Slow scholarship? Cultural studies and television historiography

What is cultural studies?

What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues (to date, see also responses in 23.3, 23.4, 23.6, and 25.5).

My 2020 book, Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History, unintentionally mirrored the cultural form it examines, the US daytime television soap opera, in that one of the form's most famous, and perhaps infamous, qualities is the long, slow duration of its storylines (Levine, 2020). Her Stories was the product of a long, slow process of research and writing, a project I worked on both steadily and gradually over more than twelve years. Her Stories argues that the daytime TV soap opera offers a lens through which to see the economic, creative, technological, social, and experiential path of American television, revealing that this programming form, and the feminized identities associated with it, have been foundational to this medium and its cultural impact. As such, it is a book that traverses 75 years of US broadcasting history and that examines the relationship between television and the social construction of femininity.

As a television historian and a media and cultural studies scholar, my approach to this project was typical of the research and analysis I have pursued across my career. By this I mean that it combined attention to the economic and cultural specificity of American television with attention to the negotiation of power in and through a cultural site. As well, it follows a pattern in much historical research in drawing from a broad array of archival manuscript and video sources, along with a large body of published primary sources. I see the project as embodying the multi-perspectival foci of cultural studies and the combined breadth and depth of historiography. In retrospect, I also see how the long duration of this work fits with the practice of slow scholarship, a phenomenon intended to resist the neoliberal pressures of the contemporary academy. In this article, I use the project and my research and writing practices to examine the ways that cultural studies may fit with the mode of slow scholarship, as well as the ways that the radical contextualization embedded in a “circuit of culture” model (Johnson, 1986/87) may be especially well served by such an approach.

The concept of slow scholarship has evolved in relation to other forms of slowness advocated in various social and cultural realms. Advocates of slow food resist a fast-food economy by embracing local growers, home preparation, and an emphasis on the pleasures of taste. As the Official Slow Food Manifesto, adopted at an international conference in 1989, states, “A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of the Fast Life…. This is what real culture is all about” (Petrini, 2001: xxiii–xxiv). Art historian Lubin (2017) notes the cultural embrace of slowness beyond the food world: “The slow food movement spawned offshoot movements, such as slow design, slow economy, slow cities, slow cinema, and even slow sex.” Lubin uses this provocation to advocate for slow looking in our engagement with visual art, a practice promoted as well by museums hosting Slow Art Days beginning in 2009.

In the 21st century, scholars across multiple disciplines have also examined and championed slowness, typically as a mode of resistance to the neoliberalization of higher education and the pressures of productivity upon all in our advanced capitalist age. One 2012 article examined “the intensification of academic life and its implications for pedagogy,” tracing the corporatization of the university and its damaging effects on intellectual life and learning (Hartman and Darab, 2012: 49). In 2015, a group of Canadian and American geographers and public health researchers jointly authored a call for slow scholarship as a “feminist politics of resistance to the accelerated timelines of the neoliberal university,” arguing for a collective ethic of care that would fundamentally restructure “the university as a workplace and learning environment” (Mountz et al., 2015: 1238, 1248).

Such critiques do more than challenge the context of academic labor; they highlight the scholarly benefits of slowness. As Mountz et al. (2015: 1237) assert, “Good scholarship requires time: time to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, and collaborate.” Hartman and Darab champion the “critical insight, creativity, and innovation” available when “the pace of work is decelerated and the mind has time to be creative” (2012: 58). As a 2014 edited collection, Open to Disruption: Time and Craft in the Practice of Slow Sociology, describes in its introduction, scholars who experienced various “disruptions” found that they were able to write something “more serious, more profound, and more honest to themselves and those they studied” than might otherwise have been the case (Nelson and Hertz, 2014: 3).

Across disciplines, contemporary scholars are examining the patterns and pace of their intellectual inquiries, raising questions about the contexts of their labor and the qualities that make for their richest, most generative work. I knew nothing of such ideas when I embarked on the process of researching and writing Her Stories. Searching my email archives reveals that I was starting to explore what kind of book I might write about soap opera earlier than I had realized, in 2005. I tend to think of the real origins of the project as rooted in 2008. At that point, I had just received tenure, my only child was soon to enter his elementary school years, and my partner and fellow academic had recently begun his own tenure stream job at my institution, resolving the “two body problem” that had hung over the early years of my career. The marker of my first sabbatical in fall 2008 has long felt to me like the “start” of Her Stories because it was when, for the first time in years, I felt I had an opportunity to slow down, to explore a new, long-term research project, to figure out what I wanted to think about, research, and write in the years ahead. I took advantage of that sabbatical to begin to work through what kind of book about soap opera I could conjure, and to begin to imagine it as a history.

The previous year had seen the publication of my first book, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Levine, 2007). That project included a chapter about rape stories on American daytime soaps of the 1970s. As I researched and wrote that chapter in the early years of the 2000s, I had been surprised by how much material I was able to gather. I did that work pre-YouTube, yet I was able to piece together the specifics of many storylines using fan-targeted books and contemporaneous fan magazines, videotape collections curated by fans, and scripts in manuscript archives. I was excited that such research was indeed possible and, by 2008, recognized how much more was available to me due to the materials now accessible online. These experiences, plus the time I spent reading or re-reading the secondary literature and visiting manuscript and moving image archives to explore their holdings, convinced me that the history of the American daytime television soap opera I envisioned was not yet written and would be possible logistically.

As the project took shape between that 2008 sabbatical and early 2012, other factors helped me recognize both the (comparatively vast) parameters of my project and the necessarily slow pace at which I was going to work on it. This slowness was not intended as an intervention in the expectations of academia or as a feminist act of resistance, even as I support such aims. I was not refusing demands on my time; in fact, I increased them. I had another child, restarting the time-intensive early childhood years. My partner and I decided to write a book together about the discourses of legitimation surrounding contemporary television (Newman and Levine, 2012), and the institution at which I worked was entering an era (that is ongoing and has in fact intensified) of austerity, in which faculty and staff have increasingly taken on more responsibility and work without commensurate compensation.

I emphasize these contexts not only to demonstrate that I was not setting out to do “slow scholarship” in any kind of interventionist sense, or to bemoan my fate. I was in a position of privilege that enabled me to pursue these personal and professional goals and I am someone who takes real pleasure and satisfaction in managing multiple projects and tasks. And I was committed to doing this “soap book,” a project that became as much about taking the time to explore as many primary materials as I could as it was about eventual publication.

I made my soap research an ongoing part of my work. I watched one or two episodes of the few past soaps I had access to most workdays. I monitored and saved materials from a number of fan-targeted soap blogs (in the years before the spread of social media), and I gradually made my way through archival materials. Through an inter-archive network, I was able to review manuscript archives a few boxes at a time that were conveniently shipped to me in Milwaukee from their home at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. When, between 2009 and 2011, four of the remaining eight US daytime soaps on air were canceled, I started to see a clear narrative arc for my project, a time that would provide a provisional “end” to the history of soaps that I would begin with the transition from radio to television in the late 1940s. The long duration of my research pace made it possible for my work to accommodate this shift and its aftermath, the rise of streaming TV distribution. It was over this time that I came to see my story as being as much about the social, technological, and industrial development of American television writ large as about soap opera itself. By 2015, I had enough material drafted to start pursuing a book contract, but my research and writing and organizing and re-writing took place over four more years, until the book was fully entered into production early in 2019. As with anything I have written, the full parameters of my argument were not wholly in place until my final draft. The researching and the thinking and the mapping and the writing and the revising took time to develop and mature into a carefully crafted argument supported by evidence and presented as a narrative whole.

The fact that my research employed historiographic methods had a significant role in its duration. As historian Emily K. Abel writes in her contribution to Open to Disruption, “What is slow to a sociologist is fast to a historian … historians weave together in-depth analyses of material from disparate sources to compose a coherent narrative … [that] takes a long time” (2014: 197). Or as medievalist Karen Louise Jolly has written, “most historical research is a complex process of moving between text and theory, source and thought” (2019: 131). In my case, these patterns were further abetted by the voluminousness of soap opera texts. The programs at the center of my study aired in 5 weekly installments, 52 weeks a year, some not just for years but decades. While I never set out to watch or grapple with this massive textual array in any totalizing sense, I did try to watch what (relatively few) defunct soap episodes were available to me, and to watch what I could access of complete storylines that became prominent examples in my narrative. This amounted to thousands of hours of viewing over the many years of my project. Indeed, the slowness of my work was as much a result of my object as it was of my methods. Soaps texts are sizable and endure over long stretches of time; they wind their way through our daily lives. My research followed a similar path.

I was well aware of the connection between the temporal rhythms of soap opera and my own work, and of the ways that my parceling out of my research and writing amidst the other duties of my personal and professional lives was much like the relations between soap opera viewing and women's domestic work theorized in early feminist research on soaps (e.g. Modleski, 1983). I can now see the ways that my privilege in being able to work at this pace might also be classified as a feminized “cost” for the many demands on my time and care. But my work has long insisted that we need not accept an inherent association between the feminized and the devalued. For me, this was a valuable process, whether feminized or not.

Along with my primary research methods, the multiple responsibilities I was juggling, and the slowness of soaps themselves, the temporal patterns of the project were also indebted to my commitment to cultural studies as a multi-perspectival approach. For me, this approach adopts a model of culture as not only or even primarily located in conventional textual form but as a shifting array of forces that shape and are shaped by what we might label as a cultural object or text. My object was the textual phenomenon of the American daytime television soap opera, but it was also the economic, technological, social, and cultural phenomenon of television itself, and the social construction of gender, especially femininity, and its intersections with other aspects of identity across the 75-year period of my study. The fact that my work is not just cultural studies but also television studies also shapes its multi-perspectival focus. Drawing on D’Acci’s (2004) integrated approach to a cultural studies-informed television studies, my research and writing moves between four “sites” of articulation: the US television industry, including its regulatory structures and its economic and creative determinants; the soap opera “text”; the soap opera audience and the broader realm of reception; and the social, political, and cultural contexts within which the above operate. Central to understanding the inter-relationships of these forces are relations of power, tensions between dominance and subordination that structure both the institutions and the everyday lives that touch this televisual world.

Researching an object across such multiple vectors is a time-consuming process indebted to a radically contextualized conception of culture. Ien Ang has framed the challenges of audience research in such terms, writing that, “the consumption and use of television is a multicontextually articulated, indeterminate, and overdetermined set of co-occurring, competing, mutually interfering activities at once” (1996: 253). She emphasizes the necessary tension between such an understanding and the necessity of researchers making “consciously political choices … for which contextual frameworks to take on board” (1996: 257), seeing this tension as both a challenge and a guiding research principle. Such tenets guided my research, in that I pursued an intersecting array of contexts for understanding the relationships between soap opera, the imperatives of the American TV industry, social and political forces, and audience engagement, and made repeated, conscious choices of what needed to be included and excluded from my narrative. Such choices allowed me to emphasize both the political economic and gendered cultural stakes of the history of soap opera within American television.

Pragmatically speaking, I used non-linear, digital tools to manage my materials and to structure my narrative, a practice that felt essential for such work (Levine, 2016). These tools helped me to order the full book chronologically but to dwell in each era across multiple chapters. For example, the first section examines the period of transition from radio to television as the central medium for American daytime soap opera. It is a period aligned as well with the immediate post-World War II years, a significant time in US culture for the retrenchment of gender roles and the expansion of middle-class life, including an intensification of consumerism. Across the two chapters of this section, I focus, first, on the business and creative practices that transitioned soap opera from a radio form to a televisual one, writing about the text as a product of the economic, technological, and creative forces shaping broadcasting. Such matters remain a part of my story in the second chapter, but here I turn more to the industry's gendered construction of its audience. I delve into the stories told in the TV soaps of this era, focusing in particular on the ways that both the fictional worlds and the industry and audience discourses surrounding them offered therapeutic solutions to the marital and familial strains of post-war American life. Dividing the chapters in these ways allowed me to make multiple passes across the same eras, telling different parts of the stories of television, soaps, and gendered identity.

Conceptualizing culture as an ever-shifting circuit of mutually influential forces does not lend itself to an easily managed scholarly task. And cultural studies scholarship need not always take on all of the forces at work in any one cultural instance. But the slow approach and long duration of my process with Her Stories allowed for such an intersectional examination. Slowness as a scholarly principle may or may not be a product of personal privilege, it may or may not be of benefit to knowledge production, it may or may not be an intervention into the neoliberal academy. But in my experience it is a particularly generative mode of scholarly labor that may be particularly suited to the scope of the questions posed by cultural studies.