This writer analyzes a piece by the British poet John Fuller.  She traces two very different readings -- one of which accepts and one of which resists the way the speaker in the poem makes sense of the world. 

As a reader, you have the power to accept, reject or reconfigure the author's world view.  One way to do that is to reimagine the race, gender or social position of the person written about.  In this poem, for example, you could ask yourself as you read: how does the meaning of this poem change if the subject is male rather than female?  

Valentine 

The things about you I appreciate 
May seem indelicate: 
I'd like to find you in the shower 
And chase the soap for half an hour 
I'd like to have you in my power 
And see your eyes dilate 
 
I'd like to have your back to scour 
And other parts to lubricate. 
Sometimes I feel it is my fate 
To chase you screaming up a tower 
or make you cower 
By asking you to differentiate 
Nietzsche from Schopenhauer. 
I'd like successfully to guess your weight 
And win you at a fete. 
I'd like to offer you a flower. ... 
 
[If one] constructs the reader as male, so that the reader adopts the position of [tk: a male spectator?], the reader here will find the poem a funny, witty and rather charming poem, which retains some of the innocence of schoolboy Valentines through its bathetic rhymes and rhythmic structure. The repetition of  "I'd like", together with excessive statements in the rest of the poem, such as "I'd like to sail with you to Tangiers" and "I'd let you put insecticide into my wine", supposedly signal to the reader that the narrator is passionately in love with the unnamed addressee.  If this reader is to participate in the humour, s/he is placed in a position of complicity with a particular set of background assumptions about women and about romantic love. 

So, for example, it will seem self-evident to this reader that the woman's body can be fragmented in this way and described in loving detail. (There is a long literary tradition of men extolling the virtues of the parts of women's bodies, whereas it is far more difficult for women to write similar poems in praise of men.) Such a reader will also find it self-evident that women are passive recipients of excessive love. 
 
A resisting reader will refuse to participate in the humour of the poem and will focus more on the power relations which it expresses, and on how the ideology of romantic love also contains within it a great deal of violence. This reader will focus on the use of phrases such as "I'd like to have your back to scour" and "I'd like to have you in my power". When the narrator states "I'd like to see your eyes dilate" the resisting reader might begin to wonder whether the beloved's eyes should dilate in excitement or in fear. In such a reading the poem as a whole begins to take on a much more sinister air. 

Resisting readings may be developed for most texts, and may focus on the representation of a range of issues -- race, for instance, or class, as well as sexual relations.  Adopting such an approach, the reader can first trace and describe the dominant reading of the text and then refuse this particular position in order to focus on other elements of the text.  In this way the reader is positively enabled and encouraged to assume power and responsibility in relation to the text and to the determination of its meaning. 

-- from Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature. Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, et al. New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 228-9. 

-- Images from Greg Gorman, Photography, As I See It. #29 in a series. Kohler Faucet Advertisement. 

 
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