New Call for Papers:
Queering
Popular Romance
(September 1, 2014 Deadline)
In 1997, Kay Mussell called upon scholars
of popular romance “to incorporate analysis of lesbian and gay romances into
our mostly heterosexual models.” Today, closing in on two decades later, that
challenge has yet to be met. Although
print and digital venues for LGBTQ romance have proliferated, meeting a growing
demand for such work among readers (especially for male / male romances), and
although there is a burgeoning interest in writing LGBTQ romance on the part of
both LGBTQ and straight authors, queer romance fiction remains peripheral to
most academic accounts of the genre.
Likewise, with a handful of exceptions, scholarship on popular romance fiction has scarcely
begun to engage the theoretical paradigms that have become central to gay and
lesbian studies, to queer theory, and to the study of queer love in other media
(film, TV, pop music, etc.).
The Journal
of Popular Romance Studies therefore calls for papers on “Queering the
Romance,” in the broadest possible sense of the phrase.
Recognizing that there are both
similarities and tensions between “queer theory” and “lesbian and gay
criticism,” we call not only for papers that consider the importance of
identity politics to popular romance fiction—that is, papers on romance novels
with LGBTQ protagonists—but also for papers which give “queer” readings of
ostensibly heterosexual romances, as well as for those which are theoretically
engaged with the fluid concept of “queerness,” no matter the bodies and / or
sexualities of the protagonists involved.
We think here of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s famous assertion that “one of
the things that ’queer’ can refer to” is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps,
overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the
constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or
can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”
Topics to be addressed might include:
● Continuity
and Change in LGBT romance (including publishing, circulation, and readership),
from gay and lesbian pulps to digital platforms
● Rereading
the Romance, Queerly: queer re-readings of older romance scholarship, of
canonical romance texts, and of the text / reader relationship
● Queering
the romance genre across different media (film, television, graphic novels, video
games, etc.)
● Queering
subgenres and romance conventions / tropes (virginity, sexuality, attraction,
betrothal, the Happily Ever After ending)
● Questions
of Authorship / Authority / Appropriation: who writes, reads, and gets to judge
LGBTQ romance, and why?
● Intersectional
texts and readings: queerness and
disability, race, ethnicity, illness, religion, etc.
● Beyond
m/m and f/f: bringing bisexual, transgender, asexual, and other genderqueer romance into the discourse
This special issue will be guest edited by
Andrea Wood and Jonathan A. Allan. Please
submit scholarly papers no more than 10,000 words, including notes and
bibliography, by September 1, 2014,
to An Goris, Managing Editor, at managing.editor@jprstudies.org. Submissions should be Microsoft Word
documents, with citations in MLA format; please remove all identifying material
(i.e. running heads with the author’s name) so that submissions can easily be
sent out for anonymous peer review. For
more information on how to submit a paper, please visit http://jprstudies.org/submissions/
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