Consumers and heroines: Gender in soap operas

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between television soap operas, consumption and gender, in order to understand how media is articulated to the promotion of goods and of consumer culture, and how gender is a very important axis of such articulation. The research has originally started from a soap opera reception ethnography, but unfolded in the analysis of the relationship between television and advertising, discussing the feminilization of consumption and the construction of a certain hegemonic female image both in soap operas and in advertising. Copyright © 2007 by Revista Estudos Feministas.