What does seem clear [...] is that the struggle over the romance is itself part of the larger struggle for the right to define and to control female sexuality. (Radway 17)That was the assessment made by Janice Radway, writing in 1991 about "writers who are trying to incorporate feminist demands into the genre" (17), but it seems no less applicable to the genre today, except that nowadays the struggles related to sexuality are not solely about "female sexuality" but about a much wider range of sexualities. For example,
In what appears to be yet another line drawn in the sand between conservatives and liberals in the broader cultural debate on LGBT rights, a letter from Romance Writers of America member Janet Butler, published in the July 2006 issue of the Romance Writers Report, asks that the RWA redefine the romance genre to include only love stories between one man and one woman. [...]
In her letter, Butler responded to a letter printed in the May 2006 issue of RWR on redefining romance. She argued: “Romance isn't about just any ‘two people' celebrating ‘love in all its forms.' [...] What brought romance fiction to its present level of success is a collection of decades' worth of one-man, one-woman relationship stories, in all their richness, variety, and power. RWA should be the first to endorse that, rather than attempting to placate fringe groups trying to impose their standards upon the rest of us. If anyone's in danger of being ‘censored' here, it's believers in ‘what comes naturally': one-man, one-woman romance.” (Lo)
Dear Author isn't censoring anyone; this week it's giving away "more than 125" books with LGBT protagonists as part of its “Gay Writes” campaign. Here's Sarah Frantz, explaining why, in a video posted as part of the It Gets Better project, begunby Dan Savage in September 2010, in response to the suicide of Billy Lucas and a number of other teenagers who were bullied because they were gay or their peers suspected that they were gay. Its goal is to prevent suicide among LGBT youth by having gay adults convey the message that these teens' lives will improve. (Wikipedia)
I was interested to find out more about Sarah's view of her role as a literary critic of the genre, and she's agreed to be interviewed for Teach Me Tonight.
Laura: In the video you say that
One of the reasons that I’ve always had faith that it would get better is because I read romance novels. Yes, romance novels, like these... with the mantitty [...] … but increasingly romance novels like these … about two women, and romance novels like these … about two guys. In fact, I love these books so much, and I’ve learned so much from them about how everyone deserves their happy ending that I’ve made a career out of them.A lot of people would scoff at the idea that one could learn anything useful from a romance novel. Could you mention just a few of the things that readers can learn from romances?
Sarah: I have always claimed that I learned everything I know about communication in a relationship from romance novels. I learned to make sure both partners get heard, that we keep talking until no one feels resentful anymore, to make sure that both partners figure out how to talk to each other. And it's served me well for 20 years. But I have also learned that everyone deserves love, no matter their past traumas, past relationships, or how they're viewed by society. And of course, reading romance is a way to gain sexual knowledge in a way that demystifies a sexual practice. These, of course, combine to demystify all sexual identities, GLBT and BDSM.
One of the reasons for National Coming Out Day, among all the other fabulous reasons, is that the most important thing a GLBT person can do to help gay rights is to come out, because the thing that changes people's minds about gay rights more than anything else is knowing someone who is GLBT. So when the homophobes scream about how gay people in the media are normalizing the homosexual "lifestyle" and making it more acceptable to the general populace...they're absolutely right. So, GLBT romances, or GLBT characters in heterosexual romances, can expose readers to the fact that GLBT people are just people. And that's a wonderful thing to learn too.
Laura: Would you agree that "the struggle over the romance is itself part of the larger struggle for the right to define and to control sexuality"?
Sarah: Yes, but I think the opposite way Radway means it. I'm not clear whether Radway's talking about the struggle during the romance narrative, or the struggle over the romance genre itself. I'm talking about the romance genre: I think, fundamentally, romances are about female pleasure. And part of that pleasure is sexual pleasure, but it's also the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of choice. People don't tend to engage in activities they don't enjoy, that don't bring them pleasure. So romance's ability to bring pleasure to its readers is very important and, I think, utterly untheorized.
Laura: Would you agree that "the struggle over the romance is itself part of the larger struggle for the right to define and to control sexuality"?
Sarah: Yes, but I think the opposite way Radway means it. I'm not clear whether Radway's talking about the struggle during the romance narrative, or the struggle over the romance genre itself. I'm talking about the romance genre: I think, fundamentally, romances are about female pleasure. And part of that pleasure is sexual pleasure, but it's also the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of choice. People don't tend to engage in activities they don't enjoy, that don't bring them pleasure. So romance's ability to bring pleasure to its readers is very important and, I think, utterly untheorized.
I recently had a frustrating discussion with a colleague who seems stuck in the reductive Second Wave feminist belief that all heterosexual romance must diminish female power (however that power is defined) because heterosexual romance is so deeply implicated in patriarchy. So any discussion of romance is a discussion about patriarchal power and any romance is by definition destructive. I once saw Naomi Wolf speak and as much as I might take issue with what she writes in some of her books, she had a really important thing to say. To paraphrase: "women are told that the penis is their enemy, that the penis is out to control them, but lots of women go home at night after a hard day's work thinking of the penis as their friend." Romance, in all its many forms, can be problematic, but it's something most of us in the Western world want, whether we're gay, straight, kinky, or otherwise identified. And the fight over the romance genre is one about power and choice and sexuality.
Laura: Do you see some of your literary criticism as activism?
Sarah: I absolutely do. This became very clear to me during #amazonfail. My championing of romance is a championing of the normativity of sexuality and women's pleasure. And my championing of GLBT and BDSM romance is the championing of the normativity of alternate sexual identities, and I think all that's pretty important.
Laura: You mention in the video that you started writing reviews for Dear Author "specifically to review romances about characters with alternate sexualities because [...] everyone deserves their happy ending and because there are some brilliant GLBT romance novels out there." Are you currently writing any literary criticism of some of these novels?
Sarah: Heh. Short answer: yes. I'm deep in an article on the construction of the submissive male in Joey Hill's Nature of Desire series. One of those books is a m/m romance, all of them are BDSM books. I have a not-so-secret desire to write an analysis of Anah Crow's Uneven, which is the very book for which I started writing at Dear Author, and that's a m/m book. My book project, Alpha Male: Power and Masculinity in American Popular Romance Fiction, will have a chapter on m/m romance (perhaps combined with a discussion of BDSM romance, perhaps separate from it). I feel my post on historical accuracy in m/m romance counted as a form of literary criticism, or at least literary commentary.
Laura: Do you see some of your literary criticism as activism?
Sarah: I absolutely do. This became very clear to me during #amazonfail. My championing of romance is a championing of the normativity of sexuality and women's pleasure. And my championing of GLBT and BDSM romance is the championing of the normativity of alternate sexual identities, and I think all that's pretty important.
Laura: You mention in the video that you started writing reviews for Dear Author "specifically to review romances about characters with alternate sexualities because [...] everyone deserves their happy ending and because there are some brilliant GLBT romance novels out there." Are you currently writing any literary criticism of some of these novels?
Sarah: Heh. Short answer: yes. I'm deep in an article on the construction of the submissive male in Joey Hill's Nature of Desire series. One of those books is a m/m romance, all of them are BDSM books. I have a not-so-secret desire to write an analysis of Anah Crow's Uneven, which is the very book for which I started writing at Dear Author, and that's a m/m book. My book project, Alpha Male: Power and Masculinity in American Popular Romance Fiction, will have a chapter on m/m romance (perhaps combined with a discussion of BDSM romance, perhaps separate from it). I feel my post on historical accuracy in m/m romance counted as a form of literary criticism, or at least literary commentary.
But yes, I plan to write about these books as often as I can, because I think it's important to the literary world to know that romances are deserving of study; I think it's important to the romance world to acknowledge that GLBT romances are a thriving, vital sub-genre, and I think it's important to let GLBT people know that there are romances out there for them, too.
Laura: Thanks very much for answering my questions, Sarah.
If you head over to Dear Author you can read more about their Gay Writes week, organised by Sarah.
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Laura: Thanks very much for answering my questions, Sarah.
If you head over to Dear Author you can read more about their Gay Writes week, organised by Sarah.
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- Lo, Malinda. "A Romantic Brouhaha." AfterEllen.Com. August 16, 2006.
- Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.
Thanks, Laura & Sarah! I've just assigned this interview to my students in ENG 390, the senior seminar I'm teaching on romance. I'll be interested to hear their responses to it.
ReplyDeleteUm, wow. Thank you, Eric. O.O
ReplyDeletePersig, in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" opined that the word "quality" was difficult to define but that everybody recognized it when they encountered it. His opinion solves nothing, really, for it sends the question back to "everybody" and I doubt whether many would accept that as an acceptable way to define. What good would language be if meaning didn't have some base which "everybody" could agree to?
ReplyDeleteBut that, unfortunately, is the position in which the word "romance" and the genre find themselves. So, do we go with Butler, who insists that the meaning of "romance" is determined by the vast majority of examples that exist? Do we conduct a carefully worded poll to decide what "romance" is, essentially following Persig's method and deciding meaning by recognition? Or does each person just decide for him/herself what a romance is?
dick
Dick,
ReplyDeleteI think Butler's being disingenuous when she says that her definition is based on examples or tradition. Rather, her definition is based on hatred and contempt for real-life same-sex and menage relationships, and she doesn't want to allow "romance" to include such love stories because she doesn't want to let non-hetero-monogamous stories inhabit the same imaginative space as stories about the people she sees as fully human and worthy of love, which is to say, straight people.
It's the same disingenuous argument that's used about the word "marriage"--which is to say, it's not really about the word.
On reflection, I don't want to assume that it's "hatred and contempt." Could be something more benign, like "fear and disgust." But I don't see it as anything more than an expression of that, in the end.
ReplyDelete"do we go with Butler, who insists that the meaning of "romance" is determined by the vast majority of examples that exist?"
ReplyDeleteWouldn't that tend to stifle authors' creativity? There are always romances which push the boundaries of the genre and a very detailed definition, based on pre-existing works, could restrict innovation.
If one had drawn up a Butler-esque definition of the genre at the beginning of the 20th century, it would probably have stated that romances are love stories between a white man and a white woman (at least one of whom is middle to upper class). Nowadays, however, we have non-white protagonists. There are even some romances in which both protagonists are working class. We also have the protagonists of paranormal romances, who may not even be human.
I think one could easily make the case that experimentation and change with regard to the protagonists' identities is part of the genre's history, and the inclusion of GLBT protagonists is simply following a pre-existing trajectory which, over the years, has continually expanded the range of protagonists to be found within the genre.
@E.M.Selinger:
ReplyDeleteI don't know Ms. Butler. However, nothing in the quote given in the post under discussion suggests she holds the attitudes you suggest. I also hold the position that the term romance should be limited specifically to heterosexual unions, but I hope in future you'll argue against the position rather than the person expressing it. However, I do think words should have meanings as specific as possible. All human beings can have love affairs, but not all love affairs are romances.
And I think it IS "marriage," both as a word and an institution for both sides of the same-sex marriage debate. Both sides are adamant about the word being applied to their unions--one wanting it limited to one kind of union, want wanting it to include another kind of union but both insisting on the specific word "marriage."
dick
@L. Vivanco:
ReplyDeleteI doubt it would stifle creativity much, as, despite the stringent requirements of the genre, the multitude of past and present publications in it attests, by far the greater majority of which deal with m/f relationships. It seems to me that Butler's position uses the same process in arriving at it as we use when we discuss say what anything is. How else we do arrive at the idea of classes?
dick
And I think that limiting protagonists to a m/f duo is fundamentally different from limiting their class, their race, or their created existence.
@Dick
ReplyDeleteWell, I think we'll have to agree to disagree here, and not pursue the discussion. To me, Butler's references to "fringe groups" and the charge that she and other conservative folks are being "censored" are pretty clear signals of her underlying views.
The real issue, of course, is that I seem to be suggesting that everyone who opposes these extensions of the terms "romance" and "marriage" does so because of truly unworthy and ignoble biases and attitudes, even if they don't realize it.
That is, in fact, what I believe.
I've simply never heard any non-aversive, unprejudiced reason to hold the views that you and she evidently share, except for ones (like your language argument, that words should have "as specific meanings as possible") that seem to me both false to the nature of language and also rather trivial, when one thinks of the impact of those views on people's lives.
In any case, we're not going to convince each other. And having laid my cards on the table I'll try to tone down my rhetoric in the future.
"I think that limiting protagonists to a m/f duo is fundamentally different from limiting their class, their race, or their created existence."
ReplyDeleteI disagree, but then, I don't think men and women are so very different from each other. To quote a review of Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender in the Boston Globe:
the notion that gender accounts for differences in minds and behavior through some biological, brain-based process is an idea as popular as it is unproven. Promoted by popular science and pop psychology authors, nudged along by credulous newspaper and magazine editors looking for hot headlines, a cottage industry has emerged to convince us that men and women are, metaphorically at least, from other planets. These ideas — that boys and men are naturally better at understanding systems and things, while girls and women tend toward skills with people and emotions — are nothing novel. “As an empirical endeavor,” Fine points out, “the neuroscience of sex differences began in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century,” when their findings were used to oppose women’s suffrage and equal rights in general. Still, it’s notable how these ideas have been resurrected, after a period in which gender differences, and sexism itself, were mostly seen as having historical, societal, and cultural roots. Nowadays, when we find ourselves in a society in which women still can’t quite have it all, it’s no surprise that old notions are making a comeback, with an assist from advanced brain imaging — used, as Fine says, “to reinforce, with all the authority of science, old-fashioned stereotypes and roles.”
All of which is a huge mistake, according to Fine.
Thanks for the reminder about Fine's book, Laura! It sounds relevant to my students; I'll bring it to their attention. (They've been raised to put a lot of stock in "innate" differences between men and women, and it would be interesting to bring up this researched counter-argument.)
ReplyDelete@Dick--I've been trying to think of an example of someone trying to ride herd on the definitions of a word in some very different, non-romantic context, one in which I don't have such strong feelings and can therefore be a bit more detached.
One example might be Wynton Marsalis's attempt to narrow down the word "jazz" so that it no longer would be used to describe various other sorts of music (improvised or otherwise) that he saw as simply too distant from the core musical tradition that the term originally described.
Perhaps that effort was free of dislike for the other kinds of music, and more purely a matter of semantic clarity. I tend to doubt it, but if I have the time, I'll look into it. That might be a way for me to think about this issue more systematically, from a distance. (Wynton also recently released an album you might like, mixing jazz with poetry about "romance" in your sense of the term: "He and She," it's called.
Thanks for the reminder about Fine's book, Laura! It sounds relevant to my students; I'll bring it to their attention. (They've been raised to put a lot of stock in "innate" differences between men and women, and it would be interesting to bring up this researched counter-argument.)
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Fine's book yet, but I've read excerpts of The Myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron which are very interesting and along what seem to be the same lines as Fine's work:
Excerpt 1
Excerpt 2
Excerpt 3
I have a feeling she mentions the work of Janet Shibley-Hyde:
Shibley Hyde, Janet. “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis.” American Psychologist 60.6 (2005): 581-592. The pdf of that is freely available online from the American Psychological Association.
@E.M. Selinger:
ReplyDeleteI suppose, in some way, all positions are "unworthy," especially when a position opposes one we ourselves hold. The basis of arguing with another about anything suggests, I think, that one looks upon the opponent's position as "unworthy," but applying the term "ignoble" to another's argument is as ad hominem as your statement that Butler spoke from hatred and contempt as is the implication that the position I take can only be derived from an aversive and prejudiced mind.
So yes, I prefer to withdraw from the argument.
dick
I, however, am going to have to step in. Not all positions are equally "unworthy." A racist, sexist, or homophobic argument is more "unworthy" than one promoting tolerance and acceptance. Someone arguing that black and white people should not be able to marry, or arguing that a woman should be stoned to death for being raped, or arguing that gay people are going to hell, is making hate-filled arguments that are WRONG, immoral, and even, if you want to go that far, evil.
ReplyDeleteThere is very little relativity here. As much as I can see both sides in the abortion debate, for example, and the death penalty debate, I feel that when you're arguing for intolerance, for inequality, and, ultimately, for hate and eventually violence, you're on the wrong side.
@L. Vivanco:
ReplyDeleteI agree. Men and women don't differ very much. But I wasn't clear in the statement you quoted.
What I intended to say was that limitations by gender differ from limitations by class, race, or created identity. It's the limitations that differ.
Fair enough--I'm just not able to avoid ad hominem arguments about this issue, I fear.
ReplyDelete--E
What I intended to say was that limitations by gender differ from limitations by class, race, or created identity. It's the limitations that differ.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure which "limitations" you're referring to, but on the basis of previous statements you've made, I suspect you mean that procreation requires an ovum and a sperm cell.
Leaving aside the fact that I don't agree that reproduction (or the promise of it) is essential to the genre's HEA (something discussed in that previous post I linked to earlier in this comment), to me this particular "limitation" doesn't seem particularly limiting given the possibilities opened up by
* adoption
* sperm/ovum donation
* surrogate parents
* trans protagonists (not that I've seen any in the genre, but I know they exist and there have been non-fictional cases of men becoming pregnant)
* cloning
* vampires who "change" people (this seems to be depicted as a form of creating progeny in many paranormal romances, in which the female vampires are unable to become pregnant).
I also think that if one were to make reproduction an essential element of the HEA, one would have to remove from the genre all romances about protagonists who are infertile. There are quite a lot of them.
No, I meant that limiting the protagonists in a romance to a male and a female is different from limiting the protagonists by social class or race, because both social class and race have greater compass than gender and thus each can include both males and females. All classes, after all, depend upon limitations by some means or another, just as the term mammal includes females with mammary glands, hair on their bodies, and similar structures in their ears.
ReplyDeleteHow are classes established except by looking at all specific items which might be included and noting what features the greater number have in common?
A comment in passing: I thought, prior to now, that this web site was an extension of the academy, where ideas are calmly and reasonably discussed, not a place where one is reviled for holding a different position from others. Yet I have been called prejudiced, hateful, evil, and violent
I hope academia hasn't changed that much.
Re: the academy, I'm afraid that my own experience has been closer to the one you've had here than to the oasis of reasonable discussion that you describe. Not all the time, but when certain topics come up (race, gender, sexuality, mostly), things do sometimes get ugly and personal, and it's worse when the conversation takes place on line or by email.
ReplyDeleteHaving been on the receiving end of such charges myself, when I criticized the aesthetic quality of a particular poem, I know how unpleasant it is to be the subject of such accusations. It's painful to be reviled, particularly when you're told that what feel from the inside like calm and neutral views are "actually" (that is, "are perceived by others as") expressions of prejudice or hate.
In my own case, the reaction did teach me something important about what was at stake in the issue (something more than aesthetics) and about what were, in fact, some unconscious elements of prejudice and condescension on my part. This won't be true in every instance, but it was in mine.
I have been called prejudiced, hateful, evil, and violent
ReplyDeleteYou haven't been called those things on this blog, Dick.
Eric wrote that
I've simply never heard any non-aversive, unprejudiced reason to hold the views that you and she evidently share, except for ones (like your language argument, that words should have "as specific meanings as possible") that seem to me both false to the nature of language and also rather trivial
Eric is not stating that you are prejudiced: he is, however, saying that views such as the ones you were expressing seem, in his experience, to be based either on "trivial" factors or on prejudice.
Sarah wrote that
A racist, sexist, or homophobic argument is more "unworthy" than one promoting tolerance and acceptance. Someone arguing that black and white people should not be able to marry, or arguing that a woman should be stoned to death for being raped, or arguing that gay people are going to hell, is making hate-filled arguments that are WRONG, immoral, and even, if you want to go that far, evil.
It is extremely clear that Sarah is calling certain arguments "hate-filled" and "evil." She did not, at any time, state that you are hateful or evil. In addition, the three arguments she describes as "hate-filled" and "evil" were not, in any case, ones you were making.
Sarah then followed this up by stating that
There is very little relativity here. As much as I can see both sides in the abortion debate, for example, and the death penalty debate, I feel that when you're arguing for intolerance, for inequality, and, ultimately, for hate and eventually violence, you're on the wrong side.
Again, Sarah is clearly not stating that you, personally, are violent. It is, however, a fact that some arguments do provide support for violent acts, and anti-abortion violence is an example of this.
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I meant that limiting the protagonists in a romance to a male and a female is different from limiting the protagonists by social class or race, because both social class and race have greater compass than gender and thus each can include both males and females. All classes, after all, depend upon limitations by some means or another, just as the term mammal includes females with mammary glands, hair on their bodies, and similar structures in their ears.
But even if gender is more limited I still don't see (a) that this necessarily makes it more important than any other aspect(s) of people's identities or (b) that this has any relevance to deciding who the protagonists of romance novels should be.
And as an aside, given the popularity of shapeshifter romances, and the possibilities opened up by science fiction romance, it may be worth noting that
Some species, such as some snails, practice sex change: adults start out male, then become female. In tropical clown fish, the dominant individual in a group becomes female while the other ones are male, and blue wrasse fish are the reverse. In the marine worm Bonellia viridis, larvae become males if they make physical contact with the female, and females if they end up on the bare sea floor.
Some species, however, have no sex-determination system. Hermaphrodites include the common earthworm and certain species of snails. A few species of fish, reptiles, and insects reproduce by parthenogenesis and are female altogether. (Wikipedia)