FROM SOAP OPERA TO REALITY PROGRAMMING: EXAMINING MOTHERHOOD, MOTHERWORK AND THE MATERNAL ROLE ON POPULAR TELEVISION
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Representations of motherhood dominate the television landscape in a variety of popular genre texts, and as such it is important that we consider the ways in which these women are being constructed and circulated on the small screen. Indeed, although much work has been done to investigate the depiction of women on television, little research exists to account for the portrayal of mothering, motherhood, and the maternal role. With this in mind, this article introduces extant literature concerning the representation of motherhood in the media and then examines ways in which this research might be understood in relation to the depiction of mothers in soap opera, situation comedy, teen drama, dramedy and reality television. It considers the ways in which popular television texts form a consensus as they negotiate the idealized image of the ‘good’ mother in favour of a more attainable depiction of ‘good enough’ mothering which stands apart from the romanticized image of the ideal mother that dominates the broader entertainment arena.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".