Page 100 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Feminist desire and female pleasure: on Janice Radway's 91
This is not to say that romantic fiction should be considered above all criticism. The
ideological consequences of its mass production and consumption should be a continuing
object of reflection and critique for feminism. Questions of sexual politics, definitions of
femininity and masculinity, and the cultural meanings of the romance in general will
remain important issues. However, all this should not invalidate the significance of the
craving for and pleasure in romantic feelings that so many women have in common and
share. In fact, I am drawn to conclude that it might be this common experience that could
serve as the basis for overcoming the paralysing opposition between ‘feminism’ and
‘romance reading’. While feminists, as Elizabeth Wilson (1986:17) has noted, have often
dismissed romanticism, it has a psychic reality that cannot simply be banished. However,
by taking the love for romantic feelings seriously as a starting point for engagement with
‘non-feminist’ women, the feminist researcher might begin to establish a ‘comprehension
of self by the detour of the comprehension of the other’ (Rabinow 1977:5), in a
confrontation with other women who may have more expertise and experience in the
meanings, pleasures and dangers of romanticism than herself. What could change as a
result of such an ethnographic encounter—and to my mind it is this process-oriented,
fundamentally dialogic and dialectical character of knowledge acquisition that marks the
distinctive critical edge of ethnography—is not only ‘their’ understanding of what ‘we’,
as self-proclaimed feminists, are struggling for, but, more importantly, the sense of
identity that is constructed by feminism itself.