The Romance of Patriarchy: Ideology, Subjectivity, and Postmodern Feminist Cultural Theory Author(s): Teresa L.

Ebert Reviewed work(s): Source: Cultural Critique, No. 10, Popular Narrative, Popular Images (Autumn, 1988), pp. 19-57 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354105 . Accessed: 22/10/2012 11:21
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The Romance of Patriarchy: Ideology, Subjectivity,and Postmodern Feminist Cultural Theory

Teresa Ebert L.

ontemporary popular romance narratives are among the most significant narrativemodes in advanced industrial societies. They They are primary sites for the ideological construction of individuals as gendered subjects, especially female ones, in male-dominated heterosexual couples. By producing the female subject as complemented and sexcompleted by her relation to a male partner, patriarchynaturalizes ual identity, masking the cultural construction of the feminine, thereby continually reproducing women in a subordinate position. Only by interrogating the ideological production and circulation of gender is it possible to begin to change the social, economic, and power relations among individuals and in society. Patriarchyis the organization and division of all practices and signification in culture in terms of gender and the privileging of one gender over the other, giving males control over female sexuality, fertility,and labor. While seemingly universal, the particularstructureof patriarchy at any given moment is alwayshistoricallydetermined since it is formed
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0882-4371 (Fall 1988). All rights reserved. Critique. by Cultural

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in conjunction with a specific social formation and its dominating mode of production.' Under capitalism, the kinship relations and exchange of women characterizing previous (agricultural)patriarchal societies are displaced by new class relationsand commodity exchange,2 and the domestic economy-the "production of life," specificallysubsistence goods and human life-is subsumed under the privileged, profit-makingproduction of commodities in terms of wage labor-the "production of things"-while domestic labor is literally "de-valued" as non-wage labor. One of the main contradictions of patriarchalcapitalism is that the system of gender-differentiated power and property relations is eroded by the labor demands of capitalism itself. Women are periodically required as a cheap and available source of wage-labor at various levels of the economy, from manual to professional, while some men in turn engage in aspects of non-wage domestic labor. In order to perform the work required of them as they enter the (wage)labor force, women find it necessary to acquire cultural attributes previously reserved for men (such as assertiveness, analytical thinking, ambition, and leadership) and to occupy positions and perform functions previously defined as masculine, while the men who become involved in the domestic economy assume traits usually assigned to females (such as nurturance, emotionality, and tenderness). The differentiations between masculine and feminine increasingly collapse
1. By mode of production, I am referring to recent reformulations of the concept, under pressure of feminist and neo-Marxist critiques, to mean the historicallyvariable relation between the "production of things" and the "production of life," that is, the The production of subsistence goods and human life (see Gail Omvedt, " 'Patriarchy': 13, Sociologist no. 3 [Spring 1986]: 30Analysis of Women's Oppression," TheInsurgent 50). For current materialist-feministdiscussions of patriarchy,see especially the essays and and Women Modes by Kuhn, McDonough, and Harrison in Feminism Materialism: of ed. Production, Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe (London: Routledge, 1978), and in at and Relations Employment (MinnePatriarchy Capitalist Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy Work. Oppresapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). See also Michele Barrett,Women's in sion Today: Problems MarxistFeminist Analysis(London: Verso and NLB, 1980); Seyla as On Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, Feminism Critique: thePolitics Gender of (Minneapoto lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Christine Delphy, Close Home:A Materialist trans. D. Leonard (Amherst: University Press of MassaAnalysis Women's Oppression, of and Socialist Femichusetts, 1984); Zillah R. Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy theCasefor and nism (New York: Monthly Review, 1979); and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis Femiand Women nism:Freud, Reich, (New York:Viking, 1975). For a critique of some of Laing, these theories, see Diana Adlam, "Review:The Case against CapitalistPatriarchy," m/f 3 (1979): 83-102. and 2. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis Feminism, 376-81; 409-13.

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under the pressure of capitalism, yet patriarchyfinds new ways to perpetuate male privilege, making sure that wages, property ownership, control over production, and political power remain largely gender differentiated. In the face of these changing social and economic roles and attributes for women and men, how does patriarchysuccessfully maintain and reproduce the domination of one gender over the other? To answer this question I shall argue that the very ground of patriarchy-gender-is a signifier, a cultural construct and nota biological or naturalfeature. I will investigate the way patriarchyacts on individuals to reproduce gendered subjectivities through the consumption of commodities, notably texts. Especially effective in this process are what are called popular texts: mass-produced novels, films, television, comic books, and so on. The most powerful texts for reproducing gender distinctions are romance narratives,which are crucial sites for the operation of patriarchalideology. In this essay, I will focus on Harlequin Romances, since they demonstrate the fundamental ideological structure organizing all romance narrativesin any genre. Such an inquiry into the political and cultural processes through which patriarchyoperates to secure gendered subjectivityis part of what I shall callpostmodern cultural theory.3 postmodernism I do not feminist By mean "the logic of late capitalism" and thus do not reject it in toto(as FredricJameson seems to do in his "Postmodernism, or The Cultural neither do I embrace it (a la Lyotardin his Logic of Late Capitalism");4
3. I elaborate on the dimensions of postmoder feminist cultural theory in my Narratives: Theory Postmodern A Feminist Cultural But book, Patriarchal of Critique. it is important to point out here that my concept of "postmoder feminism as critique" differs from such current views of postmoder feminism as E. Ann Kaplan's notion in which feminism is seen as intervening in "utopian" and "commercial" postmodernism while continuing to be based on a largely untheorized female experience (E. Ann Kaplan, "Feminism, Transgression, and Postmodernism: Bakhtin and Baudrillard in Popular Culture Theory," session on "Transgression in Postmodern Culture," MLA Convention, San Francisco, 29 December 1987). I also contest Alice Jardine's eclectic, politically reformist attempt to reconcile the notion of woman as "gynesis" ("as the putting into discourse of 'woman' " as a process, "reading effect") with the traditional humanist idea of the subject and "experience" found in mainstream American femiand nism (AliceJardine, Gynesis: [Ithaca, N.Y.: Corell ConfigurationsWoman Modernity of Press, 1985], 25). At the same time I find the recent efforts to theorize "femUniversity as to inism as critique" in the essays in Benhabib and Corell, Feminism Critique, be because of their continued reification of female experience and for their problematic ambivalent and, for the most part, politically conservative conceptions of the subject. 4. FredricJameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,"

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ThePostmodern as Condition)5 the philosophy of the new epoch in Western history in which metanarrativeshave lost their epistemological legitimacy-a theory which is part of a larger mode of anti-foundationalism made popular in the United States by the "new pragmatism" of Richard Rorty and his followers. BothJameson and Lyotard"totalize" the highly complex and diverse cultural politics of postmodernity. In contrast, postmodern feminism is the moving site of opposition and contestation of patriarchy situated within, along side of, and against existing discursive practices (both moder and postmoder). It partakes of the discourses of poststructuralism and materialism but does not use (in other words, appropriate) them to renovate the dominant regime of truth. Postmodern feminist cultural theory, then, is an oppositional practice that simultaneously participates in and contests prevailing knowledges in order to critique and transform patriarchy.It refuses to reify "female experience," "woman," or the "feminine" (whether as the "natural" body or as the "body" of writing, as in I'criture feminine)nor does it essentialize the binarism of male/female. Postmodern feminist cultural theory is the critique of patriarchyin late capitalism and its organization and reproduction of practices, signification, and subjectivities in terms of asymmetrical power relations based on gender exploitation. Postmodern feminist cultural theory is transdisciplinaryand "post"poststructrualist:it engages in a critical investigation of the politics of knowledge and signification in culture and theorizes culture as an ensemble of conflicting discourses that aim at producing and maintaining subjectivities.Subjectivitiesare positions of intelligibility:the modes of knowing necessary for the reproduction of existing social arrangements-in other words, the patriarchaldivision of the "real" in terms of gender. Postmodern feminist cultural theory thus regards the cultural "real" to be the effect of social struggles to establish subjectivities that are supportive of specific gender, class, and race interests. It therefore "reads" theories of the "real" transgressively:both against and with each other. Such a feminist cultural critique draws on those theories of cultural signification that recognize meaning as instances of conflictuality.A. J. Greimas's theory of semiotics, for example, which
New LeftReview146 July-August 1984): 53-92. on Condition: Report Knowledge, A trans. G. 5. Jean-FranCoisLyotard, ThePostmodern Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

The Romanceof Patriarchy 23 proposes that cultural meaning is constructed out of diverse contradictions and contrarieties, provides a particularlyeffective approach for interrogating the struggle over meaning and subjectivities. Similarly, post-Althusserian ideology critique, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Pecheux's oppositional sociolinguistics all conceptualize the cultural construction of the "real" as the outcome of divisiveness, contestation, and conflictuality. In this essay I have undertaken a postmoder feminist cultural critique of the way romances engender female subjectivities in patriarchy. Such an inquiry into the politics of signification forces a rethinking of the way patriarchalideology contains and reappropriates changes in sex role differentiations and points toward new sites for feminism and the viable transformation of the patriarchalorder. The critique of patriarchalideology developed here is thus situated in the space opened up in cultural theory by Althusser and further revised by such subsequent thinkers as Hirst, Poulantzas, Laclau, Mouffe, Therbom, Callinicos, Coward and Ellis, Aronowitz, and E. O. Wright. Ideology as theorized in postmodern feminist cultural critique is not false consciousness or distorted perception, as it is in traditional Marxistusage, nor is it a set of disembodied ideas. Rather, ideology is the organization of material signifying practices that constitute subjectivities and produce the lived relations by which subjects are connected-whether in hegemonic or oppositional ways-to the dominant relations of production and distribution of power (and the consequent relations of exploitation) in a specific social formation at a given historical moment. Postmodern feminist cultural theory breaks with the dominant humanist view that the social informs most (Anglo-American) feminist practices in which the subject is still considered to be an autonomous individual with a coherent, stable self constituted by a set of natural and pre-given elements such as biological sex.6 It theorizes the subject as produced through signifying practices which precede her and not as of the originator meaning. One acquires specific subject positions-that existence in meaning, in social relations-by being constituted in is, of ideologically structureddiscursive acts. Subjectivityis thus the effect a
6. For a different reading, see Michael Ryan, "The Theory of Ideology ReconStudies2, no. 1 (1988): 57-66. sidered," Cultural

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set of ideologically organized signifying practices through which the individual is situated in the world and in terms of which the world and one's self are made intelligible. To enter signification, to be constituted as a subject in discursive practices, is to enter simultaneously into whatJacques I-acan calls the symbolic order. The symbolic order for Lacanis synonomous with language yet exceeds it; it is the economy of signification through which the subject is constituted, reality is made intelligible, and the limits on allowable meaning are set. It is also, if we read it intertextuallyin terms of (post)Althusseriantexts, the realm of ideology, the signifying pracof tices through which we live our relations to the world. Above all, the symbolic order is patriarchal:it is structured, according to Lacan, by the law-of-the-fatherand is synonomous with the name-of-the-father.7 By recognizing this patriarchal order of the symbolic, the apparent conflict between common theories of patriarchyas either the "rule of men" or the "rule of the father" dissolves insofar as men "rule" in the name-of-the-(symbolic)-father according to the law-of-the-(symbolic)father-in other words, in terms of the organization of significations around the phallus. As the domain of ideology, however, the symbolic order is not universal but historically produced; consequently, its features are susceptible to change. Although Lacan's theory, as Althusser I points out, is "profoundly anti-culturalist,"8 have located the subject as written by Lacan in its political and historical situation. Thus, psychoanalytic theories of patriarchy should be read not as prescriptive but as descriptive of historicallycontingent signifying practicesthat can only be transformed when the way patriarchydetermines the symbolic order is fully specified.9 The subject produced in this patriarchalsymbolic order, that is, in language, is, according to Lacanian theory, a fundamentally divided
A trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:Norton, 1977), 7. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: Selection, 66-68. and 8. Louis Althusser, Leninand Philosophy OtherEssays,trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 189. 9. On the uses of psychoanalytic theories for feminist critiques of the operation of and Jacqueline Rose, "Femininity and patriarchy,see Mitchell, Psychoanalysis Feminism; its Discontents," FeministReview 14 (Summer 1983): 5-21; Juliet Mitchell and (New Sexuality: freudienne" JacquesLacanand the "ecole Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine York:W.W. Norton and Pantheon, 1985); and Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and An vol. and Narrative Cinema," Movies Methods: Anthology, 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 303-15.

The Romanceof Patriarchy 25 and gendered self, unlike the unitary subject of Althusserian theory with its residue of the humanist essentialized self. By gaining language, the subject written by Lacan becomes entirely contained within signification and the already existing social-and ideological-network of the symbolic order (that is, patriarchy)and loses any direct, unmediated contact with its own body, with what common sense calls nature or the real. At the moment of entry into signification, the imaginarywhich designates the individual and cultural unconscious-is also constructed as supplementary to the symbolic. The subject is thus doubly divided by signification: separated from immediate contact with its own body and split by the gap between the imaginary and the symbolic. Relationships in the symbolic order are multiple and marked by differences, mediations, and the "principle of heterogenity," while those in the imaginary are dyadic and characterizedby an unmediated identification, merging the self and an ideal image. Such images are "specular" and are based on what Lacan calls the "mirror stage";they reduplicate one's desire and reflect it back in the form of a coherent, unitary other in contrast to the selfs own fragmented lacking. By giving Lacan's orders a more political reading, we can view the symbolic as the site of social struggle over signification in which opposing significations are repressed and relegated to the imaginary, which is the space for what the symbolic excludes. The imaginary is thus the arena of desire-the repressed and unattainablewish for what the subject loses upon joining the symbolic order. The unconscious is not the individual anarchic, "free" space of humanist psychological theories. Rather, it is determined and limited by ideology and the contestation over signification:the unconscious is inscribed in the social and political. I acan's third term, the "real," is not merely physical phenomena as Lacan asserts, nor simply textually mediated history asJameson deof fines it,10but the concrete effects the social struggle over signification in the symbolic. Ideology, then, can be theorized as the occurring it order; uses the forms and representations of the agency the symbolic of on behalf of the injunctions of the symbolic. Ideology harimaginary nesses the unconscious-the impetus of desire-in order to engender subjectsand secure them in the relationsof power and subjugationgenWe erated by the symbolic order-that is, by patriarchy. can thus clarify
10. Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic CritiStudies55/56 (1977): 384, 388-89. cism, and the Problem of the Subject," YaleFrench

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that the symbolic is traversedand disrupted by that which it tries to exclude-the imaginary-at the same time that its agency-ideologyreduplicates imaginary representations and desiring in order to support the symbolic and affect the real. As the agency of the symbolic order, ideology is the dynamic operator that organizes signifying practices and attempts to fix and limit the representations, meanings, and subjectivities they produce according to the requirements of the symbolic order. Ideology does so, I contend, by simulating the fixed, dyadic, specular identifications of the imaginaryon the level of the symbolic. This move suppresses the struggle over signification by representing the relation of signifiers to signifieds as a stable dyadic correspondence, which is then naturalized. This naturalization conceals the slippage, multiplicity, and alterity of signifieds. Through the same strategyof reduplicating and naturalizing imaginaryrepresentations, ideology seeks to situate individuals in relations of fixed identification with those subject positions necessary to maintain the symbolic order. Thus ideology represents gender differences, which are significations, as natural, biological givens, thereby producing the seemingly stable subject positions of male and female for individuals to occupy. Ideology calls, or in Althusser's term "interpellates,""lindividuals to take up their place in the gendered subject positions represented in discourses (specificallynarratives)in terms of which we make ourselves and the world intelligible. Individuals are not coerced but willingly ("freely")enter the site of male or female in the already existing patriarchalsystem of difference, privilege, power, and exclusion signifiedby gender because ideology, particularly through the harnessing of desire, makes gendered subject positions seem not only desirable and pleasurable but also the way thingsare:the obvious that goes without saying. Ideology thus constitutes, according to Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, "the very basis of the subject's activity,the conditions of its positions as subject, and the coherency of that subject in the face of contradictions which make up society."'2In other words, subject positions provide the individual with a reassuring sense of coherence and stability, concealing not only its split-self but also its own
173-74. 11. Althusser, Leninand Philosophy, in 12. Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Languageand Materialism: Developments and Kegan Paul, 1977), 68. and the Theory the Subject of (London: Roudedge Semiology

The Romanceof Patriarchy 27

situationin ideology:contradictory both becausethe incontradictory dividualis located in multiple and conflictingsubjectpositions and, more importantly, becauseideologyitselfand the subjectivities proit duces are fissuredby inconsistencies. not Ideology is thus misrepresentation,in that it is a false version of some originary "real"or thatit standsin oppositionto the "truth" or an "objective" scienceoutside ideology(as in Althusser's but theory), in that it represents itself and its signifying practicesas "natural," unified-even global-totalities free of contradictions. concealsnot It but only its own inconsistencies also its own construction throughsignification."Representations" thus not mental or physicalreflecare tions of "natural"and "real" referents,but ideological constructs its throughwhich ideology misrepresentsown actualityas a signifying thatrefersonly to its own significations. system Ideologysets the conbut ditionsof intelligibility determinenot only subjectivity knowlthat edge as well and establishesthe boundariesbeyond whichwe cannot know.Thereis no "outside"ideology,no unmediateddirectaccessto the "real"or the "truth" fromwhichto critiqueideology;to be outside sitone ideologyis merelyto be locatedin anotherone. If one is always theseideologicalopuatedin ideology,then the only wayto demystify erationsof productionand concealment-the only way to engage in of ideologycritique-is to occupythe interstices contestingideologies and createdwithina sinor to seekthe disjunctures opposingrelations gle ideologyby its own contradictions. in A critiqueof patriarchal ideologyis especially problematic thatits dimensionsare so extensive:it simulatesglobalityso suchegemonic and naturalwhile at the same time alcessfullyas to appearuniversal construction. hegemony, most completelyerasingits own historical By of of all aspects society, I do not meana unified,compelling governance of and but the dominantarticulation organization signifying practices in and producingsubjectivities theirlivedrelations such a wayas to appearnatural,coherent,and uncontested.Hegemonicideologies,such concealtheir own contradictions, as patriarchal successfully practices, and and constructedness effectively co-opt and suppress oppositions, and effortsto challengetheirdomination.Myfocontestingideologies cus in this paperis on a critiqueof the waypatriarchal ideologysecures and maintainsits hegemony through the reproductionof gendered and change.Thusmy ideologycritiqueseeks subjects by appropriating

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not only to "demystify" patriarchalideology's concealment of its own contradictions but also to reveal the way attempts at equality do not necessarily challenge patriarchy but may be recuperated and used to reinforce its domination. To develop such an ideology critique, we can adapt Greimas's semiotic square and use it not as a taxonomy of a semantic category but as an analytical model of the ideological oppositions organizing both the symbolic order and specific signifying practices, especially as can be seen in Harlequin Romances. The semiotic square, at its most abstract, is a schematic representation of what Greimas calls "the elementary structure of signification" which is the fundamental network of contrary, contradictory, and complementary relations between value terms necessaryfor the production and apprehension of meaning.13 But meaning is generated not out of a universal logic but in terms of historically specific contestations among different social groups in diverse sites of culture determined by the conjunction of a symbolic order and the social formation.We thus need to dispense with the square's logical formalism and reinterpretthe relations of oppposition, contradiction, and complementarity it describes (the elementary structure of signification) as the ideological relations (the historical conditions of
13. For Greimas's discussions of the elementary structure of signification and the An at Semantics: Attempt a Method,trans. semiotic square, see especially his Structural Daniele McDowell, et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) and Greimas and trans. LarryCrist, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana and A.J. Courtes, Semiotics Language, Press, 1982), as well as his key essays, "Elements of a Narrative Grammar" University (trans. Catherine Porter, Diacritics no. 1 [Spring 1977]: 23-40) and "The Interaction 7, Studies41 [1968]: 88-105), which of Semiotic Constraints" (with F. Rastier, YaleFrench are now collected along with other discussions of his semiotics and the square in his in Selected trans. PaulJ. Perron and FrankH. Collins On Meaning: Theory, Writings Semiotic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See also Ronald Schleifer'sdiscusand Semantics in his AJ. Greimas the and sions of Greimas in his introduction to Structural and Natureof Meaning: Semiotics, Discourse Theory (Lincoln: University of NeLinguistics, braska Press, 1987). Feminist uses of the semiotic square in textual analysis are largely thematic descriptions of the narrativepositioning of female characters,for example, in social roles (Nancy Armstrong, "Inside Greimas's Square," in TheSignin Musicand Lited. erature, Wendy Steiner [Austin: University of Texas Press, 19891 or semantic axes Realist Fiction the and Women, Theory, French [New York:Ox(Naomi Schor, Breaking Chain: ford University Press, 1983], 48-77). The few exceptions include Christine BrookRose's feminist critique of Greimas's squares ("Woman as a Semiotic Object," Poetics Today nos. 1 & 2 [1985]: 9-20) and Sara Steinberg's use of the square for a tropic 6, reading of Freud's dreamwork and gender relations ("The Master Tropes of Dream4, of ing: Rhetoric as a FamilyAffair,"AmericanJournalSemiotics nos. 3 & 4 [1987]:29-51).

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possibility) organizing the symbolic order and its signifying practices. We can then reconceptualize Greimas's semiotic square as an analytical model that both describes the fundamental relations of ideological incongruities determining any production of signification in a symbolic order and indicates the suppression and concealment of oppositional elements just as ideology attempts to repress its incongruities and prevent those aspects that challenge its hegemony from being articulated in discourse. Greimas's semiotic square lends itself to such a reunderstanding since it maps the various stages in which the terms and relations of the underlying elementary structureproducing meaning are transformed and only partially realized on the level of discourse. In other words, we can politicize Greimas's square to map in effect what Fredric Jameson calls the "tension between the realized and the unrealized terms" in a text.14Jameson, who has interpreted the semiotic square as a model for ideological closure, argues that "what for Greimas is to be formulated as a structural homology between the various levels on which the semiotic rectangle reproduces itself, for us on the contrary, becomes powerfully restructuredinto a relationship of tension between presence and absence."'5 A politicized semiotic square can interrogate the ideological organization of texts and identify the ways ideological contradictions are represented or disguised in textual features. The semiotic square, however, is not an analytic apparatus for constituting a "truth" separate from ideology, nor is it part of a formalist and ahistoricalstrategyor a metalanguage standing outside the historical relations that produce signifying practices. The semiotic square is alwaysideologically and historicallysituated. As a signifying practice in the symbolic order in which it is formulated, the square is itself ideologically constructed and bounded by the determining constraints on the symbolic order-the boundaries of intelligibility outside of which ideology does not allow meaning to be recognized. To specify these ideological limits we need to adapt "the typology of rules" Greimasformulates in his well-known essay with F. Rastier,"The Interactionof Semiotic Constraints.""Everysystem," accordingto Greimas, "comprises by definition a group of rules"which are manifested as
as Act Narrative a Socially Unconscious: 14. Jameson, ThePolitical Symbolic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 48-49. 15. Ibid.

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"prescriptions" and "interdictions."16So seminal are these oppositions organizing culture (out of nature) that the Soviet semioticiansJuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky use them to ground their definition of culture: "In the widest sense of the word culture may be understood as nonhereditary collective memory expressed in a definite system of prescriptions and prohibitions."17Thus we can define culture or the symbolic order of patriarchyas the set of discourses aimed at producing and circulating subjectivities in terms of prescriptions and prohibitions, and ideology as the agency that enforces these injunctions and thus secures those subjectivities.Taking it one step further, we can now conceptualize the elementary structureof signification, the fundamental ideological incongruities determining all signifying practices in a the and between prescribed theforbidden. symbolic order, as the opposition Modifying Greimas's typology, this irreducible ideological contradiction can be mapped as a semiotic square (see Figure 1).18 Injunctions Forbidden Prescribed / Contrary %.

! Desired/

Feared/
rohibited

Permitted

Sub-Contrarv Not-Prescribed Not-Forbidden Non-Injunctions Figure 1. The Relations of Ideological Contradictions

16. Greimas and Rastier, "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," 91. 17. Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij, The Semiotics Russian Culture,ed. Ann of Shukman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 3. 92. 18. Adaptedfrom Greimasand Rastier,"The Interactionof SemioticConstraints,"

The Romanceof Patriarchy 31 A semiotic square describing injunctions can be used to analyze the ideological incongruities at any point in the symbolic order, from the most fundamental injunctions of the entire system to a specific representation of these injunctions in a particularsignifying practice-such as the texts of Harlequin Romances. The prescribed term of an ideological inconsistency is that which is necessary for the symbolic order to exist in its present form and reproduce itself. It is thus desired and permitted. Its contrary, the forbidden term, marks an alternativeway of organizing signification and threatens the very existence of the hegemonic symbolic order. Ideology thus fears and suppresses this taboo way, prohibiting its articulation in the text, thereby rendering it unsaidand relegating it, whenever possible, to the excluded realm of the imaginary. Because it points outside the dominant system, beyond the boundaries of allowable meaning, the forbidden is literally unknowable to those located within the system, but is potentially intelligible to those situated, either historically or culturally, outside that system. Not only does the square indicate the relations hidden in a specific discourse or text, but it also reveals the enabling conditions of the prescribed term: its complementary relation with the not-forbidden. The not-forbidden, the fourth term of the square, is the negation of the negation and enables the prescribed term by implicating or complementing it.19It is a crucial site for the operation of ideology-particularly the recuperation of change and reinforcement of hegemony. In order to preserve this complementary relation, ideology represents it, on the level of discourse, as a natural given or substitutes the not-forbidden for the forbidden term, thereby creating a false and misleading opposition that conceals the forbidden threat to the hegemony of the prescribed. To analyze the production of gendered subjectivityin patriarchy,we need first to identify the fundamental injunction organizing it. It is the law-of-the-father-described in psychoanalytic terms as the Oedipal and castration complexes-which in its broadest sense is the mandate enjoining the subject to line up on one or the other side of the opposinot to tion seeming have or seeming to have the phallus constituting gender difference.Thephallusis the privilegedsignifieraround which nearly
19. Jameson, The Prison-House Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, of 166. 1972),

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all signifying practices in patriarchycirculate. It is not the anatomical organ, the penis; as Lacan says, "the phallus is not a phantasy.... Nor is it as such an object.... It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes."20If the phallus is a signifier then, as I acan puts it, the "relation of the subject to the phallus ... is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes."21Sexual difference is determined not by anatomy but by the subject's relation to the signifier. We are not, in other words, under any biological or natural constraints to line up on one specific side of the phallic divide or to remain in that subject position; our gender is thus precarious and unanchored. Furfixed thermore, signification itself slips, and meaning is not naturally but is produced out of the play of difference. Such fluidity and freedom of subject positions, if allowed, would undermine patriarchal privilege and power, which depend on a fixed and predictable differentiation of subjects in terms of the presence or absence of the phallic signifier. Such fluidity and freedom also threatens the patriarchalorganization of the economic order, which determines wages and work value in terms of gender. However, patriarchalideology operates to secure a stable relation between the individual and the phallic signifier and to restrict the shifting of subject positions by representing the phallus as natural and suppressing its actuality as signification.22 This ideological naturalization can be mapped on the semiotic square to reveal the elementary structureof significationit conceals (see Figure 2). The prescribed term, which is necessaryfor patriarchyto exist, is the representationof the phallus as natural, as anatomical organ, as penis. Through this hegemonic representation,ideology attempts to tie the meaning of the signifier to anatomy and to naturalize it as the obvious mark of biology. Contraryto the position of the phallus as natural is the forbidden term: the actualityof the phallus as culturalsignification which ideology conceals and renders unspoken-taboo-in order to maintain the illusion of naturalness.Ideology also prohibits and suppresses the recognition of the phallus as constructed, as not-natural,
20. Lacan, Ecrits,285. 21. Ibid., 282. 22. Ideology thus operates to limit the play of signification by asserting "transcendental signifieds" which cannot be simply removed from cultural and political effectivity by a hermeneutic operation-being placed under erasure. Ideology always already masters a deconstruction that does not engage the political, economic, and ideological practices of culture.

The Romanceof Patriarchy Prescribed Phallus as Natural (Anatomical)

33

Forbidden Phallus as Cultural Signification (Signifier)

Contrary

Desired/ Permitted {/

'

Feared/ Prohibited

Not-Forbidden Phallus as Given (Not-Signification)

Not-Prescribed Phallus as Constructed (Not-Natural)

Figure 2. Representation of the Phallus in Patriarchy which is complementary with the phallus as cultural signification. Opposed to these are the permitted, visible, and complementary terms, the phallus as both natural and given. The phallus as given, as not-signification, negates and hides the forbidden term and provides the enabling condition for the "natural"phallus, creating the ground of ideological obviousness on which it depends. Signifyingpracticesin patriarchy, such as romance narratives,participatein the representationof the phallus as alreadygiven and natural, thereby tying the phallus securely to anatomy and enjoining individuals to line up onlyon the side of having the phallus or of nothaving the phallus ideologically bound to their anatomy, thus producing the subject positions of male and female 23in terms of which individuals live their relation to reality and through which the actual condition of the phallus as constructed in signification
23. I use the terms "male" and "female" subjectivities instead of the more common "masculine" and "feminine" to stress that "male" and "female" are not biological sites but culturally-that is ideologically-produced positions, and to emphasize sexual identities and not merely to culturally deterthat these terms refer to constructed mined personality traits as the uses of "masculine" and "feminine" generally imply.

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is suppressed and hidden. The phallus is merely an empty signifier, yet it is ideologically disguised as a full, embodied presence. This naturalized phallus or penis, which is the determining ground of patriarchy,is thus a fraud represented as the authentic, natural, and inevitable given. Ideology must continually reproduce this fradulent phallus, forcing us to occupy the gendered subject positions reified by our anatomy, preventing us from either recognizing the arbitrarynature of the phallus in signification or challenging our engendering in patriarchy, which would necessarily threaten such an economic and social order based on the reproduction of gender differences. As a consequence, representationsof this naturalized phallus are so pervasive and so much taken for granted that they pass largely unnoticed. Harlequin Romances, for example, are saturatedwith representations of the male anatomicalorgan. These representationstake the form of tropic substitutionsfor the penis, as in such descriptionsof the hero as "straightand tall, as brown and unbending as the monster trees rearing ... behind him,"24and "the erect masculine figure astridethe horse";25 or, more directly,"the thrustingweight of steel-hardthighs and hips."26 These images, which are sites for the circulationof desire and the imaginary in romances, reify the penis and thus mystifymale power, sensuality, and sexual difference as physical and natural, while concealing the production of the phallus as signifieras well as the constructionof male prowess and privilegein significationbehind the naturalizedpenis. The texts of romance narratives simultaneouslyreproduce the primacyof the phallus and perpetuate its fradulent naturalization. Since the female is not naturaland given but ideologically produced, mapping the engendering of the subject on the semiotic square (see Figure 3) reveals the ideological inconsistencies informing the production of gendered subjects, both in romance narrativesand in patriarchal capitalism. The prescribed gender position in patriarchy is, of course, male: male, man, and masculine are all naturalized signifiersfor to seeming have the phallus.
24. Margaret Rome, TheWildMan (London: Mills & Boon, 1980; Toronto: Harlequin-Romance, 1981), 139. 25. Janet Dailey, Dangerous (London: Mills & Boon, 1976; Toronto: HarMasquerade lequin-Presents, 1977; rpt. Harlequin Salutes ... Janet Dailey, 1979), 119. Man (London: Mills & Boon, 1979; Toronto: Harlequin-Pres26. Dailey, ThatBoston ents, 1980), 90.

The Romanceof Patriarchy 35 Prescribed Male Gender

Contrary

Forbidden Ungendered

Desired/ U 3 Permitted

Feared/ Prohibited

Not-Forbidden (Quasi) Bigendered

Not-Prescribed Female Gender (Not Male)

Figure 3. En-Gendering the Subject in Patriarchy Those individuals located or "interpellated" in the place of male gender find themselves representativesof patriarchallaw and subjects of power, property, and privilege. Contradictory (diagonally) to male gender is the non-prescribed, the undesired position of female gender. Female, woman, and feminine are all naturalized signifiers for the imaginary relation between the anatomy of those lacking a penis and the subject position of seeming notto have the phallus. "Men and women" are thus, in Lacan'swords, both "signifiers bound to the common usage of language."27But woman, unlike man, is negatively constructed; she is relationallydefined in the patriarchalsymbolic order as notman, as the Other, as the one lacking the phallus-penis and consequently the one excluded from power and subjected to the rule of patriarchy and the domination of the privileged male gender. The meaning of female subjectivity, however, exceeds the limits of patriarchalsignification. Patriarchalideology tries to assert a positivistic, fixed relation of one signified for one signifier in an effort to limit the slipping of signifiers, but such relations are continually struggled over and, consequently, unstable and sliding. The signifier "woman"
27. Lacan, "Le seminaire XX," quoted in Mitchell and Rose, Feminine 49. Sexuality,

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cannot be securely fixed in the negative space of "not" male, and, insofar as it exceeds the limits of intelligibilityset by patriarchalideology, it becomes the site of the unspeakable and incomprehensible, the taboo place of ungendered subjectivity. Female subjectivity, as a result, is complementary with ungendered subjectivity: the forbidden and unarticulatedpossibility of a way of differentiatingindividuals and sigthan by the phallus. Patriarchythus fears and pronification otherwise hibits both, relegating much of their meaning beyond the bounds of signification of the system: they lie somewhere else, beyond the phallus, and therefore are unsaid and unintelligible. Bigendered subjectivity is the site where the economic order puts patriarchy under pressure, forcing it to allow some shifting of gendered features to meet transformations in the relations of production and the fluctuating labor needs of capitalism. But patriarchycannot allow individuals complete freedom to become bigendered, that is, to take on freely any or all of the attributes of the other gender, since it would undermine the illusion of "natural," immutable gender differences. Thus bigenderism is a strategic or quasi-bigenderism that can only be partiallyand temporarily enacted. Individuals are permitted to occupy bigendered subject positions-to take on limitedattributes of the other gender-only to the degree that is specifically required by current relations of production and only so far as the primacy of male gender is not substantially threatened. As the negation of the forbidden, bigenderism is complementary with male gender and ideologically permitted-even desired-because it provides the flexibility that enables the continuation of patriarchalorder in the face of the changing demands of capitalism. Ideology masks and preserves this fundamental complementarity by representing a false opposition between male gender and bigenderism, which it substitutes for the real threat to male hegemony-the forbidden, ungendered subjectivity.Ideology successfully deflects the site of conflict and any call for change away from the potentially revolutionary, nongendered subjectivitywhich is concealed and rendered unsaid, even unknowable: it is not possible to articulate this alternative(taboo) organization of signification, merely to mark it. Romance narratives are not only largely determined by this hegemonic ordering of gendered subjectivity but, even more important, they function primarily to reproduce it. Patriarchalideology operates through these narratives to conceal its contradictions and to locate

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firmly the "subjectof the text" ("the heroine") and the "subjectspoken by the text" ("the reader who identifies with the representationsproduced in the text") in the place of not-male, that is, of the female.28By "reader," I am referring specifically tofemale readers. Given the slippage of sexual identities into bigenderism, it is possible that romance readers can include males as well as females. However, ideology operates to inhibit male identification with female subjectivity (largely by stigmatizing the not-male), and romance readers are thus overwhelmingly female. Moreover, this reader who engages the text is not the essentialized "reader" of reader-response theories (i.e., those of Bleich, Holland, Iser, and Fish) and of most critical analyses of romances29which adhere to the humanist assumptions that readers are rational, unitary entities with pre-existing identities (including gender) and already formed beliefs which they bring to texts. In all these interpretations,as well as those of readers, writers, and editors, "femaleness" is naturalized as "essential" and alreadygiven by the body; only the specific features of "feminine" personality and roles are seen as constituted by such social units as the family. Texts, then, are viewed as largely reflecting these roles rather than producing them. These theories suppress the reader as a divided subject whose identity and even gender are constructed through her participation in such signifying practices of culture as texts.30
28. On the "speaking subject" and the "subject of speech" (the text), see Emile in trans. Mary Benveniste, "The Nature of Pronouns," in his Problems General Linguistics, Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fl.: University of Miami Press, 1971), 217-22; and Kaja Silverman'sdevelopment of these concepts to include the "categoryof the spoken sub(New York: Oxford of ject" (the subject spoken by the text) in her TheSubject Semiotics University Press, 1983), 45-48, 196-99. Also see Colin MacCabe's discussion of and Cure:Essaysin Psychoanalysis Benveniste and the subject in language in TheTalking ed. Language, Colin MacCabe (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 188-217. and the 29. See, for example, Janice A. Radway, Reading Romance: Women, Patriarchy, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Margaret PopularLiterature Jensen, Love'sSweetReturn(Toronto: Women's Educational Press, 1984); and Leslie Heroine:Text,History,Ideology Rabine, Readingthe Romantic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985). 30. This focus on feminine personality development, that is, on "sexual roles,but Sexu(Mitchell and Rose, Feminine only within the limits of an assumed sexual identity" of ality, 37) is articulated especially clearly by Nancy Chodorow in her TheReproduction and of Psychoanalysis the Sociology Gender(Berkeley: University of California Mothering: Press, 1978). Chodorow's concepts are adapted by Radway,Rabine, and Angela Miles.

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The process of engendering subjects through texts is neither a simple identification of the reader with the images of the text nor an interalization of its norms. Rather, the reader actively inserts herself in the relations of signification and the subject positions ideology articulates in the text. Of course, not all female readers readily assume the female subjectivities manifested in romances. Those that do are produced, in Michel Pecheux's terms, as "good subjects" who take up their place in the symbolic order. Those female readers, on the other hand, (i.e., feminist critics)who, to quote Pecheux, "turn against" and "counteridentify" with the subject of romance (the heroine) are "bad subjects" (as are those few male readers who may identify with the romance heroine and counteridentify with the male subject in the text, the hero). But by simply refusing the subject position offered, the reader does not challenge patriarchalideology, for she has not interrogated her engendering: counteridentification merely confirms what it opposes. The transformation of dominant "discursive formations" for Pecheux is enabled by "disidentification"in which "ideology . . . does not disappear, but operates ... on and againstitselfthrough the 'overthrow-rearrangement'of the complex of ideological formations."31 Patriarchalideology, however, effectively induces identification with the appropriate gendered subjectivities in the text by producing the need in subjects for a coherent, unified sense of self. Since gender is not naturally fixed, individuals constantly struggle over and even slip out of their proscribed sexual identities (as in the case of bigenderism). Such gender instability and identity confusion threaten to undermine the individual's imaginary sense of a whole self. As a result, individuals readily seek out and embrace those ideological representations that symbolically resolve these contraditions and produce the illusion of a In unified, stable subjectivity.32 fact, readers have been immersed in
While Rabine initially uses a Lacanian notion of the subject in her introduction, she considers only the "masculine subject ... as a necessarily split, alienated subject" the Heroine,10);her discussion of the "feminine subject" in Harlequin (Reading Romantic draws on Chodorow and refers to the "heroine's wholeness" (177) and "the deepest core of her feminine self' (174). For critiques of Chodorow, see Parveen Adams, "Mothering," m/f8 (1983): 41-52 andJudy Housman, "Mothering, the Unconscious, America16, no. 6 (November-December 1982): 47-61. and Feminism," Radical the and Semantics Ideology: 31. Michel Pecheux, Language, (New York:St. Stating Obvious Martin's Press, 1982), 156-59. 32. For a discussion of the appeal and operation of the imaginaryresolution of contradictions in producing gendered subject positions, see Valerie Walkerdine'sanalysis

The Romanceof Patriarchy

39

the ideological engendering practices of romance narratives-such as and Beauty,Cinderella, SnowWhite- since their enfairytales like Sleeping into (patriarchal)signification. Thus, when engaging romance nartry rativesas adults or young adults, readers are already deeply invested in their gendered subject positions and repeatedly seek to confirm those investments and resolve the contradictorypressures and practices that destablize their identity by frequently participating in the seemingly coherent female subjectivityproduced in these narratives.This desire to re-secure continually their female sexual identity accounts for the large number of romances consumed by individual readers and the frequency with which they re-read favorite texts.33 The primary ideological function of all contemporary romance narratives-Harlequins as well as such copy-cat imitations as Silhouette and Candlelight Romances-is the use of desire to reassert the "natural" "inevitability"of female subjectivityand continually to recuperate those subjects-both heroine and reader-who slip out of femaleness into bigendered positions. In doing so, romances conceal and naturalize the difficulties and the precariousness inherent in the position of being constructed as what is not-not male, not having the phallus, not privileged-and effect a narrative resolution of contradictory gender identities, thereby suppressing the ideological incongruities that threaten patriarchalhegemony. Harlequin Romances (as well as other romance narratives)represent this ideological recuperation in the form of a narrativedilemma: the heroine, the subject of the text, is not sufficiently a woman; she has not yet fully realized her sexuality, which in patriarchalideology can only be her hetero-sexuality and which is synonymous with her gender. She has not yet, in other words, realized her
and of British pre-teen girl's comics ("Some Day My Prince Will Come," in Gender Generation,ed. A. McRobbie and M. Nava (London: Macmillan, 1984). 33. John Markert estimates that "women spend $1.5 million a day on romance novels ... and read on the average 20 books a month" ("Romance Publishing and the Production of Culture," Poetics14, nos. 1 & 2 [April 1985]: 69). Radway found that of the romance readers she studied, "a third (fifteen) reported reading from five to nine romances weekly. An additional twenty-two (55 percent) completed between one and four romances every week, while four women indicated that they consume anywhere the from fifteen to twenty-fiveromances during that same period of time" (Reading Romance,60). She also discovered that "rereading is not only a widely practiced habit among the Smithton women but tends to occur most frequently during times of stress or depression. Three-fourths of Dot's customers reported that they reread favorite books either 'sometimes' (twenty-one) or 'often' (eleven)" (62).

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supposedly natural female sexual desire for the male hero, who is the ideal representative of the phallus, the paternal metaphor. Desire is not the automatic natural sexual response that romance narrativespresent. Rather, desire, as conceptualized in Tacanian psychoanalysis, is the effect of the patriarchalsymbolic order. Produced in the rupture between the conscious and the unconscious, it consists of that which is forbidden and repressed in language, that which the symbolic order-in other words, ideology-does not allow to be articulated. Desire is the repressed and unattainable wish for that which the subject loses upon entry into signification: the separation of the self from its own unconscious, its own body, the other-a disjunction it views as loss of unity, loss of fullness of being, loss of oneness with another. It is the unrealizable longing for wholeness of self and unity of oneness with another. Patriarchalideology harnesses this desire for connection by constructingit in terms of desire for the gendered other, the sexual or genital mate. The partner in the sexual relation is, in Lacan'swords, made to "stand as the cause of desire."34In romances, the hero is represented as the sexual complement who completes the heroine's lack, making her whole in the orgasmic unity and oneness of genital sexual relations, whether these are actualized in the narrative or metonymically displaced onto a kiss. The unfillable lack of the divided subject is thus ideologically disguised in the heroine's longing for the hero. Moreover, the hero, as representative of the phallus and patriarchal power, instigates and controls the heroine's desire, forcing her to recognize her difference and take her place in opposition to his subjectivity-in the place of not-male of the female other. The complementary sexual unity of hero and heroine conceals and reproduces gender opposition by reifying the genitals as the site of fulfillment and the mark of naturalized immutable physiological differences. The male, for instance, is represented as hard while the female is soft; he is strong, she is weak. The signifier "maleness" is presented as a tangible physical Boston Man presence. It is described, for example, in Janet Dailey's That and ensnare her,"35 as a "hard male vitality [that]seemed to reach out causing the heroine to capitulate as "surrender quivered through her
34. Lacan, Ecrits,287. 35. Dailey, ThatBostonMan, 48.

The Romanceof Patriarchy 41 limbs" when his "strong hands ... forced her softer shape to fit the contours of his male form."36Since the signifier of maleness (the phallus) is ideologically depicted as an innate physical and genital trait, the heroine-as well as the reader who recognizes herself and her imaginary relation to men in the narrative's representations-must place herself in the opposing, seemingly "natural" and "physical" subject position of gendered other, of female, in order to have her desire realized. Thus, as the phallic embodiment of desire, the hero is the enforcer of the injunction to line up on the "other" side of the phallic divide. In Harlequin Romances, the problem of the herione not being sufficiently female, which is resolved by the imperatives of desire, is represented in two basic themes.37The first characterizes the heroine, regardless of age, as not yet a woman, as "a child," an asexual innocent, usually a virgin, who engages in infantile and ineffectual defiance of the hero and the phallic injunctions of desire. The hero is masterful, dominating, privileged, wealthy, and propertied, and usually in a position of authority with economic control over the heroine. His "overpowering virility,"in Dailey'swords,38 compels the heroine to acknowlhis masculinity, to accept her place as female sexual mate.39 edge In the other thematic form, the heroine is presented as a working woman who denies both her femaleness and the imperativesof desire in the interests of traditionally masculine concerns for independence, assertiveness,commitment to a career, and so on. In other words, this form deals with the problems of bigendering,with the shiftingof subject positions under the contradictorypressures of the economic exigencies of capitalismand the patriarchal reassertionof gender oppositions. The heroine, while not necessarilymore sexually experienced than working the child-woman heroines, is usually financiallyself-sufficient,although rarely wealthy, and thus more independent and resourceful than the
36. Ibid., 88-89. 37. These two thematic types inform nearly all romance narratives,including historicals. While the child-woman is readilyidentifiable,as in KathleenWoodiwiss'sTheFlame andtheFlower (New York:Avon, 1972), the working-womanor bigendered heroine, who takes on masculine traits and roles, is modified, as in the "highwayman"heroine of of Madness Laurie McBain'sMoonstruck (New York:Avon, 1977) or the warrior-huntress Lindsey'sFiresof Winter (New York:Avon, 1980). Johanna 135. 38. Dailey, Dangerous Masquerade, 39. See, for example, Rome, TheWid Man,and MargaretPargeter,Marriage Impossible (London: Mills & Boon, 1978; Toronto: Harlequin-Romance, 1979).

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dependent child-woman. At the same time, the working heroine is just as adamant (althoughnot as infantile)as the child-woman in resistingdesire and refusing to be made the gendered other. Often decisive, committed, competent, educated, and having some authority, the working heroine attempts to suppress her femaleness and do her work as if she were a man, or, in Dailey's words, as "one of the boys." Above all, she tries to relate to the hero in an efficient, detached, professional manner-in other words, from a bigendered position. For the most part, these working heroines are like the bigendered heroine of SarahJames's Public a Affair, universitysecretaryand feminist, whom the hero accuses of being "so determined to be judged a person that you forget you're also a woman."40But James's hero (like all romance heroes) refuses to treat her as an equal-that is, the same as himself, as another mansince he desires her, and in patriarchythe object of desire is inevitably constructed as the gendered other. The romance hero, in other words, of imposes himself as male, as representative the phallus, on the heroine, perceiving her not in the asexual, bigendered way she tries to construct herself but as woman and sexual mate. The workplace-where the hero is still often the boss or, at the very least, a powerfulclient or investor--is often the site of this sexualization of the bigendered woman whose efforts to assume traditionallymale practicesand behavior are treated as more titillatingthan threatening.In Public Affair,for instance, the professor-hero responds to the secretary-heroine's efforts to order him out of her office by gazing "up at her.... She was magnificent in her fury. A passionate, intelligent, opinionated woman. He wondered how she would be in bed?"4lAfterworking hours, in these as well as other working-woman romances, even greaterpressureis exerted on the heroine to leave her somewhat masculine traitsat work and assume her position as female sexual mate:just as there is pressureon any workingwoman, incuding the reader, to shift subject positions when she returns home to become lover, wife, or mother. Whether the hero is dominating and opposes the heroine's work, inor dependence, and assertiveness42 whether he is tolerant, sensitive, and
40. SarahJames, Public Affair (Toronto: Harlequin-AmericanRomance, 1984), 108-9. 41. Ibid., 37. 42. See, for example, Dorothea Hale, A Woman's (Toronto: HarlequinPrerogative American Romance, 1983).

The Romanceof Patriarchy 43 at supportive of her bigendered traitsand activities,43 some point in the he asserts his "utter masculinity"-his power as representativeof story the phallus-and imposes the patriarchalimperative of desire on the heroine who finally submits to it, as does the feminist heroine of Public Affair,for example, who now "wanted only to please him with her body, to be all the woman he would ever need."44At the hero's mere presence, touch, or kiss, the heroine's bigender is overwhelmed by the masculinity represented by his body, and the previously independent heroine is firmly located back in the place of the not-male and is represented as soft, vulnerable, and weak-as the naturalized female other signaled by her body. Thus, ideology operates in bigendered romances as well as in child-woman romances to naturalize the gendered opposition of the signifiers masculinity and femininity as innate, physiological traits rooted in genital differences. The heroine, however, does not readily succumb to her recuperation back into the gendered other. Her resistance is an important element of the plot dynamic of any romance and a way of diffusing the reader's own anxiety or protest over the narrative'sconcerted effort to locate the subject in the patriarchalorder, but ideology must disarm this resistance in order to forestall any serious challenge to its hegemony. It does so by trivializing and eroticizing the heroine's defiance of the hero's desire, turning her resistance into just another form of titillation and a further means of recuperation. The heroine's efforts to resist the hero's patriarchalauthority are frequently reduced to hysterical fits, trivialrole-reversals(such as taking the hero out to dinner [Dailey, and trifThatBoston Affair]), Man]or proposing marriage James, Public ling demands that the hero consider her opinion. All occur at the sufferance of the hero who is secure enough in his power to indulge the heroine. Never is the issue of the dissemination of power or the distribution of wealth raised; the hero is the unquestioned beneficiary and arbiter of patriarchy, and the fundamental gender discrepancies in wealth and power necessary to patriarchyare always maintained. The most sustained form of resistance to the heroine's ideological recuperation is her demand for monogamous sexual commitment
43. See, for example, Cassie Miles, Tongue-Tied (Toronto: Harlequin-Temptation, 1984). 44. James, Public Affair,248.

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(and usually marriage)from the hero, as well as her refusal to assume her place fully until her demands are met. The heroine objects not to male power but to male promiscuity: the hero's supposed sexual relations with a rival female or his "philandering," as heroines commonly call it (see Dailey's ThatBoston Man and James's Public The heroAffair). ine must give up other possibilities of subjectivityand occupy the site of not-male, that is, of female other, in order to fulfill her desires and complete her inevitable lack in the (imaginary)complementary unity of a sexual relation. She thus insists that the hero permanently take up the place of her sexual partnerin order to guarantee that relation. Such a demand is represented in the narrative as female power over the male, when in fact it reproduces female subjugation to the patriarchal order. By representing female resistance, power, and desire in terms of the demand for male commitment as a reliable sexual mate, patriarchal ideology locks women-and their precarious female subjectivity-into permanent monogamous sexual relations, thereby securing them in the position of not-male for life and subverting any bigendered slippage. Of course, under presssure of capitalism and the displacement of kinship structures, few relationships actually last a lifetime. But the ideological representation of romance in terms of lasting monogamous relationships pervades the patriarchalsymbolic order, and individuals continually seek to live their lives in terms of this imaginary relation. As a result, they repeatedly enter into successive series of seemingly permanent pseudo-monogamous sexual relationships. This constant reproduction of female desire for the male sexual partner, as representative of the phallus, in romance narratives and other signifying practices is the very ground of patriarchyitself. By desiring the male/phallus, the female subject (whether romance heroine or reader) continually reproduces the phallus as privileged signifier around which all signification-including her own subjectivitycirculates. She thereby repeatedly locates herself in the secondary subject position of gendered other-the not-male, the one lacking the phallus, power, and privilege. Through the operation of desire, ideology produces the female as the willing (desiring) agent of her own engendering and the linchpin of patriarchy. The power and effectiveness of ideology to reproduce the patriarchal symbolic order and recuperate shifting, bigendered subjects raises serious questions regarding the issue of equality, the problem of

The Romanceof Patriarchy 45

are change, and the criticaldebate over whetherromancenarratives and reactionary liberatingprotestsagainstpatriarchy. or oppressive of Regardless what position they take in this debate, critics,readers, writers,and editors alike all evaluate romances and any sense of change in terms of a common sense notion of "equality."Even the of feministsgroundtheirtheoriesof change majority Anglo-American and challengesto patriarchy the sameview of "equality" "obvion as to patriarchy. ously" and "naturally" opposed This"egalitarian whichstrives achieve to feminism," economic,politiand occupational for cal, educational, equality womenwithinthe existis to conditionof ing socialstructure, necessary improvethe immediate women in patriarchy, its unproblematic, but humanistconceptions of the self,gender,andequality renderit incapable the end of significantin In femly contesting powerrelations. otherwords,egalitarian patriarchal A inismis reformist rather thantransformative. transformative countermoves beyond(without the practice patriarchal neglecting) issue of the and immediatesituation oppression women in orderto critiquethe of productionof genderedsubjectsin ideology;such a practiceaims to and of and changethe organization distribution power,signification, the of in In relations production termsof genderand abolishexploitation. aimsat unlikeegalitarian short,counter-patriarchal feminism, feminism, transformation the globalsocialsituation the symbolic of and a radical orderand not merelythe reformof specificconditions. the One way to deconstruct concept of equality,revealits production in ideology,and demystify "naturalized" its oppositionto patriarit the chy is to interrogate throughthe semioticsquare.Mapping economy of the symbolic order on Greimas'ssemiotic squarewill help but to show how equalityis notcontrary patriarchy in factis the comand plementaryand enabling condition that reproducespatriarchy concealsthe forbiddenalternative. the Potentially, symboliccanbe orderedin anynumberof ways.But of the hegemonyof the patriarchal organization the symbolicaround dominatesand is that it ideologically distinctions so pervasive gender determinesthe realizationof the other possibilities,and we cannot order.The semioticsquare, of perceive anyotherformsof the symbolic of the relationsamong variousorganizations the symbolic mapping limitedby this hegemony.Thus, the prescribed is ideologically order, can and, consequently,the desiredand permittedarrangement only

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be a gendered one in which males (representativesof the phallus) are privileged and prevail in a monodominate set of relations, that is, one in which only one gender is allowed power (see Figure 4).
Prescribed PATRIARCHY Forbidden

A-TOPIA Gendered Genderless Monodominant Nondominant Dominated (Male ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~..

Desired/ Permitted (Order)

Feared/ Prohibited (Chaos)

Not-Forbidden

(Quasi) EQUALITY Gender Devalued Bidominant

MATRIARCHY Gendered Monodominant (Female Dominated)

Figure 4. The Economy of the Symbolic Order Contraryto this male dominated organization,the forbidden form is genderless and nondominate;no gender group prevails over the other because the symbolic is ordered around otherdifferences. Largely unthinkable from within the confines of patriarchy,such a nongendered, nondominate arrangementis unseen or made invisible by patriarchyas an absence, a nothing, a void-as the feared and prohibited chaos, since lack of gendered distinctions is represented by patriarchy as the anarchicalmoment of the total lack of order itself. It is an "a-topia"(to term without accepting her notion of this place as the borrow Kristeva's "a site of a female "countersociety"),45 place outside the law," that is,
ed. 45. Julia Kristeva,TheKristeva Reader, Toril Moi (New York:Columbia University Press, 1986), 202.

The Romanceof Patriarchy 47 outside the law ofpatriarchy. is "utopia'sfloodgate" in that it marks the It of a freeing new order which is not patternedaccordingto the possibility This phallus but is organized otherwise. unnamed other, this no-place, ais the forbidden site of challenge to patriarchy that ideology topia, represses and prohibits from being realized. Matriarchy,on the other hand, is fearedas a chaos and is not prescribedbecause it overturnsmale privilege by empowering those lacking the phallus. Yet, it is still conducive to patriarchyinsofar as it preservesgender difference and privilege. Equality,like bigender, is the fourth term, and is again the site where capitalism pressures patriarchy and imposes a temporary and partial devaluation of gender distinctions that permits such restructuring as bigendered subjectivity. Equality is bidominant: male and female are supposedly equally empowered. It ismthus contrary to monodominant no matter how much gender is devalued or supmatriarchy.However, pressed in favor of bidomination, the symbolic is still organized around the phallus, making equality contradictory to genderless atopia and complementary with gendered patriarchy. Like bigender, equality occupies the same site of the not-forbidden in patriarchy, making it the negation of the negation and the enabling condition of patriarchy. Patriarchyallows the devaluing of gender differences that constitute equality only to the extent that such devaluing renders patriarchy more flexible in the face of capitalism's demands for the bigendered organization of practices, but not enough to threaten the hegemony of male domination. Equality is thus not as obvious and unproblematic as egalitarian feminists and contemporary critics of romances seem to think. It is a recuperativeoperation in which the use of gender distinctions to organize practices can only be temporarily and partiallymodified. Since patriarchyprevents full realization of equality, just as it allows yet restricts bigender, equality is no more than a quasi-equality.Women are permited greater participation in the symbolic order only in so far as the sites of equality (the kinds of jobs, for example) are strategicallylimited so as not to overturn the ultimate power and privilege reserved for men. The reality represented in any romance narrative, not just Harlequins, is overwhelmingly patriarchal,and any equality that is allowed is highly restricted and never significantlychallenges male hegemony. Men retain control of wealth and the mode of production. It is always a man's world in which the heroine moves: whether it is the plantation,

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ranch, or island of the authoritative hero (Way, Lordof the High Valley; or Stratton,Firebird)6 a business, large corDailey, Landof Enchantment; or even a concert stage (Dailey, Heartof Stone; Mortimer, First poration, LastLove;Cooper, BattlewithDesire),47 is run by men and is often it Love, controlled by the hero. If the heroine should happen to own land or a company (generally by inheritance from a male), then it is usually managed by the hero or under threat of a takeover by him (Reid, ParadisePlantation and Dailey, Dakota Dreamin.48Whatever seeming equality the heroine is allowed-limited independence, financial security, authority, and so on-exists at the tolerance of the patriarchalorder and can easily be rescinded, as often happens when the hero exerts his control over the heroine (as in Dailey's Oneof theBoys,when the producer-hero removes the camera-technician heroine from the producThese patriarchalpower relations arejust as evition of a TV special).49 dent in other romance narratives,whether contemporary or historical; the heroine is inevitably subjected to male power, regardless of any equality and bigendering allowed her.50 Since equality in a patriarchallydominated order is unavoidably gendered, it is alwayscomplementary to patriarchy.Moreover, ideology this enables and perpetuates patriarchyby substituting complementary for the forbidden contrary-the suppressed alternativeto quasi-equality patriarchy,a genderless order-and by placing it in seeming opposition
46. Margaret (London:Mills & Boon, 1980;Toronto: Harleof Way,Lord theHighValley (London: Mills & Boon, 1975; Toroniquin-Romance,1981); Dailey, Landof Enchantment to: Harlequin-Presents,1976; rpt. Harlequin Salutes ... Janet Dailey, 1979); Rebecca Stratton,Firebird (London: Mills & Boon, 1975; Toronto: Harlequin-Romance, 1975). 47. Dailey, Heartof Stone(London: Mills & Boon, 1980; Toronto: Harlequin-PresLastLove(London: Mills & Boon, 1981; Toroncnts, 1980); Carole Mortimer, FirstLove, to: Harlequin-Presents, 1981); Ann Cooper, BattlewithDesire(London: Mills & Boon, 1978; Toronto: Harlequin-Presents, 1979). Plantation 48. Henrietta Reid, Paradise (London: Mills & Boon, 1979; Toronto: HarDreamin' (London: Mills & Boon, 1981; Toronlequin-Romance, 1980); Dailey, Dakota to: Harlequin-Presents, 1981). 49. Dailey, Oneof theBoys(London: Mills & Boon, 1980; Toronto: Harlequin-PresEdiin Janet DaileyCollector's ents, 1980; collected with Beware theStranger A Harlequin of tion 5, 1982). 50. See, for example, such Silhouette Romances as Joanna Scott, Corporate Policy in (New York:Silhouette-Special Edition, 1984) and Tracy Sinclair, Castles theAir (New York:Silhouette-SpecialEdition, 1983); such Candlelight Ecstasy Romances as Bonnie Drake, TheSilverFox (New York: Dell-Candlelight Ecstasy Romance, 1983); and such historicals as Woodiwiss, TheFlameand the Flowerand Lindsey's Firesof Winter.

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to male-dominated patriarchy.The binary opposition between (quasi)equality and patriarchy is thus a misleading one that is ideologically manipulated to repress and conceal the real contrary and site of challenge to patriarchy-the unnameable genderless organization of the symbolic that threatens to dismantle the order of the phallus. Egalitarianfeminism is thus always already contained by its complementary relation to patriarchy; no feminism can ever substantially challenge patriarchal hegemony until it demystifies the ideological production of equality itself. Yet, this ideological substitution of equality for genderlessness is so powerful that nearly all recent readings of popular romances, whether by general romance readers and writersor by feminist critics, focus on the false opposition between male domination and equality. Almost all of these discussions (even those narratives which thematize this issue, such as Wentworth's Liberated Lady,51 fail to recognize the ThatBoston Man, and James's Public Affair) Dailey's ideological function of this misleading dichotomy and, instead, debate whether romance narrativesare oppressive or liberating. They largely pass over how these texts produce individuals as gendered subjects via recourse to what is "natural" and "that-which-goes-without-saying." Romance narrativesvary considerably in the way they manifest this dichotomy through such discursive features as plot, characterization, themes, tropes, and so on. Yet, many editors, readers,and literarycritics commonly perceive this diversityin terms of a progressivechronological development between male-dominated "earlier romances" (childwoman romances)and more egalitarian"recentromances"(bigendered, working-woman romances). Editorialguidelines52and the advice writers give to others encourage this sense of egalitariandevelopment; one such successful romance writer advises "to write about the conflict between career and family, the problems of love the second time around, the struggle for sexual equality. Whereas in the past, the most common theme was a woman's virginity and her preservation of it, themes have changed drastically,as have the times."53Focusing on this apparently progressive trend, such critics as MargaretJensen argue for "an emerging feminism in these positive portrayalsof women, work, love
51. Sally Wentworth, Liberated Lady(London: Mills & Boon, 1979; Toronto: Harlequin-Romance, 1979). the and Novel 52. SylviaBurack,ed., Writing Selling Romance (Boston:Writer,1983), 115-48. 53. Ibid., 7.

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and marriage.... [T]he dominant/submissive relationships between men and women traditionallyvalued in romance are increasingly disWhile critics placed by the possibility of more equal relationships."54 likeJensen find a progressive development within the Harlequin series of romances, others, such as John Markertand Janice Radway, associate the earlier, traditional, "staid" romance forms with all Harlequins and define more recent, "sensuous," "liberated" developments in terms of new contemporary romance series (such as Silhouette and Still other critCandlelight Ecstasy Romances) and some historicals.55 ics, like Ann Barr Snitow, regard claims for equality as "misreadings." Snitow argues that "small surface concessions are made to a new female independence .. . but the novels only mention the new female feistiness to finally reassure readers that 'plus (a change, plus c'est la mime chose.' Independence is always presented as a mere counter in the sexual game, like a hairdo or any other flirtatious gesture; sexual tries to explain these feeling utterly defeats its early stirrings."56Jensen that "traditional images of contradictory interpretations by noting women persist in Harlequins, alongside an emerging feminist consciousness that leaves the novels open to many interpretations."57 However, these diverse interpretationsof textual variations in plot, characterization, and themes are neither the result of substantial changes in romance narrativesnor a consequence of the temporarycoexistence of the old and the new as more egalitarianfeatures begin to displace traditionalones. The emphasis on a progressivechronology in the publicationof Harlequin Romances or between Harlequinsand other types of romances or series creates a distorted sense of progress and transformationand is at the very least a historically and ideologically limited and forgetfulview of the types of romance narrativesHarlequin
SweetReturn,139. 54. Jensen, Love's the 55. Radway, Reading Romance, see also Markert,"Romance Publishing." 56; Review20 (Spring56. Ann Barr Snitow, "Mass Market Romance," RadicalHistory 30 Summer 1979): 151. See also Ann Douglas, "Soft-PornCulture,"NewRepublic, August 1980, 25-29. witha Vengeance: SweetReturn,122. See also Tania Modleski, Loving 57. Jensen, Love's Fantasies Women Mass-Produced (New York:Methuen, 1984). For other readings of rofor Fiction Women Mass-Market and mances see Jan Cohn, Romance the Erotics Property: for of The Duke University Press, 1987);Jean Radford, ed., TheProgress Romance: of (Durham: How Fiction(London: Routledge, 1986); and Coward, FemaleDesires: Politics Popular of and Are (New York: Grove, 1985). Bought, Packaged They Sought,

The Romanceof Patriarchy 51 Enterprises has published since it began its romance series in 1958.58 Some of the "earlier"so-called non-liberated Harlequins manifest the same discursive features of equality evident in "recent" liberated and bigendered romances-independent, professional heroines and strong yet sensitive and caring heroes who in the end support the heroines' careers. In fact, in some of these, such as Allen's DoctorLucy and Shore's Doctor the Memsahib,59 women have a professional status and commitment-that of surgeons-identical to those in such recent Harlequins as that of the veterinarian in Orr's LoveIs a FairyTale,the arHour, and the speech therachaeologist in Lambert's FromthisBeloved in Miles's Tongue-Tied, in other romances series such as the conor pist and the corporate atgressional lobbyist in Daley's In Defense Passion of in Scott's Corporate Policy.60 torney It becomes even more difficult to maintain a progressivist view based on chronological change when the publishing histories of individual texts are considered. An examination of the pattern of dissemination of these romances reveals that in the contemporary market, the old and the new are circulated side by side and readers consume both with little difficulty. Harlequin Enterprises continually reprints and redistributes previously published tites, either as "new" books with redesigned, more contemporary covers or as part of its numerous "Collector's Editions" and such special editions as "Limited Vintage Edition" or "Harlequin Classic Library,"in which the original Harlequin series number or date is cearly identified, usually on the cover. For example, Doctor Lucywas first published in 1956 in hardcover by Mills & Boon in England (as were nearly all Harlequins until recently) and then as Harlequin Romance no. 416 in March 1958; it was reprinted again in 1958, as well as in 1959, 1962, and 1971; then in 1976 it was published as a "Harlequin's Collection" edition, no. 3. Doctor Memsahib a similar history of republications and special editions, has from 1958 to 1980. More recently, the Harlequin romances ranging Sweet 58. Jensen, Love's Return, 32-33.

59. BarbaraAllen, Doctor Lucy(London: Mills & Boon, 1956; Toronto: HarlequinRomance, 1958; rpt. 1958, 1959, 1962, 1971; Harlequin's Collection, 1976); Juliet Memsahib Shore, Doctor (London: Mills & Boon, 1958; Toronto: Harlequin-Romance, 1960; rpt. Golden Harlequin Library, 1972; Harlequin Classic Library, 1980). 60. Zelma Orr, LoveIs a FairyTale(Toronto: Harlequin-AmericanRomance, 1984); this Hour(Toronto:WorldwideLibrary-Superromance, WillaLambert,From Beloved 1982); Kit Daley, In Defense Passion(New York: Dell-Candlelight Ecstasy Romance, 1985). of

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written by the phenomenally successful Janet Dailey-author of "eighty titles in seven years, (whose) 100 millionth book rolled off the presses in spring of 1983"61-have been collected and repeatedly reissued in various Janet Dailey special series and collections, such as "Harlequin Salutes ... America's Queen of Romance Janet Dailey" and "Harlequin Janet Dailey Collector's Editions." Now that she has left the Harlequin and Silhouette lines and markets bestsellers under her own name, as in her four-volume Calder saga, Harlequin is again reissuing all her books in a new series, "Janet Dailey Americana," that highlights a new title on the cover and downplays both the original title and the Harlequin imprint. Other romance series have also appeared, reissuing novels under such lines as "Candlelight Ecstasy Classic Romance," which features "The Best of Candlelight." More important for an ideology critique, earlier and recent texts foregrounding equality and working women themes not only circulate simultaneously but coexist with nonegalitarian romances, which are also continually published and reissued. A large portion of the books published by Harlequin Enterprises each month, especially in their Harlequin Romance and Harlequin Presents lines, continue to emphasize patriarchaldominance and female dependency, or some combination of dominance and limited equality. A few examples of this ongoing publication of narrativesforegrounding the heroine's depenPrimrose dence and the hero's domination are Blair,The Bride; Winspear, DearPuritan; Dailey, Dangerous Masquerade; Pargeter,Marriage Impossible; Rome, Second-Best Stunt;and again, Winspear,A Bride;Lyons, Dangerous which is one of the many narratives that recirculate SilkenBarbarity, traces of one of the most popular of all romances, E. M. Hull's The Sheik,which went through 72 printings in its first year alone and, of course, was made into the 1922 film starringRudolph Valentino.62Examples of those romances which present a mixture of domination and independence include Beaty, Southto the Sun; Lindsay, Cageof Gold; Wentworth, Liberated Lady;Kidd, Beyond Dailey, Land of Enchantment;
61. KathrynFalk,Howto Write Romance GetIt Published a and (New York:NAL, 1983),35. Bride(London: Mills & Boon, 1961; Toronto: Harle62. KathrynBlair, ThePrimrose t<uin-Romance,1966; rpt. 1974, 1975);Violet Winspear, DearPuritan (London: Mills & Stunt(LonBoon, 1971; Toronto: Harlequin-Romance, 1973); Mary Lyons, Dangerous Bardon: Mills & Boon, 1984; Toronto: Harlequin-Presents, 1985); Winspear, A Silken E.M. Hull, The Sheik (Boston: Small, barity (Toronto: Harlequin-Presents, 1981); Maynard, 1921).

The Romanceof Patriarchy 53 and The mixed circulation of new and old tiControl; Mather, Sirocco.63 tles is even more extensive when we take into account such common reader practices as collecting romances (particularlythe entire oeuvre of prolific writers), frequent rereading of favorite texts, exchanging books among friends and relatives, and trading romance novels at second-hand bookstores, many of which specialize in romances and carry early editions. Thus, the change critics and readers attributeto romances is not the result of a chronological progression and transformationin romance narratives a consequence of the increasingproliferationof more serbut ies and more titles to keep pace with mass consumption. Change, in other words, is the outcome of the commodification of varietyand novelty demanded by a consumer society and not the result of any displacement of dominant values. Instead of a diachronic(historical) "change"or prothis is merely a synchronic (static)"diversification" taste and of gress, production. In 1980, "eight major publishers fought to sell 140 category in romance titles a month";64 1984, the number of new romance titles that year doubled the 1980 figures, bringing the output to published In over 1,000 titles.65 1984, Harlequin alone published 26 titles a month, divided among 5 separateseries:the original Romance (6); Presents(8), begun in 1973; the more recent Superromance(4);American Romance Since then, Harlequin has also introduced oth(4);and Temptation (4).66 er lines, incuding Harlequin Intrigue,Gothic, and Historicalromances. Each of these Harlequin series-as well as all the other romance lines and various historical romances-occupies a different site along the spectrum and likewise is located differentlyin terms patriarchy-equality of the continuum of sexual explicitness, which is commonly divided as or (some sensual action above the waist),or (3) "(1)virginal sweet,(2) spicy steamy holds barred, sexually)."67 (no
to 63. Betty Beaty, South theSun (London: Mills & Boon, 1956; Toronto: HarlequinRomance, 1964; rpt. 1973, 1977; Limited Vintage Editon, 1979); Rachel Lindsay, Cage fCGoldLondon: Mills & Boon, 1973; Toronto: Harlequin-Romance, 1974; rpt. 1977; ( Control (London: Mills & Boon, 1981; ToHarlequin Salutes, 1980); Flora Kidd, Beyond ronto: Harlequin-Presents, 1981); Anne Mather, Sirocco (London: Mills & Boon, 1983; Toronto: Harlequin-Presents, 1984). 64. Jensen, Love's SweetReturn,57. 65. Markert, "Romance Publishing," 69. 11. 66. Falk, How to Writea Romance, 67. Ibid., 12.

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The critics' sense of progress and the distinctions they draw between dominating and more egalitarianromances all presuppose, to one degree or another, that the primary relation of literarytexts to society is largely one of reflection or imitation. Thus, change or progressive developments in romances are characterized in terms of whether they imitate changes in social behavior and attitudes. Markert,for example, argues that Harlequin Romances (which he assumes are all "sexually chaste," ignoring their diversity) have been largely "out of sync with changing norms and values" and "fly in the face of social change in sex whereas he considers roles taking place during the 1960s and 1970s,"68 that the newer romance lines, such as the Dell CandlelightEcstasyseries, "more cosely approximate people in the social world in the 1980's."69 But texts do not so much duplicate social practices as produce the representations through which we live those practices and make them intelligible. In other words, the text's relation to culture is above all ideological: the text does not just respond to cultural changes but generates the patterns and subject positions necessary for making sense of and dealing with these changes in ideologically determined ways. Thus it is possible to read the same texts not as "out of sync" with the changing sexual mores and male-female relationships of the times, but as ideologically loaded attempts to adapt and constrain those practices, recuperating them back into patriarchyand insuring that they operate to engender further rather than to challenge the patriarchalorder. For instance, the frequent intensification of male presence-by a magnification of the phallic signifier-in the form of increased male violence and dominance in many romances (contemporary and historical) is not an out-moded carry over from out-of-date attitudes toward violence but a powerful assertion of the patriarchalimperative to line up on one or the other side of the phallic divide at a time when masculinirv and femininity are under pressure from an increasing bigenderism in capitalism. Moreover, the notion of change underlying these critical studies is based on the assumption that the new and different-whether social behavior or textual features-themselves are is change. But an adequate theory of change needs to distinguish between change as the
68. Markert,"Romance Publishing," 73. 69. Ibid., 87.

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fundamental transformation the economy of signification determining of culture (or of the relations of production determining the social formation) and change as merely a proliferation of differences or series of alterations that do not challenge this governing order but, rather, reinforce it. Change, as a series of alterations,continually adapts the fundamental economy of signification to various conditions in much the same way a tailor "alters" a suit without ever transforming the basic style of the garment. Such change expands diversity in order to extend the range of the dominant into other areas without minimizing its previous sphere of operation. If we are not to mistake the varietyof alterations for transformation, we need to interrogate the ideological function that specific instances of difference serve. The proliferation of romance lines and the diversification of textual features entice a varied spectrum of readers, with contradictory and changing preferences, into the imperatives of desire and gendered subject positions represented in these texts. More than 25 million women in the United States read romance novels;70this number is greatly expanded when romance readers in Britain and the Commonwealth countries are included. These women readers, according to Jensen, "are spread throughout the female population." She paraphrases a Harlequin executive as saying that "if 22 percent of the female population is between the ages of 25 and 34, then 22 per cent of
the Harlequin reading population is between the ages of 25 and 34."71

The romance reader is not only a white woman or a resident of advanced industrial societies; Harlequin "now publishes in twelve languages, and its books are sold in ninety-eight countries,"72including those of North America, Europe, the British Commonwealth, and CenRomance traland South America, as well asJapan and the Philippines.73
70. Ibid., 69. 71. Jensen, Love's SweetReturn,141. 72. Ibid., 34. 73. The worldwide distributionof Harlequin Romances points up the necessaryideological function romances perform in the imperialistproject of imposing new forms of patriarchy(correspondingto capitalism)on the more traditionalforms already existing in the third world. One example of the uses of romances for such a purpose is Oxford UniversityPress'spublication (in their Alpha Books series)of abridged Mills & Boon romances for use in the teaching of English as a foreign language in Britainand overseas Culture 15, (Peter H. Mann, "The Romantic Novel and its Readers,"Journalof Popular no. 1 [Summer 1981]: 14). The BritishMills & Boon romances are owned by Harlequin Enterprisesand are frequently reissued under the Harlequin imprint.

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readers, writers, and editors also include American minority women,

heroine and Puerto Rican setting, or the CandlelightEcstasyRoTender mance, The Mending, dealingwith a Blackheroineand hero and writtenby two Blackwomen under the pen name Lia Sanders.74 one Diversityof textualfeatureshelps differentiate line, one type, from anotherand insuresconsumptionby facilitating readeridentification of those texts which contain their preferredfeaturesand the traitsmost likelyto stimulate theirdesire-ing. Some readers find domination titillatingwhile others find rebellion titillating; some readers wantmore "realistic" heroineswho areindependentwithcareers; otherswantyoung,virginal while stillotherswant (andinfantile) heroines; the heroine,whetherindependentor dependent,to be a historical figure ratherthan a contemporary one; some readersseek masterful, dominatingheroes, and others want sensitiveyet strong ones. And some wantto be able to identifywith a heroinefrom theirown ethnic group ratherthan the conventional Anglo-Saxonone. Evenviolence, which is ideologicallyproducedas a signifierof passion, power, and is masculinity, a variabletraitthat appealsto some readerswhile offendingothers (notablyRadway's group of readers). If this considerable of romancepublications diversiand expansion ficationof textualfeatures,this seemingmove towardmore independent heroinesand more egalitarian themesareall implementsof patriarchaldesireservingto recuperate evergreater an into rangeof readers the subjectpositionsof femalesand to securetheiridentityas otherto the privilegedphallusand its representative, male, where then is the the site of change?If equalityin the end is merelya strategic gesture that reinforcesratherthan challengespatriarchal domination,what then is the natureof counter-patriarchal We struggle? can intervenein dominationonly alongthe fissuresof ideological contradicpatriarchal the concealsand by trying tion, by unmasking incongruities patriarchy the to articulate unsaid,the forbidden,ungenderedotherthatpatriarchy suppresses.Patriarchy attemptsto secure its hegemony through the ideologicalnaturalization its privilegedsignifier,the phallus. of
74. La Sanders, TheTender (New York: Dell-Candlelight Ecstasy Romance, Mending 1982. See also RosemaryBray,"Love for Sale,"Black (December 1982): 71-76. Enterprise

American Romance, A Woman's Prerogative, Hale with its Hispanic by

and publishersfeature such "ethnic romances" as the Harlequin

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But, as Terry Eagleton points out in his discussion of the ideological "securing of the conditions of existence of certain dominant social relations": "nothing secures that securing: those privileged signifiers so thus become the space of a struggle, that we are able cursorily to define ideology as 'the class-struggleat the level of signifiyingpractices.'"75 Counter-patriarchalstruggle, then, is the struggle over signifying practices. It is the attempt to prevent the securing of patriarchalsignification, the effort to displace the privileged phallic signifier, to demystify its naturalization and desireability, and to show its construction. The abolition of patriarchaldomination, then, results not so much from the call for greater equality for women but from the political move to separatethe (non)phallus from the body and reveal the construction of gender in signification and the ideological uses of desire to secure the subjectivitiesnecessary for the relations of production. In doing so, we displace the privileged signifier upon which patriarchyis ordered.
75. Terry Eagleton, "Ideology, 1979): 79. Fiction, Narrative," Social Text 1, no. 2 (Summer

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