Brazilian telenovelas are prime-time soaps broadcast Monday through Saturday on commercial television. Unlike daytime soap operas, telenovelas have clear narrative beginnings and endings, with each story typically lasting from six to eight months. Although the recent popularization of DVDs, cable television, and the internet has diversified television, telenovelas remain the most popular and profitable national television genre. From 1976 onward, Brazilian television companies have exported telenovelas; the genre has become one of the most successful in the world. Although in Brazil male and female audiences watch telenovelas, the genre remains defined in gendered terms as feminine by producers, market researchers, and audiences.While their narratives contribute to shifting notions around gender roles, issues such as abortion remain taboo. The different meanings telenovelas mobilize have through time prompted scholars

around the world and across a range of academic disciplines to research the genre. They are of academic interest for their unique capacity to incorporate elements of popular culture-such as literatura de cordel, literally “string literature”—into an industrial product (Rowe and Schelling 1991). The potential political influence of telenovelas on audiences has been a recurrent topic of academic discussion (Mattelart and Mattelart 1990; Skidmore 1993; Vink 1988). Synergy between telenovelas, shifting gender relations and consumerism have also been described (Almeida 2003, 2012; Hamburger 1999, 2005). Cinema is intrinsically related to the development of modern life (Charney and

Schwartz 1995). Miriam Hansen (1999) coined the term vernacular modernism to refer to the mass appeal of Hollywood cinema, with its connection to consumerism, the production of taste and fashion, and the emergence of a gendered public sphere. In so doing Hansen has connected industrialized modernism to avant-garde modernist forms. In countries like Brazil, telenovelas can be understood in relation to Hansen’s idea of vernacular modernism; these narratives are related to consumerism, to didactic display of technologies, and new means of transportation and communication. They are also in synergy with shifting notions of gender relations. With few exceptions the genre has reproduced race discrimination by favoring white casts (Araújo 2000). This chapter discusses how telenovelas tend to blur gender and genre boundaries.

They represent a typically feminine popular culture form which has dominated televisual prime time around the world, with storylines that often mobilize the nation.

In so doing, besides mobilizing national and transnational media fluxes, they provide suggestive material to question the binaries of feminine and masculine, melodrama and newscast, private and public, mass culture and modernism (Huyssen 1986). This chapter surveys the workings of telenovelas in an attempt to map this virtual space with its forms of gendered public life. I first discuss the history of television and the telenovela in Brazil and then look at the practices involved in their production, such as the proto interactive feedback process and audience control practices. Next, I look at the expansion of the feminine in telenovelas over time to raise questions about previous research on the genre and to suggest future research on the transnational dimensions of telenovela production and reception.