Page 97 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 88
therapeutic (for feminism) about Reading the Romance is its construction of romance
readers as embryonic feminists.
I do agree with Radway that the relationship between ‘feminism’ and ‘women’ is one
of the most troublesome issues for the women’s movement. However, it seems untenable
to me to maintain a vanguardist view of feminist politics, to see feminist consciousness as
the linear culmination of political radicality. With McRobbie (1982), I think that we
should not underestimate the struggles for self-empowerment engaged in by ‘ordinary
women’ outside the political and ideological frameworks of the self-professed women’s
movement. I am afraid therefore that Radway’s radical intent is drawing dangerously
near a form of political moralism, propelled by a desire to make ‘them’ more like ‘us’.
Indeed, what Radway’s conception of political intervention tends to arrive at is the
deromanticization of the romance in favour of a romanticized feminism!
This is not the place to elaborate on the practical implications of this political
predicament. What I do want to point out, however, is how the therapeutic upshot of
Reading the Romance is prepared for in the very analysis Radway has made of the
meaning of romance reading for the Smithton women, that is, how the analytical and the
therapeutic are inextricably entwined with one another.
Strangely missing in Radway’s interpretive framework, I would say, is any careful
account of the pleasurableness of the pleasure of romance reading. The absence of
pleasure as pleasure in Reading the Romance is made apparent in Radway’s frequent,
downplaying qualifications of the enjoyment that the Smithton women have claimed to
derive from their favourite genre: that it is a form of vicarious pleasure, that it is only
temporarily satisfying because it is compensatory literature; that even though it does
create ‘a kind of female community’, through it ‘women join forces only symbolically
and in a mediated way in the privacy of their homes and in the devalued sphere of leisure
activity’ (Radway 1984:212). Revealed in such qualifications is a sense that the pleasure
of romance reading is somehow not really real, as though there were other forms of
pleasure that could be considered ‘more real’ because they are more ‘authentic’, more
enduring, more veritable, or whatever.
Radway’s explanation of repetitive romance reading is a case in point. She analyses
this in terms of romance reading’s ultimate inadequacy when it comes to the satisfaction
of psychic needs for which the readers cannot find an outlet in their actual social lives. In
her view, romance reading is inadequate precisely because it gives these women the
illusion of pleasure while it leaves their ‘real’ situation unchanged. In line with the way in
which members of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies have
interpreted youth subcultures (see Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979), then, Radway
comes to the conclusion that romance reading is a sort of ‘imaginary solution’ to real,
structural problems and contradictions produced by patriarchy. (The real solution, one
could guess, lies in the bounds of feminism.) All this amounts to a quite functionalist
explanation of romance reading, one that is preoccupied with its effects rather than its
mechanisms. Consequently, pleasure as such cannot possibly be taken seriously in this
theoretical framework, because the whole explanatory movement is directed towards the
ideological function of pleasure.
Are the Smithton women ultimately only fooling themselves then? At times Radway
seems to think so. For example, when the Smithton women state that it is impossible to
describe the ‘typical romantic heroine’ because in their view, the heroines ‘are all