Not everyone who had issues with my work was supportive
Trail-blazing feminists had taught me to look closely at the way Hollywood does allow self-defining, assertive women onto the screen, but then clips their wings at closure; and I followed that train of thought into daytime television, where there is no closure. My explorations were fueled by the opportunity to write and edit for five network soap operas–Ryan’s Hope; Search For Tomorrow; Guiding Light; Loving; and Santa Barbara. Through practical and theoretical means, I pondered whether the lack of closure in soap opera stories meant that women were not deprived of their possibilities in THAT medium. In No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject (1993), I argued that to a great extent that was exactly what the virtually endless story did mean, and that it COULD mean the same for other categories of characters that were also oppressed by what happens at the ends of Hollywood movies: minorities and gay characters. It COULD also generate a valid aesthetics of visual storytelling, different from those of stories that come to closure.
A Positive Reading Of Soap Opera?
Some colleagues were horrified. Fortunately, I made my first voyage into publishing under the tender care of my first editor, Ernest Callenbach, now retired, then of the University of California Press. After the Press gave me a contract, he told me I could call him “Chick.” Of course, it was merely a nice little flourish. But it meant so much to me. I was not only validated as a scholar, I was part of the circle. His courage in backing my book allowed me to begin speaking in a (controversial) public voice. I am still pondering how the (virtually) endless narrative of soap opera works, and especially how its potential for liberating stock characters has been affected (negatively) by social developments in our country in the last 18 years since No End To her was published.