--Eric Selinger
Having hosted two international conferences on popular romance fiction (2009 and 2014), Princeton University continues to be the hot spot for Ivy League study of the genre.
Today, their English Department's Graduate Student Genres Colloquium hosts Jonathan A. Allan, Canada Research Chair in Queer Theory at Brandon University and Associate Editor of JPRS, who'll be speaking about M/M romance, or at least one topos in it. Details about the event are here, and here's the abstract:
Reading from Behind: Thinking Through Male/Male Romance Novels
In my book, Reading from Behind (forthcoming, University of Regina Press), I ask a number of questions about how we read and think about the anus: what would happen – even if only ever as a thought experiment – we privileged the anal dimensions of texts and textual and cultural analysis? What if the anus, the booty, the moneymaker, the tukhus were fully loaded signs endowed with rich and complex meanings much like the anus’s numerous nerve endings? What if we relaxed, loosened up our critical inquiries, embraced the deep fullness of the pleasure of the text, a pleasure that tickles and titillates, and removed ourselves from the paranoid, sphincter-tightening hermeneutics of suspicion? In this paper, I return to many of these questions to think about the anus and anal sexuality in the popular romance novel, particularly male/male romance novels. I argue that if “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then the way to his psyche is his asshole.” Simply put, masculinity is dependent upon its refusal to be opened and this is, in many and complicated ways, what the male/male romance novel attempts to deconstruct. At bottom, what would it mean to read these novels from the vantage of the ass, rather than the phallus, the penis, the mighty wang, etc. (which have long been the subject of feminist critiques of the popular romance novel)?
I don't know if Allen Ginsberg's poem "Sphincter" shows up in his project, but if it doesn't, Jonathan, here's a link. Good luck, and bottoms up!
I think this material is fascinating, Jonathan. Original and important work, and such lively prose!
ReplyDeleteI'm concerned, Jonathan, by the metonymic slippage in your list of terms. "The booty, the moneymaker, the tukhus" all seem to me to be referring to the butt as a whole, of which the anus is only a part (or "port," as I typed first, in a Freudian slip). Eagerly awaiting the Leo Bersani / Sir Mix-a-Lot mashup in which you address this.
ReplyDelete