PCA Romance Panel 10: The Construction of Gender: (Killer) Heroes and Heroines

Jessica's notes on this panel are available here and describe papers by Darcy Martin, Jim and Margaret Haefner, Jacob Lusk and Marnie Jones.

PCA 2009: Romance 1

Another update from Jessica at Read React Review, this time of

2126 Romance I: Romance Authorship I: Tradition and Transformation
Thursday April 9, 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University

―Me, Myself and I: Love as the Integration of Selves in the Romance Fiction of Nora Roberts
By An Goris, KuLeuven, Belgium

―A Gothic Scheherazade: The Heroine as Storyteller
By Angela Toscano, Independent Scholar

―Milton, Emerson, Kinsale, Cavell: Thinking Through Flowers from the Storm
By Eric Selinger, DePaul University

―Romance through Faith: The Enduring Stories of Grace Livingston Hill
By Darcy Martin

PCA Conference 2009 - Call for Papers

The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association will be holding their National Conference in New Orleans, April 8-11, 2009. More details can be found on their website.

The area chairs for romance fiction, Eric Selinger and Darcy Martin, are putting out a call for papers:

We are considering proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and “special panels” featuring authors or editors. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

Should you or any of your colleagues be interested in submitting a proposal or have any questions, please contact one or both of the area chairs (see below). Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to romance fiction: all genres, all kinds, and all eras.

Some possible topics (although we are not limited to these):

--Individual Novels or Authors
--New Directions in Romance Scholarship (historicist, formalist, post-colonial, queer-theoretical, etc.)
--Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Romance, and same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
--Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing authors and texts (erotic romance, SF romance, chick-lit, urban fantasy, highbrow / lowbrow crossover texts, etc.)
--African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
--Young Adult Romance and Chick-lit (series, novels, authors, communities)
--Category Romance (its past history, recent and forthcoming lines, changing demographics, etc.)
--History of Romance Fiction and its major subgenres (major authors and texts, turning points in the development of the genre or any subgenre)
--Romance and Region: places, histories, mythologies, traditions
--Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation; romance manga; non-Western writers, readers, and publishers; local, national, and multinational publishing)
--Romance communities and the Romance Industry: authors, readers, publishers, websites, blogs

If you are a romance author or editor and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the romance genre, please contact us!

As we did last year in San Francisco, the Romance Fiction area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field. Of particular interest this year: the new International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) with its affiliated scholarly publication, Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS)!

Submit a one-page (150-250 word) proposal or abstract (via regular mail or e-mail) by November 15, 2008, to the Area Chairs in Romance:

Eric Selinger
Dept. of English
DePaul Univ.
802 West Belden Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614
773-325-4475
eselinge@depaul.edu

Darcy Martin
Women's Studies
East Tennessee State University
(423) 439-6311
martindj@etsu.edu

PCA 2008: Romance II

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Romance Fiction II: Thursday, 10:00-11:30am
Histories and Rediscoveries
Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University

"Australia Doesn't Have to Rhyme with Failure: Australian Romance Pulp Fiction of the 1950s" Toni Johnson-Woods, University of Queensland
Toni was reporting on her new research grant, detailing the information about Australian Popular Fiction to 1959 that will be posted on Austlit.edu.au over the next few months and years. She is focusing solely on Australian authors, because it's a government grant to see how much influence Australia and Australian products (both books and authors) have had on the international market. After 1939, cheap pulp fiction that came from US was taxed by the Australian government as a protectionist measure. As a result, Australian-produced pulp fiction only took off after 1945. Researchers have mostly ignored the US influence on Australian fiction, focusing instead on the British influence, but pulp fiction shows how much the US influenced the Australian market as well. Australian pulp novels are worth hundreds of dollars on eBay nowadays (Toni brought some with her to show us, but made us promise we'd give them back!). The novels had a hybrid format: double-columned with comic book-style pictures. The covers kept changing, from comic book covers in the 1940s, to artistic photos in the 1950s, and paperback-style covers in the late 1950s and the 1960s. One very prolific author was Gordon Clive Bleek: he published 300 books in 20 years, 40 of which were romances. He epitomizes the Australian amateur writer; he was a working class man who looked on writing as a way to supplement his income as a postal worker. He wrote a daily diary with details about his writing, his publisher, and his earnings. In 1951 there was a surge in interest in romance, which resulted, if nothing else, in a disjunction between the covers and the plots due to the factory style production. Interestingly enough, females on the covers can meet the gaze of reader, but men are often not seen from the front but instead in profile or from the back. And men were sometimes much smaller on the cover. In 1959 the tax on imported materials was removed, resulting in a flood of US material into the Australian market, although Australians still wrote a lot of Westerns. The University of Queensland bought Juliet Flesch's romance collection, and Toni is currently scanning all the covers and posting them on the web, although in a password protected format.

"1960's Chick Lit., Female Desire and Empowerment: Rereading Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls" Jennifer Woolston, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Chick lit as seen as emergent or as part of the larger romance genre. Studies either look at older authors like Austen, or at new writers like Helen Fielding. Jennifer looked at Jacqueline Susann as part of the chick lit tradition. Susann's Valley of the Dolls is still in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling title ever. Written in the language of common speech, in modern language, it focuses on the drives and the feelings of its characters, acting as a template for all women to discover and identify with it. The book's expression of women's sexual desire, the fact that it wrote openly about female desire, was enthralling to its reader. The patriarchal view of sex was instilled in the character Ann by her mother and was used as excuse for Ann to seek to leave her small hometown. The novel as a whole seemed to be looking for an outlet for female desire in a male-dominated literary world. The depiction of lesbianism shows female sexuality as fluid in nature. Susann unwittingly depicted a poignant social commentary of the feminist criticism of patriarchal culture and its effects on women in society and condemning Susann for not writing an obviously feminist novel is anachronistic. The fact that she focused on female sexuality and female subjectivity is a feminist act in and of itself, even if was not meant to be. One can easily make a connection between modern chick lit and Susann's huge bestseller, because she questioned the dominant power structure, just as chick lit does today.

"Romance for the Masses: The 'Dime Novels' of Bertha M. Clay" Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University
Darcy discovered Bertha M. Clay in a sale of books (can't remember if it was a library sale or a second-hand bookstore, or what). She decided to do some more research on who this woman was and why her books were so popular. Bertha M. Clay was actually a "stable" of authors with 500 novels to her name. She started as a real person, Charlotte Brame, but she died when she was 49, and her name was continued by her publisher. She was born in 1836, and from 1870 to her death, there's 70 manuscripts that are hers. She wrote the dime novels that had their heyday between 1860-1915 and were the direct ancestor of modern popular genres. Rural women, especially, were the audience and fiction came more and more to focus on women's sphere: home and family. With sensation fiction, they were the prototype for the modern soap opera and were the ultimate example of the trivialities produced for "mindless, passive" consumers. George Eliot particularly condemned the "oracular" novels Bertha M. Clay wrote, novels that she wrote to forward her particular, conservative moral view with simpering, pure heroines. Dora Thorne is the most popular and long-lasting novel under Bertha M. Clay's name. Three silent films were made. The story housed three love stories in one: Dora Thorne and Ronald Earl, an earl's heir. [Bathroom break—sorry! I came back in at the very end.] We should be looking at novels that were popular precisely because they were enjoyable to the readers, no matter how strange they may be to us today.

"Eleanor Sleath: A Writer Rediscovered" Carolyn Jewel
Unfortunately, Carolyn was not able to attend the conference.

This panel shows us some of the exciting new research that is being done around the popular novel for women, if not necessarily around the modern romance novel.

PCA/ACA Conference 2007

Sarah S. G. Frantz

I am currently attending the Annual Conference for the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association in Boston, MA. Eric Selinger and Darcy Martin, Area Co-Chairs for Romance, have put together some fine panels on popular romance novels, and I thought I'd post summaries of the panels and the papers and even the discussions during the Q&A sessions.

I apologize to the presenters for simplifying their arguments. I take notes very well, but they're still notes and obviously can't do justice to the full scope of the presentation, which probably can't do justice to the full scope of what is probably a larger project anyway. But I'll try, and I'll also comment on how the papers talked to and with each other.

In fact, there's only one more Romance panel left. It's a special session tomorrow, Friday, April 5, 2007, 12:30-2:00pm. Authors Jennifer Crusie and Mary Bly/Eloisa James will be presenting, and then Suzanne Brockmann and Anne Stuart will respond and hold a roundtable session that should be a lot of fun and is being much anticipated by those of us here.

Of the five Romance panels that have taken place, I attended four. I missed the first one for embarrassing reasons (I was finishing up my own paper for the second session), so I'll just post names and titles and maybe someone who went can fill in details in the comments:

Romance II: Regional and Global Perspectives
Chair: Emily Haddad, University of South Dakota

Christine Bolus-Reichert, University of Toronto: "The Descent of Romance: Madeleine Brent, Modesty Blaise, and the Imperialist Adventure"
Apparently, if I'd been there, I would have been the only person in the audience to have read Madeleine Brent's novels, for which I can thank my mother! I'm very sorry I wasn't there, because I love Brent's stories. I imagine Christine wishes I'd been there as well. Christine very graciously gave me a copy of the paper, which I will read and comment on later.

Glinda Hall, Arkansas State University: "Inverting the Southern Belle"
ETA: Glinda explained her paper to me over drinks, so let's see if I get it right. She said that she examined three (cut down to one) books that used New Orleans as a setting. And while people in the South say that New Orleans is "different," where everyone gets wild and crazy, Hall's argument is that New Orleans is actually where everyone's motivations and real feelings actually come out instead of being repressed. So it's only different in that people are expressing all that they've repressed, rather than acting completely out of character.

Emily Haddad, University of South Dakota: "Postmodern Victorianism and the Romance of India"

The second session of Thursday was the session I was in (I had finished my paper by then!). Unintuitively, it was called Romance I because our time was switched with Romance II to accomodate travel schedules of presenters.

Romance I: Heroes and Heroines
Chair: Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University

Julie Taddeo, University of Maryland, College Park: "Searching for Romantic Heroes in Catherine Cookson Country
Taddeo discussed Catherine Cookson, a best-selling English author of over one hundred novels published between 1950-1998. Cookson's historical novels recreates a "lost" British way of life, and her readers insist that the appeal of her novels is not the romance, but the struggles and troubles the characters go through. Taddeo discussed in particular Cookson's construction of her male characters, especially the physically and emotionally crippled men who populate Cookson's novels. Cookson's women usually marry up, but they marry a man who has physical or emotional scars that equalize the relationship. Women also rescue their men from domineering first wives or shrewish mothers. Cookson was apparently troubled by the sexual revolution, but her depictions of troubled masculinity appeals to her readers because of their moments of gender subversiveness in which it is the man who needs to be mothered and saved.

I know I'm not doing justice to Taddeo's consideration of Cookson, but I thought she had some fascinating points about an author with such a long-lived publishing career and how her readers focus is NOT on the romance so much as the barriers to romance.

Kerry Sutherland, Kent State University: "Marital Rape as a Plot Device in Catherine Coulter's Historical Romances: Appropriate or Appalling?"
Sutherland's discussion of Catherine Coulter's historical romances centered around the vexed question of marital rape. Historically, rape in marriage was a legal impossibility and Coulter defends her use of marital rape as necessary to maintain historical accuracy in her novels. Sutherland, however, is deeply troubled by the fact that the rapist husband is redeemed not through a change of heart and much groveling before the heroine, but through the heroine excusing and rationalizing her husband's behavior and accepting all the blame. Sutherland questions whether female readers accept the rape: Are events acceptable because the reader is in control fo the fictional experience? Is it that husband rapists in Coulter's novels do not act as real-life husband rapists do and act on overwhelming passion, rather than through violence? Pamela Regis claims that rape in romances needs to be seen in the context of its setting, but Sutherland questions whether the heroine and/or the reader are empowered by converting the man who rapes her or does it just devalue the heroine and therefore the reader?

This discussion is, of course, very topical at the moment, with discussion at Dear Author and Romance B(u)y the Blog and Smart Bitches about rape and sexuality in general in romances.

Sarah S. G. Frantz, Fayetteville State University: "Sobbing SEALs, Frantic Football Players, and Weeping Vampires: The Rise of the Emotional Masculine Perspective in Romance Novels"
I discussed the spectacle of tears shed by hyper-masculine romance heroes, especially in Susan Elizabeth Phillips' Chicago Stars books, Suzanne Brockmann's Navy SEAL Troubleshooter books, and J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood vampire series. I demonstrated how the most important structural change in romance over the last twenty years is the inclusion of the hero's perspective, and how that focus on masculine emotional expression yields an increasing need for greater displays of feeling. Phillips' heroes cry to demonstrate to their heroines that they truly love them and it seems to be the only way in which the heroines can believe the heroes. J.R. Ward takes this a step further and directly ties her heroes' tears to their specific emotional barrier to a relationship with the heroine. The key to the entire character of Brockmann's Navy SEAL Sam Starrett is his relationship to his own tears and how they define what kind of man he is. For these alpha males, then, tears demonstrate the barriers through which they must break to fall in love with and admit their love to their heroines, but the way in which their tears are constructed allows them to enhance rather than threaten their alpha masculinity.

Darcy Martin, East Tennessee State University: "Exploding the Stereotype: The Heroine as Portrayed in the Silhouette Bombshell Series
Martin discusses the heroine of the now-defunct Silhouette Bombshell line and how different she is from the "normal" heroine of category romances. The 124 books of the Bombshell line, published between 2004-2007 have heroines who are older, experienced, both professionally and sexually, not virginal, and how engage in high-risk professions. Martin focused specifically on the six original novels of the Athena Force series, in which the heroines emphasize their bonds of sisterhood (of choice, not blood). They are strong, loyal, intelligent characaters who fight and love hard and who never back down. In fact, some of the Bombshell books, with their "happy for now" endings, might not even be considered "true" romance novels. Martin's final point was the the Bombshell authors took risks with both their storylines and their heroines, especially.

The panel really worked well together, analyzing the construction of the heroes and heroines of these very different books in ways that worked together in interesting and exciting forms. The questions focused on ways in which to reconcile the marital rapes to the reader, and Eric Selinger suggested the idea of fantasies of resiliance for female readers, and then brought up Emma Holly's novel Hunting Midnight, in which violence is played out as sexual fantasy, but not as a "reality" that it seems to be in Coulter's novels.

Popular but Ridiculed?

Lately it's been popular and analysed. Conferences coming up include

• The Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's Annual Regional Conference(February 14-17, 2007, Albuquerque, New Mexico). The call for papers on romance is here and, in an updated version, here, and according to the conference's main page the deadline for submissions has been extended to 1 December.
• Eric Selinger and Darcy Martin will be chairing a session on romance at the National Popular Culture & American Culture Associations 2007 Joint Conference (April 4-7, 2007, in Boston, Massachusetts).
• And, as mentioned earlier on this blog, there's a Feminism and Popular Culture conference coming up in the UK in June 2007.

If anyone knows of any other conferences at which papers on romance are being encouraged (and on which the calls for papers aren't quite so imminent or already past), please add details in the comments.

It's not that long since Eloisa James 'came out' and revealed that she's both an academic and a romance author (you can listen to her discuss why she made that decision here). In 2003 Dr Lee Tobin McClain wrote that:

Even though popular fiction has become more academically respectable in recent years, focusing on it can still seem hazardous to a professor's career. Studying a genre as devalued as romance is particularly fraught with difficulty, and writing romance has a reputation even below analyzing it.

As we can see, though, at the moment there are plenty of conferences and lots of academic interest in popular culture, including the romance genre, and over at the Romance Wiki there's a list of academics who write romance, including McClain herself (under her pseudonym) and Eloisa James. In her article McClain urges other academics to follow in their footsteps:

if popular fiction is your passion, working with it can be both productive and playful. In fact, popular fiction can provide a useful window into the scholarly world. As a romance-writing academic, I offer the following lessons for those who want to follow this treacherous path.

So perhaps things are slowly improving, but in the meantime some prejudices still linger. Here's a link to a short romance story by Linda Sole (who writes for Mills & Boon as Anne Herries) which touches on the issue. Avril, the heroine of For Those Who Believe is a fan of fantasy fiction and 'It wasn't unusual for friends to mock her about her choice of fiction. Not many of them shared her love of fantasy books and films'. Of course, it might be that her friends have some valid concerns about quite how seriously she believes in the fantasy world. But my sympathies are with Avril, and I think it'll be the same for most of us who know how to suspend our disbelief, so that (for a short time) the world of romance novel feels real.