Public images, private pleasures: Romance reading at the intersection of gender, class, and national identities in urban Indi

This dissertation takes an ethnographic approach to investigate the popularity of Mills & Boon romances from the United Kingdom among one group of young, Hindu, middle-class women in the city of Hyderabad in South India. My analysis of romance reading follows in the tradition of feminist cultural studies scholars Janice Radway, Elizabeth Bird, Andrea Press and Lana Rakow who used ethnography to investigate women's responses to the media. The findings of this study suggest that in a patriarchal culture, reading is a gendered leisure activity. Reading is a comfortable activity for women because they experience harassment on the streets. Women find that reading allows them to enjoy popular culture at home without arousing the suspicion of authority figures who regulate their behaviors. Women have to be home before sundown, seek approval for activities outside of home, learn domestic tasks, and avoid interacting with men. Group activities associated with reading such as visiting lending libraries are pleasurable for women; the groups women belong to help them counter street harassment and convince parents to let them venture outside the home. Women use the activity of reading to declare a need for privacy at home, which is often a place of work for them.;This study found two class dimensions to Indian women's romance reading. Readers view romances as resources to improve English-language skills and romances enable them to experience their identities as being upper-class and cosmopolitan. The gender dimensions of romance reading reveal the impact of patriarchal and nationalist discourses on women's lives. Women view their reading as sex education because they are denied knowledge of sexuality, they speak about romance reading as a "right" they deserve, and they argue that they are morally superior to "promiscuous" Western women. Readers use romances as escape fantasy to allay their anxieties about being single in a society where single women face social stigma. They find that the simplicity of Western romances, which do not describe the social expectations of Indian women, allows them to escape from the roles of dutiful daughters, wives, and mothers.