New Publications: LGBTQ+ romance, dark romance, rape, publishing, folklore and coral

Items whose titles are hyperlinked are accessible freely.

Greening, Alo (2024). History, Huh: A Post-Modern Study of the Consumption of Queer Romance. Master of Arts in Women and Gender Studies, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Hernandez, Janeth (2024). Exploring Consent: An Analysis of Consent in Dark Romance and Contemporary Romance Books. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University. 

 

Keran, Molly (2024). The Genre of Rape: Women’s Popular Literature and Contemporary Representations of Sexual Violence. PhD thesis, University of Michigan. 

Kousholt, Moa (2024). A Time, A Place, and A Person: A comparative literary analysis of Red, White & Royal Blue and One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston and how queer representation can be problematized in a classroom context. Teacher Education Programme for Upper Secondary School, Linnaeus University. 

 

Miclea, Adelina-Cerasela (2024). The Scientification of Love: A Cognitive Literary Approach to Romance Novels. PhD, Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara. [Only an index and summary is currently available online.] 

Poirel, Carole (2024). "The long tail business model in publishing: The case of Hachette's romance division in France " Business Model Innovation in Creative and Cultural Industries, Ed. Pierre Roy, Estelle Pellegrin-Boucher. Routledge. 69-88. [Abstract available from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032714462-5 ]

Šmídová, Monika Markéta (2024). " 'Oh, my friend, those weren’t angels': Trauma, Recovery and Folklore in The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal and Spectred Isle by KJ Charles". Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

 

Valovirta, Elina (2024) "Love and Loss: Corals and Cultural Sustainability in Caribbean Popular Romance Novels." Arrivals and Departures: The Human Relationship with Changing Biodiversity. Ed. Otto Latva, Heta Lähdesmäki, Kirsi Sonck-Rautio and Harri Uusitalo. De Grutyer. 109-126. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111215273-006

 

New Publications: Race, Rape, and Romance in Maltese Libraries

Maybe I've simplified things a little in the title of the post due to the allure of alliteration. But there's definitely a lot in these recent publications about race/ethnicity and racism.

As always, if there's a hyperlink in the title, that means it's freely accessible online.

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Abdullah-Poulos, Layla (2023) "Sisters, Skanks, and Jezebels: American Muslim Fiction and the Other Woman." The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture. Ed. Hussein Rashid and Kristian Petersen. London: Bloomsbury. 205-214. [Excerpt here.]

Derbyshire, Valerie Grace (2023). “ ‘Do you think I haven’t paid for what I did?’: Rape in the Mills & Boon Romantic Novels of Penny Jordan.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 12. 

Garcia, Christina (2023). The Race of Publishing: The Troubling Whiteness in Publishing and the Forces Pushing Back. Master of Arts in English, Texas Christian University.

Henderson, Aneeka Ayanna (2024). "Popular Romance and Literary Undergrounds." The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature. Ed. Yogita Goyal. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 164-179. [Excerpt]

Hutter, Verena (2023). "Fire, Savannah, and Passion: The New Africa Novel and the Construction of White Femininity." Gender and German Colonialism: Intimacies, Accountabilities, Intersections. Ed. Chunjie Zhang and Elisabeth Krimmer. New York: Routledge. [See https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/bibliography/fire-savannah-and-passion-new-africa-novel-and-construction-white-femininity for more details.]

Kamblé, Jayashree (2023). “Romancing the University: BIPOC Scholars in Romance Novels in the 1980s and Now.” Esferas Literarias 6: 39-55.

Phumithammarat, Nanphatchaon (2023). The Cultural politics of Chinese -Thai Identities in Ethnic Romance Novels by Female Authors. PhD thesis, Silpakorn University.

Posti, Piia K. (2024). “‘I Get to Exist as a Black Person in the World’: Bridgerton as Speculative Romance and Alternate History on Screen.” History and Speculative Fiction. Ed. John L. Hennessey. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. [The whole book is available for free since it's open access.]

Limond, Verity. (2023) "‘The door is open to everyone’: The public libraries of Gozo." Omertaa, Journal for applied anthropology. 745-754.

Posts, Podcasts and Publications: Endings, Identity, Preservation and Negotiation

Charlotte of Close Reading Romance has written a series of posts thinking through how

any HEA is, fundamentally, an act of inferring the future from information about the past. In queer romance, though, doing so means imagining optimism from not-always-hospitable spaces. It has also sometimes meant thinking around certain concluding structures integral to the genre – cohabitation, marriage, procreation – that haven’t always been accessible to queer protagonists. So as I often do, I started wondering about the particular prose demands of writing re-imagined pasts and imagined futures. What kind of work is done by the last sentences of queer love stories, the words that place a completed narrative into the past while opening up towards imagined futures?

Here's the Introduction to the series and links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Jayashree Kamblé's been promoting Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation so there's now a video in which she discusses the book at the Asian American/Asian Research Institute: https://aaari.info/23-09-22kamble/ and there's an episode of the podcast  ShelfLove in which she discusses the book: https://shelflovepodcast.com/episodes/season-2/episode-145/heroines-creating-identity-in-romance

Over at JPRS, Jonathan A. Allan has been worrying about how to preserve romance texts for future scholars and I do think it's a big issue, especially for works which are ebook only. Eric Selinger says that if you have any answers to the questions/issues raised in Jonathan's note, please contact the journal to add a note of your own on this topic!

And here's a list of some new publications:

Ali, Kecia (2023). "The End of the World as We Know It: Climate Catastrophe in Nalini Singh's Paranormal Romance Fiction." The Journal of the Core Curriculum: An Annual Literary and Academic Anthology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University 32:81-86. [The link is to a pdf of the whole volume, which means you'll have to scroll down/do a search to find the article. It's free, though!]

Bharathi, L. Divya and K. Muthuraman, K. (2023). "Nicholas Charles Sparks’s The Notebook: A Novel Of Love Or Romance?" Journal of Namibian Studies 35, special issue 1: 3749-3755. 

Horgheim, Celina (2023). From Rape to Romance: Sexual Consent Negotiation in Romantic Retellings of the Myth of Persephone. MA Degree Secondary Teacher Programme, University of Oslo.

Petrović, Janja (2023). Breaking the stereotype – romance novel today. Masters thesis, University of Zagreb.

Taken Out of Context or Taking Responsibility: Rape, Abortion and the Romance Writer

The Guardian has reported quotes made at the Melbourne Writers' Festival, in a panel session about Romance as Resistance, by Melanie Milburne, who writes for Harlequin Mills & Boon:

“Women have lots of options if they fall pregnant after a one-night stand, and marrying a perfect stranger is not one of them, in my opinion,” Milburne said.

Her discomfort is part of a tension being felt in some areas of the romance community in the wake of #MeToo, and in the context of debates around consent and reproductive rights.

“It takes a village to rape a woman and romance writers are part of that village,” Milburne said.

It’s a tension inherent in a genre – filled with women many of whom consider themselves feminist – that is regularly painted as both challenging and upholding patriarchal ideas.

Naturally, this reporting raised concern in the romance community.

Secret Babies, Pregnancy and Abortion

As far as the pregnancy quote is concerned, it's probably worth noting that Milburne's latest novel, Cinderella's Scandalous Secret, involves a pregnant heroine and when the hero "learns about her pregnancy, he's intent on sweeping her away to Sicily ... and marrying her!"

Unfortunately this novel has not yet been released, so it's not possible to examine it yet to assess how Milburne tackles the heroine's decision-making process with respect to her pregnancy. However, Kat at BookThingo has pointed to editor Kate Cuthbert's address to the 2018 Romance Writers of Australia conference, in which Cuthbert praised

one of the bravest acts I’ve ever seen. Earlier this year I attended the Australian Romance Reader Awards, where Melanie Milburne was the guest speaker. At the table beforehand, she told me that she wasn’t sure how her speech would be received, that she was nervous because what she had to say was controversial. And then she got up and said that after a stellar career and nearly 80 titles to her name, not only were there some books that she wished she could go back and rewrite, but that there were some of which she was actively ashamed.

Cuthbert exhorted the gathered authors to (among other things)

Write options. Secret babies are a treasured part of our genre, but unwanted pregnancies have serious financial, emotional, and professional repercussions for women without a support system around them. Use this plot point, by all means, but be deliberate in your choices and don’t romanticise it. You don’t know who’s reading. 

This is part of the context to Milburne's comments at the Writers' Festival. Moreover, as reported in The Guardian, in May, other authors have been discussing this type of storyline and stating that in such circumstances abortion should be seriously considered as an option and sometimes one which is taken:

The unexpected pregnancy that forces a couple into a marriage of convenience – only for them to soon fall in love – is a common trope in romantic fiction. But in the days after Alabama’s state senate passed a near-total ban on abortion, writers are asking themselves why none of these heroines ever considers termination. According to the Guttmacher Institute, an organisation promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights, it’s a common experience for women in the US, with nearly one in four having had an abortion by the age of 45.

“We need to start putting abortion in our books,” the novelist Liz Lincoln tweeted on Wednesday. “As an alternative to marrying virtual strangers after a surprise pregnancy. As a part of character backstory. As a thing lots of people experience.”

Rape, MeToo, and Romance's Responsibilities

Dr Jodi McAlister, who was chair of the panel, has clarified that "Melanie was explaining that romance has occasionally been complicit in the past with some narratives which are harmful to women, & she doesn't want to perpetuate that in the future. Out of context, it sounds way more dramatic than that!"

Kate Cuthbert, who was "the curator and co-programmer of a day-long discussion on the romance genre at a major Australian literary festival this past weekend" confirmed that Milburne had been "quoted accurately"

but argued that the quotes needed to be understood in their context:

the quote that is causing the most concern came as part of an incredibly broad & wide-ranging discussion on the genre, and its place in a #metoo world. [...] First, she said it as part of a discussion on the history of romance and how romance has changed as a genre from its past iterations to present day. Second, she was speaking to her own past, her own backlist and things she would like to have done differently if she had her time over. Melanie has over 80 books to her name, so she had some perspective to this. Finally, she was speaking to her own beliefs as a writer to the responsibility of romance genre writers, in the context of her own feminism and experience.

This kind of conversation is something Cuthbert supported in her speech last year:

I keep coming back to this idea of potential and obligation. Because I think this is why romance has been so important to so many women for so long: it shows the potential within all of us, and it honours its obligations.

Now, obligations are slippery. And in a genre as big as ours, they’re hard to pin down. The romance readership contains multitudes, and it’s impossible to be everything to everyone. And, as one cogent argument goes, we’re not the only genre. Why is romance being held accountable in a way that other genres are not? Why must we answer to this ingrained malice in a way that no one else is expected to?

Because it’s obligation. If we want to call ourselves a feminist genre, if we want to hold ourselves up as an example of women being centred, of representing the female gaze, of creating women heroes who not only survive but thrive, then we have to lead. We can’t deflect and we can’t dissemble. We need to look to the future and create the books that women need to read now. We’ve been shown our potential. To rise to it is our obligation.

---
Edited to add responses made to this post/after it was written:

Nicola Davidson: "I've seen the context, and agree that robust discussions on consent and culture are important and worthwhile. Doesn't change my opinion that the phrase used was an extremely poor choice of words, and as a rape and sexual assault survivor, I hope to never see it again."

Beverly Jenkins: "But consent is at the center now and has been for years. We’re basically leading the charge on that. I had a heroine who had an abortion."

Tasha L. Harrison:  "I get that it was part of a larger conversation. However, this kind of language about romance from a romance author creates this mentality that romance has a greater influence on women than the constant and consistent narrative from ALL genres and ALL media pre-me too."

Bree: "I still think she said something dumb, I guess. She just didn't throw us under the bus to a reporter."

Zoe Archer: "It's an ongoing dialogue and process to which so many are contributing. The positioning of an author as the lone voice of change troubles me and doesn't negate the shock value of that last quote about villages."

Jodi McAlister: "I want to emphasise that while it wasn't the best wording ever, in context, it made much more sense. It was part of a claim that, essentially, rape culture exists, and that in the past, romance (including the works of the author in question - it was a self-interrogative claim) has sometimes upheld or played into narratives which uphold this culture. It was also an expression of desire from this author that her future works don't perpetuate narratives which are harmful to women, and we moved into a discussion of some of the radical potentials of the romance genre. Taken in isolation, the quote in question seems quite shocking, but in context, it was part of a very thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the romance genre (something which was a great privilege to be part of, given the track record of mainstream lit festivals in this regard)."

An exchange between Elizabeth Bright and Elizabeth Kingston
EB: It takes a village to rape a woman.
It takes a village to tell her she deserved it.
It takes a village to raise boys who say no means yes.
It takes a village to look the other way.
And when romance writers call a raping love interest a hero, well…we are part of that village.
I have a lot to say on the raping years of romance novels, and where we came from and where I hope we're going. I also think it takes guts to look back on your own body of work and express regrets about things you got wrong. I wasn't there. I don't know what she said, or what she meant. I'm just taking the words at face value, and I don't think the words are entirely wrong. Feel free to disagree. If someone could explain why they're mad about it, that would help because I just don't get it.

EK:  Speaking as someone who has had to say hard truths about what this genre promotes (innocently or not), I can say I think she was just careless about her word choice. She made it accusatory, and crudely so, which is wildly hurtful to many people who are already hurt.

EB: I think that’s probably true. But we’ve all had things to say about old school rom and even some very recent ones. The response from Romancelandia caught me by surprise. Her choice of words might be awful, but I’ve heard similar things from many of the people shrieking about it.

EK: I don't think I've ever heard someone oversimplify it so drastically, though. It's very different than saying "we are complicit" or "we have contributed." It's a pretty complex subject and there are pitfalls to being pithy, I guess.

EB: Absolutely. Her wording wasn’t good at all, not even for the sake of symmetry of language. I think what bothers me is that it seemed like people weren’t angry about the phrasing; they were angry at the implication that we are complicit. But maybe I misunderstood their anger, too.

EK: No, I think you're right that the anger is about that too - that's where the lack of nuance is a big problem. Women who wrote those things were often doing so in an attempt to find a way to process their own oppression and abuse, not to excuse or justify or perpetuate it. So to take that tangled and painful history and turn it into something that reads like "you're basically a rapist too" is anger-making

EB: Now that makes sense. Thanks for taking the time!

EK: Thanks for raising the question. This is just my take on it, who knows if I'm right. And fwiw, I think there's definitely an element of "don't air our dirty laundry so carelessly to outsiders" involved

Dr Sandra Schwab: I don't know about you, but I've read a large amount of category romance from the late 1990s and 2000s, and yes, from today's POV, many of these books contain massively problematic stuff. The hero blackmailing the heroine to have sex with him or to marry him was such a common motif. The hero kidnapping the heroine because of some stuff she did or did not do, whisking her away to a remote island, keeping her there against her will and threatening her a bit until she has sex with him? Yeah, that happened pretty often. Punishing kisses? Yep. The hero thinking of the heroine as a slut because she had sex with him? Yep. (Of course, he later realizes his mistake, blah, blah.) In many of these books abortion was vilified as was the morning-after pill. And a woman wanting to have a career? The horror! She must be an evil bitch. Moreover, a lot of these novels were massively homophobic: The hero's cold fiancée turns out to be a lesbian (which makes the hero blackmail the wedding planner into marrying him...); the heroine's manipulative fiancé who makes her feel all unwomanly turns out to be gay. Perhaps the language Melanie Milburne used to make her point was extreme, but she is not exactly wrong: These tropes were repeated over and over again by many authors, and readers gobbled these books up.

Kate Cuthbert: As an addendum to my earlier thread, please see below from Calla Wahlquist, the writer of the article and a romance advocate in her own right. Calla was a moderator at the event as well as an attendee.

Calla Wahlquist: Apologies - I wrote this brief and it was intended to be a brief, a quick what we learned note from a few panels. I included that quote because it snagged in my brain and because I found Melanie so impressive. I agree that context is important and will update that bit.

The Guardian article has been updated to include a note saying "This piece was updated on 13 September to contextualise a conversation about consent in the Romance as Resistance panel" . The relevant part now reads:

In earlier days of the genre, she said, consent was not always handled well because of societal restrictions on women agreeing to and enjoying pre-marital sex. That made coercion, a kind of not-quite-rape, a bodice ripper trope. Romance now is clear about consent, but there is a legacy.

“It takes a village to rape a woman and romance writers are part of that village,” Milburne said.

It’s a tension inherent in a genre – filled with women many of whom consider themselves feminist – that is regularly painted as both challenging and upholding patriarchal ideas.

For comparative purposes, the earlier version of the article can still be viewed here, via the Internet Archive.

New to the Wiki: Greece, Consent, War, Women, and Zombies

Laura Vivanco

There's a new volume of essays out about Greece in British Women's Literary Imagination, 1913–2013 which includes two essays I've added to the Romance Scholarship Bibliography. I'm not just drawing attention to the volume because one of the items was written by me: I'd also like to note that there's a third article I've not included in the bibliography because it's about a work which is probably better classified as "romantic fiction" than "romance" but which might nonetheless be of interest. It's Keli Daskala's "Victoria Hislop’s The Island (2005): The Reception and Impact of a Publishing Phenomenon in Greece" which discusses the depiction of leprosy in that novel.

Dyhouse, Carol, 2017. 

Hearthrobs: A History of Women and Desire. Oxford: Oxford UP. Excerpt

Gifford, James, 2017. 

“Mary Stewart’s Greek Novels: Hellenism, Orientalism and the Cultural Politics of Pulp Presentation.” Greece in British Women’s Literary Imagination, 1913-2013. Ed. Eleni Papargyriou, Semele Assinder and David Holton. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. 99-118. Excerpt

 

Malloy, Audrey Miles, 2017. 

"Remnants of the Bodice Ripper: How Consent is Characterized in Heterosexual and Lesbian Erotic Romance Novels." Bard College, Senior Projects Spring 2017, Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects.

Regan, Lisa. 2017. 

"Women and the 'War Machine' in the Desert Romances of E. M. Hull and Rosita Forbes." Women's Writing 24.1 (2017): 109-122. Abstract

Vivanco, Laura, 2017. 

"'A Place We All Dream About': Greece in Mills & Boon Romances." Greece in British Women’s Literary Imagination, 1913-2013. Ed. Eleni Papargyriou, Semele Assinder and David Holton. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. 81-98. Abstract

 

Wilt, Judith, 2014. 

Women Writers and the Hero of Romance. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [See in particular the chapter on "Exotic Romance: The Doubled Hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik."]

I've also added a new item to the Rom-Com bibliography (because it seems to mostly focus on romantic films/movies):

Romancing the Zombie. 

Romancing the Zombie: Essays on the Undead as Significant "Other". Ed. Ashley Szanter and Jessica K. Richards. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017. Excerpt

CFP: "Asking For It: Discussions of Consent and Sexual Violence"

--Eric Selinger

In light of some recent discussions of rape, rape fantasy, empathy, and romance at Dear Author and Olivia Waite's eponymous blog, I thought this CFP for a book project called Asking For It: Discussions of Consent and Sexual Violence seemed relevant and on point.  I have some hesitations about the CFP's reference to sexual violence as a "source of entertainment" in romance novels, since this seems a gross exaggeration of a complex issue in the genre's history and current practice, but perhaps that's all the more reason for romance scholars to propose contributions.  

NOTE:  Given the reviews out today (June 15, 2015) of Lilah Pace's new erotic novel Asking for It at Dear Author and at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (trigger warnings at both sites), this seems even more relevant than it did last week.

The current deadline for submissions (3-6,000 words; longer pieces will be considered) is June 26, 2015.  If that won't work for you, and you still want to submit, it's worth getting in touch to discuss a workable time frame.

Call for Papers

Asking for It: Discussions of Consent and Sexual Violence

Joshua Stein, ed.

Email: jds651@nyu.edu

At the start of the 21st century, there are few social justice issues as divisive and important in popular culture as that of sexual violence and consent. Sexual violence is a fixture in popular culture, both as a source of entertainment (e.g. Law & Order: SVU; romance novels; etc.) and as a major news issue (e.g. University rape accusations; sexual and domestic violence in professional sports; etc.). These instances have fueled public discourse on consent and sexual violence.

The goal of this anthology is to provide an interdisciplinary and inter-subjective look at the subject of consent, focusing on the various contexts in which consent to sexual activity is violated in our society, the victims of sexual violence, and the social structures that are barriers to seeking justice and care for those victims. In the course of this discussion, the authors explore both the human, social, and ethical dimensions of our social problems with consent and sexual violence.

A secondary goal for this book is to develop the perspectives of a younger generation of academics, and so priority will be generally (though not absolutely) given to younger contributors and/or essays that address concerns and instances in popular culture. Historical analysis that discuss instances of sexual assault before the 20th century are fine, but are best if such analyses are placed in contrast to 21st century instances and data.

This anthology roughly divides into four parts:

Mainstream Narratives of Sexual Violence Contemporary narratives around sexual violence in certain public spaces have become distressingly common: cis-gendered man or men sexually assault a cis-gendered woman, whether in a University, at a party, in a hotel, on the street. Essays in this section discuss the common themes and eccentricities around these events, ranging from media representation, social factors, the experiences and struggles of the victims, and the legal process.

The Consent of the “Others” There are an enormous number of cases of sexual violence that the public narrative doesn’t include, notably sexual violence against non-cis-female people. These instances problematize social beliefs about what sexual violence looks like, and create further social and personal barriers for victims who do not fit in the mainstream narratives. These victims, included men, trans* people, people of color, the incarcerated, etc. are often forgotten in our discussions of consent, and the goal here is to bring the discussion back to focus on them.

Theoretical Considerations The discussions around consent, and the instances of sexual violence presented in the first two sections, requires a broader consideration of two theoretical questions. First, how does our contemporary society address sexual violence, at its best and at its worst? As a matter of fact, what are the social structures that are meant to ensure justice, and how do they work? Second, how ought we to address issues around consent? What constitutes consent, and under what circumstances? How are we to evaluate violations of consent to sexual activity and ensure just treatment of perpetrators and compassionate treatment of victims?

Creating a Culture of Consent Following consideration of the theoretical issues, what we should aspire to in our culture, we close by attempting to address concrete social changes that can be made to improve our society’s ongoing issues with consent and the perpetuation of sexual violence, both as a matter of institutional reform and in order to create a culture that values a more ethically sound view of consent.

This collection is open to submissions in the form of narrative, social criticism (interdisciplinary or limited to a single discipline), or ethical argument. The goal is to provide academic-level analyses of this serious social issue and present those analyses in ways that are accessible and engaging for readers both inside and outside of academic study; regardless of the approaches to analysis, the discussions need to be able to engage readers who possess a limited familiarity with technical material and theoretical framework in the various disciplines being utilized.

We are looking for submissions between 3-6,000 words on the subject of consent and sexual violence for inclusion in this volume. Consideration will be given to longer articles, where there is a particularly compelling reason for inclusion.

Articles can focus on:

• Depictions of sexual violence in popular culture and media, as well as the benefits and problems of such depictions.

• Social factors that condition both acts of sexual violence and responses from victims, support systems, and the wider community.

• Groups that are victimized by sexual violence who are often ignored by mainstream portrayals or discussions of the issue. (e.g. men, trans* and queer persons, people of color, indigenous people, the incarcerated, sex workers)

• Resources for victims of sexual violence, and the limitations of and barriers to those resources.

• Radical social criticisms (e.g. feminist, Marxist, anarchist, etc.) of society’s treatment of sexual violence and consent violation.

• The relationship of sexual violence to other parts of culture. (e.g. mass incarceration, television and film, political discourse, etc.)

• Prospective solutions, social programs, and community organizations to address the problems of sexual violence.

One of the goals of this volume is to bring out the voices of young advocates on the subject of sexual violence; while articles addressing pre-21st century subject matter or written from a more venerable perspective will be considered, it is recommended that such articles consider contrast with contemporary examples.

Academic analyses are welcome, but will require editing to make them stylistically accessible to a non-academic audience.

Rape Culture: Taming the Male

Laura Vivanco

In our 2010 essay for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Kyra Kramer and I wrote that in romance we often find that

The heroine, who is generally unaware of the extent of her GHH’s [Glittery HooHa's] power over the MW [hero's Mighty Wang], may initially fear the “magic spell” cast by the MW. Such fears are not unfounded. In Barbara Samuel’s The Love Talker, in which the hero is quite literally a magical being, we are given a description of the full extent of the damage a MW can cause to women whose GHHs are not glittery enough to tame it:

The Love Talker is a fixture of Irish faery lore, a seductive and dangerous being indeed, a conscienceless faery who ravishes the senses of unsuspecting women and leaves them to pine away to their deaths. In all the poems and stories, he is the King of Rakes, a libertine of unholy power. (195)

This reflects the way in which male sexuality is culturally constructed as an active, unemotional, possibly dangerous part of masculine behaviour.

Today I came across an essay by Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress which reminded me of this model of male sexuality:

In a (not surprisingly) depressing post railing against equal marriage rights over at National Review, Maggie Gallagher, the founder of the misleadingly-named Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, quotes an anti-equality speaker who argues that “Only one creature has been known to calm men down into faithful and stable relationships since the dawn of time — a woman.” What makes that attitude so sad is the low estimation in which it holds men, an attitude reflected in the hysterically angry reaction to the idea that men can play a role in stopping sexual assault. To different degrees on the same spectrum, these views both agree that men are not particularly in control of themselves, and that if they are to be tamed into monogamy and consensual sex, women will have to do a sometimes enormous amount of work, at great expense to their own expectations and personal liberties, to bring about those outcomes.

These views are very sad, but part of what’s depressing about them is that they aren’t necessarily exceptionally marginal. The idea that it takes a woman to tame a man is at the core of an enormous amount of popular culture—particularly culture aimed at women.

One of the most prevalent arenas for the idea that men need to be tamed by good women, and one of the places where that trope has evolved most, is in romance novels. As I wrote at Slate last week, that genre’s evolved from its earlier reliance on character arcs in which the heroine would be seduced, ravished, or outright raped [...] to one in which the rakish hero [...] meets the woman who makes him realize that monogamy isn’t just socially acceptable—it will make him happier than he’s previously been tomcatting around. These men in contemporary romance novels are rarely as repulsive as their earlier counterparts [...]. But there’s still an air of condescension operating there: it seems to have never occurred to any of these otherwise smart, handsome, and professionally adept men that their own behavior might be causing their unhappiness. And often, rather than being truly responsible for their romantic and sexual choices, romance novel heroes are broken in a certain way that can only be fixed by the ministration of heroines whose value was previously overlooked: often they had cruel or absent parents, particularly fathers, who damaged their ability to connect, and rather than seeking out therapy or staring their own deficiencies straight in the face, its up to women to give them the love they were previously denied.

She goes on to suggest that the emotional work required of heroines in romantic comedies is even greater.
-----
Rosenberg, Alyssa. 'Maggie Gallagher, Rape Culture, And The Persistent Idea That Women Can Tame Men And Need To Fix Them', Think Progress, March 26, 2013.

Vivanco, Laura and Kyra Kramer. 'There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre', Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

Out Now: JPRS 2.2

Laura Vivanco

There's a lot in this issue of JPRS so I decided to split my post about it into two parts. Here are the items which are not in the "Special Forum."

Editor's Note

Five years ago, at a hotel bar in Boston, Sarah S. G. Frantz and I sat down with a half-dozen scholars from the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere to plan a new era in popular romance studies. [...] Whatever our scholarly organization and annual conferences looked like, we decided that night at the bar, it should have room for the creators and editors and non-academic scholars of popular romance, in whatever medium, to join the conversation [...]. As Walt Whitman says, then, this issue is dedicated to “You, Whoever You Are.”

A Parody of Love: the Narrative Uses of Rape in Popular Romance - Angela Toscano

Rape in popular romance represents both the violence of love and the violence of understanding that attend the quest to know the Other. In many rape scenes, however, this quest is obstructed by the mistaken assumption that the Other is already known. This occurs because on some level the hero has already appropriated the heroine as an extension of his own desires, rather than having acknowledged her as a separate person. The rape is committed precisely because the hero wrongly believes that his knowledge of the heroine is sufficient and total. His certainty of the absolute authority of his knowledge—of his perception—allows the hero to behave as if the heroine had always already consented to the sex act. The rape reveals the inadequacy of this perception and exposes through its violence and its violation the false underlying assumption that one can know the Other by outward signs, by social role or public name, by the body and its presence, or (most elusive of all) by an access to the interior and singular self through discourse.

Francophone Perspectives on Romantic Fiction: From the Academic Field to Reader’s Experience - Séverine Olivier

This paper will examine why contempt for romantic fiction and for romance readers remains predominant in the French academic field, bringing to light the differences between the dominant construction of the genre and its readership in the French critical context and romance readers’ own perceptions of the books they like to read.

This article is in two parts. The first gives an overview of Francophone romance scholarship and the second is an interview with Agnès Caubet, "Webmaster of lesromantiques.com [...] the first and currently only Francophone website about the romance genre."

Review by Hsu-Ming Teo of Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010.

Review by Laura M. Carpenter of Kate Monro's The First Time: True Tales of Virginity Lost and Found (Including my Own). London: Icon Books, 2011.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (1)

Laura Vivanco

Close-Reading the Romance: Nora Roberts, Lyric, Eloisa James, and the Male Rape Victim

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 3:00pm - 4:30pm

“Darkness Piles Up in the Trees”:  Love and Lyric in Eloisa James
Eric Selinger -  DePaul University

In 1993, Allan Bloom announced the “death of eros.”  It was not by natural causes.  Feminists, sexologists, and the ghost of Jean-Jaques Rousseau conspired in this “de-eroticization of the world” and consequent “disastrous decline in the rhetoric of love.” “There have been hardly any great novelists of love for almost a century,” Bloom sighed, although “cheap romantic novels, the kind that are sometimes stuck into boxes of household detergent, apparently flourish among housewives who haven’t heard that Eros is dead.”  Bloom’s fears about the “end of the novel of love” (as Vivian Gornick described it four years later) find a curious echo in period concerns about the “death of poetry,” which was announced and contested by Joseph Epstein (1988) Vernon Shetley (After the Death of Poetry, 1993), Donald Hall (Death to the Death of Poetry, 1994), among others.  What, one wonders, do these “deaths” have in common—and what are we to make of the evident survival, even flourishing, of both poetry and eros in “cheap romantic novels” from the 1990s and after?   The romance novels of Eloisa James provide an ideal oeuvre in which to explore these questions.  Professor of Renaissance drama, daughter of the poet Robert Bly and short-story author Carol Bly, James quotes and alludes to poetry throughout her work, not least in her latest novel, The Duke is Mine.  Renegotiating the cultural status of both poetry and romance fiction, she explores the afterlives of love and lyric in a (post-?) skeptical age.

Picturing the Self in Nora Robert's Sanctuary
Zohar Korn - Independent Scholar

My paper explores Nora Roberts' use of photography as the central metaphor for the self in her 1997 romantic suspense novel, Sanctuary. My claim is that through her treatment of photography, which she uses to develop characters as well as further the action, Roberts proposes two models of the self: the autonomous subject and the self-in-relation, advocating the latter. Both heroine and villain are photographers; the model of photography each chooses not only shows what each of them privileges as the principle around which to construct his or her sense of selfhood, but also implicitly provides Roberts’ commentary on those principles.

In the romantic plot, Roberts uses the heroine's roles as practitioner, object and observer of photography to positively construct a selfhood that promotes affective wellbeing. The heroine’s gradual transition from taking pictures of unpopulated scenery to including portraiture shows a growing emphasis on care and relationship rather than self-sufficiency and independence, an emphasis that is portrayed as strength rather than sacrifice. Thus, framed within its narrative through the theme of photography, Sanctuary proposes a theory of selfhood that can, despite its different genre, be put in conversation with psychoanalytical theories.

Furthermore, the mystery plot juxtaposes the two photographers, determining that one is good and the other evil. By associating autonomy with the murderous villain who takes pictures as part of his killing ritual Roberts suggests that this notion of selfhood is morally problematic because it leads to objectification and violence. By showing that autonomy leads to objectification of others and violence while self-in-relation gives strength through care without negating selfhood, Roberts makes an ethical and affective claim in favor of the latter, which complicates criticism of the romance genre by showing that the self-in-relation is not a limiting construct used by heteronormative society to subject women but rather a positive way of life that might actually subvert some principles of heteronormativity.

Recovering the Hero: The Male Rape Victim in Romance Novels
Sarah Maitland - University of Rhode Island

Rape is a common trope in romance novels, typically perpetrated on the heroine. Often, although not always, the rape serves the purpose of positioning the heroine to be saved by the hero. We can identify the hero by the way he reflects multiple cultural norms of masculinity, including the ability and willingness to physically defend both himself and his woman from harm, or to seek revenge when harm is done. In this paper I will discuss a number of novels that deviate from these typical roles. The novels I examine also include rape, however instead of the heroine, these novels cast the hero as the victim. When the hero of a romance novel is raped the cultural norms of masculinity are violated. Typically the penetrating body, rape changes the landscape of the male body to be the penetrated. Romance novels that compromise the inviolability of the male body destabilize the gender roles that define the genre. In my paper I will examine the process the hero must undergo to reestablish his masculinity and reinstate the gender roles. In conversation with feminist theory, I will consider what the presence of the rape victim-hero and the process he must undergo means for the genre and what it may provide for readers.

Conferences Coming Up

Laura Vivanco

Given that

The American Comparative Literature Association’s 2012 Annual Meeting will take place at Brown University, Providence, RI from March 29th to April 1st, 2012

and

The 42nd Annual PCA/ACA [Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association] National Conference will be held at the Copley Marriott Hotel in Boston from April 11 to 14, 2012.

and I'm not going to be at either of them, I thought I'd share details of some of the papers which will be given at these conferences. I'll begin with the ACLA conference:

Jayashree Kamble, University of Minnesota

“Mermaid or Halibut? Crises of National Identity in Joanna Bourne's Historical Romance Novels”

Jayashree also has a post up today at the Popular Romance Project, about myth in Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances.

Eric Murphy Selinger, DePaul University
“After the Deaths of Love and Poetry: Romance, Cultural Capital, and the Novels of Eloisa James”

Eloisa James mentioned cultural capital when she gave the keynote address at the McDaniel conference (Sarah Frantz's tweets of the speech can be found here).

Martin Hipsky, Ohio Wesleyan University
“Eros and Danger in the Edwardian Romance Novel”

You may recall that Marty wrote a guest-blog-post for TMT about his new book, Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925.

Angela Toscano, University of Utah
“Ravished, Raped, Rewarded: The Crisis and Catastrophe of Love in Popular Romance”

I very much enjoyed reading the paper Angela gave to the McDaniel conference, on "The Liturgy of Cliché: Ritual Speech and Genre Convention in Popular Romance."

Finally, although they don't specifically mention romance in their titles, I'm fairly sure these are about romance too:

Jonathan Andrew Allan, University of Toronto
“Loving, Talking, Curing”

Antonia Losano, Middlebury College
“Consummate Failure/Incomplete Bliss”

Contextualising Sex

Laura Vivanco

Eloisa James has recently stated that

sex -- its practices, its customs and conventions, and prevailing attitudes toward it -- is a function of the historical, cultural and social conditions of a given time and place.

Similarly A. Dana Ménard and Christine Cabrera, in their article which I discussed last week, note that:

It has been well established that the attitudes and behaviours of consumers are affected by exposure to sexual content in the media (e.g. lifestyle magazines, television, movies) (Bielay and Herold 1995; Kim and Ward 2004; Ward 2002, 2003). However, in many cases, the specific messages about sexuality and sexual behaviours that are being promoted have not been studied. There has been a distinct lack of research on romance novels (Clawson 2005; Phillips 2006) and, in particular, on portrayals of sex and sexuality in these books, despite the widespread readership of these novels and their experimentally demonstrated power to influence readers’ attitudes and beliefs (e.g. feelings about condom use) (Diekman et al. 2000).

I discussed Diekman et al's study here at TMT last year, and quoted the abstract of their paper:

According to the sexual script portrayed in romance novels, true love is demonstrated by being “swept away” in passion. To the extent that this traditional romance script influences romance readers' own sexual scripts, readers may express greater reluctance to engage in precautionary sexual health behaviors, such as using condoms. We explored the relationship between women's reading of romance novels and their attitudes toward condom use, reports of past condom use, and intention to use condoms in the future. A systematic content analysis of modern romance novels documented the extremely low incidence of portrayals of condom use in initial sexual encounters. Study 1 demonstrated that high levels of romance reading were associated with negative attitudes toward condoms and reduced intent to use condoms in the future; Study 2 showed experimentally that including safe sex elements in romance stories increased positive attitudes toward condoms and marginally increased intent to use condoms in the future.

Condom use doesn't seem to be a particularly controversial and recurring topic of discussion in the romance community, but rape/"forced seduction" is. Just recently there have been a couple of posts about it at Dear Author. Today at Dear Author Janet is attempting to answer the question "Is there Such a Thing as Feminist Sex?" It's an interesting article and I'd encourage you to read it in its entirety but I'd like to pick out just one of the questions Janet raises:

If we had no inequality between men and women, we would not see sexual submission or dominance as symbolic of that inequity. But because we do have so much inequity, it’s easy to see sexual behavior and sexual desire through that same lens. However, isn’t it possible that these two things are completely separate? That we can enjoy equity in the boardroom and power plays in the bedroom?

Accepting that this is the case might require people to negotiate with each other and discuss their sexual preferences, and perhaps some people are reluctant to negotiate "in the bedroom." After all, Diekman et al found that in "the sexual script portrayed in romance novels, true love is demonstrated by being “swept away” in passion"; it seems likely that for some people negotiation would seem as lacking in passion and spontaneity as condom-use.

However, much as Diekman et al found that it is possible for romances to incorporate condom-use (and, indeed, Ménard and Cabrera found that in the romances they sampled, "books from 2000 to 2009 included contraception usage in 57.9% of scenes"), there are certainly ways to incorporate explicit consent into a range of sexual fantasies in romance novels. In the following scene from Jules Jones and Alex Woolgrave's The Syndicate, for example, the protagonists discuss whether or not to have sex and they then begin to set the scene for their rape fantasy:

"Now," murmured Vaughan a moment later, pulling a straw out of his mouth, "I've dragged you into this haystack completely against your will, Allard, and I'm going to have my wicked way with you whether you like it or not." [...]

"You're not going to make a sound as I ravish you," said Vaughan, "because there are loads of people a few feet away from this haystack, and you don't want them to know what's happening to your maidenly virtue."

Allard did his best to remember when he'd had maidenly virtue (about twenty years ago) and decided that being quietly ravished had distinct possibilities.

It seems to me that some of those who find rape/"forced seduction" troubling in the romance genre may do so not because we believe "rape fantasies" or BDSM sex are inherently wrong or anti-feminist, but because they have so often appeared in scenes which, unlike that in Jones and Woolgrave's novel, have little or no consensual context.

Jessica at RRR recently linked to a post by Thomas MacAulay Millar in which he paraphrases Violet Blue:

She said the rise of rough sex and sort of BDSM-by-any-other-name in gonzo porn wasn’t a good thing: that it brought with it the physical and psychological aspects of BDSM (I’m paraphrasing here) and popularized them with a mainstream audience, but didn’t normalize all the ethical tools of negotiation and communication that should always go with that stuff.

Similarly, when a romance hero rapes or "forcibly seduces" his heroine, this is generally not separated out from their other interactions and marked as a "power play in the bedroom." Although Janet has suggested in another of her posts that it is possible to read rape/"forced seduction" scenes as sexual fantasy, a sort of unmarked BDSM scene in which all the negotiation and consent issues are negotiated in the reader's head, it seems clear that not all romance readers read the scenes this way. These readers therefore find themselves in a situation similar to the one MacAulay Millar and Blue discuss: situations in which they are watching/reading sexual activity which is not explicitly placed in the context of negotiation and consent. Blue writes that when she watches porn and finds "sex acts, or acts in sex, that are typically practiced consensually in BDSM" "in every DVD, without context, as part of a senseless formula" she finds this "creepy." The creepiness arises not from the acts themselves but from the lack of a consensual context which would clearly mark the scenes as safely negotiated acts of sexual play/fantasy.

This lack of context may be particularly important if it shapes viewers/readers' "sexual scripts." In romance novels protagonists who engage in unsafe sex rarely if ever contract diseases. Nonetheless, this fictional behaviour is not unproblematic if, as Diekman et al found, it encourages "negative attitudes toward condoms and reduced intent to use condoms in the future." Is it possible that heroes who override a heroine's lack of consent may also shape readers' behaviours? Could they be reinforcing a sexual script which discourages negotiation and "enthusiastic consent"?

That sexual script certainly exists, and Jaclyn Friedman has a few things to say about it:

many folks raised female have been taught that we ought not to have sexual desires, and certainly if we have them we shouldn’t talk about them, lest anyone think we’re slutty or something (and we all know what happens to sluts.) And lots of male-type folks are taught that they’re supposed to know what their partner wants without even having to ask, or else they’re not “real men.” So there’s stuff to overcome here, for sure. But I’m here to testify: it’s super-worth overcoming it. Because when you become able to talk about sex while you’re having it, not only do ensure that nobody’s raping anybody, but you have way, way better sex. You know more about what you’re partner wants in the moment, and your partner knows more about what you want, and, well, everybody gets more of what they want.

It seems, then, that as Lena Chen has stated,

Feminist sex doesn't have to be vanilla or very PC. But what differentiates it from your run-of-the-mill sexual encounter is that it recognizes the importance of satisfying everyone's needs. [...] And of course, feminist sex also means that we keep in mind how fluid sexual identity and experience can be. There isn't only one way to have sex, nor is there a "best" way.

-------

• Blue, Violet. "Putting Rough Porn in Context." Violet Blue: Open Source Sex August 21, 2005.
• Chen, Lena. "The Feminist Guide to Hot, Happy, Healthy Sex." Sex. Really. October 15, 2010.
  
• Diekman, Amanda B., Mary McDonald and Wendi L. Gardner. “Love Means Never Having to be Careful: The Relationship Between Reading Romance Novels and Safe Sex Behavior.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 24.2 (2000): 179-88. [Abstract]
• Friedman, Jaclyn. "The (Nonexistent) Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Consequences of Enthusiastic Consent." Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape January 3, 2011.
• James, Eloisa. "Bringing past sex to life is complicated." CNN April 25, 2011.
• Janet. "Is there Such a Thing as Feminist Sex?" Dear Author April 25, 2011.
• Jones, Jules and Alex Woolgrave. The Syndicate: Volume 1.
  
• MacAulay Millar, Thomas. "Sarah Prickett’s Ambiguous Aside." Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape March 9, 2011.
• Ménard, A. Dana and Christine Cabrera. "‘Whatever the Approach, Tab B Still Fits into Slot A’: Twenty Years of Sex Scripts in Romance Novels." Sexuality & Culture, Online First™, 3 April 2011.