The full schedule of the 2023 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance is now online. The conference itself is taking place from 28-30 June.
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Here are the new publications, which I've added to the Romance Scholarship Database:
Allan, Jonathan A. (2023). "Softcore romance: on naked heroes and beefcakes in popular romance novels." **** Studies. [Some quotes and link here. I'm trying to avoid getting caught in a Blogger filter so I'm starring out words I think might trigger it.]
Davisson, Amber and Kyra Hunting (2023).
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From private pleasure to erotic spectacle: Adapting Bridgerton to female audience desires." Journal of Popular Television
11.1:7-25. [I've not been able to access this, but the abstract can be found here. It's part of a special issue about the television version of the Bridgerton novels.]
Hanson, Donna Maree (2022). Romance fiction as a bridge to understanding changing gender roles in society. PhD in Creative Writing, University of Canberra.
[The dissertation is partly a discussion of two surveys carried out in 2016/2017, one with romance readers and the other with romance authors, with a view to understanding their attitudes towards feminism. The full dissertation is available via a link provided on the page to which I've linked above.]
Pérez-Gil, María del Mar (2023). "Mass Tourism, Ecocriticism, and Mills & Boon Romances (1970s-1980s)." Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.
Reed, Eleanor (2023). Woman's Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918-1958: Making Homemakers Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. [More details here.]
Sharma, Vishal, Kirsten Bray, Neha Kumar, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2023. “It Takes (at least) Two: The Work to Make Romance Work.” In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
This discusses the work involved in self-publishing romance. It notes that:
Wells, Juliette (2022). "Afterword: Sex, Romance, and Representation in Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last." Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond. Ed. Nora Nachumi and Stephanie Oppenheim. University of Rochester Press. Rochester, NY. 243-252. [Some quotes and links here.]While white participants reported using pen-names to separate their writer identity from their personal one, our participants of color undertook much more significant identity management. In addition to adopting white-sounding pen names, they mentioned about how race influenced their story lines and characters. Digital platforms, and the need they create for writers to engage with readers, surface questions of how they become arenas in which some are excluded while others are privileged based on whether it is possible for everyone to engage equally (e.g. whether everyone can use video for conversations). [...] Romance novelists continue to confront issues of racism within the community, and our research suggests another dimension to this reckoning, which shows how the tools writers use perpetuate or even exacerbate discrimination.
