Page 22 - Decoding Culture

THE STORY SO FAR 15

readers as one in which the basic reference point was a hegemonic
'preferred reading'. While this 'preferred reading' could in princi­
ple be resisted or negotiated, the tendency was to see culture and
communication as largely text-and-ideology dominated. Thus, both
of the main post-structuralist bodies of cultural studies theory had,
in their different ways, emphasized the power of texts over readers.
Yet it was rapidly becoming clear that readers were much more
active contributors to the reading process than could be counte­
nanced in these models. How was this limitation to be overcome?
It was in response to such doubts that the 1980s saw a reformu­
lation of the relationship between text and reader. One important
contribution to this analytic shift came from feminism, which had
been playing an increasingly significant role in all areas of cultural
studies. In Screen theory, for example, the use of psychoanalytic
concepts to theorize the subject had been further developed in
feminist terms by Laura Mulvey in an influential and much­
reprinted paper first published in 1975. I shall discuss hers and
other feminist arguments in some detail in Chapter 6. Here it is
only necessary to note that it was the debate precipitated by
Mulvey's analysis, initially revolving around questions of gendered
spectatorship, that served to open up the whole issue of active
spectatorship in the subject-positioning model. Meanwhile, other
forms of feminist cultural studies were focusing upon women's
ability to appropriate texts and to use them in ways not necessarily
consistent with the ideology that they allegedly conveyed. In exam­
ining forms of 'women's culture' such as soap opera and romantic
fiction, feminists exposed the tension between their textual attrib­
utes as expressions of patriarchal ideology and the creative use
that readers made of them in search of pleasure.
Even without these feminist interventions, however, the rise of
the reader seems retrospectively inevitable in the ferment of 1980s
cultural studies. Earlier ideology based models were in serious

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