PCA/ACA 2012 - (9)

Laura Vivanco

Consuming and Reimagining Romance

Saturday, April 14, 2012 - 9:45am - 11:15am

Media Love
John Storey - Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK and Katy MacDonald, University of Sunderland

In our paper we will present the theoretical framing and research findings of a research project we call Media Love. The project looks at how young people (mostly aged 18 to 24) use media when they fall in love. By use we mean two things: the use of the discourses of media to inform social practices and the actual use of media technologies (SKYPE, MSN, email, mobile phones, etc.) when falling in love.

The paper will be divided into two parts. The first part will present the theoretical framing of the project, including our understanding of the romantic power of the media. The second part of the chapter will focus on the findings of discursive questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews.

Transcultural Romance: Harlequin Mass Market Romances and International Audiences
Mindy Trenary - University of Arkansas

Harlequin Enterprises, launched in 1949, has developed an international reader base, publishing in 113 different languages with licensing agreements in 14 countries.  In the past decade, Harlequin launched several English language manga formats, utilizing this comic style to inform visualization of the text, while utilizing plots from established Western authors.  Similarly, abbreviated Japanese and Korean language manga/manhwa versions of English language Harlequin novels have been translated back into English by fan translators, establishing a bilateral system of enculturation.  This phenomenon suggests that the romance formulas established by Harlequin can be applied cross-culturally, as evidenced by the popularity of this subgenre internationally.

The Harlequin imprint Ginger Blossom attempted to “marry . . . bestselling Harlequin romance fiction and female-friendly Japanese manga! These [manga adaptations]. . . [are a step above] the cookie-cutter manga hitting the shelves today.”  Yet the Ginger Blossom line was unsuccessful, ceasing distribution in 2007.  However, these Harlequin manga adaptations proved more successful in Japan and South Korea.  Harlequin imprints, such as Emerald, Passion, and Pure, released stories appealing to the shojo demographic in Asian countries.  These English language Harlequin stories illustrated by Japanese mangaka and translated into Japanese and Korean are receiving an increasingly positive reception amongst American manga readers.  Scanlator teams have begun projects re-translating these Japanese and Korean texts into English.  These texts, often set in the United States and featuring American characters, appeal to American audiences, and the slightly stilted re-translated dialogue and manga style illustrations offer a uniqueness to Harlequin’s formula driven novels, appealing to a new reader base not familiar with traditional Harlequin fare.  It appears that the readers of these scanlations see these texts more as international phenomena, incorporating elements of American, Japanese, and Korean cultures.  The popularity of these imprints, then, seems linked to the transcultural nature of the texts.

Romancing the Academic: Blending the Fictional and Analytical Genres of Popular Romance Writing
Catherine LaRoche and Catherine Roach - University of Alabama

[This paper has now been cancelled.]

This proposal takes up the call’s request for attention to issues of “genre-bending and genre-crossing” in popular romance studies.  As part of an ongoing critical analysis of the function of the romance narrative in popular culture, I’ve been employing experimental methodologies of performative ethnography to engage in a project of hybrid academic writing.  This project bends/blends/crosses the genre of academic writing with that of popular fiction, as I write analytically about the romance while writing romance fiction at the same time, in a self-reflexive process whereby both forms of genre inform each other.  This paper will briefly demonstrate this genre-bending/blending.  First, I lay out the methodology I’ve followed of performative ethnography and hybrid academic/creative writing, with a brief description of the project's parameters, rationale, and precedents.  I then read short scenes of my historical romance fiction, which I write under the persona Catherine LaRoche.  Back in the voice of Catherine Roach (romance studies academic), I critique from the perspective of sex-positive feminism the fiction of Catherine LaRoche, who responds to the critique from the perspective of her romance-writing self.  This genre-blending exercise allows for reflections on the transgressive and progressive possibilities of romance fiction and also on the constraints of the genre, with conclusions about how LaRoche is both more conservative but perhaps also more creative than Roach, as demonstrated by a final love scene wherein LaRoche's heroine takes charge in a penetrative act with the hero, to their mutual delight.

The Popular Romance Project

A presentation by Laurie Kahn, documentary film maker (Tupperware! and A Midwife's Tale) and Executive Producer of the Popular Romance Project.

She will show teaser clips of the shooting done so far for the documentary, will discuss the website, and will describe the broader project. Editors of the PRP-affiliated blog, "Talking About Romance," Sarah Frantz and Eric Selinger, will describe their vision for the blog and for the larger project as well. Website: http://popularromanceproject.org

PCA/ACA 2012 - (8)

Laura Vivanco

BDSM and Kink: Context, Culture, and Romance

Friday, April 13, 2012 - 1:15pm - 2:45pm

Different Love: Master-Slave Relationships as Marriage in Scene-Aware Erotic Romance Novels
Cecilia Tan - Erotic Authors Association/Circlet Press/SFWA

Just as popular culture as a whole has seen greater representation of diverse sexualities and lifestyle choices than before, so it goes with the romance novel. Once largely the domain of entirely heteronormative representations, in which the goal and happiest ending is a heterosexual wedding, now one finds entire sub-genres of romance dedicated to gay men, lesbians, threesomes of every combination, and so on. One even finds romances that explore bondage, domination, and power exchange play between lovers. These "scene-aware" romances are a far cry from the "bondage" books of old, in which heroines were kidnapped and sold into harems (for example). "Scene-aware" novels use the existing BDSM lifestyle and the existence of the consensual community as a backdrop for the romance to unfold.

In these novels, which include the newly published "Story of L" by Debra Hyde as well as the "modern classic" book "Exit to Eden" by Anne Rice (writing as Anne Rampling), the central issues that often arise between principles in a romance novel are magnified and codified by the fetishes represented. Many romance novels contain conflict hinging on the compatibility or seeming incompatibility of the two lovers. In a BDSM romance, these elements may be represented literally or metaphorically by  a panoply of activities like bondage, spanking, corporal punishment, et cetera. And no more central issue exists in a romance than the question of True Love. Is he Mr. Right or just Mr. Right Now? In a BDSM romance this manifests itself as something beyond "mere" love, a near-mystical, spiritual bond, often described as the master/slave bond (or mistress/slave, or owner/owned; it is not gender-specific).

This paper will relate the way in which the tropes of the romance genre are transformed and represented in the BDSM romance via the ways this different form of loving adds hues to the erotic and relationship color palettes.

The Purple Circle: Confluences of Kink and Geek Cultures
Claire Dalmyn - York University

The first part of Staci Newmahr's ethnographic study of the culture of BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadomasochism) rests on her analysis of participants' sexual identities as intimately connected with their status and self-perception as 'outsiders', different from others, and many of the people she observed and interviewed identify themselves as "geeky" as well as kinky. In this paper I will critically unpack and explore some of Newmahr's conclusions and assumptions regarding the dual or linked marginal subject positions of participants who identify as both kinky and geeky. I will ground this analysis in my personal experience as a kink practitioner engaged in study of, with, and among my perverted peers, drawing also on my concurrent experience as a participant in online media fan culture. I will additionally hold Newmahr's assertions and my own participant observation in kink and fan cultures together in tension with representations in mainstream popular culture of characters who are explicitly or subtextually marginalized in multiple ways including sexual deviance, citing examples of tropes such as sadistic outcast villains, doomed masochists, and comic grotesques and buffoons of a fetishistic bent, as well as a potentially emerging figure in the contemporary "Age of the Geek": the new pervert hero.

Newmahr, Staci. 2011. Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kink as Context
Evelyn Chester

[This paper may now have been cancelled.]

All criticism is done from a point of view.  For many people, their kink is an essential part of their sexual and personal identity. How does being part of a sexual minority, specifically a practitioner of BDSM, contextualize one’s experience and engagement with popular media?  Is there a kink lens or gaze that affects the way we see and understand certain characters and their relationships?  How true to the real-life experiences of kinky people are the depictions we see in popular culture?  How do these depictions make us feel?  What characters/moments/media are embraced and celebrated by the BDSM/kink/leather communities as being particularly meaningful or representative of our identities?

How does this perspective intersect with other ways of engaging with or critiquing media (feminist theory, Marxist theory, queer theory, etc)?

Popular media likely to be discussed: Secretary, White Collar, CSI, Law & Order: SVU, Farscape, Rhianna’s “S&M” and many, many others.

BDSM Romance Fiction: Positive Introduction to BDSM Identity, Practice, and Lifestyle
Sarah Frantz - Fayetteville State University

I will examine BDSM Romance Fiction, positing it as a generally positive introduction for its readers to BDSM identity, culture, practice, and lifestyle. I will discuss the importance of the positive exposure to BDSM in popular culture, its normatizing function, and possible drawbacks of bad BDSM fiction.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (7)

Laura Vivanco

Romance on Television

Friday, April 13, 2012 - 9:45am - 11:15am

Vampire Diaries' Damon and True Blood's Eric: Dicks or Dreamboats?
Amber Botts - Neodesha High School/Independence Community College

The Vampire Diaries' Damon and True Blood's Eric  both display a number of traits that are typical of alpha heroes. However, they go beyond romance scholarship's definition of traditional alpha behavior with extremely violent and unredeemably bad behavior that often risks more than the heroine's virtue or loyalty to her more typically "good" boyfriend. Still, fans passionately advocate for these ultra-bad boys to be paired with the heroines.  The question is why.  The answer lies in the complexity of their appeal, which stretches the old alpha/beta hero delineation. In romance scholarship, writers Tami Camden, Caro LaFever, and Sue Viders observe that today romance heroes have gone beyond previously defined divisions of heroes into alphas and betas, and they have defined eight archetypes of heroes.  Of these, Damon and Eric still do not fit any one archetype, but instead, fit several (the  Chief, Bad Boy, and Lost Soul, with a dash of Charmer); thus, they create a new kind of hero, the Dick Dreamboat.

New Editions and TV Movies: A Methodology for Decoding the Romance Novel Genome
Jayashree Kamble - University of Minnesota

When a mass-market romance is adapted for a new edition or a new medium, it changes fundamentally. In effect, an adaptation destabilizes the hybrid form termed “romance novel.”

When a romance novel is adapted for a new edition, its alterations involve a change in the “romance” half of its composite identity. For instance, when Lisa Kleypas’s New Orleans-set historical romance Only in Your Arms (1992) was reissued as When Strangers Marry (2002), it had its hero renounce his slave-owning life in a conversation with the heroine; in the ten years between the two editions, the author-publisher apparently decided that the narrative could not be romantic without fixing the hero’s culpability in slavery. Such an adaptation, though a rarity in the genre, helps examine the evolution of the “romance” strand of the “romance novel”. On the other hand, the transformation of a romance into a movie is not just a step away from the written medium, but more specifically, from the narrative conventions that have been collectively termed the Novel since the seventeenth century. When Nora Robert’s romances are scripted into tv movies for Lifetime, for instance, it is not the new medium that prevents their being effective representations of the books--it is the absence of the Novel conventions that are privileged highly by the “romance novel” and are an inextricable part of its identity.

Movie adaptations may thus retain the “romance” yet diverge from the “novel”, while new book adaptations preserve the novelistic elements and medium while offering a changed conception of “romance.” Each transformation exposes the hinge between the two individual concepts that have been yoked together under the nomenclature “romance novel.” Studying adaptations is therefore useful because they are mutations that reveal the genre’s constructed nature and the role of its two strands of DNA, so to speak.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (6)

Laura Vivanco

Romancing Race II: The International Other

Thursday, April 12, 2012 - 3:00pm - 4:30pm

The “Noble Savage” and “Happy Darky”: Race and the American Popular Romance
Maryan Wherry - Black Hawk College

This paper examines the use race in the American popular romance. Rather than focusing on “the Black Romance,” I’m interested specifically at the presence and treatment of Blacks and American Indians as secondary characters and in subplots and how this racial tension confronts (or not) the American cultural narrative.

“He Didn’t Seem Indian”: Exploring and Analyzing the Construction of Race in Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows
Mallory Jagodzinski - Bowling Green State University

Historical romance novels, as a whole, tend to be overwhelmingly white, especially those set in England.  There are few characters of color in these novels and often are not privileged to be either the hero or heroine in the central love story of the novel.  Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows, however, subverts this tendency by making her hero a native of India “whose blood [is] one-quarter native” (16).  This paper explores the ways in which Duran’s English heroine encounters and experiences race under the British colonial regime in India and during the rebellion of 1857. Throughout the novel, the heroine’s views on race and what is moral are challenged by the hero and his status as an individual with double consciousness.  In this paper, I will use textual analysis to analyze Duran’s portrayals of race and colonialism in order to suggest that the way she represents colonialism demonstrates that she is interested not only in depicting the reality of colonial violence, but also in making the reader uncomfortable with hierarchical systems of reality by depicting the reality of its effects.  I will be utilizing the theories of Frantz Fanon and Lola Young, each of whom discusses the process of colonization and what it does to both to the white colonizers and the colonized individuals; Young’s work in “Imperial Culture: The Primitive, the Savage and White Civilization” will be of utmost importance to my essay as she engages with issues of history and representation.  In addition to these theorists, I will make use of works that address issues of creating racial progressives such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists to argue that Duran constructs her heroine as a woman who becomes aware of her white privilege through the understanding of her inferior position in the colonial system due to her gender.

Protest Like an Egyptian: Tracing Erotic Investments in the Middle East through Desert Romances
Amira Jarmakani - Georgia State University

The spring 2011 Arab uprisings provoked an interesting set of engagements in the U.S., such as the placards at the Wisconsin rallies to save unions from demolition, which read “Protest like an Egyptian.”  One particular engagement, the blog “Gay Girl in Damascus,” received substantial media attention for its brazen deceitfulness – many readers had been following the story of a Syrian lesbian facing persecution by the secret police only to find out that the blogger behind the story was a heterosexual white man from Georgia (USA).  Though it may be tempting to understand these kinds of investments in the Middle East as a new phenomenon, they have been clearly prefigured by the steady rise in popularity of desert romances since 2001, and, indeed, by their longstanding position within the genre as a whole.  Particularly given the ongoing “war on terror,” how can one account for the rise in desert romances as viable fantasy narratives?  Groping toward an answer to this question, I focus on the roles of fantasy and violence in both the film Sex and the City 2 (a type of desert romance, I argue, though it lacks some of the elements) and contemporary desert romances. Through mimicry, which tends to enact a kind of violence to the other (in its desire to subsume the other) and menace, which tends to play on the fear of violence from the other, I argue that the two together underscore a potential reason for the salience of the Middle East in the contemporary context: both represent actual and phantasmatic violences that perhaps psychically or subliminally connect to the violence inherent to the process of identification.

Saving China: The Transformative Power of Whiteness in the Interracial Romance
Erin Young - SUNY Empire State College

This project examines the novels of Elizabeth Lowell (Jade Island, 1998) and Katherine Stone (Pearl Moon, 1995), both of which explore romantic relationships between a white hero and a mixed-race Asian (and white) heroine.  I argue that these interracial romances invert the conventional romance formula by featuring white heroes who domesticate their Asian heroines, and in turn, the family-owned companies they represent, thereby “modernizing” corporations that are portrayed as overtly patriarchal, regressive, and anti-capitalist.  Lowell’s and Stone’s respective narratives reveal that a racial and nationalist hierarchy is potentially (re)affirmed in the formulaic conventions of popular romance.

In their negotiations of interracial romantic relationships, both novels construct conflicts between Orientalist conceptions of “East” and “West.”  The Asian heroines have been traumatized by a particular depiction of Chinese culture and its anti-capitalist leanings.  The Chinese family and community functions as a regressive past in which individual desires and feelings are painfully oppressed, and defined roles are marked by an extreme enforcement of gender inequality.  Lowell and Stone construct “Chineseness” as something that must be rescued from itself; Jade Island and Pearl Moon are essentially narratives of progress, in which the Chinese community may offer security at the expense of freedom, but the British and/or American corporation has the ability to offer more satisfactory versions of both.  The hero, who represents the (white) British or American corporation, introduces the Chinese heroine to a “domesticated” workplace—one that is specifically racialized and nationalized—and she is transformed in the process.  The conventional (white) heroine’s gendered victory is reconfigured as a racial and national victory for the heroes of interracial romance.  These novels reveal that whiteness, despite its invisibility in the majority of romance novels, is central to the formulaic conventions of the genre.  More importantly, perhaps, they suggest that the contemporary romance alleviates particular racial and national anxieties that emerge out of a global economy.    

PCA/ACA 2012 - (5)

Laura Vivanco

The Conventions of Romance

Thursday, April 12, 2012 - 9:45am - 11:15am

Looking at Character and Conflict in Popular Romance through the Johari Window
Chryssa Sharp - Lindenwood University

As the discipline of Popular Romance studies grows, one question is what models and theories can other fields contribute to the discussion of Romance studies?  Since one of the central elements of a romance novel is that, “the main plot centers around two individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work” (“About the Romance Genre”), one way to analyze the romantic story is to focus on the factors which influence the nature of the relationship between the hero and heroine (or hero/hero; heroine/heroine).  In this regard, the field of Organizational Behavior can provide some unique perspectives through which to do this analysis.  Organizational Behavior is the study of how people behave in organizations.  For the purposes of this paper, “organization” will be defined as the community within which the hero/heroine function.

The Johari Window is a tool for analyzing interpersonal interactions as well as people’s perceptions of themselves and others.   The four quadrants of the Johari Window are derived from the idea of what information is known to the “self” and to “others” with the different quadrants being classified as open (known to both), blind (known to others, unknown to self), hidden (known to self, unknown to others) and unknown areas (unknown to both)  (Luft).   This information could pertain to values, attitudes, beliefs, experiences, goals, desires, needs etc., in short, the many internal building blocks of both characterization and conflict used by Romance authors to build a story.   (A diagram of the Johari Window is attached.)

Awareness grounded in the ideas of the Johari Window can help people become more comfortable with each other and/or identify and explain sources of conflict.  It is this latter point which could be of particular interest for scholars of Romance fiction.  What techniques are authors using to build inter-personal conflict and tension into the Romance?  How are these conflicts resolved?  What roles do the people around the couple – friends, family and co-workers – play in shifting the frames of the Johari Window, thus aiding or hindering the couple on their path to romantic resolution?

On a more meta level, do certain authors favor particular positioning of their protagonists?  How do these authors move both protagonists to the Open Area – the quadrant which helps support a relationship?

Eternal Love: representations of the "post-HEA" in Nora Roberts' and J.R. Ward's popular romance fiction
An Goris - University of Leuven

The Happy Ever After – or HEA – is often considered one of the most salient narrative characteristics of the contemporary popular romance novel, which traditionally ends on this happy note of promised everlasting romantic happiness. Yet in recent years, in part due to the proliferation of narrative series in the romance genre, popular romance novels increasingly frequently contain scenes that are located in what I call the “post-HEA” – i.e. the time in the fictional world after the HEA has been established. In this paper I explore the representations of such post-HEA scenes in paranormal romance series by Nora Roberts and J.R. Ward, two of the genre’s most popular authors. While post-HEA scenes are extensively featured in both Roberts’ and Ward’s paranormal series, a number of significant differences between these representations exist. In this paper I suggest that an analysis of these differences provides crucial insights not only into Roberts’ and Ward’s respective authorial voices, but also into how the complex conceptual functioning of the HEA in the romance generic narrative is complicated and potentially subverted by the narrative representation of the post-HEA. As such this paper then contributes to a better understanding of the romance’s happy ending, which is not only one of the genre’s most crucial but also one of its most maligned characteristics.

Romancing the Adaptation: The Princess Bride as a Classic Tale of True Love
Lindsay Hayes - University of Oklahoma

It’s been said that there are two kinds of people- those who love The Princess Bride and those who have not seen it. 25 years after the film’s release, its status as a cult classic is unquestioned.  But what about the novel upon which the film is based? This paper will explore The Princess Bride as an adaptation.

Portrayals of romance in the book and film will be explored. What elements of plot and character are depicted as being particularly romantic or the ideal of romance?  The characterization of love will also be examined. What makes this a story of “true love?”  How is love shown by one character for another? Differences in depictions of romance and love in the novel versus the film are discussed. The novel and film as metanarrative will also be considered.

Other subsequent adaptations will also be explored in brief.

A Union Heart: Josie Underwood's Civil War Romance
Amelia Serafine - Loyola University, Chicago

“He is not the hero of my heart with his disunion ideas!” This quote comes to us from the Civil War diary of Kentucky slave-holding unionist Josie Underwood. Underwood speaks of her frustrating secessionist beau, a theme which is recurrent and intermingled with descriptions of the sentimental romantic literature she both consumed and imagined for herself. This diary, and others like it, offers a rich and nuanced understanding of the expression of female lives, and through an understanding of the language and tropes utilized, their political expressions as well. As a wealthy Southern woman raised in leisure, novel reading was an emotionally and intellectually important part of Underwood’s life. Her diary illustrates the manner in which Underwood articulated herself through the familiar medium of sentimental literature, and integrated her politics into that medium in ways specific to the crisis of disunion.
This presentation is part of a larger work which explores Southern women’s expressions of self during the Civil War. In the case of Josie Underwood, her sense of self was articulated through sentimental romance, a language which both complicated and realized her political beliefs. Ultimately, Underwood married her romantic ideals with her Union politics, spurring the much-beloved Tom Grafton. For Underwood, the novels she read gave her a language in which to imagine romantic sentiment as political action. Her diary speaks to the utilization of romantic elements in women’s political choices, and suggests that for many, romantic literature was or could easily become a political tool.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (4)

Laura Vivanco

Romancing the Monster: Authors, Audience, Steampunk, and Fan Fiction

Thursday, April 12, 2012 - 8:00am - 9:30am

“The Person Behind the Curtain”: Evolving Roles of Author and Audience in Paranormal Romance
Esther Guenat -  Temple College

When considering reader response criticism and its focus on examining literature and its readers in such a way that explores the diversity of readers’ responses to literary works, one might not immediately consider audiences of popular fiction, let alone audiences of romance novels. Readers of urban fantasy and paranormal romance are becoming much more diverse—both regarding who does the reading and those readers’ expectations—and the writing of each has evolved along with the audiences. While the use of supernatural aspects, sexual exploration, and urban locale were different standards of the two sub-genres, the conventional romance remained the same, as did reader expectation—heterosexual women sought out tales of supernaturally enhanced heterosexual relationships that ended in happily ever after. Recent reader-oriented critics have focused on how a given type of fiction audience’s expectations change over time; feminist and gender critics ask whether there is such a thing as “reading like a woman,” just as gay and lesbian critics ask whether there is a homosexual way of reading. Audience expectation of urban fantasy and paranormal romance has become much more diverse in its response—to gender roles, homosexual relationships, and even heterosexual relationships—and the formulas of these two sub-genres are no longer exact. Various authors have been able to somewhat adapt and evolve their writing so that it encompasses and allows for a more diverse following. Through this examination of works of various urban fantasy and paranormal romance authors, I explore the way the conventional romance novel formula is changing, how the readership of the genre is changing, and how authors of the genre are responding to and adapting to this change, thus creating a sub-genre of popular fiction that defies conventional ideas of romance and matches its audience in diversity.

"I am so over the whole vampires and werewolves and demons, oh my": How a Series of Steampunk "Romances" Offered This Romance Reader an Alternative to Paranormals
Glinda Hall - Arkansas State University

It is not difficult to acknowledge the popularity and role that the paranormal plays and has played within our culture, and especially throughout our literature.  For romance fiction, it is easy to understand the appeal because the paranormal allows for sexual expression and experimentation that readers may not dare fantasize about within mainstream and/or contemporary romance.  However, when I began my journey as a romance reader and scholar some 8 years ago, I also found paranormals appealing for this very reason; but now I have become disillusioned with the illusion.  Not to overplay a feminist approach to romance fiction, but (thanks to the saturation of the Twilight series) it seems the paranormal has outlived its usefulness in terms of its once used format for sexual exploration.

In my paper presentation, I will show how Gail Carriger’s steampunk series – Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, and Heartless – gives us a heroine, Alexia Tarabotti, that represents a strong, intelligent female, but also one literally immune to the supernatural that is a very real part of her alternative Victorian reality.  Alexia is an anti-paranormal protagonist, and this anti-paranormal plot schematic and characterization exposes devises used by romance paranormals and counters them.

Re-imagining the Heroine as a 'Slave to Desire': Power Games and (Hetero) Sexual Rhetoric in Labyrinth and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fanfiction
Danielle Lawson - Edinboro University

This paper explores the sexual rhetoric of power games, specifically representations of erotic power exchange in fanfiction written for the Labyrinth (Jim Henson) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon) fandoms. In particular, this research is concerned with the erotic power dynamic represented between the primary ‘romantic’ relationships in both original stories: Jareth/Sarah (Labyrinth) and Spike/Buffy (BtVS). Although the genres and intended audiences of the movie/tv show differ greatly, there are many similarities in the way the relationship dynamic between the characters is developed by authors of fanfiction. Using a combination of rhetorical analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study demonstrates how authors of hetero-oriented fanfiction re-claim the ‘dominant male/submissive female’ construct as an acceptable relationship dynamic. Moreover, the research presented shows that this re-claiming serves to build a subtext of feminine power, wherein the heroine is empowered (rather than oppressed) by accepting that they have the freedom to submit to their desires – even if that desire is to be dominated. In reaching this point, the male antagonists engage in a three phase power game: 1) Setting the Bait, 2) The Chase and 3) The Surrender. Other themes discussed include the disconnect between romance, power and ‘happily ever after’.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (3)

Laura Vivanco

Romancing Race I: African-Americans in Popular Romance Fiction

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 6:30pm - 8:00pm

African American Romance Novels: Reinventing Images of African American Women
Ann White and Tamara Buck - Southeast Missouri State University

Despite stereotypes of romance fiction as “trashy” and “poorly written” Americans spend millions of dollars each year on romance novels, and many of those books are African American romances – books that are written by African American writers and feature characters in settings familiar to their readers. According to market reports, African-American readers make up the fastest growing segment of the romance reading community, accounting for about 25 percent of the romances sold.

African American romances have a unique history.  One of the goals of African American publishers has been to provide outlets for the publication of material that enlightens and informs African Americans, and another has been to oppose the stereotypical images of African Americans that have pervaded mainstream media. The earliest of these efforts began in the late 19th century with the publication of work by African American women writers who created characters that were in opposition to the stereotypes of African American women in antebellum literature.

In this paper, I look at the history of African American romance novels through the lens of cultural representation. This is particularly significant for producers of African American romances because it gives those producers the power to control images of African American women that circulate in culture. The production of contemporary African American romances also provides writers an opportunity to challenge to the stereotypical images of African American female characters that appeared in American literature during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that have reinforced stereotypical images of African American women.

“Outlaw stories in our own papers”: Heroic Outlaws in African American Romance
Sarah Ficke - Marymount University

The popularity of Beverly Jenkins’s novels set in the West testifies to our continued fascination with outlaws and other desperados from America’s frontier. However, the novels Jenkins writes do more than simply translate the character of the White outlaw into a Black story. Her engagement with the complex experiences of African Americans in the West and the nuanced motivations of her outlaw heroes (and sometimes heroines) encourage her readers to see these novels as educational interventions that recapture stories that were untold, or untellable, in the nineteenth century. Black outlaws, and cowboys like Nat Love, were instrumental Western figures, but they were not translated into fictional heroes until the late 20th century.

In this paper I will examine the outlaw as hero, focusing particularly on the historical novels of Beverly Jenkins, including The Taming of Jessi Rose, Something Like Love, and Wild Sweet Love, and their relationship to nineteenth century works of African American romantic fiction, including Winona by Pauline Hopkins and Clotel by William Wells Brown. As Jenkins notes in Wild Sweet Love, the presence of Black outlaws mattered to the African American population, and for more than their entertainment value. However, there were few outlaws in nineteenth century African American romances, and none of them are the heroes. The heroes are doctors, soldiers, or intellectuals. The outlaws haunt the margins of these stories, but never get a happily ever after.  I argue that the absence of black outlaw heroes in nineteenth century African American romantic fiction highlights the connections between personal romances and national politics in the history of American race relations, and the outlaws’ appearance in Jenkins’s novels in the twentieth century shows the key role that romances continue to play in our national dialogue.

You Still Can't Do That on Television! (Or Can You?): Racism and Interracial Coupledom in American Television
Jacqueline Brown - Independent Scholar

PCA/ACA 2012 - (2)

Laura Vivanco

The History of Romance: Rakes, Gothics, Queer Publishing, and Preservation

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 4:45pm - 6:15pm

A Rake’s Progress: Examining the Archetype of the Rake in Popular Romance
Angela Toscano - Independent Scholar

The rake or the rakehell is a stock character first appearing in Restoration era dramas. The English equivalent of the French libertine, the rake’s function in novels of the 18th century was primarily to serve as the antagonist or moral counterpoint to the more worthy hero or heroine. For example, in Richardson’s Clarissa, Lovelace’s rape of Clarissa and his eventual death highlight Clarissa’s virtue while revealing his own moral outlook as deficient and ultimately vacuous. Thus the rake also functions to expose the corruption of the aristocracy and the ideologies of which he is a proponent. Because of this, canonical literature features a rake’s progress that nearly always results in an early death preceded by an act of contrition or penance.

While the rake in popular romance shares certain qualities with his Restoration and 18th-century counterparts, he deviates from the type in one significant way: he is redeemed and he lives. By giving to the rake a happily-ever-after, popular romance both retains and reforms the structure of the rake’s story. More curiously, the redemption of the rake doesn’t necessarily result in a total shift in the character’s morality. In many novels, the rake’s redemption is not dependent upon moral rectitude but only on sexual fidelity to the heroine. It is by admitting that he loves the heroine that the rake is reformed. By tracing his literary genealogy down to his more contemporary characterizations, I wish to explore what it is about the rake that is so appealing to romance narrative that he has become one of the most oft repeated types of character.

Meet Paperback Michelangelo and the Queen of Gothic Romance
Brigita Jeraj - LMU Munich

My paper deals with Phyllis A. Whitney and Michael Avallone who were among the most popular writers in the 1960s, when Gothic romance boomed in the paperback market. For marketing reasons, Avallone pretended to be a female writer by using pseudonyms like Dorothea Nile, Edwina Noone, and Priscilla Dalton for his “Gothics”. Avallone picks up the genre’s convention of playing with the reader’s expectations. But is there a notable difference in writing between a male writer, who passes for female, and a female writer, when both of them address their fiction primarily to a female audience? Not only because of its popularity, but also because of the particular handling of gender and emotion in and apart from the text, Avallone’s and Whitney’s work surely is worth exploring in the Gothic context.

Both writers published in various fields of literature and thought a lot about the process of writing itself. Avallone once said: “A professional writer should be able to write anything from a garden seed catalogue to the Bible and everything that lies in between” (The Little Times, Jan 27, 1982). Manuscripts were discussed regularly and the self-crowned “Fastest Typewriter in the East” and Phyllis Whitney were closest friends most of their life-time, which is documented by various letters and notes. The correspondence and literary remains of both writers are accessible in an archive in Boston and provide an interesting insight into (Gothic) romance writing.

Trends in Queer Romance Publishing: 2004-2012
Len Barot - Bold Strokes Books, Inc

The early models for queer publishing were formed during the feminist and gay movements of the 1970s and early 1980s. Dozens of small independent presses sprang up to supply the hundreds of independent feminist and gay bookstores throughout the US and abroad. Publishers generally supplied vendors directly, without using distributors as the “middle-men.” While libraries carried many queer titles, most non-feminist/non-gay bookstores did not. Sales of popular titles (by historical report) were 20,000 or more. In the last decade of the 20th century, most of the small presses disappeared commensurate with the closure of the majority of independent queer/feminist bookstores (last report suggests there are less than fifty such bookstores remaining). These small presses were eventually replaced with POD publishing companies, issuing limited numbers of titles via narrow distribution channels. The bulk of the titles published by these presses were lesbian romances.

Bold Strokes Books, established in 2004, is a midsized publisher with an active catalog of 300-plus titles and a front list of 75 to 100 new titles per year. We utilize mainstream distribution channels employing traditional, non-POD print runs of 1500-8000 copies/title. 75% of our titles are gay and lesbian romance titles (the remainder being queer general fiction, mysteries, spec fic, and erotica). This paper analyzes eight years of sales data in the romance market looking at overall sales trends, comparative sales based on sub-genre and format (print versus digital), and variations in genre popularity in print versus digital format. This data allows us to analyze the trends in the queer romance market in terms of sub-genre preference, to extrapolate future markets, and to guide acquisitions.

Harlequins at the Browne:  What Shall We Do With Them?
Stefanie Hunker - Bowling Green State University

The Browne Popular Culture Library’s (BPCL) collection of over 9000 category romances, such as those from Harlequin and Silhouette, holds a treasure trove of material for anyone wanting to study these sometimes misunderstood pieces of literature.  To enable researchers to find these items more effectively, the BPCL is preparing to launch a retrospective cataloging project to update the bibliographic records of hundreds of category romances.  Previous cataloging practices did not require the use of subject and/or genre headings, the lack of which decreases the findability of these resources. Typically when category romances are cataloged, Library of Congress (LC) subject headings are assigned that represent the subject matter or theme as well as occupations of the main characters and location of the story.

Unfortunately, themes in older Harlequins can differ greatly from themes of more current Harlequins and many times subject headings simply do not exist or do not fit the subject matter adequately.  Inadequate LC subject headings make more difficulty for the cataloger to accurately describe an item, which, in turn, makes difficulty for the researcher to find items for study, especially if their needs are fairly specific.

Using the thousands of Harlequin Romances at the BPCL (which begin in the 1950’s and end in the 2000’s) as a starting place, a survey of themes, occupations, and locations has begun and will offer a more thorough understanding of the collection and enable better description of these items within the LC classification.  If appropriate LC subject headings cannot be found, should local subject headings be used or should LC be petitioned to create more descriptive or more appropriate subject headings to better serve researchers’ needs?  Would tagging be more appropriate for these items?  Should summaries of each book be added?  What would make these items more findable in general?  What kinds of tools are researchers using to find resources with which to study?

In an effort to enlist the assistance of dedicated romance researchers, I would like to administer a questionnaire and, possibly, lead a discussion that would answer many of the questions I have about how romance researchers find their resources.  Their responses coupled with our survey of themes, occupations, and locations should give a more complete picture and will enable us to make a more informed decision about what our next steps should be with the project.

PCA/ACA 2012 - (1)

Laura Vivanco

Close-Reading the Romance: Nora Roberts, Lyric, Eloisa James, and the Male Rape Victim

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 3:00pm - 4:30pm

“Darkness Piles Up in the Trees”:  Love and Lyric in Eloisa James
Eric Selinger -  DePaul University

In 1993, Allan Bloom announced the “death of eros.”  It was not by natural causes.  Feminists, sexologists, and the ghost of Jean-Jaques Rousseau conspired in this “de-eroticization of the world” and consequent “disastrous decline in the rhetoric of love.” “There have been hardly any great novelists of love for almost a century,” Bloom sighed, although “cheap romantic novels, the kind that are sometimes stuck into boxes of household detergent, apparently flourish among housewives who haven’t heard that Eros is dead.”  Bloom’s fears about the “end of the novel of love” (as Vivian Gornick described it four years later) find a curious echo in period concerns about the “death of poetry,” which was announced and contested by Joseph Epstein (1988) Vernon Shetley (After the Death of Poetry, 1993), Donald Hall (Death to the Death of Poetry, 1994), among others.  What, one wonders, do these “deaths” have in common—and what are we to make of the evident survival, even flourishing, of both poetry and eros in “cheap romantic novels” from the 1990s and after?   The romance novels of Eloisa James provide an ideal oeuvre in which to explore these questions.  Professor of Renaissance drama, daughter of the poet Robert Bly and short-story author Carol Bly, James quotes and alludes to poetry throughout her work, not least in her latest novel, The Duke is Mine.  Renegotiating the cultural status of both poetry and romance fiction, she explores the afterlives of love and lyric in a (post-?) skeptical age.

Picturing the Self in Nora Robert's Sanctuary
Zohar Korn - Independent Scholar

My paper explores Nora Roberts' use of photography as the central metaphor for the self in her 1997 romantic suspense novel, Sanctuary. My claim is that through her treatment of photography, which she uses to develop characters as well as further the action, Roberts proposes two models of the self: the autonomous subject and the self-in-relation, advocating the latter. Both heroine and villain are photographers; the model of photography each chooses not only shows what each of them privileges as the principle around which to construct his or her sense of selfhood, but also implicitly provides Roberts’ commentary on those principles.

In the romantic plot, Roberts uses the heroine's roles as practitioner, object and observer of photography to positively construct a selfhood that promotes affective wellbeing. The heroine’s gradual transition from taking pictures of unpopulated scenery to including portraiture shows a growing emphasis on care and relationship rather than self-sufficiency and independence, an emphasis that is portrayed as strength rather than sacrifice. Thus, framed within its narrative through the theme of photography, Sanctuary proposes a theory of selfhood that can, despite its different genre, be put in conversation with psychoanalytical theories.

Furthermore, the mystery plot juxtaposes the two photographers, determining that one is good and the other evil. By associating autonomy with the murderous villain who takes pictures as part of his killing ritual Roberts suggests that this notion of selfhood is morally problematic because it leads to objectification and violence. By showing that autonomy leads to objectification of others and violence while self-in-relation gives strength through care without negating selfhood, Roberts makes an ethical and affective claim in favor of the latter, which complicates criticism of the romance genre by showing that the self-in-relation is not a limiting construct used by heteronormative society to subject women but rather a positive way of life that might actually subvert some principles of heteronormativity.

Recovering the Hero: The Male Rape Victim in Romance Novels
Sarah Maitland - University of Rhode Island

Rape is a common trope in romance novels, typically perpetrated on the heroine. Often, although not always, the rape serves the purpose of positioning the heroine to be saved by the hero. We can identify the hero by the way he reflects multiple cultural norms of masculinity, including the ability and willingness to physically defend both himself and his woman from harm, or to seek revenge when harm is done. In this paper I will discuss a number of novels that deviate from these typical roles. The novels I examine also include rape, however instead of the heroine, these novels cast the hero as the victim. When the hero of a romance novel is raped the cultural norms of masculinity are violated. Typically the penetrating body, rape changes the landscape of the male body to be the penetrated. Romance novels that compromise the inviolability of the male body destabilize the gender roles that define the genre. In my paper I will examine the process the hero must undergo to reestablish his masculinity and reinstate the gender roles. In conversation with feminist theory, I will consider what the presence of the rape victim-hero and the process he must undergo means for the genre and what it may provide for readers.

CFP: PCA/ACA Conference 2012

Laura Vivanco

This is a call for papers for one of the subject areas covered at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's 2012 Conference, which is being held in Boston from April 11 - 14, 2012. Apparently this "is a week later than we have traditionally held it in the past."

Call For Papers: Romance Area

Deadline for submission:  December 15, 2011.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance:  all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and any-when, are welcome topics of discussion.

This year we are especially interested in papers on Romance on/and/in Television, to be presented on panels jointly sponsored by the Romance and the TV areas.

The Romance Area is also co-sponsoring with the Gay/Lesbian/Queer area papers that discuss BDSM and Kink in any form. Representations of BDSM/Kink in popular media and/or discussions of real-life BDSM/Kink practices and practitioners are all welcome. Romance is not a necessary component of papers to be presented in BDSM/Kink.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

If you are involved in the creative industry of popular romance (romance author/editor, film director/producer, singer/songwriter, etc.) and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the representations of popular romance, please contact us!

Some possible topics for Romance (although we are by no means limited to these):

• Popular Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation, Western and non-Western media, local and comparative approaches)
• Romance Across the Media: crossover texts and the relationships between romance fiction and romantic films, music, art, drama, etc.; also the paratexts and contexts of popular romance
• Romance High and Low: texts that fall between “high” and “low” culture, or that complicate the distinctions between these critical categories
• Romance Then and Now: representations of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern love
• Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
• Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
• BDSM Romance and representations of romantic/erotic power exchange
• Romance communities
• New Critical Approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science (e.g., the neurobiology of love)
• The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
• Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)
• Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
• African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
• Young Adult Romance
• History of/in Popular Romance
• Romance and Region:  places, histories, mythologies, traditions
• Definitions and Theoretical Models of Popular Romance: it’s not all just happily ever after

As we do every year, the Romance area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field of Popular Romance Studies.  All are welcome to attend.

Presenters are encouraged to make use of the new array of romance scholarship resources online, including the romance bibliography, the RomanceScholar listserv, and the open Forums at the webpage of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract by December 15, 2011, to the Area Chair in Romance:

Sarah S. G. Frantz

sarahfrantz@gmail.com

If you have any questions as all, please contact the area chair.  Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

On the topic of CFPs and conferences, don't forget that the IASPR 2012 conference, focusing this year on the topic of "The Pleasures of Romance," will be held in York from 27-29 September. Proposals for "individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations" need to be sent to conferences@iaspr.org by May 1, 2012.

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The image of the television was created by Robert Couse-Baker and was downloaded from Flikr under a Creative Commons licence. The BDSM symbol was created by Aida, released into the public domain by Aida and AnonMoos, and downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.