Page 96 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Feminist desire and female pleasure: on Janice Radway's 87
profound separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Elsewhere, Radway has formulated the
task as follows:

I am troubled by the fact that it is all too easy for us, as academic
feminists and Marxists who are preoccupied with the analysis of
ideological formations that produce consciousness, to forget that our
entailed and parallel project is the political one of convincing those very
real people to see how their situation intersects with our own and why it
will be fruitful for them to see it as we do. Unless we wish to tie this
project to some new form of coercion, we must remain committed to the
understanding that these individuals are capable of coming to recognize
their set of beliefs as an ideology that limits their view of their situation.
(Radway 1986:105)

Does this mean then that doing feminist research is a matter of pedagogy? The militant
ending of Reading the Romance leaves no doubt about it:

I think it absolutely essential that we who are committed to social change
learn not to overlook [the] minimal but nonetheless legitimate form of
protest [expressed in romance reading]. We should seek it out not only to
understand its origins and its Utopian longing but also to learn how best to
encourage it and bring it to fruition. If we do not, we have already
conceded the fight and, in the case of the romance at least, admitted the
impossibility of creating a world where the vicarious pleasure supplied by
its reading would be unnecessary.
(Radway 1984:222)

Here, Radway’s feminist desire is expressed in its most dramatic form: its aim is directed
at raising the consciousness of romance reading women, its mode is that of persuasion,
conversion even. ‘Real’ social change can only be brought about, Radway seems to
believe, if romance readers would stop reading romances and become feminist activists
instead. In other words, underlying Radway’s project is what Angela McRobbie has
termed a ‘recruitist’ conception of the politics of feminist research (1982:52). What
makes me feel so uncomfortable about this move is the unquestioned certainty with
which feminism is posed as the superior solution for all women’s problems, as if
feminism automatically possessed the relevant and effective formulas for all women to
change their lives and acquire happiness. In the course of the book Radway has thus
inverted the pertinent relations: whereas in the beginning the ethnographer’s position
entails a vulnerable stance that puts her assumptions at risk, what is achieved in the end is
an all but complete restoration of the authority of feminist discourse. This, then, is the
therapeutic effect of Reading the Romance: it reassures where certainties threaten to
dissolve, it comforts where divisions among women, so distressing and irritating to
feminism, seem almost despairingly insurmountable—by holding the promise that, with
hard work for sure, unity would be reached if we could only rechannel the energy that is
now put in romance reading in the direction of ‘real’ political action. In short, what is