SOURCE: Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Toward a Theory of Gendered Reading.” Reader, no. 30 (fall 1993): 1-25.

In the following essay, Linkin explores the connections between various reading theories and gender research and interpretation.

Introduction

The intersection of reading theory and gender research continues to produce a variety of intriguing studies seeking to explore, describe, and account for projected differences between the ways men and women read, or better, between male and female modes of reading. Most scholarship still falls into the two areas Elizabeth Flynn noted in her “Gender and Reading”: either research into the reading behaviors of precollege students or interpretive analyses of literary texts by feminist critics whose resisting readings militate against the once prevalent form of “immasculation” Judith Fetterley named into common consciousness (the process by which female readers learned to identify as males, given a canon that so long privileged masculinist stories of separation over feminist...