Learning the Cultural Curriculum of Soap Operas as Lessons in Intimate Citizenship

• In Event: Theorizing Curriculum Through Popular Culture and Media

Abstract

This paper analyzes a form of mass media in the United States, daytime dramas, or “soap operas,” as a curriculum of class, culture, community, and civic participation. The paper argues explicitly how soap operas pedagogically position viewers to form attachments to “the good life” and other forms of intimate citizenship. Curriculum scholars doing work in cultural studies can understand such a curriculum through theories of affect, especially sentimental affects of compassion, optimism, and transparency. These affects, often associated with melodramatic aesthetics, work in powerful ways to educate viewers in taking up specific subject positions as U.S. citizens. Thus, this paper argues, soap operas can be considered a form of sentimental education in the broader sense of a cultural curriculum.

Author

• Mark Helmsing, George Mason University