Page 161 - Decoding Culture

154 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

ideological force'. This is not just a reflection of the wider theoret­
ical doubts then emerging about 'top-down' ideology-based models
of culture, but also a manifestation of the growing feminist concern
to document women's 'lived experience'. This was always apparent
in the ethnographic aspect of McRobbie's studies of young girls'
culture, but in the 1980s - as in both cultural studies and feminism
more generally - it was to grow in significance. When McRobbie
returned to girls' magazines at the end of the 1980s, a whole new
literature had developed. Not only on women's magazines and
romantic fiction, which were now 'recognized as key cultural forms
reflective of distinctively feminine pleasures' (ibid: 135), but also in
the developing fields of reception studies and theories of reader­
ship. In this context it is notable that, as well as recognizing the
decline of romance as a central topic in the 1980s magazines,
McRobbie no longer views the discourse as ideologically con­
straining to the degree that she did in the earlier study. Times had
changed, empirically and theoretically.
In due course these changes would see the study of culture
'quite dramatically transformed as questions of modernity and
postmodernity [have] replaced the more familiar concepts of ide­
ology and hegemony' (McRobbie, 1991b: 1) . But that is a topic for
the next chapter. Here I am more concerned to examine the dis­
tinctively feminist element in the 1980s decline of top-down,
textually oriented theories. We have seen in the pattern of
McRobbie's work how an initial determination to render women
visible in cultural studies and sociology progressed through a cri­
tique of existing work toward a comprehensive 'gendering' of
theory. This was succeeded by an increasingly distinctive focus
on women's culture, a focus which attended appreciatively to forms
of culture previously neglected or denigrated yet retained varying
degrees of commitment to the view that 'female forms' were a vital
part of the ideological apparatus of patriarchal domination. This

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