This paper identifies the problems with media studies of and in the third world, especially with reference to their treatment of women's issues. These problems include a lack of gender-specific analysis, a persistence in superficial treatment of issues related to women, and the empirical invisibility of women. I then argue that feminist communication studies of third world women's experiences with popular culture provide an opportunity to go beyond unidimensional and reductive analyses to more historical and multidimensional approaches to understanding intersections of ethnicity, gender, class, and colonialism.
Keeping in mind this larger project, I subsequently evaluate and analyze Janice Radway's ethnographic study of romance readers to explore its potential as a way of investigating the inextricably interrelated issues of female sexuality, gender roles, and female subjectivity. After briefly touching upon the work of scholars in the United States who have borrowed heavily from Radway's work, I discuss the significance of studying the reception of romances in other non-Western cultural settings. Here, I outline the issues underlying romance reading in India, a third world postcolonial country, underscore the problems of "exporting" Radway's study to the third world and suggest that her study, while offering rich possibilities, has to be judiciously adapted to postcolonial third world cultures. (73)