From Jonathan Allan and Catherine Roach:
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the journal Porn Studies focused on
“Popular Romance and Sexuality/Erotica”
In “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different,” American feminist scholar Ann Barr Snitow laid the groundwork for what has become something of a perpetual debate: is the romance genre pornography? For nearly fifty years, scholars, commentators, authors, publishers, and readers have debated this question, and truth be told, after fifty years, opinions are divided and there is no clear consensus. In particular, some feminist scholars favour the relationship while others dismiss it as pejorative. This Call for Papers is interested not in answering the “is it or isn’t it” question but in thinking creatively about affinities between “porn studies” and “popular romance studies.” What fruitful relationship exists between these two fields of inquiry?
To this end, the Call for Paper seeks new approaches to an old and often antagonistic question. What if instead of comparing romance novels to pornography, the relationship was about the similar ways both genres are scrutinized, dismissed, and controlled? For instance, it is very common for concerns to exist about the potential harms of pornography to the viewer and society. Strikingly, the 1970 Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography includes lengthy discussions of pulp fictions, such as love stories with sexual content alongside the visual medium. The history of American censorship debates can be written alongside the history of popular romance novels. In 1973, Miller v. California appears only months after the first blockbuster romance The Flame and the Flower (1972). During the 1960s, newsstands became sites of potential crime. In 2024, “obscenity” debates have returned in the context of book banning, library wars, and battles over school sex ed curricula. Age verification for pornography is becoming normalized in various jurisdictions. How might these moves affect popular fiction, especially erotic fiction and popular romance? It is not difficult to imagine age verification as a requirement for access to sexually explicit fiction or queer romance—or indeed to texts that challenge heteronormativity, patriarchy, or white Christian nationalism.
More details can be found here. The closing date is 1 December 2024.
I said on BlueSky that I want someone to trace the misogyny of a controlling society where relationship stories are conflated with porn, because how dare women seek sexual agency, even if only in their reading.
ReplyDelete(Personal peeve: sweet stories can have explicit sex)
Because there's a lot of internalized misogyny "there's sex on page" and "the characters are good people who care for each other" into unrelated things, so we get the artificial dichotomy of "sweet"/"spicy" (which I hate with the heat of a thousand suns), where the assumption is that sex is inherently a purely carnal activity that never involves emotion, and conversely, any real and lasting emotion can't ever be expressed through sex.
(I also said over there that I have decades' worth of thoughts on the topic; I lack the academic background to tackle it for publication)