Page 169 - Decoding Culture

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

the grain? Much feminist political practice was committed to this
strategy, arising in considerable part from the doctrine that the
'personal is political'. This crystallized in an acute form the evi­
dent contradictions between, on the one hand, a view that
recognized the enormous power of patriarchal ideology and, on the
other, a political commitment to resisting that power wherever it
was manifest. In dealing with this contradiction, feminist
researchers, whether concerned to defend women's cultural forms
such as soap opera and romances or to raise more general ques­
tions of female spectatorship, lent considerable impetus to those
arguing for a more active conception of readership in cultural stud­
ies. The strong ideology theories of the 1970s were already facing
difficulties by the end of that decade; feminist work of the 1980s
greatly accelerated their decline.
This growing focus on the nature and activity of gendered 'read­
ers' foregrounded the interrelated topics of the constitution of
gendered pleasure and, more generally, gender identity. This, too,
was both influenced by and influential upon broader trends in cul­
tural studies. The pleasures afforded by culture had been
systematically neglected in both main cultural studies traditions. So
concerned had analysts been to demonstrate the ideological power
of texts that they had all but forgotten that such power was depen­
dent on readers taking pleasure from those texts in the first place.
The terms of post-structuralism - including, it should be said, the
very general concepts of plaisir and jouissance so often borrowed
from Barthes - afforded little leverage to those wanting to under­
stand the specifics of the pleasures readers took from texts. One
response to that limitation was empirically to examine the process
of reading itself, with a view to developing a more detailed sense of
what was involved. The so-called 'ethnographic turn' in cultural
studies was central to this project, a shift in which feminist
research played a crucial part. A second, less empirically focused

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