The Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance Studies
Think Globally, Love Locally?
Sydney, Australia
27-29 June, 2018
Space,
place, and romantic love are intimately entwined. Popular culture
depicts particular locations and environments as
“romantic”; romantic fantasies can be “escapist” or involve the “boy /
girl / beloved next door”; and romantic relationships play out in a
complex mix of physical and virtual settings. The romance industry may
be globalized, but popular romance culture is
always situated: produced and circulated in distinctive localities and
spaces, online and offline. Love plays out in real-world contexts of
migration and dislocation; love figures in representations of
assimilation and cultural resistance; in different times
and places, radically disparate political movements—revolutionary,
reactionary, and everything in between—have all deployed the rhetoric
and imagery of love.
For
its seventh international conference on Popular Romance Studies, the
International Association for the Study of Popular
Romance calls for papers on romantic love and popular culture, now and
in the past, from anywhere in the world. We are particularly interested,
this year, on papers that address the relationship between love and
locality in popular culture: not just in fictional
modes (novels, films, TV shows, comics, song lyrics, fan fiction,
etc.), but also in didactic genres (advice columns, dating manuals,
journalism), in advertising, and in both digital and material culture
(wedding dresses, courtship rituals, etc.).
The
conference will be held at Macquarie University’s city campus, 123 Pit
Street, Sydney. The venue is in the heart of
Sydney’s CBD shopping and dining precinct, a 15-minute walk away from
the Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, and historic Rocks area.
Topics of interest might include:
- Geographies of love and sexuality
- Love’s Settings: e.g., the imagined Outback of Rural Romances; the Scottish Highlands; romantic cities; small-town and island romances; the communal space of “Romancelandia”
- Romantic Chronotopes: times and places when love is imagined to be “truer” or “deeper” than the here-and-now (e.g., Regency or Victorian England; medieval Provence; Tang Dynasty China; the Joseon settings of Korean TV-drama, etc.)
- Honeymoon travel (past and present) and romantic tourism, including fan pilgrimages for romantic texts and films, destination weddings, and the like
- Locality and LGBTQIA romance culture
- Courtship in public and semi-private spaces: e.g., paying visits, dating, office romance, romance and car culture
- Love’s Architectures: Hotels, Fantasy Suites, Clubs and Restaurants, Domestic Spaces (kitchens, bedrooms, Red Rooms of Pain, etc.)
- Local, National, and Transnational Book Industries
- Local Romance Writer Groups, Reader Groups, or Media Fan Groups / Events
- Romance and the (Local) Library or Bookshop
- Local Love on Television (e.g., Farmer Wants a Wife) and online (Tinder, etc.)
- “Escapist” reading and the places / practices of romance consumption
- Place and Race in Popular Romance
- The “Phone-World” and other Virtual Spaces for Love
- Off the Map: Emerging and Under-Studied Settings and Romance Cultures
·
Material locations and imaginary spaces for love, and the combination of the two in Edward Soja's concept of "thirdspace"
·
Migration and love: migration
for love, love hampered by distance, love in migrant and refugee communities
·
Non-geographic
love (e.g., love experienced entirely online) and the intersections of
technology with long-distance love, now and in the past
·
Lieux de memoire in the context of romantic love (as opposed to national identity)
·
Love and nationalism, love and regionalism, love and (local) political struggle
All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome, including discussions of pedagogy.
Submit 250-300w proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations to
conferences@iaspr.org by 1 September 2017. All proposals will be peer reviewed.
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