ABSTRACT
Genre has long been a key analytic concept in media scholarship, with theoretical, historical, and critical work seeking to understand how genres are defined, how they do and do not change over time and place, and how and why they tell the stories they do. In television studies, the soap opera is one of the most examined genres. It has been a major object of analysis for feminist media scholars, central to conceptions of gender and genre, female spectatorship, and women as socially positioned audience members.1 Indeed, soap opera has been central not only to explicitly feminist scholarship but also to a host of television research concerned with the medium’s storytelling capabilities and its distinctiveness from other media.2 Pair this with the attention to the genre’s variations in multiple national and global contexts, and it becomes clear that a substantial, even foundational, body of soap opera scholarship is at the center of television studies. Yet significant gaps remain in our understanding of soap opera, particularly historical gaps. For the most part, the existing soap opera scholarship focuses on the genre’s heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s, basing its at times universalizing claims on a relatively narrow historical moment. Much of this scholarship conceives of soap opera as a stable and static media institution, treating the genre synchronically rather than diachronically, assuming generic features that remain in place across a changing media industry, changing reception practices, and a changing culture. Take Tania Modleski’s work as an example, first published in 1979. While Modleski identifies many prominent features of the genre that continue to pertain, other points of her argument are difficult to reconcile with more recent developments. For instance, her emphasis on the “good mother” character as a stand-in for the spectator’s ideal mother positioning is complicated in the US daytime soaps of the past ten to fifteen years, since most of the shows’ increasingly youthful casts keep the older mother characters off the story canvas. So, too, do Modleski’s assumptions about the soap opera viewer as housewife, and the pleasures the genre brings to a woman in such a social position, seem out of touch with the soaps’ more recent
institutional and reception contexts. Even Robert Allen’s Speaking of Soap Opera (1985), one of the few takes on the genre to place historically specific analyses at the center of its inquiry, admittedly offers only a start at conceiving what such a history might be. Otherwise, much of Allen’s analysis concerns the structure and narrative form of soaps as a genre, although he recognizes that those features can and do change over time. The soap opera scholarship so central to both television studies and feminist media studies is more often critical or theoretical than it is historical. This tendency is in keeping with the existing body of genre scholarship. Although scholars have engaged in important, historicizing work on genre in recent years, the concept itself-one that steers our inquiries toward the style, form, and content that define a category-pulls the preponderance of existing genre scholarship away from the historical, speaking to those features that continue rather than change over time.3 In the case of soap opera, while the existing scholarship on the genre has been foundational in many senses, the tendency in such scholarship to conceive of soap opera in universalist terms shapes the ways in which scholars do-and more often do not-examine the genre in contemporary practice. In this chapter, I challenge that practice by arguing for the value of an historical approach to daytime soap opera and, by implication, to genre scholarship as a whole. By drawing on examples from my own past and present soap opera research, I explore not only the reasons why soap opera scholarship has seemingly fallen out of fashion but also suggest what an historical approach to the genre might offer. I do so primarily by grappling with some of the key historiographic challenges such research is likely to encounter and also by suggesting ways I have found to manage these challenges. There are two chief reasons why soap opera scholarship-and historical work on US soaps in particular-has been an infrequent, almost non-existent, subject of media scholarship since the early 1990s. First is an assumption many media scholars likely hold that we already know what we need to know about soap opera. This may also be the case with many long-standing film and television genres about which much has already been written. In the case of soaps, this stance is surely rooted in the large body of existing work.4 But lurking underneath this faith in the existing knowledge may also be a sort of acceptance of soap opera’s denigrated cultural status, particularly in the current context, in which the US television industry is increasingly losing confidence in the genre’s ability to deliver the audiences and advertiser dollars essential to fiscal solvency. Placing these concerns about scholarship falling prey to the inclinations of the media industries aside, however, the other chief reason that soap opera historiography is so infrequent is surely the daunting nature of the task. As Allen pointed out, grappling with the text of even one daily soap opera would
“require 233 days of nonstop viewing, during which time another 164 hours of text would have been produced” (1985, 13). Add to this the radio years of a soap such as The Guiding Light or the twenty-two television years from Allen’s writing to the present, and the size of the text alone makes studying it in any comprehensive way an impossibility. In addition, grappling with such a text is daunting not only because of its size but also because of its inaccessibility. Before the mid-1960s, all daytime soap operas were broadcast live, and are thus largely unavailable to us in their originally produced form. Even with the coming of videotape to soaps in the 1960s and 1970s, episodes were not always saved. For example, in the late 1970s, videotaped episodes of the Procter & Gamble-produced As the World Turns were kept for just thirty days before being erased (Adams 1980, 140). For these reasons and more, an historical approach to daytime soap opera presents significant challenges. Yet such an approach is both possible and valuable, not only in terms of our understanding of soaps but of media genres as a whole. Indeed, an historical approach helps us to see that all genres are historical, and thus changeable, constructs (Feuer 1992). As recent theorizations of film and television genre assert, genres are constructed and circulated differently in different historical moments and geographic contexts.5 As Jason Mittell argues, “Genres are cultural products, constituted by media practices and subject to ongoing change and definition” (2004, 1). Studying one of broadcasting’s most enduring genres from this perspective can put such theorizations into practice. A second value in an historical approach to media genres in general and to soap opera in particular is the opportunity it offers for examining the media’s role as a site of hegemonic negotiation over time. Owing to the soap opera’s long existence and daily schedule, as well as its tendency for ongoing development of characters and their story arcs, the histories of the soaps’ production and reception can illustrate the minute ways in which televisual discourses shift across years and decades. This is especially so for discourses of gender, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships, arguably the main fodder for soap opera stories across their history, and also the aspects of social identity and experience to which US soaps are most often articulated, given their assumed audience of women and their status as a feminized form. An historical analysis of the US daytime soap allows for the tracing of shifts and consistencies in such discourses across the history of the genre, at levels of production, reception, and broader cultural circulation. Such an approach serves the interests of feminist scholarship as well as the concerns of media critics and historians. However, to take on this kind of project requires access to a range of different kinds of evidentiary materials, all of which can be difficult to access and many of which hold an uncertain status as historical evidence.
