Blogging IASPR 2011

Laura Vivanco

The 3rd IASPR conference is underway and I've been following the many tweets written by attendees. Some of those present have also written blog posts:

24 June - Victoria Janssen posted about how she was "hoping that, in attending this conference, I will meet more of my colleagues in the love of romance fiction, and be enriched by the interaction."

26 June - Megan Mulry writes about "How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Romance Novel" but although she is "comfortable with detached academic observation [...] when I crack open a new romance novel (yes, I am a spine-cracker) I have learned to dispense with academic analysis lest I forfeit the immediacy and urgency that characterizes a particularly good one."

27 June - Amanda Usen "joined the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance because I wanted to learn from people who think about romance a little differently than I do, people with a broader perspective who might, just might, be able to help me write better fiction by explaining how other authors write. I’m out of my comfort zone, but it’s interesting to realize I might not be the only one."

27 June - Cecilia Tan provides "Notes from the IASPR conference: Laura Kipnis keynote."

27 June - Victoria Janssen's photos of the venue.

27 June - at the dinner Theresa, of edittorrent was asked "A Question to Ponder."

27 June - Eloisa James mentioned An Goris's paper in a comment on Facebook.

29 June - "More geeking out about romance from IASPR" by Cecilia Tan.

29 June - Rose Fox comments "that several people at both IASPR and RWA mentioned that magic is now so common in romance that it’s being casually mixed into other genres rather than just being considered a genre of its own."

30 June - "Bertrice Small at IASPR, interviewed by Sarah Frantz & the audience," as reported by Cecilia Tan.

4 July - jmc's notes from IASPR. A detailed summary of the entire conference.

Please let me know if you write one or spot one that I haven't included and I'll add it to the list.

IASPR 2011: Sex, Money, Power, and Romance

Laura Vivanco

This year's IASPR conference takes as its theme "Can’t Buy Me Love?
Sex, Money, Power, and Romance." The schedule has now been finalised and the papers being given are as follows:

Catherine Roach (University of Alabama, USA): “I Love You,” He Said: The Money Shot in Romance Fiction as Feminist Porn

Ashley Greenwood (San Diego State University, USA): Nora Roberts and Archetypes

Jonathan A. Allan (University of Toronto, Canada): Fetish Commodity of Virginity in Popular Romance Novels

An Goris (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium): Rape as a Trope in the Work of Nora Roberts

Sarah S. G. Frantz (Fayetteville State University, USA): The Rapist Hero and the Female Imagination

Linda Lee (University of Pennsylvania, USA): The Illusion of Choice: Problematizing Predestined Love in Paranormal Romance

Jessica Miller (University of Maine, USA): Emotional Justice in the Novels of Jennifer Crusie

Margaret Toscano (University of Utah, USA): Love’s Balance Sheet: Accounting for the Bondage of Desire and the Freedom of Choice in Historical Romance

Hannah Priest (University of Manchester, UK): ‘Hit Cost a Thousand Pound and Mar’: Love, Sex and Wealth in the Fourteenth-Century Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle

Amanda Allen (Eastern Michigan University, USA): Charm the Boys, Win the Girls: Power Struggles in Mary Stolz’s Cold War Adolescent Girl Romance Novels

Su-hsen Liu (National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan): Modern Gothic Romance and its Translation in Taiwan: A Case Study of the Chinese Translation of Mistress of Mellyn

Pamela Regis (McDaniel College, USA): The First Silhouette: Following the Money

Eric Selinger (DePaul University, USA): Owning the Romance: Crusie, Phillips, and the “Erotics of Property”

Ann Herendeen (Romance Author, USA): The Upper-Class Bisexual Man as Romantic Hero: The “Top” in the Social Structure and in the Bedroom

Angela Toscano (University of Utah, USA): The Limits of Virtue, the Limits of Merit: Power, Privilege & Property in Historical Romance Fiction

Jennifer Kloester (University of Melbourne, Australia): Creating a Genre: The Power of Georgette Heyer’s Regency Novels

Susan M. Kroeg (Eastern Kentucky University, USA): Regency World-Building, History, and the End(s) of Romance

Betty Kaklamanidou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece): The Absence of Sex and Money in the Contemporary Rom Com. Fact or Fiction?

Jayashree Kamble (University of Minnesota): Temptation and the Big Apple: Bollywood romance goes West in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna

Federica Balducci (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand): Love on a Shoestring: Romance, Recession and Consumer Culture in Italian Chick Lit

Elena Oliete Aldea (University of Zaragoza, Spain): Greed is Good, but Love is Better: the Influence of Economy on Romance in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street Films

Beatriz Oria (University of Zaragoza, Spain): Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: The Representation of Romantic Love In Sex and the City

Antonia Losano (Middlebury College, USA): Value for Virtue in Multiple-Romance Narrative Romance

Katherine E. Lynch (SUNY Rockland): One Small Step for Romance: The Evolution of the Queer Female Hero

Ruth Sternglantz (Editor, Bold Strokes Books): Where the Wild Things Are: Contemporary Lesbian Romance and the Undomesticated Queer Hero

Lynda Sandoval (Author): The Queer Heroine as a Re-imagined Reflection

Len Barot/Radclyffe (Romance Author, Editor, and Publisher, Bold Strokes Books): Queering the Alpha

There will also be a keynote speech by Laura Kipnis (Northwestern University) and discussions of "Boundaries and Intersections: Romance, Erotica, and Pornography" and "Popular Romance Collection Development in University Libraries."

Final Calls: PCA 2011 (Dec 15, 2010 deadline) and IASPR NYC 2011 (Jan 1, 2011 deadline)

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Final Calls for the Romance Area at PCA 2011 and for IASPR 2011 in New York City (just before RWA's conference).

PCA 2011 is in San Antonio, TX. As always, it's over Easter weekend!!! April 20-23, 2011. So if it's a problem to be away from your family for Easter/Passover, we'll miss you, but we'll understand.

PCA is an amazing conference to go to to experience the joy and sheer intellectual brilliance of the field of Popular Romance Studies. We are truly a community. We hang around together all weekend, eating most of our meals together, talking between panels. It's a VERY inviting conference for new scholars, and for interested non-scholars. We've had undergraduates and brand new graduate students present their papers at PCA and they loved it. We're welcoming, friendly, fun, a little bawdy, and very very interesting.

PCA/ACA 2010 National Conference

San Antonio, TX, April 20-23, 2011
Call For Papers: Romance Area

(Conference info: http://pcaaca.org/conference/national.php)

Deadline for submission: December 15, 2010.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance: all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and anywhen, are welcome topics of discussion.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

If you are involved in the creative industry of popular romance (romance author/editor, film director/producer, singer/songwriter, etc.) and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the representations of popular romance, please contact us!

Some possible topics (although we are by no means limited to these):

• Popular Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation, Western and non-Western media, local and comparative approaches)
• Romance Across the Media: crossover texts and the relationships between romance fiction and romantic films, music, art, drama, etc.; also the paratexts and contexts of popular romance
• Romance High and Low: texts that fall between “high” and “low” culture, or that complicate the distinctions between these critical categories
• Romance Then and Now: representations of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern love
• Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
• Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
• BDSM Romance and representations of romantic/erotic power exchange
• Romance communities
• New Critical Approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science (e.g., the neurobiology of love)
• The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
• Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)
• Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
• African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
• Young Adult Romance
• History of/in Popular Romance
• Romance and Region: places, histories, mythologies, traditions
• Definitions and Theoretical Models of Popular Romance: it’s not all just happily ever after

As we have done for the past three years, the Romance area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field of Popular Romance Studies. Of particular interest this year: the 2011 New York City conference for the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), planning for the 2012 IASPR conference, and the first volume of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS).

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract (via regular mail or e-mail) by December 15, 2010, to the Area Chairs in Romance:

Sarah S. G. Frantz
Department of English and Foreign Languages
Fayetteville State University
1200 Murchison Road
Fayetteville, NC 28301
(910) 672-1438
sarahfrantz AT gmail DOT com

Darcy Martin
Adjunct Faculty, Women's Studies
East Tennessee State University
12 Wataugua Court
Bluffton, SC 29909
(843)705-4861
martindj AT etsu DOT edu

If you have any questions as all, please contact one or both of the area chairs. Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

IASPR 2011:

A Call For Proposals
for
The Third Annual International Conference on Popular Romance

Can’t Buy Me Love?
Sex, Money, Power, and Romance
New York City June 26-28, 2011

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is seeking proposals for innovative panels, papers, roundtables, discussion groups, and multi-media presentations that contribute to a sustained conversation about romantic love and its representations in global popular media. We welcome analyses of individual books, films, television series, websites, songs, etc., as well as broader inquiries into the reception of popular romance and into the creative industries that produce and market it worldwide.

This conference has four main goals:

1. To explore the relationships between the conference’s key thematic terms (sex, money, power, and romantic love) in the texts and contexts of popular romance, in all forms and media, from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives
2. To foster comparative and intercultural analyses of these recurring themes, by documenting and/or theorizing the ways that different nations, cultures, and communities think about love and sex, love and money, love and power, and so on, in the various media of popular romance
3. To explore how ideas and images of romantic love—especially love as shaped by issues of sex, money, or power—circulate between elite and popular culture, between different media (e.g., from novel to film), and between cultural representations and the lived experience of readers, viewers, listeners, and lovers
4. To explore the popular romance industry–publishing, marketing, film, television, music, gaming, etc.—and the roles played by sex, money, power, and love in the discourse of (and about) the business side of romance

After the conference, proceedings will be subjected to peer-review and published.

Please submit proposals by January 1, 2011 and direct questions to conferences@iaspr.org.

CFP: IASPR Conference 2011 and JPRS 1.2

Laura Vivanco

JPRS 1.1 has been out for over two weeks now, the 2nd IASPR Conference is over (though Jonathan A. Allan, a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature, U of Toronto, has just posted a conference summary), and so it's time to think about next year.

A Call For Proposals
for
The Third Annual International Conference on Popular Romance

Can’t Buy Me Love?
Sex, Money, Power, and Romance
New York City June 26-28, 2011

The International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) is seeking proposals for innovative panels, papers, roundtables, discussion groups, and multi-media presentations that contribute to a sustained conversation about romantic love and its representations in global popular media. We welcome analyses of individual books, films, television series, websites, songs, etc., as well as broader inquiries into the reception of popular romance and into the creative industries that produce and market it worldwide.

This conference has four main goals:

1. To explore the relationships between the conference’s key thematic terms (sex, money, power, and romantic love) in the texts and contexts of popular romance, in all forms and media, from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives
2. To foster comparative and intercultural analyses of these recurring themes, by documenting and/or theorizing the ways that different nations, cultures, and communities think about love and sex, love and money, love and power, and so on, in the various media of popular romance
3. To explore how ideas and images of romantic love—especially love as shaped by issues of sex, money, or power—circulate between elite and popular culture, between different media (e.g., from novel to film), and between cultural representations and the lived experience of readers, viewers, listeners, and lovers
4. To explore the popular romance industry–publishing, marketing, film, television, music, gaming, etc.—and the roles played by sex, money, power, and love in the discourse of (and about) the business side of romance

After the conference, proceedings will be subjected to peer-review and published.

Please submit proposals by January 1, 2011 and direct questions to conferences@iaspr.org.

And that's not all!

Journal of Popular Romance Studies: Issue 1.2

For its second issue (Spring, 2011), the Journal of Popular Romance Studies is now considering papers on representations of romantic love in popular media, now or in the past, from anywhere in the world. Topics addressed might include:

* Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation, romantic love in non-Western popular culture, local traditions, comparative approaches)

* Romance Across the Media: crossover texts and the relationships between romance fiction and romantic films, music, art, drama, etc.; also the paratexts and contexts of popular romance

* Romance High and Low: texts that fall between “high” and “low” culture, or that complicate the distinctions between these critical categories

* Romance Then and Now: representations of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern love

* Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture

* Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts

* Romance communities: authors, readers, Web sites, blogs

The Journal also solicits reviews (individual and combined) of relevant scholarly works, along with interviews, pedagogical discussions, and other material of use to scholars and teachers in the field of Popular Romance Studies.

Please submit scholarly papers of no more than 10,000 words to Kymberly Hinton, Managing Editor; longer manuscripts of particular interest will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Submissions should be Microsoft Word documents, with citations in MLA format.