Vivian Stephens and the RWA

Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out. https://t.co/SI9xxoVbbQ

— mimi swartz (@mimiswartz) August 19, 2020

There's a fascinating article in the Texas Monthly, by Mimi Swartz, about Vivian Stephens, a ground-breaking romance editor.

Candlelight Ecstasies are obviously, genuinely, radically different than other category romances of the period. So seeing her talk about why that was, and the fact that it was a deliberate choice, is fascinating. Even now, 40 years later, it's impossible to miss the shift.

— Elisabeth Lane (@elisabethjlane) August 19, 2020

Stephens was also one of the founders of the RWA and the article discusses the differing visions for the RWA which led to a parting of the ways. A few years ago, the RWA leadership apparently again failed to listen to her; if they had, they might have avoided the 2020 racism implosion. And now the RWA is naming their main award after her.

A horrifying detail which emerged as a result of the publication of this article is that the account given by staff to Courtney Milan of a conversation they had with Stephens is diametrically opposed to what Stephens herself told Swartz. The conversation took place

in March 2016. She is at lunch at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Houston’s Museum District with three white women: two members of the RWA’s executive staff and the then president of the organization, Diane Kelly. Everyone has their hands in their laps, and some kind of ice cream and pastry dessert sits in front of each of them. Despite their smiles, the party looks a little stressed.

At that time, the racism roiling within the organization had not yet burst into public view. Stephens, who had mostly lived the life of a retiree since moving back to town, usually met with the RWA executive staff once a year or so, and the meetings were typically friendly, full of small talk. But during this lunch, Stephens told the women that she could see trouble was coming, and she had brought along the RWA magazine that featured photos of all the RITA winners, none of whom were Black, as a visual aid.

“Well, what do they want?” Stephens recalled one of the women asking.

“The same as you,” was her retort.

Courtney Milan has now tweeted:

My aside: I was on the Board when this conversation happened, and was told about it afterwards. This is absolutely not what was conveyed to me by the white participants in the conversation.

I was told that Vivian Stephens did not think I should be speaking up about racism. [...] I know they often heard...different things than what was said, which then had to be resaid along with assurances that no, I didn’t think they were racist, but... Just to be clear: they conveyed to me that Vivian Stephens thought I was white. They said Vivian Stephens specifically referenced this blogpost and thought I should not be speaking.

Allison Kelley is the person who told me this. Carol Ritter was also at that meeting. Those are the two unnamed staff not mentioned, but I’m thinking we could already guess that.

And Alyssa Cole's response sums up my response too:

I'm so sorry. I thought I couldn't be shocked anymore and maybe I shouldn't be, but this is extra evil.

— Alyssa!!! Cole (@AlyssaColeLit) August 19, 2020

RWA and Broader Concerns

Australian romance scholar Dr Jodi McAlister has

been wondering about how the RWA implosion is going to function as a paratext to the romance genre in the years to come - that is, how is this going to affect the romance novels that are written and read, going forward?
RWA is a national organisation, but there's no getting away from the fact that North America (and especially the US) is the dominant centre and marketplace for romance publishing.
The impacts of this are not only going to be felt among the RWA membership, but will almost certainly ripple through to most of the rest of the Anglophone romance writing world. But what will those impacts be?

It's because of the importance of the RWA to the genre as a whole that I feel it's important to keep recording some of the details of the current crisis here at Teach Me Tonight, even if all of those details don't seem directly about the academic study of romance.

I didn't want to keep updating my previous two posts about the RWA (1) and (2) so I'll add some updates here.

There was coverage on 27 December from The Seattle Times and since it's an AP article it appears in the same form in The Washington Post. The article is focussed on the situation as it relates to Courtney Milan. This does not mention the fact that the RWA appears to have created an Ethics Committee for this process which by-passed the existing Ethics Committee. Rachel Grant (who was on the Ethics Committee) states that a new committee was created "without informing the existing committee that was never informed of the complaint"

In addition to the implications of the specific complaints against Courtney Milan, the details of the ruling against her, concerns about the processes according to which it was handled, etc

there are broader concerns about how complaints have been handled and used in the past:

1) There is at least one account of a "similar use of complaint as retribution against marginalized authors speaking out against racism in a RWA chapter" (retweet by Alyssa Cole of complaint against Diana Hicks)

Sally Kilpatrick suggests that the complaint was never formalized but that nonetheless "the RWA wanted the then president to ask Diana to resign"

2) By contrast, it appears that formal complaints made by marginalized authors/about discriminatory language used to refer to people from marginalized groups did not reach the Ethics Committee and neither was further action taken.

Katee Roberts reports that she asked the RWA Office about this in relation to complaints by Olivia Waite and received the message that "Olivia Waite's Ethics complaints in fact were reviewed by the office. The subjects of those complaints subsequently resigned their membership and at that point, there were no longer matters to bring to the Ethics Committee."

However, according to Olivia Waite "the person I reported for saying queer women were as repulsive as alcohol addiction (on the RWA forums!) has not withdrawn, as staff claims. Not only is she an active member, she is currently the treasurer of her local chapter."

[Edited to add: Olivia Waite points out a loophole in the procedures which may have allowed the Executive Director to process complaints informally rather than sending them to the Ethics Committee through the formal procedure. However, the use of the informal procedure is supposed to involve the consent of the complainant, and Olivia Waite did not consent to it. Robin Covington corroborates that the staff have "strenuously urged" the "use [of] this informal process but I refused. When I did I was encouraged to drop them [both complaints]. Neither went anywhere."]

Concerns have also been raised about:

1) The interpretation/application of the membership requirement of “proof of serious pursuit” of a career in romance writing, as detailed by Xan West here and another case which is linked to on this thread.

The rejected applications contained the requisite "central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending" (RWA definition of romance).

Karin Kallmaker was refused entry to PAN (the Published Authors Network) despite being a multipublished author:

I joined/rejoined RWA I think a total of 4 times in about 25 years. The first 3 times I had to go through hoops and each time I was not allowed access to the PAN forums. The 4th time I finally was. So I have to wonder.
The first time they rejected Naiad as an appropriate publisher for some technical contract based reason (lack of advance?). Naiad was the largest lesbian press in the world that produced 30+ books a year, more than half romance.
The second time I think the same thing happened and I had 10 books to provide them as proof I wrote romance.
The third time they ruled that I was a publisher because I said that my publisher occasionally asked my opinion on a manuscript, maybe 1-2 times a year (this was long before I joined Bella Books as a consultant).
The 4th time I finally got access to the PAN forums.
It didn't occur to me these were trumped up reasons because nobody wanted the words "lesbian" and "queer" showing up on the forums. That's the insidiousness of discrimination - sometimes you just don't know so you blame yourself wrongly. 

2) Inequality in other contexts, including one Chapter of the RWA paying "black speakers half the rate they usually pay"

Melissa Blue, one of those speakers, gives more details here.

Here are some reader responses, from Wendy the Super Librarian , Smart Bitches Trashy Books and from Lynn Spencer at All About Romance.

An open letter has been composed, from readers to RWA. It will remain open to signatories until 29th December. I have added my signature to the letter.

In an astonishing turn of events, communications have now been released from both the former and current presidents, respectively Carolyn Jewel and Damon Suede. These suggest that the Board made its original decision on the basis of information provided by current RWA president Damon Suede (at the time the Board members had not seen the original text of the complaints):

Here's Courtney Milan's thread. The text of Carolyn Jewel's letter is provided by Alyssa Day.

The above image is only part of the message from Damon Suede, which can be read in full here.

[Edited to add: another surprising fact emerges from a different communication sent by Carolyn Jewel to Carrie Lomax.

One of the things stated is that "The complaint that was made public was only the starting point and does not represent the totality of what the Ethics Committee considered." Jewel adds that "The Ethics Committee then reviews the complaint, the accused's response, and any evidence provided and conducts a thorough investigation of the matter." Claire Ryan has transcribed this communication in full here, along with a time-line of events.

This means that it is unclear both exactly what the Ethics Committee considered and what information was provided by Damon Suede to the Board.]

Racism, Literary Criticism and a "Safe and Respectful Environment"

In the same year as the Romance Writers of America finally awarded RITAs for the very first time in its history to African American authors, and when they were instituting new procedures in the RITA judging process to reduce bias, I'm very sad to have to report that the RWA Ethics Committee, and its Board in upholding the recommendations of the Committee, have taken a massive step backwards.

Alyssa Cole reported on Twitter that RWA had notified Courtney Milan "they'd agreed with ethics complaints filed against her for calling out racism." As reported at Smart Bitches Trashy Books (who link to the various documents in the case)

RWA has “moved to accept the findings of the Ethics Committee” and has recommended as penalty that Milan be suspended from RWA for a year, and be banned from holding any leadership positions on the national or chapter level.

One complaint was filed by Suzan Tisdale, who wrote that "Recently, someone on twitter accused one of my acquisition editors –Sue Grimshaw --of being a racist. This happened after they discovered Sue Grimshaw had liked a tweet on twitter." The circumstances surrounding this were discussed at length, at the time, here at TMT. Another key part of Tisdale's complaint was that

Ms. Milan began tweeting screenshots from a book that Kathryn Lynn Davis wrote in the 1990’s titled Somewhere Lies the Moon. [...] In these tweets, Courtney alleges the book is racist, inaccurate [...] Her allegations of racism are not based in any kind of fact or truth. Ms. Davis has a master’s degree in History and immersed herself into the Chinese culture for six years before she even began to write the aforementioned novel. Keep in mind, this book was written and published in the 1990’s.

The allegations clearly are based on a "kind of fact" since Milan was performing literary criticism of a text, and she provided screenshots of the parts of the text in question which she felt perpetuated racist tropes/stereotypes. Quotations from a primary text constitute a "fact" in literary criticism.

It is suggestive that Tisdale felt the need to ask the RWA to "keep in mind" the publication date of the novel. The implication here is that novels from this period should not be held to the same standard as novels with a more recent publication date. Could this be a tacit admission that novels published in the 1990s, including this one, were more likely to include racist elements? [Edited to add: perhaps Tisdale was echoing Kathryn Lynn Davis's complaint to the RWA, in which Davis defends her book by stating that "The book [....] was written in the 1990s and is historically accurate, which makes it both immune from and irrelevant to current judgments of racist literature." Davis is wrong regarding both immunity and irrelevance: here's just one example, by Hsu-Ming Teo, of analysis of a romance novel from the past which discusses its racism and outlines its ongoing relevance in the decades following its publication.]

Since Tisdale mentions Davis's degree, it's also worth pointing out that, as recent debates about racism in medievalism and academia more widely make all too clear, academic credentials are no guarantee of an absence of bias.

So, Courtney Milan has been highlighting racist behaviour and racism in the text of romance novels. As a result, the RWA's Ethics Committee

determined that Ms. Milan’s comments were in violation of the organization’s expressed purpose of creating a “safe and respectful environment” for its community of writers. Most particularly, the committee considered the legal phrase of “invidious discrimination,” defined as “By word or deed likely to arouse, inflame,or incur resentment or anger in others; tending to cause discontent, animosity, envy; words that created an unjust comparison or were unfairly discriminating,” as being applicable to this case.

Considering the imbalance in the RITA awards, which are supposed to reward excellence in the romance genre, one might well ask whether promotion of these awards has included a great many "words that created an unjust comparison or were unfairly discriminating."

Certainly, as many people (including May Peterson) have pointed out, racism in the RWA means it has not been a "safe and respectful environment" for many writers and "that racism, both covert and overt, institutional and individual, absolutely expose[s] RWA members of color to hostile and unsafe conditions and potential damage to career and reputation."

Since I am not, and have never been, a member of the RWA, I don't feel it's my place to offer suggestions to those who are. However, I do want to point out that the RWA awards academic grants and

The objectives of the program are:

1. To support theoretical and substantive academic research about genre romance texts and literacy practices.
2. To encourage a well-informed public discourse about genre romance texts and literacy practices.

In the context of this ruling by the RWA Board, in which criticism of racism in a text was part of the evidence against Milan, I'm not sure how academics can "encourage a well-informed public discourse" about romance fiction without running the risk of the RWA deciding that the research is lacking in respect towards its members. I have never applied for one of these grants and had not thought of doing so in the future, but this latest episode in the RWA's history makes me wonder if romance scholars as a whole need to consider whether receipt of one of these grants will henceforth involve tacit approval of the RWA's stance with respect to Milan and criticism of romance authors and novels.

[Edited to add: I'm not sure how many romance scholars are still using the RITA awards when trying to create a corpus for study, but given the biases which have been revealed in the competition's procedures, we probably shouldn't be doing so, at least not unless we take them into account/are wanting to investigate those biases.] 

[Edited again to add that Caitlyn Lynch has brought up an interesting point: in the future, in the light of this decision by the RWA Board,

Are RWA going to take into account the applicant's history of critique of issues like racism, homophobia, ableism etc when considering who to award grants to? Will applicants be eliminated if they have previously been critical of RWA members, and IF NOT, would members ... have a case against the org itself, for 'contributing to the unsafe environment' by KNOWINGLY giving a grant to applicants with a known history of critiquing RWA members? Catch-22.]


[And I'm going to add a few more links, for posterity:

Copied from SBTB and Alyssa Cole's thread:

• The formal complaint from Suzan Tisdale
• Part II of complaint
• Courtney Milan's response to Suzan Tisdale's complaint
• Formal complaint from Kathryn Lynn Davis
• Courtney Milan's response to Kathryn Lynn Davis's complaint
• RWA’s Ethics Committee Report
• Result of RWA Board’s vote on the report (this one's saved at the Internet Archive here)

and


The Wrap's Writeup:
https://www.thewrap.com/romance-writers-courtney-milan-suspension-racist-mess/

Which is reported by Kirkus.

And another edit, to add the latest comment from RWA:

Early on the 25th of December (UK-time) the RWA tweeted that

At a meeting today that identified a gap between policy and process, RWA’s Board of Directors rescinded its vote accepting the findings of the Ethics Committee report and the consequent penalties against Courtney Milan pending a legal opinion.
RWA reiterates its support for diversity, inclusivity and equity and its commitment to provide an open environment for all members.

Various people have pointed out on Twitter that this is not an apology. It is not clear what type of legal advice RWA are seeking, or why they are seeking it. 

I have posted a further update in a new post.

RWA, RITAs and Race

Laura Vivanco

On 30 March the RWA posted the following (as part of a slightly longer statement):

We’ve only recently started collecting demographic information on our members, and that is on a voluntary basis. But from what we could determine, the statistics for black author RITA finalists from 2000 to 2017 are:

• The number of finalist books by black authors is less than half of 1% of the total number of finalist books

• No black romance author has ever won a RITA

We understand there are questions about which authors enter and what percentage of entrants are black authors. We will attempt to gather that information in the future to answer these questions but, in the meantime, it is impossible to deny that this is a serious issue and that it needs to be addressed.

I don't know precisely what prompted this statement. It seems quite likely it had been in preparation for some time, but the demographics of this year's RITA finalists had caused concern after "RWA announced the finalists for the 2018 RITA and Golden Heart awards on March 21" (RWA). Courtney Milan, who is a Director-at-Large on the current RWA Board of Directors, has noted that

If we lived in a society with real representation, of the 88 works that were RITA finalists this year, we would expect that 12 of them were black, 5 were Asian, 1 was Native, and 16 were Hispanic (with some percentage of those being nonwhite Hispanics.) [...] By my count, this year 4 of our finalists are Hispanic and 2 are Asian (Four Hispanic because I’m going by finaling works, not authors, and Alexis Daria and Priscilla Oliveras has works that double finaled as best first book.)

One of the ironies of this is that RWA came into existence because of an African-American editor, Vivian Stephens:

In 1979, editor Vivian Stephens and a group of romance writers met at a writers conference at the University of Houston. At the time, writers groups largely ignore the romance genre, and these women recognized the value of an organization dedicated to the needs of romance writers in the rapidly growing American romance fiction market. (RWA)

And yet, the RWA has often felt like an extremely unwelcoming place to people of colour. For instance,

Did you know that women of color who attend RWA often have what is in effect a buddy system? So they’re not left alone? Did you know that every year, Black women who sit down at lunch tables see white women stand up and move to not sit with them? That black women with twenty books to their name get called “aspiring authors”? That these things happen under the nose of white authors who don’t say anything because it would be “mean”? (Courtney Milan)

That black author with twenty books to her name was Kianna Alexander:

And the person who said it to me was an editor at a major publishing house, who simply looked at me and assumed I was "aspiring" rather than multi-published.

Publishers are clearly part of the problem. The lack of diversity in romance publishing was highlighted in The Ripped Bodice's 2016 report on the issue. In 2017 they repeated their analysis of romance publishing and their

study highlights just how glaring of an issue racial discrimination continues to be. This is an urgent issue. The downward trend in the industry as a whole this year shows that simply noting and discussing the problem is not enough. We need action. [...]
Do not mistake this data as evidence that books written by authors of color do not exist. The books ARE out there. They are being self-published due to publishers' historic and current attitudes towards non white authors.

As Courtney Milan indicates, the net effect of all discriminatory attitudes and barriers to inclusion is to create

a tale of two RWAs. [...] It’s not just about people. It’s about the entire system of power. [...] In 2016, more black women were RITA finalists than in any of those other years before. One of those black women was @PhyllisBourne, who finaled with a book that was released by Harlequin Kimani. Harlequin tends to celebrate its RITA-finaling authors—they’re very proud of the fact that their series authors write wonderful books that capture hearts, and they should be. Those authors are often given pride of place at their publisher signings. Phyllis Bourne, who was attending RWA, was not invited to sign her RITA finalist book at their signing. She wasn’t invited to sign at all. She reminded them she had a RITA finalist (was, IIRC, the only black Harlequin finalist?), and they just snubbed her. [...]

Like I said, this is a tale of two RWAs—one in which every woman of color was aware that a large number of black authors faced an existential threat to their career, and one where most white woman had no idea. [...] WOC wanted Phyllis to win. We really did. And yeah, we understood it might not happen, but man, publishing is full of disappointments. You get up and you keep going. But there was ONE book in that category that...um, let’s say, I didn’t hear a lot of WOC they wanted it to win. This was a book (written by a white author) where the heroine was Native. She had a family history of alcoholism and poverty (because of course she did) and the hero was a white savior, and... it’s really not about that book. [...] It was hurtful that we knew some of our fellow authors who served as judges had read these books and didn’t notice that they were deeply racially problematic at best. But it’s not like racially problematic books hadn’t finaled before. You just hope they don’t win. It’s one thing if five judges randomly chosen don’t notice it. But five final round judges, hand-picked, would have to like it for it to win. You know which book won. And—by the way, this is important—Harlequin also published this book.

This, and more details and examples, can be found here, on Courtney Milan's thread. Seressia Glass adds more detail about the hurtful comments directed at her at that conference and each one matters because, as she states, "microaggressions add up." A pattern of microaggressions makes clear who is an "outsider" and whose work is not likely to be valued; the targets of microaggressions react accordingly. Beverly Jenkins, who is celebrated for her historical romances about African-Americans, for example,

never received a RITA until the LTA [Lifetime Achievement Award] last year because I never entered. Back in the 90s, I knew my chances of being a finalist were zero to nil, so why put myself through that. When I gave keynote in 2016 there was a record number of POC and queer finalists. Was this due to the judges? The numbers submitted? I was hoping it was a trend, then last year? Nope. Back to “normal”. This year “normal” too.

Sasha Devlin notes that:

Romance is always talking about how empowering the genre is for women, how welcoming, rah rah sisterhood & yet the truth is for many of us it's a gauntlet. Every event, con, meeting is a chance for Who Might Be Racist? Who Will Back Me Up?

To summarise, this is an issue which affects many different areas of publishing. It affects: how people are treated in person; which authors receive contracts from publishers and which do not; it is about the contents of the books which are and aren't published; it is about readers and the books they do (or don't) find problematic. On that last point, here's an example of a Harlequin romance, published in March 2017, which as pointed out here by azteclady has "so many things wrong with it" yet it nonetheless received a favourable, B review at All About Romance, whose reviewer would "recommend this book to adventurous readers looking to try something new." And here's a 2007 RITA-winner published by Jove which I critiqued at the time for its racist stereotypes: the reviewer at the Historical Novel Society noticed the "helpful peasants, and villains who only lack a mustache to twirl to complete their stereotypical portrait" but nonetheless concluded that "this is still a fast, fun read."

There's a lot to fix:

I mean fix the presumptions of quality. Fix the presumptions of "I can't relate to 'those' characters." Fix the perspective that you can't help.  (Adrienne Michel - another current RWA Director-at-Large)

We can all play our part in bringing about change. I wish RWA well as it attempts to address this deep-seated, systemic issue.

New to the Wiki: The Canary Islands, Fatherhood, First World War Romance, Interracial Romance, Orphans, SEALS

Laura Vivanco

Items whose titles are hyperlinked are currently available free online in their entirety.

 

Chelton, Mary K., 2015. 

"Readers' Advisory: There Seem to be More SEALs in Romance Fiction than in the US Navy, and if so, Why Does it Matter?" Reference & User Services Quarterly 55.1: 21-24. Abstract

Edlins, Mariglynn. 

"Superhero, Sleeping Beauty, or Devil? The Making of Orphan Myths and Public Administration". [What stories exist that might influence how street-level bureaucrats think about children who are separated from their parents? [...] In this paper, I explore the narratives of superhero stories, romance novels, and horror films in order to identify the orphan archetypes they portray.]

González-Cruz, Maria-Isabel. 2015. 

"Love in Paradise: Visions of the Canaries in a Corpus of Popular Romance Fiction Novels". Oceánide, Journal of the Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture SELICUP, vol. 7.

 

Jagodzinski, Mallory, 2015. 

Love is (Color) Blind: Historical Romance Fiction and Interracial Relationships in the Twenty-First Century. PhD dissertation, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University. [This dissertation analyzes three historical romance novels — Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress by Theresa Romain (2015), The Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran (2008) and The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan (2013)]

King, Laura, 2015

‘The Perfect Man: Fatherhood, Masculinity and Romance in Popular Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Love and Romance in Britain, 1918-1970, ed. Alana Harris and Timothy Willem Jones (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 41–60.

Potter, Jane, 2015. 

"‘Khaki and Kisses’: Reading the Romance Novel in the Great War." Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives. Ed. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 29-44. Excerpt

Laura Vivanco

Romance XIII: The Romance of Work? Books, Sex, Magic, and the Academic Heroine

Heroines in Bookstores: The Romantic Economies of You’ve Got Mail and Three Sisters Island

(Heather Schell, George Washington University)

Around the turn of the millennium, two Noras created popular love stories:  Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail and Nora Roberts’ Three Sisters Island trilogy.  While the plots differ strikingly, the heroines in both stories have strikingly similar work experiences:  Kathleen and Mia both own and manage independent bookstores, stores which are extensions of the heroines themselves and which serve as central meeting places in their communities.  Yet in both cases, Kathleen’s and Mia’s love interests appear to conflict directly with their work interests.  In fact, in both stories, the hero’s economic pursuits threaten to destroy or at least undermine the heroine’s bookstore.  Both the film and the romance novels discussed here pay careful attention to economic issues, and they have their heroines do the same.  However, the resolution of each love story reveals a distinct economic model underlying the plot:  a cynical neoliberalism in Ephron’s story, in which the heroine’s only option is to take a wage job provided by the hero; and, in Roberts’ series, an insistence on regulated economic planning based on community needs, which allows both the heroine and her hero to develop mutually beneficial economic strategies that benefit their island.  In fact, I would argue, the ideal economy in Roberts’ series is modeled on the ideal romantic relationship.

“She would take her fate into her own hands”: Sex work and Happily Ever After in popular romance

(Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud, Universiti Brunei Darussalam)

Popular romance as a genre confronts sex work as an inevitable facet of male-female relationships, particularly in historical romances, tending to condemn the industry and humanize its workers (particularly mistresses and prostitutes). This paper will examine the deployment of romantic heroine as sex worker in four texts: Lisa Kleypas’ “Dreaming of You”, Catherine Anderson’s “Comanche Magic,” Courtney Milan’s “Unclaimed” and Joan Wolf’s “His Lordship’s Mistress”.

A comparison of the central conflicts or “barrier” and the Happily Ever Afters of these four texts will query both the effectiveness of female solidarity and authority within the industry, and whether/how men can be allies to female sex workers. Additionally, this paper will explore the extent to which the texts resist the resolution of the tension between romance and the sex industry, by resisting the use of romantic hero as "saviour", and how this works with popular romance’s generic insistence on a holistic (physical and emotional) approach to romantic love.

Contemporary Supernatural Romance and the Academic Woman

(Jennifer Mitchell, Independent Scholar)

Deborah Harkness’s The All Souls trilogy (2011, 2012, 2014), Juliet Dark’s Fairwick Chronicles trilogy (2011, 2013), and Elizabeth Hunter’s Elemental Mysteries foursome (2012, 2013), all chronicle the supernatural romantic entanglements of young women in academia. Harkness’s Diana Bishop is an historian of alchemy, splitting her time between two prestigious institutions: Yale University and the University of Oxford. Dark’s Callie McFay is a scholar of folklore, mythology, and the Gothic who takes a tenure-track job at the aptly named Fairwick College. Hunter’s Beatrice de Novo is a serious student pursuing degrees in literature and library science. All three women, who are intimately tied to their respective fields of study, become involved with non-human partners: Diana falls for Matthew de Clermont and Beatrice falls for Giovanni Vecchio, both of whom are centuries old vampires while Callie has a tumultuous relationship with her own demon lover.

Each of these heroines is presented to readers as exceptionally intelligent, fiercely loyal, and, most interestingly, deeply committed to her own scholarly pursuits. Moving beyond the reductive eternal and teenaged romance of the Twilight novels and beyond the reconfigured Cinderella story of the Fifty Shades of Grey series, these works all speak to a particularly telling trend in the relationship between a woman’s academic identity and her romantic desires. As such, this paper analyzes the perhaps unexpected allure of young, sexualized female academics as the ideal protagonists of these erotic supernatural romances.

It's All Academic: Scholar, Scientist, Romance Heroine

(Jayashree Kamble, CUNY LaGuardia Community College)

From time to time, one encounters a romance fiction heroine who is an academic, be it as a field researcher or university professor. In some novels, such as Kresley Cole's Dark Desires After Dusk or Laura Kinsale's Midsummer Moon, the scholar heroine comes across as a familiar stereotype--an absent-minded and unworldly scientist, focused on her work to the extent of it being a near-fatal liability. In others, such as Linda Howard's Son of the Morning, the heroine is intrepid and clever, while in Nora Roberts's Jewels of the Sun, she is an Earth Mother fleeing from the cut-throat nature of academic life. As the genre has had a love-hate relationship with academia since the 70s, these choices provide an intriguing glimpse into how academia may appear to romance fiction writers.

No matter how these representation vary, however, the everyday reality of the researcher--teach, grade, read, write--is seen as problematic, co-terminus with backbiting, boredom, behavioral disorders, or breakdowns. Cole's Holly Ashwin is one academic who uses the staid routine of academic life to keep her anxieties--she has OCD--under control, anxieties resulting from being a closeted Valkyrie. In other words, Ashwin is a professor who has a hidden violent and homicidal side, one she does not comprehend herself. Ashwin's mousy work persona is a veneer that both protects her from her fear of her true self and manages to keep her enemies at bay till she can come into her powers as a warrior woman. In this take on the identity conflict that is central to the journey of romance heroines, Cole rejuvenates the trope of the workaday academic and turns it into an origin story of a superheroine.

Laura Vivanco

Romance VIII: Imperialism, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Genre

Imperial Affairs: Colonialism, race and the early twentieth-century romance novel

(Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University)

The romance novel became a distinct genre during the zenith of the British Empire and, unsurprisingly, women writers used Britain’s colonies as exotic backdrops for their love stories. At a time when many men insisted that the empire was ‘no place for a white woman’, romance novels from the 1890s to the Second World War spread imperial fantasies of women who travelled to the colonies, hunted, worked as governesses, nurses and secretaries, managed households, ran viable plantations, fended off attacks by ‘the natives’, fell in love, married and made a place for themselves in the empire.   This paper explores how dreams of love and empire building bloomed in the Kenyan novels of Florence Riddell and Nora K. Strange; the Rhodesian and South African romances of Gertrude Page; the New Guinean romances of Beatrice Grimshaw; and the Raj romances of Maud Diver, Ethel M. Dell, Bertha Croker, Alice Eustace and many more. Martin Green has argued that ‘the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years … were, in fact, the energizing myth of English imperialism … they charged England’s will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule’. Romance novels may not have created such determinedly colonizing drives among women, but they were important nonetheless because they purportedly disseminated ‘knowledge’ about Britain’s colonies and naturalized colonial possessions and racial hierarchies among women readers. At the same time, they unintentionally foregrounded the fragility of love relationships between British men and women by portraying the strains colonizing activities placed on interpersonal relations and the racial anxieties caused by the sexual attractiveness of ‘native’ men.  

Tears and Desires: Qiong Yao’s Romantic Melodrama in a Transnational Frame

(Danju Yu, Stony Brook University)

Qiong Yao, the renowned Taiwanese female novelist, is known for her sensational novels that depict pathos, overwrought emotions and the ostensibly suffering female protagonists. The visual adaptation of one of her most popularly-received novel, You Can’t Tell Him (Tingyuan Shenshen, 1972), tells the story of a female schoolteacher’s rendezvous with a student’s blind father, who eventually discovers that this mysterious school teacher happens to be his beloved ex-wife who has been reported dead for years. The novel as well as its film adaptation mimic Jane Austen’s 1847 bildungsroman novel, Jane Eyre, while the narrative is relocated to Taiwan in the 1970s with the backdrop of problematic Cold War geopolitics and Taiwan’s rapid economic boom. Embedded in the romantic love affair are the film’s detailed depiction of Taiwan’s budding tea farm business and the growing community of working class women. This paper examines the gothic elements, melodramatic narrative, elaborate mise en scène to tease out the underlying neoliberal desires expressed through the tears and desires of female protagonists. In addition, this paper intervenes in the derogatory reading of Wenyi Aiqing melodrama (romance melodrama) films by shifting the attention to excessive emotions that provide ruptures in dominant ideologies. By tracing the transnational trajectory of You Can’t Tell Him, I explore romance melodrama and its role in opening up new spaces for female discourse.

“I’m Just Telling You a Story, That’s All”: The Reading and Misreading of Gendered, Raced, and (Dis)Abled Bodies in Courtney Milan’s The Heiress Effect

(Mallory Jagodzinski, Bowling Green State University)

Courtney Milan is quite well-known in the romance industry for walking away from a “very nice deal” at Harlequin to successfully self-publish her subsequent novels and for writing characters one doesn’t often see in the genre (such as virgin heroes, suffragette heroines, and heroines whose characters are defined by the work they do). In interviews, she alludes to the fact that this is because she has more freedom to write these characters due to the fact that there is no publisher asking her to make her characters more generic and typical. In her 2013 novel The Heiress Effect, which is set in 1867, Milan writes a “B” romance featuring an epileptic heroine, Emily, and an Indian student studying at Cambridge, Anjan.

In this paper, I show how Milan builds the romantic relationship between the heroine and hero through the reading and misreading of bodies in regards to gender, disability, and race. I argue that Milan uses the constraints placed on Emily and Anjan’s bodies by systems of power and privilege to illustrate the ways our society has and continues to allow bodies to speak for individuals rather than trusting their stories. It is only after Emily and Anjan begin telling stories to one another about their possible courtship that the two are able to achieve the genre’s requisite happily ever after, which I assert to be Milan’s insistence on importance of diverse representation in the stories American culture tells itself about who is worthy of love.

Brothers Under Covers: Race and the Paranormal Romance Novel

(Amanda Hobson, Ohio University)

From sparkling teen-angst-filled “vegetarians” to crime fighting warriors, the vampire hero has become a mainstay in novels, films, and television. Vampires have held the imaginations of readers since the time of the “penny dreadful” and Dracula.  In contemporary American culture, the vampire has shifted beyond the borders of the horror and science fiction genres to become a featured icon in the romance genre. The subgenre of paranormal romance has inundated the publishing market over the last decade for both adult and young adult romance readers.  One of the most glaring and intriguing aspects of these vampire romance novels is their consistent whitewashing.  Just where are all the undead heartthrobs of colour, and why are they seemingly absent? Though this piece will focus on Black vampire heroes specifically, where are the women of colour as female leads?  While these vampire romance novels may have periphery characters that are people of colour, they remain almost entirely populated by whites, mainly Americans descended from European heritages.  I explore the representations of race and ethnicity within the paranormal subgenre, focusing on two popular series as guideposts: Kerrelyn Sparks’s Love at Stake series and J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series. How can a reader understand issues of race and ethnicity within these vampire romances?  The vampire, who has long-stood as the iconic symbol for the Other, reconstructs oppression within the narratives of these paranormal romance novels first by eliminating race and ethnicity from the vast majority of the texts and then by reinforcing the cultural stereotypes of Black masculinity.  The genre in which the vampire fiction is written matters a great deal for the representation and inclusion of Black vampires.  Using genre theory and critical race theory, this paper examines the lacuna of race and ethnicity present within vampire romance fictions.

Laura Vivanco

Romance III: Civic Engagements: Romance Communities, In and Outside the Text

“Have you forgotten how bad the gossips are around here?”: The Functions of Idle Chatter in Harlequin Medical Romance

(Jessica Miller, University of Maine)

Harlequin medical romance novels depict an emotional love story that develops within the social world of medicine. These novels focus on two morally good and professionally competent protagonists navigating a highly dramatic and intense romantic relationship. But much of the excitement and appeal of medical romance also derives from the “high stakes” health care setting, with its medical crises, organizational challenges, and contested workplace relationships. This presentation focuses on one particular feature located at the busy intersection of the social and individual aspects of the Harlequin medical romance: gossip.

Gossip is depicted in nearly every Harlequin medical romance under review (a selection of fifty novels published between 2010-2014). As in fiction more generally, gossip serves many functions in these novels: it drives plot, illuminates the norms of the social world, reveals character, and locates the protagonists relative to the social groups in which they find their identity. In terms of genre romance specifically, gossip has a crucial role to play in defining and creating the “flawed society” (in Pamela Regis’s formulation) of the romance, and in bringing that society to a changed and improved state by the end of the novel.

In general, the novels track the prohibition against gossip present in traditional moral codes. Gossip is likely to be trivial or false, and protagonists are much more likely to be fearful of gossip, threatened by gossip, or harmed by gossip than to engage in it, use it for their own ends, or benefit from it. However, this presentation will also consider an alternative approach to gossip found in the texts, informed by recent feminist theory, that gossip is an emotionally charged intertwining of attentive moral judgment and non-trivial information sharing, especially among oppressed groups.

(EMS note:  after the abstract was posted, Jessica contacted me with a new proposal focused on the representation of nursing In HMB medical romances, especially on the "virtue script" that shapes this representation, undercutting disourses of professionalism, etc.  A lot of work on this in other media, but not until now on medical romances.)

“The town has really nice blonde hair”: The Romance Plot and Civic Engagement in “Parks and Recreation”

(Wendy Wagner, Johnson & Wales University)

This paper situates the television comedy “Parks and Recreation” within the subgenre of the small-town romance in romance fiction, focusing on the love story of Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt. Specifically, the presence of this particular love story in the show differentiates “Parks and Recreation” from similar television shows about quirky small towns, such as “Northern Exposure.” Television critics have often referred to “Parks and Recreation” as a political allegory, but I want to argue that it is, in fact, a romance plot where the hero and heroine’s relationship is deeply entwined with the story about the town of Pawnee. I compare the Leslie/Ben plot to classic romance novels such as Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation and Courtney Milan’s The Suffragette Scandal, applying Pamela Regis’s eight elements of a romance novel to make this argument and calling attention to the relationship between romance and civic engagement in these texts. These romance plots are not just about finding love but also about remaking society, which Regis notes is a key element of the romance novel: “defining the society establishes the status quo which the heroine and hero must confront in their attempt to court and marry and which, by their union, they symbolically remake.” The inherent optimism of the romance novel, its foundational belief that love can ultimately change society, is in full display in “Parks and Recreation.”


Legitimating Romance: Neutralizing the Stigma of Romantic Fiction

(Joanna Gregson, Pacific Lutheran University, and Jen Lois, Western Washington University)

In April of 2010, we began a longitudinal sociological study of romance novel writers. By interviewing romance writers and other industry insiders, attending local and national RWA meetings, following writers on social media, and experimenting with writing romance ourselves, we are examining both the craft and the career of the romance writer. In so doing, we hope to explore how writers experience working in “the most popular, least respected literary genre” (Regis 2003: xi).

The present work examines how writer’s affiliation with the romance genre prompted outsiders to trivialize their work. We examine both the application and management of this stigma. First, we describe how outsiders applied the stigma, namely by suggesting that writing romance fiction is easy, that it is not “real” literature, and that it is not important. Although writers disagreed with these views, they nevertheless had to manage these negative perceptions. Writers attempted to neutralize the stigma by defending their writing process, contrasting the goals of literary and commercial fiction, demonstrating the impact of their work on readers, touting their financial success, and pointing out the sexism implicit in the stigma.
We conclude by distinguishing between the different stigma management techniques available to authors of different career statuses, and by highlighting the gendered and class-based biases informing the dominant cultural messages about the producers and audiences of romance fiction.

Blogging and Blackouts: Exploring Romance Readers’ and Authors’ Uses of Social Media

(Stephanie Moody, Kent State University)

In the wake of the October 2014 Blogging Blackout, new questions arise about the ethics and etiquette of romance fiction book blogging and reviewing. These questions are further complicated by the multiple and competing purposes romance readers and authors have for engaging with books and with each other online. My interviews with fifty romance readers, authors, editors, and publishers demonstrate that talking about books online – through blogs, reviews, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumbler – serves many, simultaneous purposes: as a marketing device, a creative outlet, a form of intimacy, a teaching tool, a process of reflection, and a political statement. Moreover, these purposes routinely change and shift, and are shaped by the web 2.0 medium in use.

In this presentation, I explore study participants’ talk about their purposes for using social media to discuss romance novels, and I suggest that notions of ethics and etiquette are largely shaped by individuals’ reasons for engaging with books and with others online. For instance, conceptualizing a book review as both a free source of marketing and as a way to, as one blogger put it, “c[o]me into being the person who I am now,” reveals how book blogging and reviewing collapse distinctions between public and personal writing. Likewise, characterizing the relationships between authors and readers within discourses of consumption, fandom, and intimacy demonstrates the slippery subjectivities evoked through such interactions. By attending to the literacy practices and talk that comprise individuals’ engagements with romance-related social media, I extend ongoing conversations about the perils and possibilities of book blogging and reviewing.

Male Virgins: A Small Note

Jonathan Allan

I have written previously here and at The Educated Imagination about male virgins in romance. When I set out to write about male virgins, I was interested mostly in the nineteenth century, and truthfully, it was more of a theoretical exercise than anything else. Northrop Frye writes, "the prudery [about virginity in romance] is structural, not moral", and yet nearly every observation that appears about virginity in his writing on romance is about female virgins. So my question became: could the structure of romance hold if it were the male that was a virgin and not the female?

When I presented initial findings at the IASPR meeting in Belgium, my work focused on the Twilight Saga and perhaps the most famous of all 107-year-old virgins, Edward Cullen.

Now, however, I have new ideas and new concerns with male virgins in popular romance. For instance, though male virgins are not everywhere in romance, they are present enough. Many major writers of popular romance have included heroes who also happen to be virgins. The earliest male virgin in popular romance seems to be found in the 1970s and a few others appear in the 1980s. In the 1990s we see a rising interest in male virgins, and in 2000s the male virgin can be called a niche commodity.

In the 1990s, for instance, the male virgin is presented as more of a surprise for the reader. The author, in these instances, was playing with a trope, the hero, and seeing what would happen if the heroine were confronted by the fact the hero is a virgin. Of course, the virginal hero was also a surprise for the reader.

In Secret Admirer (1992) by Susan Napier, we read (toward the completion of the novel):

“Why, that it was my first time, of course.” And, as she continued to stare at him uncomprehendingly over the top of the cup, his smile gentled into a tender warmth.

“You were my initiation, Grace. I gave you my virginity; you gave me my manhood.”

It is only after the first time that Grace and by extension the reader learns that this was Scott's first time.

Later in Eloisa James’ When the Duke Returns (2009), the opening words of the novel are:

“He’s a virgin.”

“What!”

“He’s a virgin—”

“Your husband is a virgin?”

“And he won’t bed me.”

In James’ novel, the hero’s virginity is almost unbelievable. The opening of the narrative is a shocking one for both the reader and the heroine.

Today, nearly twenty years after Scott’s surprise virginity in Secret Admirer, virginity is not nearly the narrative surprise it used to be. In Cheryl Brook’s Virgin (2011), the hero’s virginity is announced in the first chapter (as are his thoughts on what the first time will be like). In Courtney Milan’s Unclaimed (2011), we read: “Sir Mark Turner did not look like any virgin that Jessica had ever seen before.” Indeed, even the marketing (which I noticed at Dear Author) for the novel reads: “In which a male virgin meets a courtesan.” And on her webpage, Courtney Milan explains: “All of my books get code names as I write them. The code-name I used for Unclaimed was Blasphemy. Because, you know, there’s a certain sense of blasphemy in seducing an upright moralist who also happens to be a virgin.”

I am now beginning to think historically – mostly thanks to Sarah Frantz and her very exciting work on the Alpha Male – about the male virgin in popular romance. I have ideas as to why the male virgin has appeared, but his place in the history of popular romance seems important given the fact there hasn’t been a year since the 90s in popular romance in which a male virgin has not appeared (and often enough we see as many as ten male virgins in a given year).

The question that continues to fascinate me is about the interest in male virgins. My interest was purely theoretical, at least initially, but what is the reader’s interest?