Page 93 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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a completely different genre than the genre it is trying to understand. But because all
feminist inquiry is by definition a politically motivated theoretical engagement, it always
seems to present a certain articulation of the analytical with the therapeutic, both
substantially and rhetorically. What I will try to do in this chapter, then, is to explore
1
some of the ways in which this articulation materializes in Reading the Romance.
What sets Radway’s book apart in a ‘technical’ sense from earlier feminist attempts to
grasp and evaluate the meaning of female romance reading is her methodology. In
2
contrast, for example, to Tania Modleski’s well-known Loving with a Vengeance (1982)
Radway has chosen to base her analysis upon oral interviews with a group of actual
romance readers. Drawing on the insights of reader-response critics like Stanley Fish
(1980) and Jane Tompkins (1980), she rejects the method of immanent textual analysis,
which she criticizes as ‘a process that is hermetically sealed off from the very people they
[the romance critics concerned] aim to understand’ (Radway 1984:7). According to
Radway, ‘the analytic focus must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the
complex social event of reading where a woman actively attributes sense to lexical signs
in a silent process carried on in the context of her ordinary life’ (ibid.: 8). By leaving the
ivory tower of textual analysis and mixing with actual readers, she pursues a strategy that
aims at ‘taking real readers seriously’. She thereby rejects the practice of treating them as
mere subject positions constructed by the text, or as abstract ‘ideal readers’ entirely
defined in terms of textual mechanisms and operations.
In her introduction to Studies in Entertainment, Tania Modleski has fiercely warded
off Radway’s criticism by arguing that conducting ‘ethnographic studies’ of subcultural
groups may lead to a dangerous ‘collusion between mass culture critic and consumer
society’ (1986:xii). In her view, it is virtually impossible for critical scholars to retain a
‘proper critical distance’ when they submit themselves to the empirical analysis of
audience response. While I share Modleski’s concern about the dangers and pitfalls of
empiricism, I do not believe that the project of ethnography is necessarily at odds with a
critical stance, both in relation to consumer society, and with respect to the process of
doing research itself. On the contrary, ethnographic fieldwork among audiences—in the
broad sense of engaging oneself with the unruly and heterogeneous practices and
accounts of real historical viewers or readers—helps to keep our critical discourses from
becoming closed texts of Truth, because it forces the researcher to come to terms with
perspectives that may not be easily integrated in a smooth, finished and coherent Theory.
If anything, then, Reading the Romance is inspired by a deep sense of the contradictions
and ambivalences posed by mass culture, and by a recognition of the profoundly
unresolved nature of critical theory’s dealings with it.
This does not mean, however, that ethnography is an unproblematic project. In every
ethnographic study the researcher has to confront very specific problems of access and
interpretation, which will have a decisive impact on the shape of the eventual account
that is presented by the ethnographer: the text of the written book. In this chapter, then, I
would like to examine the political motifs and strategies that are laid out in Reading the
Romance. For Radway, ethnography is more than just a method of inquiry, it is an
explicitly political way of staging a new feminist ‘reconciliation’ with ‘the problem’ of
romantic fiction’s popularity. For one thing, Reading the Romance is a report on the quite
difficult, but apparently very rewarding, encounter between a feminist academic and
(non-feminist) romance readers. Its broader significance thus lies in its dramatization of