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typical ways that readers reach out to other readers and establish the basis for community
through their letters. These are: the defining of a safe and common textual space; the
merging of one’s “real” world with the world of Ms.; and a sense of feeling more at home
with the Ms. crowd, than with those with whom one is physically proximate. I will then
go on to discuss what it means to be part of a self-selecting community constituted
primarily out of allegiance to a cause, and an often conflicted “yearning,” as Elspeth
Probyn (1996) has described it, “for connected-ness.
First, though, I want to discuss just what, from a research point of view, one can and
cannot learn about a readership, about a magazine culture, and indeed about the world
beyond that magazine, when using published letters as a source of information. My
reasons for beginning this paper with these methodological musings are twofold: one, I
want to acknowledge the major contribution to communications research made by
feminist scholars like Jackie Stacey and Joke Hermes who, in taking the time to
painstakingly detail their research processes as well as their findings, provide those of us
who follow in their footsteps with an invaluable insight into an all-too-often sequestered
aspect of academic activity; and two, I want to stress how important the revealing of what
lies below the surface is to this whole project of bringing the borderland zones of
Communication Studies out into the clear light of day.
I: Moving Methodology from the Margins to the Centre
Convention