ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how women collectively watch a home-grown television soap opera genre known as mega teledramas in Colombo, Sri Lanka. A melodramatic lengthy episodic television genre, mega teledramas, developed in the 2000s as a result of influences by imported Indian soap operas, gaining a predominantly female viewership. Ethnographic research for this study conducted in Colombo maps how women watched mega teledramas in close-knit neighbourhoods in their family and community kinship groups, primarily in their homes. It examines how women transgressed and negotiated the demands of gendered labour in the home to watch mega teledramas while performing unremunerated care work such as cooking, caring for elders and providing childcare. The chapter argues that women’s domestic television spaces observed in this study extend to larger ecologies of community, establishing the basis of support and care networks that sustain the home.
