Unknown Speaker 00:00 Hi, this is Janice Radway and we're both going to talk this morning about romance and sexuality. I'm going to begin by talking about literature and popular culture for girls. And then Janice is going to talk about romantic novels for women and some of the issues in relation to intervention and ideology. And we've hopefully both those talk for about half an hour each, and then we'll open it up for general discussion. Okay. I brought along with me some, I hope, when we get to the aspects of popular fiction for girls and in Britain. Okay, well with the the question that I began to ask myself in relation to today's session is, how does popular literature for girls relate to romantic novels of the kind read by women that Janice has done work on. And it's my contention that, at least in the literature I've looked at in Britain, but although the content of some of the popular fictions for girls isn't overtly sexual in any way, it actually plays on very deep and important themes, which prepare days for the romantic resolution, the arrival of the prince, the romantic novels in the future. That is popular fiction plays on things which relate to desperate losses, and no resolution, especially for working class girls, for whom the misery of their deprivation is related to their removal from harsh cruel circumstances and families, and the resolution of the insertion of the girl into wealthy families. And to happily ever after dream. The narrative, the narrative devices that are used in literature for girls, and I'm going to look particularly at girls comics, are in many ways, like those romantic novels. And I want to argue that they operate in similar ways to her girls for what's to come. And so they're a very powerful medium indeed, which can't be countered by a simple realism, or an anti sexist approach to children's literature as a kind. It's actually at least very popular in Britain at the moment. And I'm going to talk a bit about that. Specifically, these narratives, as we'll see, when I show you some examples on the overhead projector are quite fantastic. And they move beyond realism, and operate, I want to argue on desire and at the level of fantasy. And it's that which is very important. Now, before I go any further, I think I should explain that I discovered for the first time on arrival in the states that the particular kind of literature I'm going to talk about that's weekly comics, for pre pubescent girls in Britain don't actually exist here. And that's interesting in itself, these are comics which are produced and sell massive sales, particularly to working class young girls. They come out every week. And they contain strip stories, cartoon that strip stories in serial form for the most part, I'm going to show you some examples of those and apparently nothing like that exists here. So it's interesting to actually look at the the differences in the forms which are available on both sides of the Atlantic. Okay, well, let me begin by talking about some existing approaches to sexism in children's literature because I think it was important that a lot of feminist work in the 1960s and 70s crucially, I examined children's literature in relation to sexism. But what it did was suggest that there were stereotyped images, which often presented traditional sex roles in a traditional sexual division of labor. And what they suggested was that this could be resolved by presenting alternative images, to and I quote from one such example, extend children's thinking beyond stereotyping, both through in depth discussion, and by providing a range of material stories, pictures, films, people, which presents a broad image of what girls boys men and women are really like. Unknown Speaker 04:36 Okay, so here, you present, you counter these bad images with politically desirable ones. And so you assume that what girls are really like, exist somehow, in a simple sense outside the children's literature. And this, these texts themselves simply bias or distort that reality. They don't present it well. Have a taste, and that it can be counted by presenting to another way. Now one of the problems with that, for me is that I want to suggest that the cultural products like these comics themselves, actually create positions for girls to enter into them. And so they have what we might call regimes of meaning in them, that create fictional identities in the stories themselves, not through not in a kind of rote way. That is simply taken on board. But they're taken on board and related to in a much deeper sense, through multiple and often contradictory places, where femininity itself is both produced, resolved, and where contradictions and conflicts are worked through. And it's that idea about conflicts within conflicts that I want to dwell on. I want to argue that the production of fictions and fantasy are very important in relation to the development of feminine sexuality, and particularly to relate to that issues about power and desire. steriods stereotyping approach is often assumed that a shift in information is what's needed, that when little girls see alternative images, they too, will want to be something different. They want to engage in those things by which, by virtue of their gender, they've been forbidden. But this issue of wanting, I suggest is much more complex than the idea of alternative images suggests, and I want to relate it to fantasy and desire, and particularly the ways in which fantasy helps us to engage with and resolve conscious and unconscious conflicts. Now, certainly, there's an issue here of the problem of how we read the kinds of narrative devices in these comments and issues of interpretation, which I know Janice is going to talk about, and much psychoanalytic work in relation to fiction for women and girls has tended to follow the path of suggesting that there's only one reading. And it doesn't really look at the at the position of the interpreter or theories, who's putting their own interpretation on the fiction itself. But I want to look at that in several ways. And I'm going to look both that the fiction for girls and the fiction of girls, that is the fiction of childhood and femininity that's constructed both in these narratives, and in other places like the schoolroom. And I want to, I want to mention several things. Firstly, a kind of wire is in there, the social scientist, or psychologist or teacher or theorist who claims to know the truth about children, those who therefore doesn't take engage with the important aspects of desire in our own knowing of wanting to explain what we see, Unknown Speaker 08:18 on the fictions which this knowing, for example, psychological knowing the truth about children's development, for example, actually produces their its own fiction, and invest start as a true account of girls sexuality and development. And then, thirdly, to look at how girls and women themselves struggle in relation to those identities created in these fictional spaces. Now, I want to use the word struggle advisedly because I'm not talking about a passive engagement, that taking on the role model, but actually something that struggled over in relation to both in the texts and in other spaces and spaces in the social world. So I'm not arguing for pre given femininity, which fiction helps or hinders, but fiction is actually a central component of our everyday lives. So not just in stories, but actually, in all the practices that make a person. so central to the idea of struggle, for me is the issue of power. And part of that is the concern about power and powerlessness, and its relation to independence independence. Now, I'm not going to argue again that women are dependent, but I will suggest that the result of their struggles often particularly render certain goals or position and in certain ways, which lead to their insertion in various kinds of double bond, particularly the double bind to the kind of infantilization Then patriarchal practices, in which their only source of power is through servicing, caring through the caring, and the caring professions or service in the service industry. Now, moving on to fiction itself, I want to suggest that these young girls as readers make meaning through the production of fantasy relations in the texts themselves. And while they are, are themselves already created with these other within these other fictional spaces within these other practices, and so that reading isn't a simple passive thing, but a dynamic Act, in which the fictional places which have already created their identities, also engaged with the fictions that they're reading. I want to look at several different fictional sites or practices for where girls identities related, is created, especially those which are related to sexuality. I know that Janice talks a lot in her work about the way that women read romance novels to escape the drudgery of their lives in which they have to become part of caring in the pet caring professions or service in the service industries, how they looking after other people. And there was a very nice quote, that I like to want to Genesis papers where she talks about this woman who says, all the time that she she takes the children to the dentist, and she takes him to the doctors. And she does this. And she does that and reading the novels is actually her own private space, away from all that. And it's that aspect of privacy, which I think is also very important. They provide moments of escape into a fictional fictional space in which wishes can come true. The heroine is recognized to desired and winnings wins the prize, the man the home, the family. Now, in these novels, women win a man and that yet turns out not to be the resolution of the dream that they'd hoped for. Here they are taking all the kids to the dentist all the time. And what they longed for was something else. And the only space in which that's possible is in the romantic novels. So that's, that's how I read what you were saying to me. They can only imagine a different order in which their dreams will come true in which they'll be happy ever after. And in these novels, they focus on the right man, the one who will love them as they desire to be loved. Now, in that sense, these novels form part of their coping strategy for dealing with everyday for dealing with their everyday lives, in which they feel they get nothing for themselves. Unknown Speaker 12:55 And then here is certainly distinction between fantasy engagement in the text and what happens in the rest of their life. But I want to make that distinction not as fantasy and reality, but as fantasy as something which is, or something which is lived in, excuse me, lived in the head, and therefore related to delusional states away from the real, but fantasy is creating important fictions which position women in the real every day. So the fiction of the mother is just as much affection as a caring servicing nurturance mother, as is the dream come true of heterosexual romance. So how then do girls and women come to occupy these these positions? And how do they struggle to occupy and to cope with them and to resist and avoid them? In this sense, reading romance novels and popular literature for girls can be seen as a kind of resistance to the position of services carer, but one which is contradictory, since at the same time, it helps to get them there. Relatedly, then we can see the call girls as engaged in a struggle to be something and to resist something, what the current social order demands of them. I want them to examine some of the components of just such struggles. And I want first to look at an example of the way in which girls are put in a double bind, in which they both struggle for power and end up in positions in which they have to reproduce the dependency in others. And particularly, the positions for girls which I've looked at in in some of my work on young girls and schooling, is that girls can either be in the position of the mother that is dependable, or they can be in the position of what Juliette Mitchell calls the hysteric, that is, they can deny that they can't possess the balance in terms and that those are the only two positions open to them. And I just want to give you a couple of examples of girls playing in a nursery to show you the relationship between those kinds of fantasies that are engaged in every day. And the reading that girls do. One is a little girl who is playing doctors and nurses in the nursery. And they in fact, the teacher has set up this game. And of course, she's given all the white coats to the boys and older nurses uniforms to the girls, but one of the girls actually tries very hard to subvert them. Having been asked to help the doctors, she actually goes into the home corner of the nursery, and she starts making cups of tea. And then she turns it into making supper. One of the doctors arrives in the home corner, and she says to him, you gotta go quickly. He says, Chris, you're going to work? And then he says, rather reluctantly, but I'm being a doctor. And she said, Well, you've got to go to work doctor, because you've got to go to the hospital. And so do I don't like cabbage, do you shake your head? When you haven't got cabbage, then I'm going to hospital. If you tidy up this room, make sure and tell me. Okay, so in this tiny little moment, she actually shifts the power relations in the only way that she can, which is to stop being the subservient nurse and to actually be the controlling housewife stroke mother, who actually gives the doctors dinner and sends him off to work in which he's he's infantilized in it. Now, in many of the games I looked at, in the in the nursery, that struggle was played out again and again and again, girls strove to create domestic play in which they had power as mothers, boys equally strove to disrupt domestic play, because they were being They tended always to be infantilized by the girls as they're zoned for boys and told what to do precisely because it was a site of power for the, for the girls, the boys would want to shift it and they did so often very, very nasty ways. Um, and so here are the girls then, not passive and dependent in any simple sense, but actually struggling and always put in that kind of double bind in which the sites, the fictional spaces in which they can have power are also themselves full of conflict and contradictory. Okay, so how then, do Unknown Speaker 17:53 literature for girls also provide places in which that struggle can be engaged with what's being struggled with and what's being struggled and struggled against? Now that particular girls comics that I had a look at our two, two ones called bunting and Tracy, which are for pre pubescent girls in England. And as I said, they contain strip stories. And I want to Well, I'll just show I just can't wait to have organization of these different comics. I mean, one of the things that happens again and again, is that the stories present miserable circumstances, often very difficult lives, but they do so in a way that provides solutions and escapes ways out in fantasy and in practice. The stories often romanticize poverty, and suggestive way of dealing with it, which is almost masochistic. It's desirable because it can be suffered virtuously and move beyond. And poverty is presented as a result of tragic circumstances in which children are often orphaned. And so there are families who are wicked and oppressive, which are usually the result of some terrible accident of fate of fate. And so these stories, I think, are palatable precisely because they are fantastic at one level. They're actually removed from everyday life in a variety of ways, a different historical period, a different geographic location, the overwhelming use of surrogate parents and siblings. They, most of the stories are not about children who are with their biological parents or their siblings. So in that sense that they're not a realistic text in any simple sense. And here are in the the comments that I looked at the topic They cover. Apart from 11 strip stories, who are about girls who do not have or don't don't live with their parents. The other seven are about the following a girl who's helpful and does good and kindly deeds for others, except when she puts on a glove puppet, at which point her character completely changes and she becomes vicious, angry and evil. And of course, the moment she takes off the glove pocket, she has no recollection curry will do. A girl who's perfect to school, clever, beautiful, helpful, sensible, but whose cleverness and good deeds make her the object of envy, and therefore she becomes very unpopular and unhappy. A girl who lives with her mother, the latter having been made redundant, and the girl is saved from having to sell a precious camera by her ingenuity and using it to make money by selling photographs, and this and she uses her camera for kindly deeds for others, a girl whose mother who is a teacher who's chosen to live in a rough teaching a rough comprehensive school, and is constantly trying to reform the children and her daughter, by her own ingenuity and good deeds actually has to take responsibility for the rather it for the innocence of the mother, a girl who was a Victorian serving girl who's been frozen for 100 years and a block of ice. A girl gymnasts from an Eastern Bloc country who's helped to escape by British girl gymnast, a horse who develops a theme of jealousy, and another horse who's jealous off her but the heroine tools helps the other and selfishly despite the other jealousy. Okay, so those are the those are the stories apart from the ones which are center on orphaned girls who are in receipt of gross injustice. For example, when often Joanie Jackson was adopted by Kate and Robert Stewart, she looked forward to the kinds of Happy Family she'd always dreamed of. But things didn't quite work out as she planned. Okay, so here hear then, themes of both escape from very difficult circumstances, escape from terrible families into a reservation with the longed for wealthy happy family. Unknown Speaker 22:23 Or fantasies of helpfulness in which the rewards are given precisely by the girl suppression of her own desires in order to to produce those of others. And so, a deprivation and loss are counted by girls active struggle to bring about the resolution of the bourgeois dream, to help the wealthy and happy mother and father. Now I'm suggesting that there's actually prefigures in some important ways, the arrival of the man and romantic novels, even though there's nothing over the intersection without them. Now, in a previous analysis that I did, I concentrated very much on the loss, what goes with lost and how this helped produce these girls as passive victims of harsh circumstances, that they're they're very passivity seem to get them what they desired. But also, although I've said that I think that what's important is the law, and it's presented as inevitable, and yet it can be made good by certain actions on the part of the girl, selflessly, selflessness, helpfulness, caring for others, cleverness for others. So she combined those qualities which she displays that is precisely the qualities of traditional feminine caring, when the fantasy of escape the prizes and the man. Now what's important to them is the way in which the comics work on those losses, and those lakhs themselves, what the girl has lost and what she can gain and how she can do it, her own active part in that struggle to resolve certain conflicts. Now Freud suggested, for example, that it was very common for young children to fantasize about alternative families with better birth. And that enabled them to work through very difficult conflicts within their family by distancing them from them. So that cruel cat parents could become not one's real parents, and therefore they could be replaced by the fantasize good parents. Now, these comments therefore work as a level of fantasy, and inscribing girls in those fantasies, which are not served by realism, but maybe explicitly explicit explicitly aided by this kind of Romanticism. And I wanted to suggest that particularly harsh and difficult circumstances are romanticized in the store And however, what's important is what are the circumstances, how they're resolved and what the end is. So there are conflicts which is set up to engage with one's already present for girls. And that's what I'm suggesting about entering into the fantasy, the Terra girls already engaging in the practices of their everyday lives with conflicts which they have to deal with, and that the fantasy devices of the comics allow further engagement. But more than that, because they present certain ways of resolving these conflicts, and therefore certain solutions, they're very powerful devices indeed, which are nothing like the realism of the alternative images for girls as a as a realist, antiseptic tech. So they describe the region in fantasy scenario, which provides a way for her to actively engineer a resolution. And so you get, as you saw, in those, those two that I put up, there's jealousy, rivalry, harsh relatives, but they're also dealt with in particular ways. The jealousy and the rivalry is often split between characters out in the she'll stay a slave, there's a bad girl and a good girl. The jealousy is always projected out onto the bad character. And there are no for example, there are no rivalries, sibling rivalries with boys. The relationships between brothers, for example, never dealt with. So if you look at them, there are a whole set of conflicts for girls which are dealt with and a whole set of others are which remain precisely silent in the text. And that's also very important in relation to later literature for for girls is outside. Unknown Speaker 26:54 Okay, so the drudgery of women's lives, girls lives and the poverty of being working class, particularly for these young readers can be escaped from by providing these resolutions and providing they do it in the right way. So therefore, here doesn't mean a resistance, which is active, anger, complaint, or jealousy, all of those are in the bad characters, but an attempt to struggle to be a good girl, and that being a good girl will bring about its own rewards, as we've seen. So it's a docile subject, and a docile worker, and a dose to her mother, all about, all of which will be resolved through the struggle of fantasies of escape into wealthy life. So it's a very, very specific fantasy. Well, what is lost and what is gained? Certainly living out of a fantasy relates to in certain important ways in psychoanalytic terms, the loss of the mother and the typical investment in the father. But how are girls to make this out? Do can they only either become hysterical the mother or they are infantilized? Or can they have a career? Now one of the things that I was quite critical of when I did this work, was some psychoanalytic work within feminism, feminism, which suggested that the loss for girls and women is to quote Louise Eichenbaum and Suzy all that varied and denied in the culture at large. Now, I want to suggest that it's certainly not buried and denied at all. It's quite their present in fictions like these. What's important is not it's varying and denial, but precisely how it's worked with, and therefore what fantasies are put forward for dealing with that loss and its resolution. So failure, then, in that sense, is quite inevitable. It's not like the imposition of roles that girls these girls will always fail to achieve something, but what's important is the struggle for it. So why are these comics then so effective and successful? They operate at the level of fantasy to engage with the loss and its fulfillment therefore, they invite particular solutions and particular identity. And so in many ways, they prepare girls for the romantic resolution and I argued prepare girls for the adolescent magazines that they'll come on to later now in Britain also, there are magazines for slightly older girls, some of which have been examined by Angela Robbie in her work on Jackie, which is a magazine for teenage girls or slightly older than the girls that read these stories and there they are romantic stories in which girls actually do game the boy and the They also operate in certain kinds of important ways. The girls in the Jackie stories operate with a fatalism about loss, especially the loss of the boy. They're encouraged to wait for Better luck next time. And the struggle there for that they engage with this the attraction of the next boy, rather than examining the aspect of anything that's gone before. And since this attracting as the next boy could happen anywhere from the bus stop to the disco, the girl has to be always prepared and therefore always engaging and struggling. And yet, in the same way that Jonas is saying that romantic novels are read in privacy, and Robbie also suggested that these kinds of magazines like other aspects of a subculture for girls are engaged in, in private, or often read in private, and a subculture for girls is engaged in the privacy very often for girls bedrooms. Very, very unlike, of course, the sub cultural spaces performed Unknown Speaker 31:05 as a result of the reading the sample of good books and bad books that I was reading recommended by these women. And it posed an interesting kind of suggestion. This was in the sample of bad books, but it's actually it wasn't considered the worst by the women I talked to it was right on the borderline. They liked it, but disliked it for a particular reason. And it was an interesting plot, because he had two heroes, a good girl and a bad girl. Now I think that could be altered. But what was interesting about the good girl story was that she developed a professional identity, both before she became involved with a male. And in some ways, as a consequence, the way she was constructed passively in a power relationship with a professor. She then gets herself out of that original relationship with the professor develops individually in a career, and then stumbles into an ideal relationship, as it's constructed by my my romance readers. And the story eventually resolves itself, and the book ends with her in her apartment in New York, and the hero in Abu Dhabi or someplace. And she's thinking about this ideal relationship. And she's thinking, Well, I have my work, and there will always be Peter. And then she thinks to herself at the end of the story, well, maybe there won't always be queue, but it exists for now. And the last line of the book is, and she got down to work. So there's a kind of open endedness, about the story of kind of temporary myths about the relationship. Now what was fascinating with respect to the women is they liked her as a heroine, because they could identify with her strength and her power. But what they found disturbing about the book was the ambiguity of the ending. Okay, so every time I ended up, coming close to imagine something on the order of what you're talking about, it wouldn't speak to romance readers. So then you get involved in the whole issue of political gradualism. And what does it mean to gradually convert romance readers have no idea whether that's possible, but it might it's worth trying. To Unknown Speaker 33:18 find out, whatever I'm reading, was Unknown Speaker 33:25 called never to be called. Somebody falls into IANA ignoring. The fact that Unknown Speaker 33:37 I have Unknown Speaker 33:40 literary tastes, Unknown Speaker 33:41 the same thing different than when I Unknown Speaker 33:46 was in Louisiana, reading the reasons for me or what's going on, Unknown Speaker 33:54 you reacted? Unknown Speaker 33:56 I want to ask you some questions. Unknown Speaker 34:00 I think that it's a hard to answer. With a simple kind of answer. I think that there are multiple things going on in the way a trained individual who has been privileged to be part of my culture reads that material so that when anyone would pick up, say, now, Jane Eyre, I think there are multiple things going on. One is the canonical, or at least ultimately canonical. And there's a question of status that's involved in reading. But at the same time, I do think that they address many of the same conflict and address the construction of desire. In some ways. I haven't come to any final conclusion about the way value is connected with complexity. My argument, I guess, would be that Jane Eyre or the Bronte's or whatever, constructs those conflicts in a more complicated way. and resolves them less perfectly so that there are still, there's still an open ended nature to the resolution whereas I would say that there is not in the average category. Yeah. The common sense not only have you Unknown Speaker 35:33 i It's not anything I particularly do any work on because we do have soap operas, too. Yeah. But are there soap operas here specifically for children? Unknown Speaker 35:46 Yeah, I, it's hard for me to answer because I don't know the comics real well, but on the basis of having read the paper, and there might be similarities in the way teenage girls engage with Rome with soap operas, particularly since soap operas have been changed recently, where the characters and soap operas are much younger. And soaps had been transformed and kind of consideration of romance, much more so than previously. So you've got a really good idea, I think you might be quite right. Unknown Speaker 36:18 Because you're finding the same characters. It's like week two, if you follow this character we've seen Unknown Speaker 36:24 yet the stories last so many weeks, and there are several stories in the comic Unknown Speaker 36:29 that I'm working on as a human just making the idea of one that continues, as opposed to the closing. Unknown Speaker 36:36 Yeah, yeah. So we were talking about that earlier. And it's actually not something I've explored. But I think it's very important. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 36:43 Well, in the group that I've talked to, I have no idea how extensive this is in the romance audience, generally. But in the group that I talked to, they were not soap watchers at all. And there were two reasons that they didn't watch soaps, they were offended by the morality of the soaps, they thought that they explored perversions and that sort of thing. But the other thing was, they didn't like the fact that it didn't end. They wanted to see that story. And and they had elaborate procedures, to select books on any given occasion, so that you can read it in one suit, and get to the resolution. What do you make of Unknown Speaker 37:15 that? Well, the suggestion that there's just radically different population, new ordinances on yourselves, and now I would have thought that Unknown Speaker 37:24 I would have thought so too. I mean, I don't I don't know. I mean, it may have to do with the question of resolution, and the way in which the romance audience wants to see the family romance resolved, and perhaps a soap audience. I mean, I don't even know I mean, a soap audience is obviously tolerating and ongoing this soaps may be a way of coping, more realistically, with day to day life in the sense that soaps are, in some ways close to the notion of suffering, close to the way notion of coping, and not so removed fantastically. I'm thinking off the top of my head, I really don't know. Unknown Speaker 38:04 I think that the same thing we're to do every day, and they go on and on and on. It's a sense of community. Yeah. So Unknown Speaker 38:12 I upgraded my money. Oh, my God. I thought it was like that, but she was so involved Unknown Speaker 38:21 with the community. Yeah. That's possible. The other thing is that I found with these romance readers is they're involved with the community of Romance Writers. And they feel connected to these women, they know all about these women, they know their personal lives. And they're deeply involved with these people so that it's almost not a world of books, as much as it is a world of readers and writers. So you Unknown Speaker 38:45 won't have any kind of Unknown Speaker 38:50 essence of subjectivity in knowing that and knowing the kind of formulae while the books and all these and on the comics, but so there's an element. And other possible subjectivity of subversion is the very fact that when we choose news, we have a real knowledge of what's been going on yet. And choose it as as a macro subject to, and then it could be a possible subversion Unknown Speaker 39:14 of that. I mean, the fact that they can choose you mean is Unknown Speaker 39:17 that they that they know that they know about the repetition. No. It's not I mean, the revenue records we talked about the repetition being always denigrate. But there could be a possible Subversion and knowing that you're you're doing something that is going to be pulling them and then you're engaging in that process with the knowledge of that. Unknown Speaker 39:42 Interesting idea, I tried to explore the issue. This way is in addition, they talk about the books the women as if they were novels, when I asked questions like, describe a typical romantic heroine to me, they'd look utterly nonplussed. and say, well, there's not a typical romantic heroine. And I'd say well describe a typical romantic plot. And they would say, well, there isn't a typical romantic plot so that in many ways, the stories were constructed as novels. And when they discussed them, they could indeed remember, plots, and they could remember characteristics of individual characters, so that some way that proved to me that they did engage with them as unique stories of unique individuals. On the other hand, they did exhibit unconsciously very rigid notions of what a basic core plot structure is like. And I found, to my surprise that about two thirds of the group, at least occasionally had to read the ending of the story before they took it out of the store. So I argue that they wanted to make sure that it had that ending. So what I argue is that there's a tension between the need to believe that women leave original lies, and the desire to see the patriarchal structure develop. So what you have is the illusion that this is a new story about a new woman leading a new life. But in fact, what it shows you is that the myth that women are defined by him through others is restored. So that's sort of the way I tried to deal with it. Your construction is very interesting, though. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 41:23 The half, I tried to find out through the publishing industry, what percentage of romance novels are written by men and from everybody, I've got the statement that it isn't many. I don't know what that means. But the women insisted that they could tell the difference between a male authored romance and a female authored romance and I was skeptical, I thought they couldn't be right. But I accepted what they said. And when I set out the two samples of audiobooks and failed books, I started to read the failed books. And I got through one, and I got to the sex scene. And I thought, point of view has shifted. And so I looked, and indeed, it had been written by a man, and it happened twice in the sample. And I really am not nearly as educated a romance reader as the women were. But each time you got to a sex scene, the point of view would shift and it would become a male fantasy of a woman offering herself. And so I could detect it, I think the women can detect it. They did say that there are a few men that they like, but not many. Unknown Speaker 42:28 Public libraries here there are three novel Unknown Speaker 42:32 series of novels in here. Unknown Speaker 42:38 Even more about 910 11 and harlequins now say welcome to adult area to pick up. They don't continue, but the covers of the books, and almost identical girls. They're all in a different pose, and whatever the classic Barbie all kinds of girl, and the right kind of clothes. And each was a little bit different. So the kids pretty much know which story is to cover. And they do come up to me and they asked about the office information I was offered. But I tried to read those, and those, to me are very similar. And I was trying to find something else that I could offer, when whenever they say they want to Spicer as an adult area. But if I'm trying to find a children's Unknown Speaker 43:26 book that would have a Unknown Speaker 43:29 positive or just something different than the girl gets a boy in the end, and she's done something to get. She's either stopped being so aggressive, of course she's dressed. And I'm always trying to like to think and that's Unknown Speaker 43:51 all those series that are available. Unknown Speaker 43:56 called Sweet trees. I'm just interested to read about Unknown Speaker 44:03 the author's. Discuss their nature that interested in their continuity of care either was quite easy to get into the office. Well, more from the point of Unknown Speaker 44:18 view, having the moments readers speculate, because it's Unknown Speaker 44:24 closer to speculate about what patients are getting Unknown Speaker 44:32 this, right. It's bad, I think is another wedge. I've seen that they're fascinated with the women because they are capable and creative. The women that I talked to divide the world into book readers and non book readers, and people engage with books tend to be in their view, intelligent, sensible, not given to mindless kind of play. And that kind of bleeds over into their notion of creativity with Respect to writing. They want to know as much as they can about the woman's personal life, because they want to believe I think that she has the kind of ideal relationship that she writes about. They know, in fact that many of the women had very painful childhoods. And I don't know again, how much how much that could be borne out in a statistical sample. But it seemed to me that many of the women that were talking to me about had had very unhappy childhoods. There is apparently a very high conversion rate for women who are readers to become writers. If you think about it, it would have to be true, because right now, 40% of all mass market paperbacks are romances. That means that something like 100 romances are published every month. Obviously, there have to be 1000s, or hundreds of 1000s of women out there attempting to write romances, so that these publishing houses can issue this many things. Now, if that's true, if one of the things that romance reading can lead to is romance writing, then what you've seen is a very important shift, a woman who has been sung has suddenly adopted a public voice of a sort, bought a typewriter and declared a space within which he has to work. And what's interesting is there's great conflict within the family. When this occurs, a student I know of at Penn just finished a dissertation at the Annenberg School of Communications. And she did interviews with 60, some Romance Writers through the Romance Writers of America chapter in Philadelphia. And what was fascinating about that is that many of those women described themselves as feminists, and described themselves as angry with publishers because they couldn't very loose on the way they wanted. So I think that, again, can be explored. I think that there is a possibility of working with some Romance Writers and of varying the genre in ways that would at least make it not so not Unknown Speaker 47:03 sure how to formulate this question, but I'm wondering about the relationship between ways of reading and changing the social order, I mean, in certain ways, it clear that you could change the romance plot to the feminist plot. And then if you don't change the social order, and that you just read for what now becomes the Unknown Speaker 47:21 new, normal, good, happy Unknown Speaker 47:23 ending, that there's no change at all. And I was wondering what you thought Unknown Speaker 47:28 about Unknown Speaker 47:31 I don't know what we didn't have to how we changed the way the ad to make it more subversive act, or even how the way you teach meetings to make it more subversive? Unknown Speaker 47:44 It's obviously the crucial question, I don't have answers that are satisfactory to me at all. I don't believe that it's sufficient to transform either the act of reading or the way in which reading practices are extended to the rest of the world, clearly, material and social situation has to be changed as well. But the reason I think that reading has to be engaged with mass produce fantasies have to engage be engaged with is that I think, cultural, the site of cultural production has to be cited for political action as well. But it has to be shored up with all kinds of practices. Now, to pose the question of how to teach reading. That's creative. I actually haven't hadn't thought about that before. Except insofar as the way I teach reading in a classroom, with college students, which would be a way of critically engaging with the text. Instead of simply absorbing the text. Again, I'm just Unknown Speaker 48:57 I'm here to answer well, not really No, I, the only, I can only think of two ways to address what you're saying, and neither of them address it properly. But I suppose one of the things that has occurred to me lately is that as well as kind of teaching, reading or engaging with how we read, we also have to engage with our own position in relation to those that are serious, for example, or feminist that. I mean, one of the things that's been important for me lately is trying to link as I said, in the talk, the fictions in the narrative, the fictional narratives to other fictions of the child and how, therefore, social scientists and theorists become involved in producing those fictions. Now, in order to understand that we have to engage with ourselves, that is our own desires to know. And it seems to me that there are two things there one might be if we took that psychoanalytically and knuckles terms one would be Romance reading would be about an imaginary closure, or wish fulfillment. But our only engagement would be it would be a fictional fantasy of symbolic control. And it's just as much affection and a fantasy space. And I think we need to engage with that ourselves. And therefore, our desires to be that and to know that and to explain them to understand. And I think in my own work and teaching, that's what I try to do, so that we don't separate ourselves from these other set of people who, as it were read differently. So that we've put we've positioned them as other objects, and then leave ourselves out outside in this voyeuristic way, kind of looking in. Now that I'm sorry, that doesn't answer your question. That's the only way I can think of to engage with it. In terms of teaching reading, there is actually an important issue in relation to teaching reading, and children's learning to read. Because certainly very little work on children, for children learning to read, engages with these issues about fiction and fantasy at all. And the most, in quotes, progressive approaches to teaching reading, use a rather well a very staid form, and kind of using linguistics to make sense. But there is no insertion of a reader and a set of practices breeding. Neither is there any fantasy engagement or investment in the reading. So none of that actually goes on. So reading in that sense can only is only at best in those approaches seen as an inquisitive process, not as a social practice, and that we're not different kinds of reading, at least that's as far as let's work with little children. Unknown Speaker 51:59 Can I Can I ask a question about the question of giving up the fantasy of symbolic control? Is it possible to give up that desire, or at least engage that desire to control and remain politically committed in the same space? Unknown Speaker 52:19 Why not? Unknown Speaker 52:19 Well, I guess what I was thinking is that is that if you're engaging with people, with whom you don't politically agree, to retain your political commitment is in some ways, always to say that you know, better. Yeah. So that in some ways, you're still retaining control, no matter how athletic you are, at pretending not to be that's the dilemma for me. I don't know any way out of it. To change. Yeah. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 52:52 Yeah. So I mean, I suppose I was just trying to stand back and say, Well, what, what are the desires inscribed in those kinds of productions, that those kinds of work and if we understand those, and particularly in relation to the skewing of masculinity and femininity that you're talking about, whereas femininity is inscribed in the helping to know. And masculinity is inscribed in the knowing? You know, I mean, then we could begin to look at those kinds of differences look, as as far as I can. That's about Unknown Speaker 53:37 it, I'm just wondering about the audience, for romance readers because for soap operas, because one thing you have noticed so far, is romance material, public domain that abides by the soap, not only watching the soap opera for watching, and stressing it outside of actually seeing it and you said there's a lot there, whether men or a woman Unknown Speaker 54:15 Yeah. Alright, so the first part of your question there, there does seem to be a certain amount of community, although in the group that I talked to the women did not have extended networks with whom they discussed. Romance is generally women seem to have one other woman to discuss romances with a mother, a sister, an aunt, or a neighbor. They don't seem to be extended networks. Now, this may be a function of the fact that these were middle class suburban housewives who were isolated in homes, they're also wealthy enough to buy their books. There are lending library networks and there are loaning networks at work. So that kind of thing is going on. And I think that obviously needs to be explored. The question of male readership is Again, very difficult to assess. It's not possible, at least so far to get any statistics from the romance publishers, they're absolutely paranoid. And if you go in, because there's a lot of money involved in the business, so when I went, they didn't believe that I was an academic, they thought I was a spot. So it's not possible to get the kind of statistics from everything. They told me, that audience is very small. There is a male audience, but it's small. But I have no idea whether that's 2% 10% Why Unknown Speaker 55:31 did you choose to work that Unknown Speaker 55:36 way some mothers before? Unknown Speaker 55:39 It was really out of desperation, what I was just trying to deal with the whole question of readership and thinking about ways, how do you get at readership, and I hope to be able to do it randomly. But there wasn't enough known about the romance audience that I could construct that kind of sample, I hope to do it through letters of to editors, but they're not cat. So what happened was, somebody sent me a xerox of an article about this woman out in the Midwest, who was a clerk in a bookstore, who had amassed this loyal following. So it is not a scientifically designed sample, it's pre selected. But the reason I wanted to do it is I want to, I felt that what had been worked out in this group was some kind of implicit aesthetic. And what I was trying to get out was the way in which an aesthetic is situated, culturally and socially. And I figured that this group would be useful for that. So it's really nothing more than a case study that must be duplicated in many different ways before we can see the way in which the audience varies. Romance is associated with any sense of stupid deviation. was wrong Romans reading? Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the most difficult things to overcome was the absolute fear of being score that the Romans women are deeply wounded. By the way the culture deals with what they think is so valuable to them. And they're very weary of the way their husbands treat their romance reading the way their kids treat romance reading the way newspaper reporters and the way women's liver Street. They're very, very aware of that. And so they often have brown paper covers to cover the books if they go to a doctor's office, or if they're riding on a bus or something. It's something that has to be privatized because of its school because of the school. It's very hard for them to deal with. Yeah, we probably should end because I think everybody wants to go to lunch. Thank you for coming.