I know the focus for this week is on melodrama but I couldn't help but think about one of the quotations in the "Feuer reading in regards to more 'masculine" genres. Feuer writes:
Traditionally male-oriented genres such as the western or the gangster film did not problematic the reader in the same way as melodrama. Thus few articles appeared on 'The Western and the Male Spectator.' If one assumes, as early studies of male genres did, a non-problematic and universalized male subject, then westerns and gangster films can be studied by means of the textually-based structuralism in vogue during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Melodrama, in problematizing questions of spectatorship and gender, demands reader-response based modes of analysis such as psychoanalysis (8).
I love ganster films and narratives, but something that has always struck me is the treatment of women in these stories and how, no matter how badly the men treat their wives, the woman always stay instead of stray. To me, that is not considered an accepted "non-problematic and universalized male subject, " but instead is something worth dissecting and pushing like we would any melodrama as it is, to use Feuer's language, a "domestic" problem (7). Women accept their circumstances instead of respond to them.
Some key terms that I found interesting in this reading are: the idea of "day-time soap operas" geared towards women (I had never heard of this before (8). Also this notion of how older melodrama's were filled with "visual hysteria" and closure, whereas more modern tv does not follow through with that traditional treatment of the genre (8).
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