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Lynne Joyrich has outlined in some detail her theories regarding how television melodrama, gender, and affect in soap operas coax a "feminine" viewpoint. At the same time, Tania Modleski has criticized soap operas for directing female anger at female power. While soap operas have never been lauded as ideal purveyors of a feminist ideology, elements of the soap opera have been freely used elsewhere in genre television. Soap operas themselves remain, for the most part, unchanging, while melodrama - which supposedly appeals more to a feminine viewpoint - has been spreading, and as such, has the potential to be utilized as a strong tool for feminism when combined with, and used to subvert, other conventions. The science fiction series Farscape (1999-2002) figures aesthetically as a science fiction/soap opera hybrid, which works toward increasingly empowered female representions.
Television has long suffered from the unfortunate stigma of being considered "culturally unredeemable" (Ross 106), and soap operas even more so, but Farscape uses melodrama as a tool that is only part of the greater whole. There were several reasons why this particular series was selected for study, not the least of these being Joyrich's assertion that "soap opera has even combined with elements of science fiction (seemingly the last domain of wide open spaces)" (132). What of science fiction, then, that has combined with elements of soap opera? As David Thorburn notes, "even the simplest account of the evolution or historical development of the medium must be capable of recognizing, for example, how the genre formulas that have dominated television have altered over time" (3). Twenty years ago the genres were not so closely intertwined; Elyce Rae Helford, writing of the post-Star Wars years, notes, "film began a new trend of female representation within the science fiction genre, marked by tough, buns-of-steel heroines, such as Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor of the Aliens and Terminator series, respectively. However, the small screen centered on the prime-time soap opera and male-dominated action-adventure series" (4). It wasn't until the 1990s that women on the small screen (Buffy, Xena, Lois Lane, and Dana Scully, among others) began taking more aggressive roles. Helford continues optimistically, "By the sheer number of science fiction and fantasy series featuring women in...