More lives to live?: archiving and repurposing the daytime soap opera

The soap opera genre is an extremely important text in early feminist television criticism, yet the physical archiving of the programs is extremely problematic for academic archives and has instead been taken on by female fans that have created their own archives of the programs, which they circulate within their own distinctive fan communities. Personal fan archives spotlight women’s work in preserving popular history as opposed to traditional official historical pathways. This dissertation argues that the history of the soap opera genre has been preserved largely by female fan cultures rather than “official” or academic avenues. By researching both official and unofficial television soap opera archives, this project examines the disconnect that often exists between official historical repositories and fan based historical collections when dealing with popular culture texts. The final component of this dissertation explores the possibilities for soap opera archives in the future and how they may offer insights into the changing television landscape. Specific soap opera texts suffered a kind of erasure from television history by never airing more than once, but the massive expansion of digital cable and satellite systems offers the possibility of rerunning soap operas on boutique cable channels such as SOAPnet. I examine how the advent of rerunning soaps may change the terms in which we have previously studied soap operas and how this phenomenon points towards questions surrounding the future of syndication for the growing number of current television programs that depend upon their serial narrative format.