Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History

Elana Levine

Mar 2020 · Duke University Press

About this ebook

Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen.

About the author

Elana Levine is Professor of Media, Cinema and Digital Studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television, also published by Duke University Press; editor of Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century; and coauthor of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status.