... identity in the United States after the Second World War, through media history and analysis. A recent article appeared in Film and History . © 2013 by Camera Obscura 2013 Louise Lasser is Mary Hartman in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (syndicated, 1976 – 77). “The Soap Opera Is a Hell...

...” and “Gossip's Stages: Theatre, Scandal, and Sexuality.” Publicity still of Joan Van Ark On the Bubble: The Soap Opera Diva’s Ambivalent Orbit Nick Salvato “To Be Fabulous” In a 2006 phone interview with two of her fans, the actress Joan Van Ark gestured, quite unintentionally, toward...

...Sandy Flitterman-Lewis General Hospital All's Well that Doesn't End-Soap Opera and the Marriage Motif Sandy Flitterman-Lewis It is a well-known fact that the desire for narrative closure-the resolution of a fiction's complications-is the mainstay of classical...

... to such efforts, for example, in the soap opera SIDA dans la cité ( AIDS in the City , Radiodiffusion-Télévision Ivoirienne, 1995, 1996–97, 2003), which consisted of three series produced by the US-based Population Services International (PSI) in Côte d'Ivoire. To the extent that AIDS in the City draws from...

... in the con- struction of the viewing experience. In order to think about the theo- retical implications of retelecasting, it is useful to start elsewhere, with a form to which Lifetime’s prime demographic should immediately point us: namely, daytime soap operas. While...

... practice of sorting genres by genders, treating soap operas as women’s television and horse operas as men’s television. In this way, we recognize four social constructs: first, that culture industries target gendered audiences, aiming specific artifacts and par- ticular genres at either men...

... fantasies for women .’ ’ Dealing specifically with the Harlequin Romance, the paperback gothic, and the television soap opera, Tania Modleski is primarily interested in the function which these texts serve for their overwhelmingly female readership / audience. All three forms are prime examples...

..., melodrama moves to television and so dominates its discourse that it becomes difficult to locate as a separate TV genre. Of course, there are some television forms that are clearly marked as melodrama. Both the daytime and prime-time soap opera, for example, seem to employ many of the characteristic...

.... After several years of operating at a loss, the management decided to revamp its daytime programming with “original, entertaining and contempo- rary” women’s shows-such as talk shows, parenting shows, and women-oriented movies-to compete with the network soaps.2 In late 1987, Lifetime...

... form to heighten sexual indeterminacy and to resist the televisual normalization (or erasure) of queer desire and racial difference. Furthermore, in fusing high and low cultural forms—borrowing from “quality” television, realist docudramas, exploitation cin- ema, and soap operas—Oz unsettles...

... as Jackson and Jill, Wren's Nest and The Marriage, to such classic comedies as I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver, to soap operas including One Man's Family, As the World Turns, and The Guiding Light, to more contemporary classics like All...

... extent have “women’s genres” across media been regarded as particularly trashy because they deal with ccwomen7sissues” and are consumed by women? Thus, my original interest in soap opera was partly sparked by irritation that no one would take it seriously...

... have been fighting against panicked declarations that soap operas make women stupid, that cartoons make children violent, that TV can only be Camera Obscura 61, Volume 21, Number 1 doi 10.1215/02705346-2005-005  © 2006 by Camera Obscura Published by Duke University Press...

... critics have never achieved any consensus on what to call the series, vacillating between “soap opera” and “social his- tory.” Ultimately, the case of Upstairs, Downstairs reveals how a 1970s television text and surrounding media discourses both con- structed and resisted such traditional...

... limits and at the risk of being presented as bizarre spectacles rather than contributing voices): television’s “reality” programming, ranging from talk, real-courtroom, and 140  •  Camera Obscura makeover shows to reality soaps and game-doc competitions. For all its apparent openness...

... the thirties and forties to postwar ideals of "domesticity" and "classlessness." Examining wedding sequences in soap operas, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis argues that they evoke memories of a cinematic past (for example, alter• nation, linearity and the female spectacle) in a television form...

... normally within the private and interior world of the imagination, often taking the form of “writing ahead” of the narrative. Charlotte Brunsdon, for example, reports on the pleasure she experiences in her own practice as a soap opera fan of writing her “scripts” ahead...

...) where “the audi- ence was aware of the personal meaning of [Matt Dillon’s] expres- sion because it literally filled the screen” (617). Whether in the television western, soap opera, or BBC miniseries, the intimacy of the small screen allows the audience to quickly pick up on a famil- iar...

... and frightening female figures” whose camp reception by gay men exemplifies the pleasures of “circumscribed transgression” within “the cultural (and economic) logic of late ca(m)pitalism.” Finally, Nick Salvato explores the ambivalent position of many soap opera fans as they follow the careers...

... of soap opera through a focus on emotion, pleasure, and the domestic sphere.25 More recent work has highlighted the essential importance of inti- macy and shame in facilitating pleasurable engagement with televi- sion. Yet this kind of attention to affect and pleasure has not fea- tured...