Page 166 - Decoding Culture

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Others in the 1980s were more direct. Hobson (1982: 105-136),
in her CCCS-originated study of the soap opera Crossroads, con­
ducted interviews and recorded 'unstructured conversations' with
the women viewers of the programme. Although she was not con­
cerned with the reading process as such - at least, not in the way
that some later researchers would be - she did begin to document
significant aspects of the ways in which soap operas were watched.
Ang (1985) , too, examined viewers' responses, this time to Dallas
and via letters solicited from fans, using this material as a basis for
discussing the familiar concerns of ideology, pleasure, and women
viewers. And Radway (1987) confronted the reading process head
on in her study of a group of romance readers united in their
common status as customers of a particular bookshop. In her intro­
duction to the English edition - the book was first published in the
USA three years earlier, in 1984 - she sees her research as falling
firmly into a then growing tradition of 'ethnographic' studies of
readership, grounded in the claim that 'empirically-based ethno­
graphies of reading should replace all intuitively conducted
interpretation in cultural study, precisely because such empiricism
would guarantee a more accurate description of what a book meant
to a given audience' (ibid: 5). Of course, there is nothing uniquely
feminist about that claim. Nevertheless, such work was frequently
motivated by a feminist concern to appreciate the full complexity of
women's reading practices in relation to cultural forms often
demeaned as crass escapism or patriarchal propaganda. No doubt
the turn to an ethnographic interest in readership would have
found expression in cultural studies with or without feminism. In
the event, however, feminist interest in the domestic context, in
previously under-analysed cultural forms, and in the tension
between ideological constraint and women's pleasure, was crucial
in shaping subsequent developments.

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