Soaps operas, or daytime serials, have long been a staple of American culture. In April 2011, ABC-Disney announced the cancellation of All My Children and One Life to Live. Cancellations propelled the fans of these programs to launch efforts to save not only the shows, but the genre. Through the use of social media, websites, and traditional off-line activities that included calling and letter-writing, fans strived to make their voices heard. The study examines the creation of an online community and discourse through a textual-analysis case study of blogs on two fan activist websites. Dahlberg’s criteria for presence in an online public space and Habermas’ public sphere allows for the presentation of ideas within a group to encourage a sense of democracy in a grassroots effort to be heard against corporate interests. The case study will examine a fan website, Sudz.Tv, as a group organized in a virtual public space.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Nov. 11, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-138).

This essay will investigate male and female usage of four swear words: hell, heck, damn and darn. A minor part of the essay focuses on comparing real life speech (by using the Longman Corpus of Spoken American English) with scripted language in soap operas (the SOAP corpus). The main part of the essay focuses on a detailed investigation of the four swear words in the SOAP corpus to see how they are used considering gender. Preliminary hypotheses were both correct and incorrect. Even though it was true that women use the milder forms of swearing in the company of men, men however use the harsher forms in the company of women. Moreover, heck seems to be a very neutral swear word used by men and women equally. Hell was most frequently used by men, and darn was very frequent among women. Overall, there was very little female to female swearing, and the category with the highest instances of usage of three of the four swear words was in fact male to female.

Mass produced narratives that have been designed and targeted for predominantly female audiences have been marginalized by dominant culture. Throughout the history of art and English literature, women have been both objectified and misrepresented. All that has been deemed domestic, emotional and of the personal sphere has been declared valueless by patriarchy. The soap opera genre reverses this negative valorization. It is one that perpetuates the feminine tradition of creating communities through words---talk, gossip, testimony. In this work, the American soap opera is discussed as a venue for the exploration of issues that concern women's lives, as a site for the generation of female pleasure, and as the mother of subcultural networks that inform a female community. While the narratives address women's concerns, the soap opera fan magazines and fan clubs celebrate a form that highlights orality, emotion and empathy in a culture that often depreciates them.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wyoming, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-179).

In traditional research approaches, soap opera viewing has been studied quantitatively. Such studies ignore the subjectivities, the sociocultural contexts, and life contexts of individual viewers. To account for such shortcomings and to offer a qualitative research approach, an investigation was conducted into the engagement that viewers have with a particular soap opera, The bold and the beautiful. The collective case study research method was used. Three subjects were interviewed using in-depth phenomenological interviewing and the data obtained was subjected to.a hermeneutic method of investigation. This involved using a reading guide that extracted firstly, how pleasure is experienced in soap opera viewing, and secondly how the viewers' interpretations of the soap opera are linked to their everyday life contexts. Pleasure was found to be related to experiencing the soap opera world as real, the social context of the viewer, the openness of the text, selecting textual elements, identification and opening up the viewer's world. The viewers' interpretations were related to their life contexts in terms of the meanings that were constructed around emotions, identities, interpersonal relations and a cultural interface. Most notable for the South African context, is that viewing The bold and the beautiful provides a cultural interface because African identities are brought to this practice.

The aim of this study is to analyse selected episodes of the locally produced television programme Generations, in order to identify specific ways in which the programme seeks to forge a South African identity, and in so doing, 'flag' our nationhood as South Africans. These elements of 'South Africanness' are broadly defined as connections to a South African way of life, context, values and experiences. Generations is a programme produced under South African broadcasting local content provisions. These provisions arise out of the need, inter alia, to reflect the identity and multi-cultural nature of South Africa in order to foster 'national identity' and 'national culture'. These elements of 'South Africanness' are extracted through a genre and ideological analysis of selected sample episodes, taking into consideration the theoretical frameworks of the politics of representation and identity. The production context of, and representations made, in Generations, are found to be situated largely within the context of the South African discourses of the ‘rainbow nation', 'African renaissance' and 'black economic empowerment'. The analysis concludes that through the various categories of representations of 'South Africanness' in the selected episodes of Generations, specific instances of identity, that of national culture and national identity are formed.

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