Feminism and Global Chineseness: The Cultural Production of Cont ...

Schweickart asserts that feminist critics, in order to succeed, must fight “for the development of the reading strategies” with “a community of women readers who are qualified by experience, commitment, and training.”¹² Instead of learning to be “immasculated” or reading as a man, the female reader must “[take] control of the reading experience” and “[read] the text as it was not meant to be read, in fact, reading it against itself.”¹³ Schweickart rightly points out that reader-response theories mostly ignore differences among readers in race and class, to which she responds with a feminist reading theory that focuses on the female reader. Although she does not mention any connection between gender and other social and cultural factors, her structure of reading is still helpful to later feminist critics who wish to take into account other social and cultural issues such as race and nationality.

While Fish and Schweichart limit their arguments within tex­tual space, Stuart Hall takes a step further in his enlightening essay “Enco­ding Decoding,” which accentuates reading as politically and ideologically invested discourses that produce our understanding of the material realities. In other words, the realities we know are discursively constructed and are constantly encoded and decoded. As he puts it, “[r]ealities exist outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse. Discursive ‘knowledge’ is the product not of the transparent representation of the ‘real’ in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions.”¹⁴ Hall recognizes how dominant ideologies impact the process of encoding and decoding, and presents three different structures of reading: the “dominant-hegemonic” reading that reproduces and maintains social and political status quo,¹⁵ the “negotiated” reading that understands preferred dominant codes while offering somewhat different interpretations,¹⁶ and the “oppositional” reading in which the reader “detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference,”¹⁷ thus deconstructing dominant discourses.

Hall’s argument is illuminating at two levels. At the textual level, Hall recognizes the multiplicity and flexibility of meaning of a text while emphasizing the determining power of decoding or criticism in the production of meaning, despite the intended encoding of the author.