Page 94 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Feminist desire and female pleasure: on Janice Radway's 85
the relationship between ‘feminism’ and ‘women’. It is the recognition that this
relationship is a problematic one, not one of simple identity, that makes Janice Radway’s
book so important. Yet at the same time it is Radway’s proposals for the resolution of the
problem that make the tension I described above so painfully felt.
In the early chapters of the book, Radway’s self-chosen vulnerability as an
ethnographer is made quite apparent. In these chapters, the dialogic nature of the
ethnographic project, which according to Radway is one of its central tenets, is more or
less actualized. Of course, the narrative voice speaking to us is Radway’s, but the limits
of academic writing practice seem to make a more heterologic mode of textuality as yet
almost unrealizable (see Clifford and Marcus 1986). She describes her initial trepidation
upon first contacting and then meeting ‘Dorothy Evans’, or ‘Dot’, her main informant
and the impassioned editor of a small fanzine for romance readers, living and working in
a small Pennsylvania community fictionalized by Radway into ‘Smithton’. The gap
between researcher and informants is apparently quickly surmounted, however:
My concern about whether I could persuade Dot’s customers to elaborate
honestly about their motives for reading was unwarranted, for after an
initial period of mutually felt awkwardness, we conversed frankly and
with enthusiasm.
(Radway 1984:47)

From this point on, Radway ceases to reflect on the nature of her own relationship to the
‘Smithton women’, and offers instead an often fascinating account of what she has
learned from them. She quotes them extensively and is at times genuinely ‘taken by
surprise’ by the unexpected turns of her conversations with Dot and the Smithton women.
However, precisely because she does not seem to feel any real strain about the way in
which she and her informants are positioned towards each other, she represents the
encounter as one that is strictly confined to the terms of a relationship between two
parties with fixed identities: that of a researcher/feminist and that of
interviewees/romance fans. This ontological and epistemological separation between
subject and object allows her to present the Smithton readers as a pre-existent
‘interpretive community’, a sociological entity whose characteristics and peculiarities
were already there when the researcher set out to investigate it. It may well be, however,
that this group of women only constituted itself as a ‘community’ in the research process
itself—in a very literal sense indeed: at the moment that they were brought together for
the collective interviews Radway conducted with them; at the moment that they were
invited to think of themselves as a group that shares something, namely their fondness for
romance reading, and the fact that they are all Dot’s customers. An indication of this is
offered by Radway herself:

In the beginning, timidity seemed to hamper the responses as each reader
took turns answering each question. When everyone relaxed, however, the
conversation flowed more naturally as the participants disagreed among
themselves, contradicted one another, and delightedly discovered that they
still agreed about many things
(Radway 1984:48, emphasis added)