Romance II: Dangerous Texts, Censorious Readers
‘mushy eyes over a quarter chicken at Nandos’: Love, gender, class and history in romantic advice texts for young people.
(
Amy Burge, University of Edinburgh)
We are in the midst of a global ‘moral panic’ about young people,
love and sex. The ‘pornification’ (McRobbie, 2008) of contemporary
popular culture has led, it is argued, to the ‘adultification’ (APA
2010) of young people, in particular young women. Forced to choose
between ‘raunch or romance’ (Bale 2011), modern young women are
confronted with a plethora of advice texts that stipulate a narrow set
of rules and behaviours that govern successful romantic discourse.
Responding to a call to consider questions of young people, love and
sex from a hitherto neglected historical-situated perspective (Egan and
Hawkes 2012), this paper compares relationship advice for young adults
from the late Middle Ages and twenty-first century.
The specific focus of the paper is on representations of class and
their collocation with romantic discourse. The late medieval conduct
poem
How The Good Wife Taught her Daughter (c.1350) emphasises a
particular type of bourgeois feminine identity which is central to its
romantic and social discourse: for late medieval women, class clearly
matters. Yet, in her 2012 study
Why love hurts, Eva Illouz
argues that gender and class boundaries have disappeared from modern
guides on love following a shift towards a focus on the self.
Is it really the case that class and gender boundaries have
disappeared from modern romance advice? Or is it possible, through a
comparison of historical and contemporary advice materials, to observe a
continued intertwining of gender and class in romantic discourse?
Employing close reading and critical discourse analysis, this paper
considers the relationship between gender, class and romance, and
proposes a deeper consideration of the historical structures
underpinning romantic love today.
Romancing the Taboo: The Marriage Law Challenge in Snape/Hermione Fanfiction
(
Amanda Allen, Eastern Michigan University)
In
No Future, Lee Edelman suggests that our politics
fetishize a “cult of the Child,” our symbolic future that must be
protected at all costs. The Child thus represents our reproductive
futurism, our drive to live into the future. This drive propels the
canonical texts of J.K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter series, but it also emerges in the bodice-ripper-styled subset of
Harry Potter fanon: Snape/Hermione fanfiction.
At the heart of SS/HG fanfiction is the recognition of
the potential symbolic violence inherent in the taboo of the
student/teacher relationship—a taboo that directly negates our drive to
protect the child. While Rowling’s texts incorporate student Hermione
(aged eleven to eighteen) and adult Snape (aged thirty-one to
thirty-eight), many SS/HG writers appear uncomfortable with “shipping”
characters of such differing ages and statuses. To protect the Child
(Hermione), the majority of these writers attempt to normalize the power
imbalance by changing the characters’ ages or time settings,
incorporating authority figures (such as Dumbledore) to sanction the
relationship, and legalizing sexual relations between Hermione and Snape
under Ministry of Magic-approved laws.
This paper focuses on fics produced under the WIKTT (When
I Kissed The Teacher mailing list) SS/HG “Marriage Law Challenge.” In
these fics, the traditional “barrier” of popular romance—the reasons why
the hero and heroine cannot marry (in this case, the student/teacher
taboo)—is inverted, and becomes the reason why Snape and Hermione
must
marry; namely, to protect the Child. Yet this protection is doubled;
while the marriage law fics use the institution of the Ministry of Magic
to legitimize a taboo relationship, the overall purpose of the marriage
law—to repopulate the Wizarding World—ensures that the fics remain
fantasies of reproductive futurism. The Child is thus both sacrificed
and saved by the romance narrative, thereby allowing the reader to
celebrate the tabooed love between Snape and Hermione.
Anyone But Baby: Child-free Heroines, Heterosexual Romance, and Female
Subjectivity in the Fiction of Jennifer Crusie and Emily Giffin
(
Jessica Van Slooten, University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc)
As Myra Hird and Kimberly Abshoff conclude in their article "Women
without Children: A Contradiction in Terms," “Feminism needs to be able
to test its theories of women against the assumption that all women
sexually reproduce. In other words, feminist theory needs to be able to
authenticate childlessness as central to experiences of womanhood and
femininity" (361). This theorization of child-free female subjectivity,
while still nascent in feminist theory, is happening in practice—in
women’s lives, and notably, in popular romance fiction. In Jennifer
Crusie’s novels
Anyone But You (1996) and
Bet Me (2004)
neither of the female protagonists want to have children. Rather than
being a barrier to romantic fulfillment, this desire to live child-free
strengthens the relationship between Nina and Alex, and Min and Cal,
respectively. In these two novels. Crusie rejects the dominant culture
narrative that romantic happiness necessitates a procreative future, and
in doing so, theorizes a feminist female subjectivity that is not
contingent upon bearing children. In contrast, Emily Giffin’s novel
Baby Proof
(2007) suggests that motherhood is the price of maintaining true love,
reinforcing theories that motherhood is central to adult womanhood and
heterosexual marriage. Ultimately, the relationship between female
subjectivity and motherhood is changing. According to the PEW Research
Center, “nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years
without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s”
(“Childlessness Up Among...”). American women are increasingly choosing
child-free lives, and popular fiction reflects these trends. While
Crusie boldy suggests that female subjectivity and adult heterosexual
romance can flourish
because of a desire for a child-free life,
Giffin reaffirms the dominant cultural narrative that places parenthood
at the center of heterosexual marriage.
Love and Healing: Explorations of the value and meaning of Love in contemporary cinema
(
Phil Matthews, Bournemouth University)
This paper will look at several selected contemporary cinematic romance
examples and discuss how they utilize the cinematic narrative devise of
the character arc model to inform and impress meaning and value to
notions of Love, and whether these definitions have wider currency
beyond the cinematic romance genre. 'HEA' or even 'HFN' are arguably
pervasive in the romance genre but is this the case in cinematic notions
of genre, and how do cinematic genre conventions respond and engage
with these arguably widely accepted literary principles not least
posited by Regis (2003).
A story cannot be told about a protagonist who doesn't want anything,
who cannot make decisions, whose actions effect no change at any
level.
(McKee, 1998. Pg. 138.)
This paper will explore and discuss screenwriting narrative mechanisms
for change in cinematic characters principally utilising the character
arc form, and how motivations and decisions communicate meaning to an
audience. In this way meaning and value can arguably be attributed to
whatever a character pursues. The pursuit of love within cinematic
narratives thereby has an assigned value and it is how cinematic
narratives negotiate and work with this value whether consistently or
not which will be explored and investigated within this paper.
Jonathan A. Allan's latest book will be published shortly (it's due on 15th November). Men, Masculinities and Popular Romance