Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 7 Gender and sexuality
there is power there is always resistance. The resistance may be confined to selective
acts of consumption – dissatisfactions momentarily satisfied by the articulation of
limited protest and utopian longing – but as feminists
[w]e should seek it out not only to understand its origins and its utopian longing
but also to learn how best to encourage it and bring it to fruition. If we do not, we
have already conceded the fight and, in the case of the romance at least, admitted
the impossibility of creating a world where the vicarious pleasure supplied by its
reading would be unnecessary (222).
Charlotte Brunsdon (1991) calls Reading the Romance ‘the most extensive scholarly
investigation of the act of reading’, crediting Radway with having installed in the classroom
‘the figure of the ordinary woman’ (372). In a generally sympathetic review of
the British edition of Reading the Romance, Ien Ang (2009) makes a number of criticisms
of Radway’s approach. She is unhappy with the way in which Radway makes a
clear distinction between feminism and romance reading: ‘Radway, the researcher, is a
feminist and not a romance fan, the Smithton women, the researched, are romance
readers and not feminists’ (584). Ang sees this as producing a feminist politics of ‘them’
and ‘us’ in which non-feminist women play the role of an alien ‘them’ to be recruited
to the cause. In her view, feminists should not set themselves up as guardians of the
true path. According to Ang, this is what Radway does in her insistence that ‘ “real”
social change can only be brought about . . . if romance readers would stop reading
romances and become feminist activists instead’ (585). As we shall see shortly, in my
discussion of Watching Dallas, Ang does not believe that one (romance reading) excludes
the other (feminism). Radway’s ‘vanguardist . . . feminist politics’ leads only to ‘a form
of political moralism, propelled by a desire to make “them” more like “us” ’. Ang
believes that what is missing from Radway’s analysis is a discussion of pleasure as pleasure.
Pleasure is discussed, but always in terms of its unreality – its vicariousness, its
function as compensation, and its falseness. Ang’s complaint is that such an approach
focuses too much on the effects, rather than the mechanisms of pleasure. Ultimately,
for Radway, it always becomes a question of ‘the ideological function of pleasure’.
Against this, Ang argues for seeing pleasure as something which can ‘empower’ women
and not as something which always works ‘against their own “real” interests’ (585–6).
Janice Radway (1994) has reviewed this aspect of her work and concluded,
Although I tried very hard not to dismiss the activities of the Smithton women and
made an effort to understand the act of romance reading as a positive response to
the conditions of everyday life, my account unwittingly repeated the sexist assumption
that has warranted a large portion of the commentary on romance. It was still
motivated, that is, by the assumption that someone ought to worry responsibly
about the effect of fantasy on women readers . . . [and therefore repeated] the
familiar pattern whereby the commentator distances herself as knowing analyst
from those who, engrossed and entranced by fantasy, cannot know. . . . Despite the
fact that I wanted to claim the romance for feminism, this familiar opposition