Empowerment or Oppression? Romance Reading as a Negotiation

王翰陞(Han-Sheng Wang)

cultural practice ； feminism ； negotiation ； romance readers ； romance reading

小說與戲劇

18卷2期（2008 / 03 / 01）

79 - 97

英文

Regarding capitalistic production as the main drive of human progress, modernist historians used to interpret history on a 'production' basis, thus overlooking the significance of everyday consumption and consumers. Nowadays this perspective has been revised to account for the under-valued dynamism of modern consumption and consumers. A 'turn' as such results from long-term debates among cultural critics, who may initially assume an ambivalent attitude (optimism or pessimism) toward modern consumption, yet ultimately turn to adopting a middle position that takes into account the two opposing forces represented by the producer and the consumer in the cultural industry. In this new light, romance reading is one of the various forms of cultural consumption that exemplify the complexity of production and consumption. A most drastic challenge to the traditional production/consumption split happens when the reader transforms herself, as is often the case, into the author of romances. Therefore, the present paper aims to explore the reader, the text, the writer, and their interaction in the romance industry, with a focus on how studies of the female reader's agency develop along with a tendency, in recent feminist scholarship, to reconsider the significance of concepts such as pleasure, interpretative communities, and romance reading/writing as a cultural practice.

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