I'm not going to deal here with the conventions of the soap genre. If you're looking for information on that, check out Daniel Chandler's site . Brown conducted an ethnographic study of the women's conversational networks which surround soap-opera viewing, building to an extent on the insights of de Certeau and Fiske into meaning production in everyday life. Like many researchers before her, especially those of the CCCS , she is concerned with the operation of hegemony , in particular patriarchy . However, it is part of the definition of Gramsci 's notion of hegemony that it can never be total.
Society is the scene of a constant battle for dominance by competing ideologies .
Since hegemony can never be total, there will always be elements which challenge the dominant culture. These may in various ways be mobilized in opposition to hegemonic culture. This is the basis for the notion that hegemony is leaky. It is this leaky hegemony that allows a cultural form that appears to reinforce dominant conceptualizations of women to create gaps to which women actually relate. It is these tertiary texts in the gaps of hegemony which Brown investigates in her study.