What do you think?
Rate this book
Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms
Robyn R. Warhol’s goal is to investigate the effects of readers’ emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. She argues that modern literary and cultural studies have ignored nonsexual affectivity in their inquiries. The book elaborates on Warhol’s theory of affect and then focuses on sentimental stories, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas as distinct genres producing specific feelings among fans. Popular narrative forms use formulas to bring up familiar patterns of feelings in the audiences who love them. This book looks at the patterns of feelings that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular genres evoke, and asks how those patterns are related to gender. Soap operas and sentimentalism are generally derided as “effeminate” forms because their emotional range is seen as hyperfeminine. Having a Good Cry presents a celebration of effeminate feelings and works toward promoting more flexible, less pejorative concepts of gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 15, 2003
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 27, 2012
Well, for what I'm interested in academically/dissertationally, this isn't my bag. However, it is super interesting and well written, so I enjoyed it. (My nerd status is becoming cemented, isn't it?)
Robyn--yes, I know her, too; she looks sort of like an older, funky academic version of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada--does feminist narratology (long story), so this text, like her others, is concerned with issues of that nature. Her main argument goes something like this: reading is a physical act. It produces physical reactions, like, as the title suggests, crying, but also, facial expressions, quickened breathing, etc. These are called feelings. (She argues successfully for WHY we should call these things feelings, instead of something else, too.) Some of these feelings have been enculturated to be gendered. (She actually makes a brilliant case for the various complications dealing with sex v. gender v. sexuality; therefore, she argues that these feelings are not gendered to be "female" but instead effeminate, though without a negative connotation to the term.)
Then she argues how certain narrative types--serials, marriage plots, soap operas, etc.--are designed to elicit these feelings from us, which then perpetuates the cycle of these pop culture forms being "consumed" by effeminate "consumers" which only keeps the cycle going of why, say, soap operas are "for women." Her close reading of Pretty Woman is spot on (though, at this point, any one who's ever heard of Judith Butler et. al and/or has half a brain can probably do a feminist critique of Julia and Richard's movie), and the amount of scholarship out there on soap operas--the shows themselves, the viewers, etc. is mind-boggling. This was a quick and easy book of the day. Again, not super useful for my work, except the idea of the act of reading producing physical effects in readers. Oh, and she talks about orgasms. So that's fun.
Robyn--yes, I know her, too; she looks sort of like an older, funky academic version of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada--does feminist narratology (long story), so this text, like her others, is concerned with issues of that nature. Her main argument goes something like this: reading is a physical act. It produces physical reactions, like, as the title suggests, crying, but also, facial expressions, quickened breathing, etc. These are called feelings. (She argues successfully for WHY we should call these things feelings, instead of something else, too.) Some of these feelings have been enculturated to be gendered. (She actually makes a brilliant case for the various complications dealing with sex v. gender v. sexuality; therefore, she argues that these feelings are not gendered to be "female" but instead effeminate, though without a negative connotation to the term.)
Then she argues how certain narrative types--serials, marriage plots, soap operas, etc.--are designed to elicit these feelings from us, which then perpetuates the cycle of these pop culture forms being "consumed" by effeminate "consumers" which only keeps the cycle going of why, say, soap operas are "for women." Her close reading of Pretty Woman is spot on (though, at this point, any one who's ever heard of Judith Butler et. al and/or has half a brain can probably do a feminist critique of Julia and Richard's movie), and the amount of scholarship out there on soap operas--the shows themselves, the viewers, etc. is mind-boggling. This was a quick and easy book of the day. Again, not super useful for my work, except the idea of the act of reading producing physical effects in readers. Oh, and she talks about orgasms. So that's fun.
January 27, 2013
Robyn Warhol attempts to conceive of how reading feels in the body. She forwards a performative theory of reading emotion in which we do not have real and fake feelings (modernist theory of interiority) but in which the physical act itself constitutes the emotion. Concentrates on 19th and 20th century serial pop culture forms. Trollope and Palliser novels.
March 23, 2022
Read for uni
1st book of 2nd (sort of) iso. Some interesting points, let down by some aspects not ageing well. First two chapters were bussin.
1st book of 2nd (sort of) iso. Some interesting points, let down by some aspects not ageing well. First two chapters were bussin.
October 9, 2015
Loved this even more the second time around. It's a little clunky in some places and I don't think it pursues the implications of its arguments as far as it could. But it seems so useful (especially for thinking about fandom and pop culture) and it was really fun to read.
December 15, 2014
Super helpful re: concept of performativity of feeling and seriality
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews