Transforming the Discourse of Exclusion and Dominance

Will add more background information. jeanne january 22, 2001.

Ien Ang's critique of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and Radway's response. pp.152-3 of John Storey's an Introduction to Cultural theory and Popular Culture. Ang points out the exclusion and elitism of assuming that women read romances for the "wrong reasons," and that they would be better off learning to confront the popular culture ideology by reacting against the one-sidedness of nuture, in which their needs are not met, rather than just escaping into an imaginary world where their needs are met. Ang, in Watching Dallas, empasizes that there is nothing wrong with pleasure for pleasure's sake, and that women need not necessarily give up the genuine pleasure of the romance. Radway agrees, recognizing how difficult it is not to exclude and reflect such elitism.

This is very much the quarrel that I have noted before in with the work of radical feminists who have difficulty respecting the motives of women who do not share a feminist ideology. Catharine MacKinnon speaks eloquently of respecting women's voices and their narrative as valid. But she, too, leaves no room for pleasure and rejecting the "cause," especially for the pleasure of "romance." MacKinnon sometimes gives me the impression that if women would just confront the reality of today's relationships, the system of interpersonal relationships would improve. I think that may be just a tad unrealistic, and I think it runs the danger of what Ang is suggesting happened with Radway. These are interdependent relationships, from which women as well as men derive pleasures along with the difficulties. Like Ang, I think we need to learn to see both harm and pleasure before we conclude that we "know" what is requisite to healthy relationships.