Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
may signify an assertion of self in opposition to the self-sacrifice associated with
marriage and motherhood in 1950s Britain (238).
Stacey’s work represents something of a rebuke to the universalistic claims of much
cine-psychoanalysis. By studying the audience, ‘female spectatorship might be seen as
a process of negotiating the dominant meanings of Hollywood cinema, rather than
one of being passively positioned by it’ (12). From this perspective, Hollywood’s patriarchal
power begins to look less monolithic, less seamless, its ideological success never
guaranteed.
Reading romance
In Loving with a Vengeance, Tania Modleski (1982) claims that women writing about
‘feminine narratives’ tend to adopt one of three possible positions: ‘dismissiveness;
hostility – tending unfortunately to be aimed at the consumers of the narratives; or,
most frequently, a flippant kind of mockery’ (14). Against this, she declares: ‘It is time
to begin a feminist reading of women’s reading’ (34). She argues that what she calls
‘mass-produced fantasies for women’ (including the romance novel) ‘speak to very real
problems and tensions in women’s lives’ (14). In spite of this, she acknowledges that
the way in which these narratives resolve problems and tensions will rarely ‘please
modern feminists: far from it’ (25). However, the reader of fantasies and the feminist
reader do have something in common: dissatisfaction with women’s lives. For example,
she claims, referring to Harlequin Romances, ‘What Marx (Marx and Engels, 1957) said
of religious suffering is equally true of “romantic suffering”: it is “at the same time an
expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering” ’ (47).
Modleski does not condemn the novels or the women who read them. Rather, she
condemns ‘the conditions which have made them necessary’, concluding that ‘the contradictions
in women’s lives are more responsible for the existence of Harlequins than
Harlequins are for the contradictions’ (57). She drifts towards, then draws back from,
the full force of Marx’s position on religion, which would leave her, despite her protests
to the contrary, having come very close to the mass culture position of popular culture
as opiate. Nevertheless, she notes how ‘students occasionally cut their women’s studies
classes to find out what is going on in their favourite soap opera. When this happens,
it is time for us to stop merely opposing soap operas and to start incorporating them,
and other mass-produced fantasies, into our study of women’ (113–14).
Rosalind Coward’s (1984) Female Desire is about women’s pleasure in popular culture.
The book explores fashion, romance, pop music, horoscopes, soap operas, food,
cooking, women’s magazines and other texts and practices which involve women in an
endless cycle of pleasure and guilt: ‘guilt – it’s our speciality’ (14 ). Coward does not
approach the material as an ‘outsider ...a stranger to [pleasure and] guilt. The pleasures
I describe are often my pleasures. ...I don’t approach these things as a distant