PopCAANZ 2018: Byron, Disenchantment, FBI, Feminism, Gender, Italy, "Magical Negroes", Names, South-East Asia, Telenovelas, Twitter, YA

Details are available for the PopCAANZ conference which is currently taking place at Auckland University of Technology. This year there are lots of papers on romance and I'll include excerpts from their abstracts. The conference continues tomorrow, and I'll add links to Twitter threads as they appear.

Donna Maree Hanson - Popular romance fiction: flirting with feminism

popular romance fiction regularly depicts feminist social issues. In this sense, the concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ applies — ‘this partly unconscious “taking in” of rules, values and dispositions...’ (Webb, Schirato, & Dahanher, 2002, p. 44). Contemporary popular romance novels are set in the everyday context and as such cannot but help portray the world in which the authors and their characters exist, including social issues present in the mind of the author, whether consciously or unconsciously. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s and since, the woman’s movement has been politically active and concepts of feminism have entered into everyday discourse. [...] research indicates that writers as well as readers of popular romance fiction have no issue reconciling their concept of feminism with writing and reading in the genre.

Lucy Sheerman - “Exempt from all affection and from all contempt”: necessary evil and the figure of the Byronic hero in romance novels

Two hundred years since his first appearance in print, the Byronic anti-hero - ‘that man of loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’ - is a figure who continues to define representations of the hero in romance novels.

The influence of this angry and defiant fallen angel on the writing of the Brontës has been well documented. In my paper I will consider four Governess novels, published by Mills & Boon in 2016 as a homage to Charlotte Brontë’s iconic romance novel Jane Eyre, and the Byronic traces of the heroes who feature in them.

The romance novel’s continued preoccupation with the Byronic anti-hero is central to the genre’s staged encounters with otherness and its exploration of emotional affect. The literary device of the anti-hero shaped the development of romance tropes such as plot, conflict and point of view, and also (as I will argue) gave rise to the Byronic anti-heroine.

Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud - Cross-cultural romance, feminism and femininity in Southeast Asian fiction

In this paper, I explore how the negotiation of cross-cultural romance also elicits a particular Southeast Asian feminism in three texts: Zen Cho’s The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (2012, Malaysian), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls (2016, Singaporean) and Ayisha Malik’s Jewel (2017, Bruneian). [...] I argue in this paper that these novels construct a feminist femininity that allows the heroines to remain connected to and sanctioned by their individually patriarchal heritages, while also allowing them to critique and expand existing expectations of feminine identity through the negotiation of cross-cultural relationships.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread on Hanson, Sheerman and Daud's papers.

Ellen Carter - What’s in a romance hero/ine’s name? a corpus study of gay and straight romance character names

The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional world, studying names given by authors to their romance heroes – gay and straight – as well as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668 straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. My results demonstrate that the phonological characteristics of names given to gay heroes are statistically significantly less masculine/more feminine than the names of straight heroes. Given that gay romance is a fast-growing romance sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and shape perceptions within (straight and queer) societies.

Carter: striking result - male characters much more likely to have names with /k/ sounds, especially male characters in M/F romance. #popcaanz18

— Jodi McAlister (@JodiMcA) 2 July 2018

Eden French - Loving invisible bodies: transgender representation in popular romance

The few novels that do feature trans heroines and heroes — niche even in small LGBTQ presses — are hailed as daring simply for permitting trans protagonists to be plausible subjects of love and desire. [...] romance’s historically heteronormative politics of gender has constrained writers and even scholars from treating transgender themes; mainstream discussion around trans bodies still manifests routinely in fetishistic and dehumanising ways. Moreover questions of embodiment (for example, the politics of gender-affirming surgery) remain contested even in the trans community. Speaking as a scholar and writer, I will discuss existing examples of trans embodiment in romance, and outline possible reconciliations for the challenge of bringing trans love into the mainstream.

French has found disclaimers and disavowals in some of her corpus which make it clear that the assumed readership is entirely cis. #popcaanz18

— Jodi McAlister (@JodiMcA) 2 July 2018

Francesca Pierini - “He looks like he’s stepped out of a painting”: The idealization and appropriation of Italian timelessness through the experience of romantic love

Marina Fiorato’s The Glassblower of Murano (2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots. Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be the timeless life and culture of Venice. At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). [...] Within narratives centred on this notion, “falling in love in Italy” occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, often contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. Through a discussion of two Anglo-American historical popular novels set in Italy, this paper proposes an exploration of the notion of romantic love as a force reconnecting displaced and fragmented souls with a supposedly timeless and unbroken society; a society perceived as holding a privileged relation with ancient traditions and the past.

Pierini has a paper freely available online which is quite similar, though lacking the focus on romantic love.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread about Carter, French and Pierini's papers.

Maria Ramos-Garcia - This is not a romance novel but a telenovela”: metafiction and bilingualism in Jane the Virgin

Jane the Virgin, based on a Venezuelan telenovela, is at the same time a parody and an homage to the popular Latin American television genre. Among the many unusual features that contribute to the originality and success of this TV series are an omniscient narrator, a metafictional discourse, a bilingual and bicultural setting and an unapologetic, unabashed, and explicit use and abuse of the conventions of the soap-opera, with a touch of Latin American magical realism. [...] This paper will provide an overview of the series, concentrating both on the Latino socio-cultural aspects that rarely make it into mainstream US television, and on the metafictional discussions of the telenovela and the romance novel — both as genres and as philosophies of love — that permeate the narrative.

Angela Hart - Combating the romance genre stigma: reading romance in the digital age

Avid readers of the romance genre can find their voices in the online sphere using social media platforms such as Twitter, utilizing the hashtags #amreadingromance and #romancelandia. Romance readers utilize the technological affordances of the platform to form groups, post about novels, and find relevant information on their specific genre. By using anonymous user login information, unidentifiable profile pictures, and unique hashtags, romance readers are turning to Twitter.

Jodi McAlister tweeted a thread about Ramos-Garcia and Hart's papers before stopping so she could present her own.

Jodi McAlister - Not quite YA, not yet adult: the short but complex history of “New Adult” fiction

This paper will trace the history of the new adult genre category, using the notion of the “genre world,” as theorised by Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins (2018). [...] this paper will explore the generic roots of new adult fiction in young adult fiction, popular romance fiction, and fan fiction, and how these parent genres have given shape to popular forms and structures of the new adult category. It will provide a much-needed scholarly framework for understanding this emergent genre category, its gradual formation, and its complex place at the borders of several different genre worlds.

Eric Selinger - Disenchantment and its discontents: Weber, Illouz, and popular romance fiction

Modernity and romantic love make uncomfortable bedfellows. As Max Weber explains, modernity is marked by “disenchantment,” not just of the natural world, but also of the inner life and of interpersonal relations. Building on Weber, Eva Illouz argues that we now live in an “ironic structure of romantic feeling, which marks the move from an ‘enchanted’ to a disenchanted cultural definition of love” (Why Love Hurts). This talk will look at how several contemporary authors negotiate and resist “disenchantment.” Of particular interest will be Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan is Not Obliged and The Other Side of Happiness, a pair of “hijabi chick-lit” novels that take both sides in this great debate, Courtney Milan’s Hold Me, which casts a cool, modern eye on romantic love without yielding to the irony that Illouz describes, and/or Alexis Hall’s Glitterland, which deploys religious discourse to redeem both love and popular media culture.

Nattie Golubov - The surveillant gaze in FBI romance

This paper is my first effort at thinking through several issues recurrent in the subgenre of the romance police procedural: the configuration of the spaces of home, homeland and nation as domestic territories, besieged not by a foreign but a home grown threat that violates the integrity of the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior; the role of individual trauma as a mark of the vulnerability of the self and the foundation of an affective investment in the protection of national territory; the "Americanness" of the values and practices that govern social dynamics in the workplace, the self-chosen family and the couple. National character is defined in opposition to the rendering of the criminalised enemy and, together with collective, institutional agency and cooperation, is also the best safeguard against social disorder. Eventually I intend to show that this romance subgenre mediates and manages social fears and anxieties by highlighting the strengths of a systemic framework and ignoring the negative aspects of surveillance: anxiety and fear lie at the heart of romantic relationships and the novels offer a means of managing them with the emotional investment in family and trust in law enforcement.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread about Selinger and Golubov's papers.

Kecia Ali - Writing while white: black martyrs as “Magical Negroes” in Nora Roberts’ novels

Roberts’ heroes and heroines are nearly always white; occasional Black characters are typically what Ikard (2017:94) describes as “magical negroes ... whose raison d’être in white redemption narratives is to support/heal/enlighten/inspire the white character(s) in crisis.” This paper explores four Roberts’ novels in which the violent murder of a Black character serves as the catalyst for vital emotional developments between a white couple or among a team of white characters [...] the single-title adventure romance Hot Ice (1987), the category romance Convincing Alex (1994), the stand-alone mystical romance Three Fates (2002), and Morrigan’s Cross (2006), the first installment of a paranormal romance trilogy.

RWA, RITAs and Race

Laura Vivanco

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

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

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

• No black romance author has ever won a RITA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sasha Devlin notes that:

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

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

There's a lot to fix:

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

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

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

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.