Hobson, Dorothy, 7, 16, 31, 52, 57, 84, 124 Home-grown, 3, 51 Homeland(s), 9, 34, 96, 101, 105, 109, 112 Homing, 111

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Host (-country/-ies/-society/-ies), 9, 25, 102, 104, 112, 116, 117, 126 Household(s), 6, 15, 20, 23, 32, 54, 57, 73–75, 78, 84, 86, 98, 105, 107, 112, 128, 129 Hybrid (ity/ities), 25, 112 Hyndman, Jennifer, 13–15, 75 I Identity(ies), 6, 9, 13, 15, 21, 25, 26, 29, 33, 36, 96, 97, 103, 104, 110, 112, 115, 117, 125, 126, 129, 130 Imagined community, 8, 14 India/Indian/Indianised, 13, 48–50, 52, 63, 103, 105, 106 Indian soap operas, 3, 10, 48–51, 54 Insider, 25, 27, 29 Interpretation(s), 17, 26, 28, 35, 58, 64, 65, 86, 89, 91, 104, 110, 111, 113, 114, 124–126, 128, 130 Intersectional/intersections, 3, 8, 10, 30, 88, 123, 124, 126 Intersectionality, 127, 130 Interview(s)/interviewing, 4, 5, 23, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 51, 53, 64, 103 J Jayawardena, Kumari, 10, 13, 73 K Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, 49 L Labour, 6, 73, 74, 98, 127 Long-distance audience, 103 Long-distance nationalism, 6, 103

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M Madianou, Mirca, 10, 111, 128 Mainstream, 21, 28, 59, 61, 116, 118 Majoritarian/majority, 5 Mankekar, Purnima, 3, 8, 10, 22, 25, 34, 84, 98, 106 McRobbie, Angela, 7, 24n12, 73, 127 Meanings and pleasure(s), 6, 8, 16, 98, 101, 103, 129 Media culture(s), 28, 36, 37, 105, 129, 130 Media ethnography, 130 Mediascapes, 8, 9, 126 Megas, 3, 5, 6, 17, 21, 30, 32, 51, 53, 55, 57–60, 64, 74, 76, 80, 82–84, 91, 100, 101, 111, 114, 127, 129 Mega teledrama(s), 3–5, 11, 14, 23, 29, 35, 51, 53–55, 58, 59, 62, 64, 74, 77, 81, 84, 89, 91, 101, 107, 109, 111, 124 Melbourne, 2, 4, 6, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 95, 98, 101, 103, 104, 107, 109, 112, 117, 125, 129 Migrant(s), 27, 36, 74, 96, 98, 100, 104, 107, 111, 115–117, 126, 128 Migration, 10, 18, 24, 26, 36, 104, 111, 115, 130 Mobilisation(s), 7, 12, 15, 128 Modleski, Tania, 7, 57, 58 Morality, 7, 10, 15, 58, 66, 86, 112 Morley, David, 4, 9, 12, 32, 74 Motherhood, 14, 59, 88–90, 113, 125 Mumford, Laura Stempel, 7, 58, 60, 84, 109 Muslim(s), 11, 12, 97, 97n2, 105

N Narrative(s), 3, 5, 11, 16, 17, 28, 34, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 65, 66, 76, 81, 84, 100, 104, 108, 111–113, 116, 124, 127, 129 Nathalia, 2, 55, 56, 59–61, 76, 82, 84, 87, 88, 113, 125, 126, 128 National, 3, 4, 6, 8–11, 15, 51, 65, 75, 87, 103, 107, 112, 124, 125, 128, 131 Nationalism, 3, 5, 8, 10, 14, 103, 123, 130 Nationalist, 3, 4, 10, 12, 14, 17, 60, 74, 91, 123–125, 127 Nationhood, 5, 9, 124 Nation(s), 67, 74, 104, 111–113, 124 Nation state, 14 Nationwide, 4 Nuanced/nuances, 6, 91, 96, 110, 111, 113 Nurturer(s), 5, 15, 75, 91, 124 O Oakley, Ann, 32, 34, 126 Oppressive/oppression/oppressor, 4, 110, 130 Oral cultures, 6, 109, 110, 128 Outsider, 25–27, 29, 35, 100 P Participant observations, 35, 127 Participant(s), 17, 20, 23, 24, 27, 29, 31–33, 35, 37, 72, 78, 79, 83, 87, 90, 96, 102, 103, 105, 111, 113, 116, 127, 129 Personal is political, 7, 73, 126 Place-making, 111, 129 Politics of inclusion and exclusion, 9, 10 Polymedia, 128

 INDEX 

Popular cultural/popular culture, 3, 5, 125, 127 Postcolonial, 8, 14, 51, 52, 97, 124 Post-war, 11, 15, 63, 100, 124, 125 Power relations, 3, 25–31, 99, 130 Preservers (of culture/cultural), 11, 67, 91 R Radway, Janice, 4, 7, 74 Reception, 4, 5, 11, 17, 35, 63, 124, 129 Reflexivity/reflexive, 28, 34, 35, 37, 98, 128, 130 Representation(s), 7, 11, 16, 33, 55, 61, 65, 66, 90, 91, 97, 103, 105, 111, 112, 115–117, 124, 128, 130 Reproductive heteronormativity, 10, 12, 67, 124 Resistances/resisted/resisting/ resistive/resists, 15, 17, 80, 84, 110, 111, 126, 130 Return/returning/returned, 25, 26, 33 Rich, Adrienne, 88, 90 S Second-wave feminist movement, 7, 73, 126 Selfhood/self/selves, 5, 16, 24, 26, 34, 97, 107, 110–113, 117, 126, 128, 130 Sense of community, 6, 97–100 Silence(s), 80, 110, 126, 130 Sinhalese, 2, 4, 5, 11, 14, 17, 22, 27, 55, 60, 91, 97, 104, 116, 124, 126 Skilled migrants/skilled migration, 3, 18, 107

139

Soap opera club, 2–4, 110 Soap opera(s), 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 16, 31, 36, 48, 52, 54, 74, 84, 109, 123, 126, 128 Social capital, 17, 103 South Asia(n), 13, 105 Spivak, Gayatri, 10, 12, 124 Sri Lanka(n), 6, 7, 11, 13, 17, 21, 26, 48, 51, 52, 56, 60, 73, 97, 99, 101, 104, 112, 124, 125, 129 Subject positions, 5, 10, 15, 124, 130 T Tamil(s), 2n1, 14, 15, 17, 97, 97n2, 105 Teledrama club, 95, 97, 99, 101–103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 127 Telenovelas, 57 Television, 1, 4, 5, 7, 16, 20, 28, 36, 48, 51, 58, 61, 73, 75, 77, 83, 102, 116, 123, 130 Transnational, 4, 8, 9, 17, 26, 36, 102, 103, 106, 125, 128, 129 Trust (with participants), 31–33, 37 U Underserved neighbourhoods, 6, 18, 20, 23, 72, 78, 90 Unpaid care/unpaid care work, 6, 74, 77, 80, 107, 126, 127, 130 V Value system(s), 10, 103, 104, 112, 113, 116, 130 Village, 20, 48, 51, 55, 83, 87, 107, 113–115, 117

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INDEX

W Western/Westernised/Westernisation, 54, 90, 113, 126 White Australia policy, 19 Wickramasinghe, Maithree, 7 Womanhood, 5, 7, 11, 15, 59, 60, 76, 91, 113, 124, 126, 127 Women’s positions, 12, 16, 58, 60, 62, 67

Women Writing Culture, 34 Woolf, Virginia, 110 Y Yuval-Davis, Nira, 10, 67, 112 Z Zee TV, 48