The sociocultural role of mega teledramas: an ethnographic study on women consuming a Sri Lankan narrative television genre in Colombo and Melbourne

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Department of Communication and Media, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

This thesis investigates the reception of a Sri Lankan narrative television genre – mega teledramas. While mega teledramas have been widely dismissed in Sri Lanka as low-brow entertainment, this study draws on ethnographic methods to investigate how the primarily female audiences, both within and outside of Sri Lanka actually engage with mega teledramas. It also investigates how the mega teledrama producers understand the meanings that they are constructing in the narratives. Through participant observations in women’s homes in Colombo, Sri Lanka and at a diasporic teledrama club in Melbourne, Australia, this study explores the diversities and contextualities of women’s engagements with mega teledramas, as well as analysing in-depth interviews with producers of mega teledramas and mega teledrama texts to understand the intentions of the narrative meanings they create. A key finding is that women’s engagements with mega teledramas cannot be generalised as passive. Moreover, this study observed how women were not confined to engaging with mega teledramas purely as texts. In contrast, mega teledramas assumed a sociocultural role in women’s everyday lives, in both localities. In many cases, consuming mega teledramas became a social act, contributing to women’s collective relationships and forming the basis of cultural identities. The ways mega teledramas formed meanings in women’s lives, in different contextualities, redefined the textual meanings that producers intended to create in the narratives. The methodology of this study, it will also be argued, makes a contribution to understanding how television reception can be researched, by identifying with domestic and diasporic consumption of homegrown popular genres.