Page 95 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 86
In relying on a realist epistemology, then, Radway tends to overlook the constructivist
aspect of her own enterprise. In a sense, doing ethnography is itself a political
intervention in that it helps to construct the culture it seeks to describe and understand,
rather than merely reflect it. The concrete political benefit, in this specific case, could be
that Radway’s temporary presence in Smithton, and the lengthy conversations she had
with the women, had an empowering effect on them, in that they were given the rare
opportunity to come to a collective understanding and validation of their own reading
experiences. Such an effect might be regarded as utterly limited by feminists with grander
aims, and it is certainly not without its contra-dictions (after all, how can we ever be sure
how such temporary, cultural empowerment relates to the larger stakes of the more
structural struggles over power in which these women lead their lives?), but it is worth
noticing, nevertheless, if we are to consider the value and predicaments of doing feminist
research in its most material aspects (see McRobbie 1982).
For Radway, however, other concerns prevail. The separation between her world and
that of her informants becomes progressively more absolute towards the end of the book.
In the last few chapters the mode of writing becomes almost completely monologic, and
the Smithton women are definitively relegated to the position of ‘them’, a romance
reading community towards which Radway is emphatically sympathetic, but from which
she remains fundamentally distant. Radway’s analysis first recognizes the ‘rationality’ of
romance reading by interpreting it as an act of symbolic resistance, but ends up
constructing a deep chasm between the ideological world inhabited by the Smithton
women and the convictions of feminism:

[W]hen the act of romance reading is viewed as it is by the readers
themselves, from within the belief system that accepts as given the
institutions of heterosexuality and monogamous marriage, it can be
conceived as an activity of mild protest and longing for reform
necessitated by those institutions’ failure to satisfy the emotional needs of
women. Reading therefore functions for them as an act of recognition and
contestation whereby that failure is first admitted and then partially
reversed. […] At the same time, however, when viewed from the vantage
point of a feminism that would like to see the women’s oppositional
impulse lead to real social change, romance reading can also be seen as an
activity that could potentially disarm that impulse. It might do so because
it supplies vicariously those very needs and requirements that might
otherwise be formulated as demands in the real world and lead to the
potential restructuring of sexual relations.
(Radway 1984:213)

These are the theoretical terms in which Radway conceives the troubled relationship
between feminism and romance reading. A common ground—the perceived sharing of
the experiential pains and costs of patriarchy—is analytically secured, but from a point of
view that assumes the mutual exteriority of the two positions. The distribution of
identities is clearcut: Radway, the researcher, is a feminist and not a romance fan; the
Smithton women, the researched, are romance readers and not feminists. From such a
perspective, the political aim of the project becomes envisaged as one of bridging this