A short set of links: romance scholarship podcasts, LGBT+ issues, and some old Mills & Boon history

A few recent developments:

• Eric's been at the Shelf Love podcast, discussing the history of romance scholarship. There's a transcript too, if you don't like listening to podcasts. There's mention of the Romance Wiki bibliography, which isn't now available but I've expanded on it at the Romance Scholarship Database. The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction is also mentioned, and the introduction to it can be found, free, here (click the "preview pdf" button).

• Jayashree has been on the same podcast, discussing "the various ways romance can be studied. She gives a brief overview of the history of the romance genre and pop culture research, why she doesn't encounter the hierarchy of taste when teaching romance, and explains who romance scholarship is for." 
  

• Queerly Chaotic M has written a document about ways in which the romance community needs to do better with regards to recognising the harms that it can cause when writing or discussing gender in exclusionary, binary ways.

• Roan Parrish has announced she "will be writing the first on-page queer romance in any of the @harlequinbooks series romance lines!"

friends, i’m so thrilled to announce that i will be writing the first on-page queer romance in any of the @harlequinbooks series romance lines!
💗❣️💗❣️💗❣️💗❣️💗 https://t.co/1g6yzSdkqz pic.twitter.com/zwnqYV0445

— The Roan Parrish October Built (@RoanParrish) October 5, 2020

That qualifier about the "series" is a reference to the fact that, as Jack Harbon pointed out, the Carina Press imprint has been publishing more diverse romances for some time.

They have queer men that write for them in a segregated imprint that pays so much less than the main romance lines, and instead of tapping one of them to be the first... Okay.

— Hope Hicks stan account (@JackHarbon) October 5, 2020

• And on the topic of Harlequin/Mills & Boon history, at the other end of the spectrum here's a thread on Twitter about a scrapbook which "seems to have been the property of early Mills & Boon novelist Louise Gerard (1878-1970), and has cuttings from her first success in 1910 to the 1920s."