Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

etween blind fantasy and perspicacious knowing continued to operate within
my account. Thus I would now link it [Reading the Romance], along with Tania
Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance, with the first early efforts to understand the
changing genre, a stage in the debate that was characterised most fundamentally,
I believe, by suspicion about fantasy, daydream, and play (19).
She cites with approval Alison Light’s (1984) point that feminist ‘cultural politics must
not become “a book-burning legislature” ’, nor should feminists fall into the traps of
moralism or dictatorship when discussing romances. ‘ “It is conceivable . . . that
Barbara Cartland could turn you into a feminist. Reading is never simply a linear con
job but a . . . process which therefore remains dynamic and open to change” ’ (quoted
in Radway, 1994: 220). 31
Watching Dallas
Watching Dallas 147
Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas was originally published in the Netherlands in 1982. The
version under discussion here is the revised edition translated into English in 1985.
The context for Ang’s study is the emergence of the American ‘prime time soap’ Dallas
as an international success (watched in over ninety countries) in the early 1980s. In the
Netherlands, Dallas was regularly watched by 52 per cent of the population. With its
spectacular success, Dallas soon gathered around itself a whole discourse of activity –
from extensive coverage in the popular press to souvenir hats reading ‘I Hate JR’. It also
attracted critics like Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture, who viewed it as the
latest example of ‘American cultural imperialism’ (quoted in Ang, 1985: 2). Whether
cause of pleasure or threat to ‘national identity’, Dallas made an enormous impact
worldwide in the early 1980s. It is in this context that Ang placed the following advertisement
in Viva, a Dutch women’s magazine: ‘I like watching the TV serial Dallas, but
often get odd reactions to it. Would anyone like to write and tell me why you like
watching it too, or dislike it? I should like to assimilate these reactions in my university
thesis. Please write to . . .’ (Ang, 1985: 10).
Following the advertisement she received forty-two letters (thirty-nine from women
or girls), from both lovers and haters of Dallas. These form the empirical basis of her
study of the pleasure(s) of watching Dallas for its predominantly female audience. She
is not concerned with pleasure understood as the satisfaction of an already pre-existent
need, but ‘the mechanisms by which pleasure is aroused’ (9). Instead of the question
‘What are the effects of pleasure?’ she poses the question ‘What is the mechanism of
pleasure; how is it produced and how does it work?’
Ang writes as ‘an intellectual and a feminist’, but also as someone who has ‘always
particularly liked watching soap operas like Dallas’ (12). Again, we are a long way from
the view from above which has so often characterized the relations between cultural
theory and popular culture.