New Publications: Medical Romance, Romance in the Caribbean, Iran, Philippines, Quebec, Sweden and more

Arnold-Forster, Agnes (2021). “Racing Pulses: Gender, Professionalism and Health Care in Medical Romance Fiction.” History Workshop Journal. [Open Access]

Abrahamsson, Elin (2021). “Superwomen, Latte Dads and Feminist Alphas: Negotiations on Feminism in Contemporary Swedish Popular Romance Novels.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 10.

Boivin, Karol'Ann and Marie-Pier Luneau (2021). "Qu’ont en commun Mimi Estival, Roxanne d’Avril et Georgette Mars? Auctorialité et roman sentimental québécois de l’après guerre (1944-1965)." Authorship 10.1

Egilsdatter Sleire, Maria (2021). “Only I shall taste your body’s joys:” The Erotic Function of Female Corporeality in The Flame and the Flower and Fifty Shades of Grey. Master's Thesis, University of Bergen.

Hughes, Bill (2021). "Genre Mutation in Young Adult Gothic: The Dialectics of Dystopia and Romance in Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown." Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others. Ed. Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. [More details here.]

Naeej, Elham (2021). "Parting the Curtain: The Virgin Heroine and the ‘Westoxified’ Villain in Contemporary Iranian Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 10.

Nickel, Eleanor Hersey (2020). Christian Popular Culture from The Chronicles of Narnia to Duck Dynasty. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers. [There is a chapter about Francine Rivers's Redeeming Love. Excerpt available here.] 

Parnell, Claire, Andrea Anne Trinidad & Jodi McAlister (2021). "Live literature in the Philippines: an ethnographic study of #RomanceClass and reading as performance." Creative Industries Journal. Online First. [Abstract]

Parnell, Claire, Andrea Anne Trinidad & Jodi McAlister (2021). "Hello, Ever After: #RomanceClass and Online-Only Live Literature in the Philippines in 2020." M/C Journal, 24 (3).

Pierre-Robertson, Petronetta (2021). "Literature as an Agent of Change." Gender and Domestic Violence in the Caribbean. Ed. Ann Marie Bissessar and Camille Huggins. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 87-103. [More details here and here.]

Warren, Jean-Philippe and Marie-Pier Luneau (2021). "The Best Romance Dime Novels on the (French-Canadian) Market: The Promotional Strategies of Police-Journal, 1944-1963." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 10.

New to the Wiki: Shades and The Sheik

Laura Vivanco

I've decided I should put up a post whenever I add (or someone else adds) an entry to the Romance Wiki bibliography because items are added quite frequently and I don't tweet or blog about them all individually, so people may not be aware of how often new items are added or what they are. In today's post, I'd like to draw attention to an issue of Women: A Cultural Review which should be of interest to romance scholars. I haven't actually been able to get hold of copies of these articles myself but the argument in the article about Heyer, in particular, seems controversial:

Deal, Clare H., 2015. 

"‘Throbb[ing] with a consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her’: Embodiment and Female Subjectivity in the Desert Romance", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 75-95.

Here's the abstract:

This article examines the relationship between the desert and embodiment in E. M. Hull’s international best-seller The Sheik (1919). This novel, a desert romance, has been the focus of feminist scholarship for decades because of its controversial rape narrative. Drawing on theories of embodiment, in particular the work of Elizabeth Grosz, the author interrogates how the desert is paradoxically presented as a space of liberation and oppression within which female sexuality could be explored despite the gendered violence of pre-existing patriarchal frameworks. Ultimately, the author provides a reading of Diana in terms of her transition from an androgynous ‘girl’ to a sexually desiring, seemingly feminized ‘woman’, and examines the connotations associated with this. The author establishes a connection between the transient nature of the desert and the liberation offered to women within this liminal space. Through an in-depth examination of the protagonist Diana’s corporeal subjectivity over the course of the novel, the author positions The Sheik as offering a voice to female sexuality and erotic fantasy, demonstrating Hull’s depiction of the desert as an appropriation of that space through which to explore female desires. This opens up new understandings of what constituted innovative literature in interwar Britain and marks Hull’s book, with its overtly erotic content and specific focus on female desire, as a political and social departure.
 

Gillis, Stacy, 2015. 

"The Cross-Dresser, the Thief, His Daughter and Her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 57-74.

Here's the abstract:

When romance fiction consolidated as a genre in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of generic conventions concerning the heterosexual imperatives came about. This article considers how these heterosexual imperatives function as a mask for queer desire in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926).  Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the article identifies in the novel a detailed account of male–male desire through arguing that while the romantic narrative is concerned with the Duc of Avon and Léonie, his former cross-dressing page, the substantial sexual tension in the novel occurs in the meetings and exchanges between Avon and Léonie’s biological father, Henri Saint-Vire. While These Old Shades ends with the presentation of Léonie by Avon as his duchess, it is male–male desire which has (queerly) driven this romance plot to its ‘natural’ conclusion of marriage.  The article thinks through what happens when the rivalry, explicitly about desiring a woman, is an implicit homosocial bond and how this functions within the heterosexual imperatives of the romance novel. The article questions how desire functions in the romance novel and, more crucially, how romance fiction can be read as resisting, at least in part, that which has been traditionally understood as their raison d’être—the heterosexual imperative.

And in the same issue there's another item which may be of interest, though I won't be adding it to the Bibliography because I've not been adding Fifty Shades scholarship to it unless there's a clear link made to romance novels:

Booth, Naomi, 2015.

"The Felicity of Falling: Fifty Shades of Grey and the Feminine Art of Sinking", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 22-39.

Here's the abstract:

This article explores the frequent faints depicted in the Fifty Shades novels in the context of a long history of feminine swooning in the popular novel, and in light of Alexander’s Pope’s famous description of bathos as ‘the felicity of falling gracefully’. Pope’s satirical treatise describes not just a sinking from the high to the low, but from the present to the past, through a process of bathetic literary travesty. The author argues that the Fifty Shades novels travesty their literary precedents, troping in particular on past moments of female powerlessness and producing bathos through depictions of the fainting female form. The novels depend in particular on (mis)readings of Tess of the D’Urbervilles: their celebration of Tess’s abjection strips Hardy’s novel of its most complex and disturbing elements, euphemizing a bloody and tragic struggle as a swoon of ecstatic submission. At stake in this discussion is the question of how popular fiction deals with its past—in this case, how the novels deal with a history of exploited femininity iconized in the swoon. The Fifty Shades novels simultaneously invoke and deny the past, celebrating female abjection in a manner that disavows the specificities of that abjection, and denying the materiality of the materials they draw upon. E. L. James’s approach to her historical referents is contrasted with Angela Carter’s, through which the texture of the past (and the motif of feminine fainting) is vividly engaged with in an attempt to transform the future.

 

Laura Vivanco

Romance VI: Risky Business: Love, Abuse, and Violence

Domestic Abuse and Violence in the Works of Nora Roberts

(Pavla Stefanska, Masaryk University)

Love overcomes everything. Everything is fair in love and war. There is a fine line between love and hate. These and similar sayings may evoke an impression that there is a close connection between love and violence. Apart from that, they also represent some of the beliefs which permeate western culture’s ideas of love and relationships. As people have the tendency to accept these sayings at their face value and rarely question where these ideas come from and how they affect their behavior, they seldom realize that these beliefs pose a potential threat to their intimate relationships.

Based on the article by Julia T. Wood “The Normalization of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships: Women’s Narratives of Love and Violence” in which she cites western gender and romance narratives as responsible for the high number of women who stay with abusive partners, this paper examines several novels by Nora Roberts, one of the most popular romance writers of our time, in which the author uses domestic abuse in hero’s or heroine’s past as a barrier which stands in the way of their HEA. The paper explores whether Roberts’ portrayal of the domestic violence corresponds to the narrative categories proposed by Wood, and is looking in more detail at the ways in which the after effects of the trauma caused by the abuse are dealt with in terms of reclaiming one’s own identity and re-establishing oneself not only within the narrative of a successful romantic relationship, but also within the much wider narrative of one’s place in community and society, to show that are differences at Roberts’ descriptions which mirror the changing trends in society and the de-tabooing of the issue of domestic abuse in the last thirty years. 


“It Felt Like A Kiss”: Violence and Violations in Jo Beverley’s An Unwilling Bride

(Angela Toscano, University of Iowa)

The title of this paper is taken from The Crystals’ 1962 single, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).” This was a song that was not popular even in its own time, and it garnered criticism for its supposed endorsement of spousal abuse. Yet, the song is not simply an unthinking approval of domestic violence. Rather, it reveals something—both in its tonality and its lyrics—about how love and violence intertwine and tangle until one becomes the metonymic stand in for the other. Similarly, discussions of Jo Beverley’s 1992 novel, An Unwilling Bride, question whether the book simply endorses violence as being synonymous with love.

Somewhere, someone once called An Unwilling Bride a novel that puts “the alpha male on trial.” Yet, it this what is being tried? What Beverley’s novel tries are the boundaries between love and violence, passion and anger, anger and abuse. These terms are alternately collapsed and separated throughout the course of the novel. What distinguishes an act of violence from an act of abuse? What is abuse? How are both related to passion? While romance community discussions of the novel have focused on either the acceptability of the hero’s actions or the believability of the novel’s HEA, my paper will argue that the novel plays out the logic of violent love in order to untie that metonymic bond between the two terms.

The Witch Must Die---- Gaze, Female Transgression and Misogyny in Linda Howard’s Dream Man

(Adam Tang, Springly Seasons International Publishers)

Linda Howard’s Dream Man, published in 1994, highlights the issue of misogyny toward female transgression through a combination of thrillers and popular romances. The story focuses on a number of female victims whose occasionally ill manners offend the male serial killer and thus are doomed to death as punishment. Howard explicitly depicts the bloody murder scenes as well as the irrational gender-specific hatred, which is rarely specified in popular romantic narratives.

Death and murder has long been a part of romantic narrative since Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Unlike the detectives or mystery, however, popular romances focus on the relationship development between the heroine and the hero rather than the process or motives of the murder itself. Mostly, murder in popular romances is never the center of romance readers’ gaze, functioning only as the story background or plot stimulation. The purpose of death and murder in romance narrative serves for the protagonists to recognize their love for each other as well as for the readers to contrast the expected happy ending. Hence, the murder depicted in popular romances is usually personally motivated. The cause of death is comprehensible and definite, lest the uncanny death threat should shadow the happily ever-after.

Yet Howard’s Dream Man portrays an irrational serial killer whose victims have little personal involvement with him. Through the heroine’s psychic sight/ gaze, the readers are presented with detailed bloody processes of murders. The murders become the center of romance readers’ gaze and none of the deaths is out of personal causes but of misogyny. This essay aims to elaborate the treatment of murder and misogyny in Linda Howard’s Dream Man and how it celebrates the female strength through a modern version of witch hunting.

Fifty Shades of Anti-Feminism: The Distortion of the Fetish and the Romance Novel in Post-Feminist Culture

(Kalauren McMillan, Winthrop University)

Fifty Shades of Gray, an erotic novel by E.L. James, tells the story of Ana Steele, who is forced via her attraction and dynamic position into an abusive, pseudo-BDSM relationship with Christian Gray. In my paper, I argue that the novel promotes a harmful trend of disempowerment of women through distorting the BDSM lifestyle, glorifying an oppressed heroine, and textually placing Ana in forceful passivity to Christian.

I start my presentation by surveying how romance novels are traditionally seen as anti-feminist. However, scholars have proven that this is not a requirement of the genre. Romance novels may contain feminist facets. I argue that James does not incorporate feminist literary techniques, but has shaped aspects of the novel toward oppression. The BDSM aspect of the novel does not conform to the tenets of the lifestyle and distorts the subculture into a mode of abuse and feminine disempowerment. In addition, Ana has no defense against the aforementioned factors due to her naivety and lack of self.

I conclude that the impetus of this novel is the post-feminist movement. The rise of post-feminism has allowed James’ novel to gain popularity with many female readers. These women, as a result, exalt the characteristics that allow and encourage Ana’s oppression via Christian. In light of Ana idolizing Christian for aesthetic beauty and perceived perfection and ameliorating his abusive and non-consensual sexual tendencies, I conclude female readers of the novel now see this portrayal of the “ideal” man as a potential romantic partner. Seeing Christian as the height of sexual and relationship pleasure, women are encouraged through the novel to seek oppression and disempowerment as “happiness” and “liberation.”

Links: Medical Romance, Fifty Shades, Viking Bondage and L. M. Montgomery

Laura Vivanco

Jessica, of Read React Review, presented a paper about medical romance novels at the PCA/ACA conference and she's summarised it on her blog. She argues that

it’s possible to view commercial fiction as actually participating, however indirectly, in bioethical conversation. [...]

The Penhally Bay series was written in the first decade of the 21st century, a time when organized medicine was having a lot of internal debates about what “professionalism” means. [...] The professionalism project emphasizes old fashioned values of altruism, compassion, and integrity. It focuses on individuals, and on maintaining continuity with a perceived tradition of medical professionalism dating back 200 years. Medical sociologists, identifying a number of competing accounts of medical professionalism, identify this as “nostalgic professionalism”. [...] I think that the Penhally Bay series presents a version of medical professionalism closely aligned with nostalgic professionalism in several ways.

The full post can be found here.

Eva Illouz has a new book out soon: Hard-Core Romance: "Fifty Shades of Grey," Best-Sellers, and Society will be published in May by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Illouz

delves into its remarkable appeal, seeking to understand the intense reading pleasure it provides and how that resonates with the structure of relationships between men and women today. Fifty Shades, Illouz argues, is a gothic romance adapted to modern times in which sexuality is both a source of division between men and women and a site to orchestrate their reconciliation. As for the novels’ notorious depictions of bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism, Illouz shows that these are as much a cultural fantasy as a sexual one, serving as a guide to a happier romantic life. The Fifty Shades trilogy merges romantic fantasy with self-help guide—two of the most popular genres for female readers.

Madison Prall, a student at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne has created a conference poster which

compares a contemporary historical romance novel series published between 2001 and 2004 by Karen Marie Moning with an older historical romance novel series published between 1980 and 1994 by Joanna Lindsey, in order to assess changing values regarding idealized romantic relationships between men and women.

Madison notes that "All three female protagonists in the Lindsey novels are enslaved by their future husbands, and Kristen and Erika are even forced to wear chains by their romantic partners." Madison finds "disturbing [...] the implication that rape and domination are elements of romantic relationships that romance novel readers think are acceptable or even desirable."

Given the recent success of Fifty Shades I can't help but wonder, though, if "Johanna Lindsey's portrayal of the bondage and domination of her female protagonists by the male protagonists" was an earlier way of writing "hard-core romance" at a time when explicit BDSM would not have been so acceptable. In other words, was it intended to be read more as a "Viking rape scene" than as a suggestion that rape could be romantic or acceptable in real life?

There's been a lot of discussion of the "romance canon" recently. It looks as though some people might be lobbying for the inclusion of L. M. Montgomery (or maybe they'd rather she stayed out of the romance canon and was accepted into the literary canon). The reissue of a book about her works may be of particular interest to romance scholars working on romances for younger audiences given that Montgomery's best known for her series about Anne of Green Gables but she did write some works for adults, including The Blue Castle:

When it originally appeared, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass was one of the first challenges to the idea that L.M. Montgomery’s books were unworthy of serious study. Examining all of Montgomery’s fiction, Epperly argues that Montgomery was much more than a master of the romance genre and that, through her use of literary allusions, repetitions, irony, and comic inversions, she deftly manipulated the normal conventions of romance novels. Focusing on Montgomery’s memorable heroines, from Anne Shirley to Emily Byrd Starr, Valancy Stirling, and Pat Gardiner, Epperly demonstrates that Montgomery deserves a place in the literary canon.

Out Now: Issue 4.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

Laura Vivanco

As Eric Selinger observes in his introduction to the latest issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies,

we have three essays on the subgenre of erotic romance:  two on the most famous recent contribution to that subgenre, E. L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy, engaging it via the sharply different perspectives of fan-fiction / fandom studies and the history of white masculinity; one on the groundbreaking collection Macho Sluts (1988) by Patrick Califia, which situates this volume of lesbian BDSM fiction at the crossroads of public history (the feminist anti-pornography movement of the 1980s), queer activism, and romance genre conventions.

 They're

• Fifty Shades of “Mommy Porn”: A Post-GFC Renegotiation of Paternal Law
  by Claire Trevenen
• Fifty Shades of Remix: The Intersecting Pleasures of Commercial and Fan Romances
  by Katherine Morrissey
• The Political Uses of Lesbian Romance Fiction: Reading Patrick Califia’s Macho Sluts as a Response to 1980s Anti-Pornography Feminism
  by Carolyn Bronstein

There is also a special section dedicated to Love in Latin American Popular Culture:

• Special Issue: Love in Latin American Popular Culture (Editor’s Introduction)
  by David William Foster
• Regimes of Affect: Love and Class in Mexican Neoliberal Cinema
  by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
• Vulnerable Bodies: Subverting Masculine Normativity in Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s Boquitas pintadas
  by Assen Kokalov
• From Latin to Latino Lover: Hispanicity and Female Desire in Popular Culture
  by Nadia Lie
• Sara García: Sapphic Romance in Mexican Golden Age Filmmaking
  by Ileana Baeza Lope
• Outing Javier Fuentes-León’s Contracorriente and the case for a New Queer Cinema in Latin America
  by Vinodh Venkatesh
• Romantic Love in Mexico and Latin America: An Interview with Enrique Serna
  by Michael K. Schuessler

And, of course, there are a number of reviews:

• Review: New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays
  edited by Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger
• Review: Delmira Agustini, Sexual Seduction and Vampiric Conquest
  by Cathy L. Jrade
• Review: Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature
  edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega
• Review: Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural
  by Victoria Nelson

New Article: Sex, Power and Desire in the Romance Novel

Laura Vivanco

Maria Nilson's "From The Flame and the Flower to Fifty Shades of Grey: Sex, Power and Desire in the Romance Novel" has been published in Akademisk Kvarter/Academic Quarter 7 (2013): 119-131.

Reading these books [i.e. the Fifty Shades trilogy] mainly as romance, Nilson focuses on how James uses well known and established romance traits from, for example, the so-called “bodice-ripper” novel and chick lit, in order to create a hybrid. These traits are visible in both how James describes her protagonists and in how the relationship between them is portrayed. Nilson argues that the Fifty Shades trilogy is, rather than a new kind of romance, a compilation of well-established traits.

The article is available in full, for free, here.

New Theses: Traitorous Bodies Exploring Discipline Relationships

Laura Vivanco

In "'Traitorous Bodies': Cartesian Dualism in Romance Novels by Susan Johnson and E. L. James," Taylor D. Cortesi argues that

Applying René Descartes’s theory of mind/body dualism to the heroines in Susan Johnson’s Seized by Love and E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey reveals not only a separation between the heroines’ minds and bodies, but proves that both heroines are depicted as distinctly body. As such, serious complications arise for the female characters, including the acceptance of sexual violence and submission to the patriarchy. (viii)

Cortesi suggests that

while Fifty Shades of Grey is superficially about the Dominant/Submissive BDSM relationship that develops between protagonists Ana Steele and Christian Grey, it is also the story of a Dominant/Submissive relationship that forms within Ana herself. Because of the Cartesian mind/body dualism evident in Ana, the opposition within her echoes the oppositional relationship between the two main characters. Ana’s mind is at first independent and strong, just as Ana is when she first meets Christian; however, once her body is awakened, Ana’s mind is weakened and becomes submissive to the desires of her body, just as she is weakened and controlled by Christian. (68-69)

Melissa E Travis's PhD thesis, "Assume the Position: Exploring Discipline Relationships" isn't solely about romance novels but it does include a section on "discipline romance novels."  As explained in the abstract,

Discipline relationships are consensual adult relationships between submissive and dominant partners who employ authority and corporal punishment. This population uses social media to discuss the private nature of their ritualized fantasies, desires, and practices. Participants of these relationships resist a sadomasochistic label of BDSM or domestic abuse.

Romance novels about such relationships are apparently growing in number:

Discipline romance novels, published through independent vanity presses or as serials through memberships, are a salient feature in discipline culture. Over the last ten years I have watched the publication and sales of discipline romance novels grow from a grass roots, blog-based movement to a more formal established network. (159)

Since these are romance novels, they share many features with other romance novels but whereas Susan Elizabeth Phillips argues in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance that

I can only shake my head in bewilderment when I hear the romance novel criticized for depicting women as being submissive to domineering men. Are the critics reading the same books I am? What is the ultimate fate of the most arrogant, domineering, ruthless macho hero any romance writer can create? He is tamed. (57-58)

in discipline romance novels the heroes are

often dominant men, or men who find their dominant selves because of a woman who needs to be tamed or brought to submission. In traditional romance novels, dangerous men are often tamed and healed by strong heroines (Regis 2003:171). In discipline romance novels, dominant men often take on headstrong or unruly women and tame them through the use of discipline. One element of discipline romance novels is that submissive women are dangerous to themselves, their relationships, or behave destructively and must be changed through discipline from a dominant partner. These dominant men are unafraid of emotionality, brave women, or taming a bratty woman. They sometimes include a dangerous man archetype, but also include taming the shrew, and rape fantasies. After she is tamed, both characters have a mutually satisfying dominant man/submissive woman traditional role depiction, which fulfills both partners. (160-61)

-----
Cortesi, Taylor D. "'Traitorous Bodies': Cartesian Dualism in Romance Novels by Susan Johnson and E. L. James." M. Lit. thesis, Texas State University - San Marcos, 2013.

Phillips, Susan Elizabeth. "The Romance and the Empowerment of Women." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 53-59.

Travis, Melissa E. "Assume the Position: Exploring Discipline Relationships." Sociology Dissertations, Paper 71. Ph.D thesis. Georgia State University, 2013. [Section on "Discipline Romance Novels", pp. 159-66.]

50 Shades (to be a Lover)

Eric Selinger

I'm not sure this counts as a "Musing on Romance Fiction from an Academic Perspective," but I'm not at all sure that it doesn't!  A little parody, this, of Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover," performed by yours truly (Eric) earlier this year.

The lyrics are all in the "description" area, below the video.

Enjoy!

Porn Studies

Laura Vivanco

Pam Regis notified me of a new journal, Porn Studies, which is to be launched in 2014.  The New York Times reports that

The journal, edited by two British academics, Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, has already inspired some hearty scholarly endorsements. “We have waited a long time for an academic journal that treats the subject of the representation of human sexuality with the seriousness it deserves,” Julie Peakman, a historian at the University of London and the author of “Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in 18th-Century England,” said in a statement. “I look forward to a lively and disciplined debate across different disciplines.”

I wonder if one of those disciplines might be popular romance studies given that romance, and particularly erotic romance,

often asserts itself as something other than pornography. It claims not to just be erotic, but romantic. The romance part ought to indicate that it is doing more with sex and sexuality than merely recounting various bits of fucking for the reader’s titillation. Otherwise, why call it romance? Why not just be pornography?  (Toscano)

The boundaries between romance, erotica and pornography may be of particular interest at the moment given the fame and popularity of the Fifty Shades trilogy: "More than just an instance of a particular genre of fiction, Fifty Shades has spawned considerable discussion of the significance of ‘women’s popular erotic fiction’ generally" (Phillips and Trevenen). As Jodi McAlister argues, Fifty Shades

occupies a strangely liminal position at the crossroads of several genres, adopting structural elements from both modern popular romance fiction and 19th-century pornography.

The call for papers for the Journal of Porn Studies can be found here.

--------
McAlister, Jodi. "Fifty Shades of Genre." Popular Romance Project. 8 Nov. 2012.

Phillips, Kristen and Claire Trevenen. "CFP – Shattering Releases: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Erotic Fiction (edited collection)." 2013.

Schuessler, Jennifer. "Routledge to Publish Porn Studies Journal." The New York Times. 30 April 2013.

Toscano, Angela. "Why I Now Hate Erotic Romance." Dear Author. 30 April 2013. Originally published at That Sly Wench, 9 January 2012.

Talking Sense About Fifty $hade$ of Grey

Laura Vivanco

According to John Lennard, my editor at Humanities Ebooks,

E. L. James has had an enormous amount of free publicity from journalists who don't have the slightest understanding or concern about what she's done to fandom, to feminism, and to the efforts of the BDSM community to gain recognition and end legal persecution. But that story is there in the fannish archives, and I've set it out, briefly and readably [in Talking Sense About Fifty $hade$ of Grey or, Fanfic, Feminism, and BDSM.]

John writes fanfic, so he has more than a little first-hand experience of a type of fiction whose earliest examples, he suggests, may be deemed to include the fifteenth-century Robert Henryson's continuation of Chaucer’s Troylus and Criseyde and the unauthorised continuation of Don Quixote which was published before Cervantes's own. In addition to a brief history of fanfiction, he also provides short outlines of feminist debates about pornography, and the history of BDSM because, though there

are of course many other things media coverage has ignored or misrepresented, [...] those three aspects – fanfiction in a digital world, the feminist dilemma, and BDSM – are at the heart of the Fifty Shades phenomenon. So it is those three things that I look at in turn to offer some ways of talking sense about E. L. James and her publishing phenomenon. Each part starts with some background and history, to explain the issues that affect Fifty Shades, but comes back to the trilogy in the end.

Given that I know relatively little about these three topics I'm not particularly well placed to evaluate this assessment of Fifty Shades but it seems to me that John succeeds in laying out the reasons why there is

a clear case that James has exploited the work and language of the BDSM community as she has exploited that of the fanfic community, and traduced BDSM as a political cause as she has traduced feminism. It is all very debatable, of course, and depends on what you know and how you see ; but then again, three strikes and you’re out.

I received my copy free from John who kindly sent it in a format I could read. He's self-published it via Amazon, and it's currently available for free for members of Amazon Prime, and otherwise at $3.28 $2.99 at Amazon.com and £2.05 at Amazon.co.uk . For those wondering about the length, in the pdf version I received, the main argument comprised 73 out of 92 pages (the rest are a few introductory pages and plentiful end notes).

JPRS CFP in the LA Times

Laura Vivanco

An article published yesterday in the LA Times begins by discussing BDSM at Ivy League universities and then moves on to describe a course Stef Woods will be teaching at American University:

AMST-330 005 AMERICAN STUDIES 
SPRING 2013 
Course Level: Undergraduate
Contemporary American Culture (3)
The 50 Shades Trilogy

The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy is a publishing phenomenon that has dramatically impacted American culture and sexual health. Using the series as a case study, this course examines the interplay of sexuality, health, public relations and marketing. Topics covered include feminism, addiction, social media marketing, sexual expression versus sexual repression, targeting the mom demographic, domestic violence, literary criticism, and relationship and identity forming. The course also relies on academic texts, online resources, lectures, and guest speakers.

The article concludes with details of a recent call for papers from JPRS:

Once completing such a course, students who wish to continue their research could take the next step and write an academic paper. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies has a call for papers for a special issue, "Before and Beyond 50 Shades of Grey: New Approaches to Erotic Romance Fiction." The peer-reviewed journal is looking for "essays, interviews, and pedagogical materials on the subject of erotic popular romance fiction, now and in the past. Essays on individual authors and texts are encouraged, along with work on the business side of the genre — its publishers, its marketing, etc. — and explorations of its reception, including fandom, censorship, and the public debates surrounding erotic romance." Its deadline is Feb. 1, 2013.

With more than 25 million copies of the "50 Shades" trilogy sold, it's only going to find more traction in academia. Maybe E.L. James herself will venture in that direction.

ENG 232: Final Syllabus

After a lot of dithering (my usual way of thinking things through), I finally chose the books and topics for my popular romance course next quarter.  As you'll see, I'm sticking with the idea of building the course around Laura's book, and since I'm not going up for promotion this year, I hope to have the time to blog about how each segment goes.  I did, though, change the list of novels considerably.  It's not even remotely representative of the genre now--there's only one historical romance, for example, and that one isn't a Regency--but the books all do the three things they need to do:  fit the topics, help me with my research, and teach well, year after year.

Now to choose the books for course #2, the Love Seminar!  (Hint:  I think I'm going to take the easy way out, whatever that turns out to be....)  

Schedule Of Classes, Topics, And Readings

Topic 1:  What is a “Romance”?  A “Romance Novel”?  A “Popular Romance Novel”?

M:  Introduction to the Class and to each other.  Introduction to “romance,” the “romance novel,” the “popular romance novel” and the “Harlequin Romance” as critical and historical categories.

W:    Vivanco, Introduction and Chapter 1 (“Mimetic Modes”) of For Love and Money

M:  Unsung Hero:  chapters 1-10 (feel free to read ahead)

W:  Unsung Hero:  the rest of it!

Topic 2:  Twice-Told Tales: Romance, Myth, and Fairy Tale

M:  Vivanco, Chapter 2 (“Mythoi”)

W:    Bet Me 

M:  Bet Me

Topic 3:  My Metafictional Romance

W:  Vivanco, Chapter 3 (“Metafiction”)

M:  Natural Born Charmer

W:  Natural Born Charmer

Topic 4:  My Metaphorical Romance

M:  Vivanco, Chapter 4 (“Metaphors”) and Conclusion

W:  Homecoming

M:  Homecoming

Topic 5:  Lore, Deportment, and Problem Fiction: Thinking in Romance

W:  Thomas Roberts, An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, chapter 7 (“Thinking with Tired Brains”) and chapter 8 (“Reading in a System”); Catherine Roach, “Getting a Good Man to Love:  Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy."

M:  False Colors 

W:  False Colors

M:  False Colors

Topic 6:  (Psst!  Isn’t It Really Just “Porn for Women”?)

W:  Ann Barr Snitow, “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different”; assorted readings on Fifty Shades of Grey (to be chosen later)

M:   Start Me Up

W:  Start Me Up

50 Shades of Pedagogy; or, "To Teach, or Not to Teach?"

Eric M. Selinger

I'm choosing books for my next course on popular romance--a lower-division undergraduate class, aimed at a "Gen Ed' student population--and a question has begun to bother me.  Should I add Fifty Shades of Grey to my syllabus?

As of the last time I taught the course, it was organized around a series of topics:  "What is a Romance (and a Romance Novel)?"; "Romance and the Problem of Patriarchy"; "Romance and / as Religion"; "Romance as Problem Fiction and 'Edutainment'"; and, everyone's favorite, "Romance Fiction as 'Porn for Women.'"  Each topic got one or two novels and a bit of secondary reading, whether it was an essay or a book chapter or an interview, and for a final project, we looked at Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation through each of the lenses we'd used across the quarter.

Now, I'd already decided to add Laura's For Love and Money to my syllabus, since it does a great job of introducing students to a lot of the ideas about the genre that we use in the opening unit, as well as the close-reading techniques that we continue to deploy all term.  Ordinarily, that would be enough novelty for one quarter--that, and maybe shifting out a novel that I've already taught a lot (like WTT) and replacing it with another one that's on my mind (say, Natural Born Charmer, which I've already taught several times).

The overwhelming media presence of Fifty Shades, though--and its natural fit in the section on "Romance as 'Porn for Women'"--makes me want to add it, too, to the syllabus, even though this violates my usual self-imposed commandment to teach only novels that I really enjoy reading.

And, of course, if I were really ambitious I could swap out J. R. Ward's Dark Lover--which comes up in the 'Patriarchy' section--and put in Twilight somewhere, so that we could talk about that book and the E. L. James together.  Of course, I haven't read Twilight yet, so I don't know if this, too, would violate my usual rules about liking the texts that I teach.

I wouldn't have Fifty Shades be the only novel for that section of the class; in fact, part of the plan would be to play it off against a book that does some different, more self-consciously artful things with romance and the erotic (probably one of Victoria Dahl's books).  Or I could go back to an older, more chronological course model, so that we'd be reading some other scandalous blockbusters for comparison, like The Sheik or The Flame and the Flower.  (What other novels fit into that category, from other decades, I wonder?)

So, folks, what do you think?

Sarah Speaks: BDSM, Romance, and Fifty Shades

Laura Vivanco

Sarah Frantz was quoted yesterday in the Ventury County Star. Speaking about Fifty Shades of Grey, she states that

"The sex is compelling. Sex is always compelling. But the 18th-century scholar in me says nothing (E.L. James) has done is new, apart from having 20,000 fan fiction followers ready to buy the book the instant it was available," said Sarah Frantz, president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and an associate professor of literature at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.

"She is using many of the conventions and tropes of romantic fiction, including the Byronic hero who has committed nameless crimes in the past who will be cured by the love of a good woman," Frantz added.

Frantz spoke on the topic during a Romance Writers of America Passionate Ink gathering in Anaheim in July. The full-length version of her presentation, "The History of BDSM Fiction and Romance," will be included in "Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades," slated for publication in November.

The term is an acronym for bondage-discipline/dominance-submission/sadism-masochism, themes that James delves into in the "Fifty Shades" trilogy — albeit inaccurately, Frantz said.

"Reading along, you very much get the feeling that the BDSM elements are there to titillate the reader, but that Christian ultimately will be 'cured' of the need to have them in his life, as though they are by definition 'bad,'" she said.

Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey will be published by BenBella Books and is edited by Lori Perkins.

Links: Librarians, Zombies, Sheihks, and Fifty Shades of Sin

Laura Vivanco

Recently Vassiliki Veros was a member of a reader’s panel at the Australian Library and Information Association's 2012 conference and she's posted her paper at her blog. She's a librarian, but

As a reader, I gave up on accessing my books from my library early on. I bought all my romances from newsagencies, supermarkets, second hand bookstores, bookshops, markets, online and swapping books with friends. As a romance reader I am not unique in this behaviour.

This is because

Libraries have treated romance readers as “the devil” for they maintain a distance from them. We see this in librarians trying to improve the readers choice, cataloguers not valuing the books the readers choose. All this is reflected in the romance readers survey responses that the library is not a provider for their reading needs.

There are a few posts about zombie romance, or "zomrom" over at Undead Studies, including one which asks

Why can’t we love the undead? So many friends push aside the idea of a zombie lover completely (you guys can’t judge me! You read about vampire sex!) [...]
As discussed before [see this post], zombie romance is more romance. Sex never enters the equation. It’s about a relationship of souls (personalities), a coming together of two people.

But still zombies aren’t good enough! The rotting is either done away with completely or can be avoided with medication. The eating of people or brains is the same. So where is the problem? They are undead humans, as are vampires. With rational thought, being capable of emotions, moral agency and free will, why are the undead any less suitable as mates?

Jessica Taylor, author of "And You Can Be My Sheikh: Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels" evidently prefers sheikhs. This summer

The top shelf of my largest bookshelf is stacked two rows deep with romances with titles like One Night with the Sheikh by Penny Jordan and Desert Barbarian by Charlotte Lamb. These books (and a corresponding set of binders full of photocopies from 1920s movie magazines) are the remnants of a research project on romantic Orientalism in the United States in the 1920s and 2000s which is currently on hiatus. [...] But now the blogosphere is in luck. This summer I’ve decided to set myself a lofty task:

Read and review all of my sheikh romances and post the reviews on this very blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. On Wednesdays I’ll post a scan from one of the many articles about how hot Rudolph Valentino is. Is this an overly optimistic schedule for someone who’s also finishing her thesis? I guess we’ll see…

And you can read all about it here. She begins with an extended synopsis of/commentary on E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1), (2), (3) and (4).

With regards to a very much more recent phenomenon in sexually titillating fiction, Remittance Girl suggests that

Fifty Shades of Grey does an interesting dance with the explicit. It revels in the details of the taboo of BDSM while seeming to condemn it. [...] And many, many readers love this. They can masturbate furiously to the scenes played out in the Red Room of Pain, while waiting for the heroine to cure Mr. Grey of his perversions.

 I am reminded of the masses who enjoyed the spectacle of the Salem Witch Trials or denunciations of heretics during the Spanish Inquisition. 

"She consorted lewdly with the Devil!" the inquisitor proclaims, partly for the judges but loudly enough to entertain the masses. He lovingly details the proof of her perfidy. The women gasp and feel a quiver between their thighs right before they all scream, "Burn the witch!" [...]

I don't think a large portion of mainstream society has evolved much since then. And for erotica writers, who usually situate themselves firmly in the sex-positive camp, this is very hard to comprehend. We write novels about how erotic experience and the exploration of new sexual territories helps us grow as individuals. For us, sex in a doorway. Very often our themes are about revelation, completion, redemption through experience. Not through shame or rejection or closing down our sexual options.

The photo of "Zombie and Bride of the Zombie" came from Wikimedia Commons and was taken by Sam Pullara, who has made it available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.


The poster of the film of The Sheik also came from Wikimedia Commons, as did Martin van Maële's "Illustration de La sorcière, de Jules Michelet. 1911" which depicts witches dancing naked.

Brushing Aside Criticism

Laura Vivanco

When one's a reader of a type of fiction about which sweeping negative generalisations are made, it can feel satisfying to respond with equally sweeping but positive generalisations. Some of those negative generalisations probably do deserve to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Others, though, contain rather more than a grain of truth and so, having recently come across a number of freshly written critiques of romance, I felt it was appropriate to share them here.

The first is Amanda Joyal's M.A. thesis, "From Victorian Literature to the Romance Novel: Disability and the Courtship Plot," which comes complete with its own counter-example. It

is largely concerned with popular romance novels as a site of criticism for disability because of its widespread popularity and locates Victorian fiction such as Jane Eyre and Olive as the predecessors of modern romance novels. Stereotypes of disability that pervade Victorian literature tend to be present in the modern romance; characters desire cures for their disabilities and operate as pitiable figures within the courtship plot. I analyze the ways in which the disabled protagonists of Yours Until Dawn, Stranger in Town, and Annie's Song must be rehabilitated by their partners in order to be a viable participant in the courtship plot. For male characters, this involves reclamation of their masculinity in order to compensate for the feminization of their disability. Disabled female characters seem to have very little involvement in their own rehabilitation and instead rely on their male partners. In contrast, the heroine of Mouth to Mouth needs no rehabilitation in order to be seen as a sexual partner. Laurel represents a unique case that disability scholars should pay more critical attention to.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any more detail about the thesis, other than that it was completed in 2012 at the University of Wyoming.
The second is by Cora Buhlert, who takes a closer look at the defence of romances which is based on the idea that they're "expressions of women's fantasies":

E.L. James [...] said [...] that the [Fifty Shades] trilogy is fantasy and portrays the sort of fantasy that people would not necessarily want in real life. We’ve heard this sort of explanation before as an apologia for the rapetastic bodicerippers of the 1970s and 1980s or for the continuing popularity of romances featuring ultra-possessive alpha males. And I cannot discount these explanations, because people have wildly different fantasies, as is their good right. But nonetheless, whenever I read another apologia that a book/film/series with stone age gender relations is just an expressions of women’s fantasies of ceding control, because they have to be so strong in real life all the time, I inevitably shake my head and think, “Whose fantasy exactly? Cause it sure as hell ain’t mine.”

I guess the main problem here is that a lot of what is considered romantic and swoonworthy in the Anglo-American part of the world, not just doesn’t do a thing for me, I actively dislike it. And I only wrote Anglo-American, because E.L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey, is British. But mainly, books like Fifty Shades of Grey or Harlequin Presents (which have several British authors as well) or the rapetastic bodicerippers of yesteryear are an American phenomenon and reflect the conflicted American attitudes about sexuality, namely that the only way a woman is allowed to enjoy sex without being labeled a slut is if she’s forced into it by an overpowering man. The old bodiceripper style romances were never as popular in Europe (including the UK) as in the US and most European readers I have spoken to actively hated them.

The third is from acrackedmoon at Requires Only That You Hate. The language is strong and I'm sure we could all think of romances which would serve as counter-examples. That doesn't invalidate her critique though: if anything, her "hatred and geekrage" seems to me to demonstrate the extent of the pain which romances can cause some people:

I don’t know about other queer women, but to me the prevalence of romance–not as a genre by itself, but romance as a pop-culture entity–fucked me up pretty severely [...] if you’re telling me that romance is categorically feminist, you’re contributing to this large damage in an insidious, silencing way. The proponents of romance-is-feminist school of thought like to pass such fiction off as inherently progressive because it is written mostly by women and targets women as an audience: it pushes the idea that reading these books is liberating and sex-positive and, what’s more, reading them is good for you. Because feminism! Liberation from the yoke of repression and sexual dissatisfaction!

Tell me this and I’ll kick you in the fucking teeth.

Yes, romance presents possibilities: as long as those possibilities involve finding a man. Yes, romance explores and depicts female desire: as long as that is a desire to have a cock shoved into your orifices. Yes, romance is about the “everywoman” whom we can all identify with as long as you can identify with a straight white woman from the first world. It reinforces the hegemony of what is normal, and what’s normal is straight sex, straight female desire, centering your life around the fantasy man, and being culturally rooted in the west. Romance enforces the hegemony of ethnocentricism, heteronormativity, and cultural imperialism. It’s not the only thing that does this: so does SFF, so does every other form of popular media.

Acrackedmoon is aware of the existence of lesbian and m/m romance; there are romances about people other than straight white women from the first world. Just, not a lot of them. Taken as a whole, popular romance fiction does marginalise certain kinds of stories and certain kinds of protagonists.

The image of various broom heads comes from Wikimedia Commons. It was originally published in the Dictionnaire encyclopédique de l'épicerie et des industries annexes (1904).

JPRS CFPs: Erotic Romance, Latin American Popular Culture, Animals, Heyer, and Religion

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies has put out three updated calls for papers: see the sections on the JPRS website about "animals in popular romance" (new deadline October 1, 2012); Georgette Heyer (new deadline October 1, 2012); and "love and religion in global popular culture" (new deadline December 1, 2012).

There are also two new CFPs for JPRS, one on "erotic romance fiction" and the other on "romantic love in Latin American popular culture":
 
Before and Beyond Fifty Shades of Grey: New Approaches to Erotic Romance Fiction
 
Since the 1970s, both the content and the institutional practices surrounding erotic romance fiction have been transformed. The remarkable popularity of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy has brought a number of those transformations to light, not just in terms of the novels’ BDSM-inflected sexual content (old news in the romance world) but also in their publishing history, moving from online Twilight fan-fiction to e-book format to paperback bestsellers.

Yet the world of erotic romance fiction extends far beyond Fifty Shades—not just historically and aesthetically, but geographically, racially, and in the range of sexual identities and practices made visible by these texts. The range of critical and scholarly approaches to these texts ought to be equally various, whether looking back to foundational essays like Ann Barr Snitow’s “Mass-Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different” or drawing on the latest in queer theory and cultural studies.

To that end, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for essays, interviews, and pedagogical materials on the subject of erotic popular romance fiction, now and in the past. Essays on individual authors and texts are encouraged, along with work on the business side of the genre—its publishers, its marketing, etc.—and explorations of its reception, including fandom, censorship, and the public debates surrounding erotic romance. All theoretical approaches are welcome. Submissions are due by February 1, 2013, and this special issue of JPRS will be published in December, 2013.

More details here. 

Romantic Love in Latin American Popular Culture
 
The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is looking for essays, interviews, and pedagogical materials on romantic love in Latin American popular culture, for a special issue guest-edited by David William Foster (Arizona State University), to be published in September, 2013. The deadline for submissions is January 7, 2013.

How have Latin American film, fiction, poetry, popular music, TV, and other media represented romantic love, now and in the past? How do these representations compare across national, cultural, and regional divides, and how have they been deployed in the service of nationalism and / or political change? How does romantic love intersect with evolving ideas of gender and sexuality, and with the eroticization of the Latin American body (e.g., the “Latin lover”) in other parts of the world? How do Latin American popular texts eroticize the Other—Indigenous, African, Asian, European—in their own right? How do high-art traditions like love poetry—by Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Julia de Burgos, Delmira Agustini, and others—function as popular culture in Latin America, and what happens when they are taken up outside of literary and academic circles?

Essays on broad cultural trends are welcome, as well as in-depth work on individual songs, films, novels, telenovelas, and other popular texts. Essays dealing with LGBTQ issues are particularly encouraged. Papers should be written in English and translations provided alongside the original text.

More details here.

Intellectual Freedom and the Politics of Reading: Libraries as Sites of Conservative Activism, 1990-2010

Laura Vivanco

I've just come across Loretta Mary Gaffney's thesis, Intellectual Freedom and the Politics of Reading: Libraries as Sites of Conservative Activism, 1990-2010. I thought I'd quote from it as a quick follow-up to my previous post about "mommy porn," and Smart Bitch Sarah's report from the fourteenth of May that,

as reported by Dianna Dilworth on GalleyCat: Brevard County Public Libraries in Florida have pulled their 19 copies of 50 Shades of Grey from the shelves.

Why?

HuffPo has a quote from Don Walker, a spokesman for the library, who said, "it's semi-porgnographic." The HuffPo article indicated that several other libraries in Florida had refused to purchase copies, but Brevard bought 19, then took them out of circulation, sending notices to the 200 or so people on a waiting list.

Library services director Cathy Schweinsberg told Florida Today: Nobody asked us to take it off the shelves. But we bought some copies before we realized what it was. We looked at it, because it’s been called ‘mommy porn’ and ‘soft porn.’ We don’t collect porn.”

They may not have been asked to take it off the shelves in this particular instance, but Gaffney's thesis describes the socio-political context in which many US libraries make their decisions:

During the 1990s and 2000s, conservative activists not only appropriated libraries as battlegrounds for causes like antigay activism, but also incorporated libraries and librarianship into the issue base of the pro family movement. A collection of loosely linked, well-organized grassroots campaigns around issues like opposition to abortion and gay marriage, the pro family movement was a resurgence of conservative activism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that brought libraries into the culture wars crossfire. Pro family library challenges went beyond objections to particular materials in order to target library policies of open access, collection diversity, and patron privacy. Pro family activists also mounted an explicit critique of the American Library Association (ALA), opposing the ALA’s defenses of intellectual freedom for all ages and all types of media. These activists described their own struggle as a quest to wrest libraries away from the ALA and restore them to parental and taxpayer control.

Gaffney's thesis can be downloaded from the University of Illinois' digital environment for access to learning and scholarship (IDEALS). It focuses on young readers: "The reason their reading is monitored is, in part, because some adults believe the young are more vulnerable readers and will be irreparably harmed by 'dangerous' media without adult intervention" (5). Nonetheless, some of the metaphors invoked in debates about their reading are more widely applicable:

Catherine Sheldrick Ross’ analysis of turn-of-the-century library discourse on the “fiction question” reveals that there were two persistent metaphors used to describe reading: reading as eating, and reading as a ladder. The two metaphors helped librarians to establish their professional expertise as guiders and selectors of “healthy” reading, as well as to articulate a hierarchy or ladder of reading tastes. Sheldrick Ross’ study not only highlights a pivotal moment in the development of librarians’ emerging professional identity as reading experts, but also reveals that metaphors, far from being mere “stylistic flourishes,” are powerful ways of structuring our experience of the world as a way to “discover new meaning.” [...]

Sheldrick Ross’ study has two key insights that inform pro family models of reading. In the case of the “reading is eating” metaphor, particularly when it is combined with the ladder metaphor to establish a hierarchy of taste, it is far easier to tell a tale of passive readers than of active ones. And passive readers are more likely to need monitoring and guidance: if reading is eating, and eating can be nutritious, bad, or downright poisonous, then readers (particularly vulnerable and inexperienced ones) will need help to discern the good from the junk. It is easy to see why the “reading is eating” metaphor is so prominent in pro family discourse. The second insight from Sheldrick Ross’ study is how reading metaphors are used to dismiss and demean reading (and eating) for pleasure. Along this ladder of taste, the closer reading materials were to pleasure for its own sake, the lower they were on the ladder. A similar hierarchy structures how pro family critics understand youth reading as an overwhelmingly didactic exercise, either ignoring pleasure and aesthetics as part of the experience of reading, or viewing them with suspicion. (9-10)

It's not difficult to see how these metaphors would be applied to romances and romance readers and

In “Reading is Not Eating,” an extension of her groundbreaking research in Reading the Romance, Radway analyzes the “reading is eating” metaphor in order to reveal its role in broader social and cultural critiques of mass media. The eating metaphor not only creates a hierarchy of taste—with the “nutritious” reading at the top and the “garbage” that is bad for one at the bottom—but also structures our understanding of media consumption in such a way that the only response to “bad” reading is censorship: if readers consume or are consumed by mass media, then the only way to save them from degradation is to stop destructive forms of media from being produced in the first place. The passivity that the eating metaphor suggests makes it more likely that critics of mass culture will focus on “objectionable materials” instead of “…actually looking at specific encounters between
audiences and mass cultural products.”

Radway’s study of romance readers and her critique of the “reading is eating” metaphor have important connections to the politics of youth reading. As with female romance readers, the eating metaphor has been used to simultaneously dismiss the agency of young readers, make pleasure suspect, and cast the popular and mass media as the villain of the educational piece. (12)

The image was made available under a creative commons license by Mace Ojala (xmacex on Flickr).

Shades of Grey Academic Opinion

Laura Vivanco

Both Sarah and Eric are quoted today in The Vancouver Sun:

Public domain shades of grey

amid the din of dissent, readers of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy seem to converge on two points: that the books are sexy as hell, and that the terms "inner goddess" and "mommy porn" need to be forever dispatched.

The latter label, which has appeared everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to CNN, has academics and fans alike cringing, thanks to its dual implication that E.L. James' trilogy is the holy grail for prudish housewives and that we should be surprised women enjoy sex.

Experts say the flywheel in Fifty's success is neither that backward nor that simple.

"The relationship described in the book is a lot like the relationship readers have with the book itself: secret, transgressive, and all the more alluring because of that," says Eric Selinger, co-editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. "But even without getting all fancy, I'd say that this book had a lot of things going for it that weren't in the story itself." [...]

Selinger, a professor of English at DePaul University, credits a confluence of factors.
 
"News of the book spread by word of mouth, of course, but once there was press coverage in places like Salon and the New York Times, that gave even more readers cover to buy it. After all, they were just reading to find out what the buzz was about, right?" says Selinger.

"And unlike most works of erotica, it has a non-sexual cover: no hot, half-naked man or woman, which attracts some readers but puts others off." [...]

Sarah Frantz, president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, says the answer may actually lie in Fifty's non-literary audience.

"She's hitting the people who read, you know, three books a year - the people who read books because they're on Good Morning America or in USA Today," says Frantz. "As much as the power-buyers who purchase a book a week are important, the books that sell hundreds of thousands of copies are the ones that take that specific track."

For more academic analysis of the Fifty Shades phenomenon, see Anne Jamison's Fifty Shades of Pop Culture Theory blog (particularly this post). Anne is

Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. In summer 2010, she taught a course on Pop Culture Theory focusing on genre: Western, Science Fiction, Noir, and Twilight Fanfiction. After one of the course texts for the fanfiction unit became a bestseller, the professor finally got around to putting up the blog she promised her students.