From the BGSU website:
Bowling Green State University Libraries announced that Elizabeth
Brownlow, a Ph.D. student in American Culture Studies, has been named as
the 2019 recipient of The Roberta Gellis Memorial Paper Award.
Brownlow’s paper “Distinguishing Feminist Readerships and Shaping Genre
in the Online Community Romance Novels for Feminists” explores
the ways in which “community members resist the image of the “typical”
romance reader and the stigma attached to it by engaging with the genre
through feminist critique and the sharing of personal experience to
“save face” in a world that tells them one cannot be both feminist and a
romance reader.”
The Roberta Gellis Memorial Award honors the best graduate and
undergraduate papers written using the resources of the Ray & Pat
Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies and pertaining to the fields
of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, or romance fiction.
Brownlow gave a paper at last year's BGSU conference on researching the romance. It was on a related topic, and
here's the abstract:
How do online spaces allow feminist romance readers to define and
negotiate feminism for themselves? How do these readers define which
romance novels are feminist, and which are not? In this case study, I
will look at the popular romance review blog, Romance Novels for
Feminists (RNFF). In 2009, Jackie C. Horne, a romance novelist, former
children’s book editor, and literary scholar, established RNFF to review
and comment on romance novels in all subgenres. RNFF does not
explicitly state criteria for book selection, only stating that it
“strives to review only books that in its opinion espouse and/or
encourage feminist value.” RNFF’s reviews of feminist romance novels are
based on a no-grading system intended to open up conversations about
feminism and fiction. The reviews on RNFF allow for dialogue amongst
readers, responding to both the books themselves and to Horne’s reading
of them. This paper will explore the traits that Horne homes in on for
her selection of “feminist romance” criteria as well as the traits that
blog responders find most important. I will focus particularly on claims
of sexist and feminist contradictions in these reviews. Moments of
agreement and disagreement between reviewer and responders suggest
romance readers are using online spaces such as RNFF to determine what
feminism means to them as well as to form and articulate opinions on
what does and does not count as feminist in the genre.
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