Radway, Janice

Janice Radway (1949–) is an American scholar in the fields of literature, American studies, and cultural studies. She has held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, and Northwestern University, where she is the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies. Radway has written and coedited numerous publications but is best known for her 1984 book Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, a study of romance novels and their female readers in the United States. The book marked a significant intervention into reception studies and feminist cultural studies, as Radway studied not only the institutional and ideological structure of the romance novel but also, particularly, the ways in which a community of women turned to the act of reading romance fiction as a means of temporary escape from their assumed feminine roles. Radway's investigation into women's consumption of mass media has ultimately established her as a key contributor in the areas of feminist media criticism, feminist theory and practice, and cultural studies.

Reading the Romance has proven to be influential across multiple disciplines. In it, Radway presents her research on a community of women romance readers in a Midwestern town (for which she uses the fictional name Smithton), drawing on material she obtained through questionnaires, observations, and interviews with groups and individuals. The first chapter of her book provides an overview of the economic and publishing changes that contributed to the rise of the romance novel, and the final chapters analyze readers' characterizations of “ideal” and “failed” romance novels. Whereas romance novels are typically assumed to uphold patriarchal conventions, Radway postulates that the women's desire for romance-based narratives featuring a powerful heroine and a sensitive male hero can be conceived as women playing out their desire to reform failed heterosexual, monogamous marriages that did not satisfy their emotional needs.

The most notable aspects of the book are the chapters in which Radway analyzes the romance readers and their motivations for the voracious consumption of what is seen as predictably plotted, cheap, mass-produced fiction. Radway found that what was most significant about romance novels for the Smithton women—most of whom were married mothers—was not the quality or style of the content but rather the act of reading itself. For these women, reading books of this genre was a means by which they could escape into fantasy worlds of high drama and romance, providing a temporary relief from the constant physical and emotional demands of wife and mother. Radway argued that this act of reading could be construed as a form of resistance, a means for women to deny, if only temporarily, the patriarchal demand that they serve others before themselves. Her findings suggested that the act of reading the romance could best be viewed as a “declaration of independence,” whereby women are able to free themselves momentarily from their typical routines in order to pursue their own individual pleasures. It is for these observations regarding gender and media consumption that Radway is best known.

Radway's approach to Reading the Romance and its findings helped to situate her as a pivotal voice in the areas of reception studies, feminist media studies, and cultural studies. Radway's emphasis on readers and reading experiences alludes to the encoding/decoding model, a cornerstone of the cultural studies approach, which emphasizes analysis not only of media content but also of its production and audience. Given Radway's emphasis on media consumption, she is often grouped alongside prominent reception theory scholars, many of whom are interested in the ways in which audiences construe meanings from media texts that may differ from their original encodings. What distinguishes Radway from other reception theorists is her additional emphasis on the motivations behind and processes of media consumption, as well as her focus on the romance novel, a women's medium traditionally thought to be one of the most degraded, mindless, and dismissible forms of mass culture. In addition, Radway has written reflectively on the process and value of media ethnography from a feminist perspective. She has advocated for ethnographers to be self-reflective about their own subject positions and how this may affect their interpretation of data and findings. Finally, Radway's work has helped to bridge academic analysis to actual practices of everyday people.

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