| Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| Introduction: Meaning as Contest | p. xiii |
| Production and Meaning | p. xvi |
| Content and Meaning | p. xvii |
| Consumption and Meaning | p. xx |
| Notes | p. xxviii |
| Marketing Desire: Fantasy, Soap Opera, and the Preferred Audience | p. 1 |
| Desire, Fantasy, and Pleasure | p. 1 |
| Identity and Interpellation | p. 3 |
| Affect and Currency | p. 4 |
| Soap Production: Blueprinting Consumption | p. 6 |
| Anonymity Unlimited? | p. 6 |
| Are You Demographically Correct? | p. 8 |
| Give Us Your Daughters 'Til They Are Sixteen... | p. 9 |
| Baby Boom or Bust/The "X" Factor | p. 11 |
| Notes | p. 13 |
| Imagined Subjects and the Gendered Text | p. 15 |
| Soap Text: Prefabricated Construction | p. 16 |
| A Flexibly Feminine Format? | p. 16 |
| The Case of the Well-Married Heroine | p. 17 |
| The Case of the Retroactively Redeemed Rapist | p. 18 |
| What's Behind Door # 3? | p. 22 |
| Soap Text: Parcelled Passion | p. 24 |
| Hunks, Babes, Divas, Vixens, and Harridans | p. 25 |
| Satellites, Supervillains, and Supercouples | p. 28 |
| Tethering Time | p. 31 |
| Triangulation Station | p. 34 |
| Front Burner, Back Burner, and Ye Olde Chopping Block | p. 35 |
| The DOOLification of Soap Opera | p. 36 |
| Active Interpreters and the Social Audience | p. 41 |
| Soap Audience: Unavoidable Disruption | p. 41 |
| Collective Bargaining | p. 41 |
| Tabloid Talk/Tabloid Soap | p. 43 |
| Why Would a Campy Gay Man Keep a Lady in a Cage?" | p. 46 |
| Soap Audience: Negotiating Currency | p. 50 |
| Notes | p. 59 |
| He's May, She's September, But are They Both from Another World? | p. 61 |
| Sauce for the Gander | p. 62 |
| Mrs. Robinson in Soapland | p. 64 |
| The "Chemistry You Don't Often See" | p. 66 |
| Geese Unite! "No Status Quo" | p. 69 |
| Mind Your Own Genre | p. 69 |
| Reducing Ambiguity | p. 72 |
| "We Can Dream, Can't We?" | p. 76 |
| "Real Men" Don't Mind Menopause | p. 79 |
| It's a Wonderful Midlife | p. 83 |
| Notes | p. 88 |
| Over the Rainbow... Dreams Become Nightmares | p. 89 |
| Nostalgia Versus P.C. | p. 89 |
| Arresting Resistance | p. 92 |
| "It Doesn't Matter How Old You Are" | p. 92 |
| "It Matters How Much You Love" | p. 93 |
| Notes | p. 110 |
| Playing (with) Favorites | p. 111 |
| Conditions of Love | p. 112 |
| Reality Checks | p. 114 |
| Future Projections | p. 117 |
| Alienations of Affection | p. 119 |
| Feasts of Burden | p. 120 |
| Poached Pleasures | p. 122 |
| There's No Place Like Home | p. 127 |
| Notes | p. 130 |
| Pleasure Principles | p. 131 |
| All the Network Allows | p. 131 |
| Love and the "Geritol" Soap | p. 131 |
| Serealities | p. 136 |
| Meta-text and Medium Matter | p. 138 |
| I'm Not an Older Woman But I Play One on TV | p. 138 |
| Lies, Damned Lies, and "Cybergossip" | p. 141 |
| No Politics Here | p. 145 |
| Notes | p. 152 |
| Conclusion: End in Hindsight | p. 155 |
| Ego-Tripping on the Information Superhighway | p. 155 |
| The Plot Thickens: A Synopsis | p. 158 |
| Notes | p. 171 |
| Methodology | p. 173 |
| Data Sources | p. 173 |
| Data Selection | p. 176 |
| Data Collection | p. 176 |
| Data Analysis | p. 179 |
| References | p. 181 |
| Author Index | p. 195 |
| Subject Index | p. 199 |
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