Tania Modleski

Tania Modleski (born 1949) is an American feminist scholar and cultural critic, Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance, "to begin a feminist analysis of women's reading", considered three popular fictional genres: the Harlequin romance, the Gothic novel and the daytime US soap opera.{{cite book|last=Clancy|first=Kim|editor1-first=Martin|editor1-last=Barker|editor2-first=Anne|editor2-last=Beezer|title=Reading Into Cultural Studies|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VGeKAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA122|year=2003|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-134-92285-7|pages=122–136|chapter=Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women}} Modleski argued that the formulaic nature of these genres gave readers the freedom to construct their own response, at a distance from the text. Her next book, The Women Who Knew Too Much, examined seven Hitchcock films: Blackmail, Murder, Rebecca, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo and Frenzy. Modelski now challenged the terms of taking 'distance' from a text, arguing that "the desire for distance itself [is] ... bound up with the male's insistence on his difference from woman." By contrast to male violence, the 'feminine' could embrace "narrative empathy, spectatorial passivity, and the subconscious imaginary".{{cite book|last=Draper|first=Ellen|editor-first=Elizabeth|editor-last=Kowaleski-Wallace|title=Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=in-MAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA378|year=2009|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-135-22129-4|pages=377–8|chapter=Modleski, Tania}}

In Feminism Without Women, Modleski argued that "male power frequently works to efface female subjectivity by occupying the site of femininity", and that the writer has a responsibility to re-articulate women's shared experience.