ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes the convergences between him as reader and researcher and two women readers that he have interviewed. The first features Evelyn, a sixty-one-year-old white middle-class woman recounting her childhood reading of Nancy Drew mysteries. In the second vignette, African-American Marge, a working-class junior-high-school student, discusses the teen romance novels she reads. The chapter discusses certain themes regarding the politics of literacies, re-presentation and gender. These concern the "non-neutrality of literacy" and literate practices, the plurality of literacy, the relation of literacies to desire, fantasy, power and subjectivities formation and the ways literacies contradictorily position women in profit-driven social structures. Teen romance fiction reading exemplifies the gender dimensions of literacies along with the similarities of literacies within a genre and across national boundaries. A. Hennegan's essay illustrates the possibilities and difficulties of reconstituting gendered literacies outside of dominant discourses of femininity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of political and instructional implications.
