Friday, October 11, 2013

Gender & Sexuality (Radway)

In her article, “Reading Reading the Romance,” Janice Radway seems to be conducting a genre analysis by analyzing and critiquing her own book – recognizing its strengths, weaknesses, and offering a more enriched view of the genre of romance novels. Radway highlights particular ways in which her book can function as a “kind of genre theory”:

1.       “it attempts to understand how the Smithton women’s social and material situation prepares them to find the act of reading attractive and even necessary” (206).

2.       ”through detailed questioning of the women about their own definition of romance and their criteria for distinguished between ideal and failed versions of the genre, the study attempts to characterize the struggle of the particular narrative the women have chosen to engage because they find it especially enjoyable”

3.       “attempts to explain how and why such a structured ‘story’ might be experienced as pleasurable by those women as a consequence of their socialization within a particular family unit” (employing the psychoanalytic lens)
What Radway concludes through this analysis is that, in order to understand the genre, the romance reader/writer’s own individual struggle must be considered (because those who engage in this genre “are themselves struggling with gender definitions and sexual politics on their own terms”). Because of this, Radway emphasizes support more than criticism, and she writes that we could potentially “activate the critical power that even now lies buried in the romance as one of the few widely shared womanly commentaries on the contradictions and costs of patriarchy” (212).

In order to offer differing perspectives and explanations on the cultural value/influences of the genre of romance novels, Radway incorporates multiple voices into her article. She explores the theories of Williams, Thompson, Hall, Marx, Freud, and various feminists/post feminists (notably McRobbie), and she analyzes the genre through their lenses – which offers an enriched perspective on romance novels.  

Though Radway’s article was interesting, it was also very difficult to comprehend in some instances. Because she is analyzing her own work, she is very present in the writing – almost too present. Though this relates to and emphasizes her idea of women’s individual struggle, it also creates a problem by overshadowing much of her analysis.

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