ABSTRACT
In recent years I have more than once set an examination question for third-year undergraduates along the lines of ‘Why have feminist critics been so interested in soap opera?’. To my recurring disappointment, no student has yet attempted this question, which I think is probably a tribute to their much underrated ability to identify their teachers’ research agendas, and the way in which these tend to frame unanswerable questions. There is also a way in which the answer can seem very obvious-because soap operas are women’s programmes-which may make it very unattractive in the competitive context of an examination. This essay is my attempt at an answer to this question, but I should make clear that I think this bald and simple answer, in the West, in the key period of feminist interest, is fundamentally correct, and that all that I shall do is to make things a little more complicated. This I shall do in two main ways. Initially, by sketching a rather broader semi-historical context for feminist analyses of soap opera-a ‘when’ of this interest-and then by tracing the different modalities of this interest-a ‘how’. In this process I hope to provide an account of the role of soap opera in feminist television scholarship. Before I start, though, I want to spend a moment on establishing why I think the question is itself interesting.
