Alien(ated) Readers: Harlequin Romances and the Politics of Popular Culture

Author
Publication year
1991
Journal
Communication
Volume
12.2
Pages
129-150
Comment

The first link above corroborates the data in this entry but nothing more. The second gives a few more details about the journal: I thought that might be helpful since there's more than one journal with this name.

This paper discusses some of the ways in which popular culture has been theorized and, by way of a consideration of romance novels, seeks to address the particular question of the relationship of the popular to the ideological. The purpose is to examine popular culture's stake in the production of meaning and to explore whether mainstream popular discourses offer any possibilities for articulating a feminist and Marxist cultural politics. (129)

this paper argues for a perspective which sees the popularity of romance novels as derived - at least in part - from the articulation of discourses of patriarchy, the socio-political hegemony of Western capitalism, Reaganite populism, and the fetishization of pleasure. (135)