ABSTRACT
The attribution of paternity is something of an obsession on daytime soap operas. Critics and viewers familiar with the form remark on the frequency of unplanned pregnancies (often from a single sexual encounter), the prominence of story-lines involving secrets or mistakes over paternity, and the importance characters attach to discovering who has fathered a particular child. In fact, the preoccupation with questions and mysteries about paternity is almost a defining characteristic of the genre. Every single daytime soap opera – as well as each primetime serial – deals with the issue of paternity on a regular basis, and the most heavily freighted single piece of information on any given show is commonly the knowledge of paternity. From a feminist perspective, the issue seems almost overdetermined – so much so that, if it is possible to describe soap operas as being “about” any one thing, they are about paternity.
