RWA Academic Research Grant: The State of Romance Scholarship

Sarah S. G. Frantz

As a requirement to receive disbursement of the RWA Academic Research Grant, I had to write a description of the "State of the Scholarship" in romance criticism. I jump-started myself at Romancing the Blog, but took a while longer to finish the essay. I thought I'd post it here (slightly edited), to let y'all see the exciting times we have ahead of us in romance scholarship. So, without further ado:

The Future's So Bright, We'll All Need Shades

I can say without reservation that romance scholarship has never been better and the future is even brighter.

Since the early 1980s, there has always been a steady trickle of academic books and articles about popular romance fiction. Every year or two another book would be published or dissertation written that seemed either to excoriate or defend popular romance fiction. Recently, however, two noticeable changes have occurred in the publishing field. First, the trickle is now a steady stream of books and articles. And secondly, rather than the general tendency to hold one of two polar positions about popular romance fiction, current academic research into popular romance fiction has the critical mass now to be generally much more nuanced. It is generally accepted now that romances are worthy of being studied, as any cultural artifact is. As such, we recognize now that popular romance novels are themselves contested cultural artifacts, potentially reactionary and revolutionary at the same time. Current academic study teases out the different narrative strands of ideological influence in popular romance fiction, while respecting the texts, and while recognizing that the authors and readers that make up the romance community are knowledgeable, desirous, autonomous subjects.

One example of the critical mass of study is the exponential increase in a serious presence of popular romance fiction at academic conferences. The Romance Area of the Popular Culture Association, chaired by Eric Selinger and Darcy Martin, had ten panels at the PCA national conference in April 2008, up from no panels in 2006. Eric Selinger is organizing a one day invitational conference on popular romance and American culture to be hosted by Princeton University in April 2009 and the First Annual International Conference on Popular Romance will be hosted by the Queensland Institute of Technology in Brisbane, Australia in August, 2009, in conjunction with the annual conference of the Romance Writers of Australia. Additionally, a group of scholars hope to present two or three panels at the annual conference of the Romance Writers of America in July 2009, to demonstrate to the romance writing community what it is that academics actually do, and to emphasize the fact that we are fans of popular romance fiction as well as critics.

One thing the recent conference panels on popular romance fiction have demonstrated is the caliber of work being done, not only by full-time academics, but by graduate students. An Goris, Shruthi Vissa, Severine Olivier, Glinda Hall, Jayashree Kamble, Joanna Fedson, to name a few, are doing intensely theoretical graduate work on popular romance fiction that provide brilliant promise for the next ten years of academic study of romance. Goris is tackling formal genre theory in her dissertation, while Vissa and Kamble examined popular romance in light of postcolonial theory and racial and gender categories in theirs. Olivier uses sophisticated translation theory to examine European translations of romance novels, while Fedson provides much-needed analysis of inspirational romance. Hall's dissertation expands romance criticism into Heritage Studies, while Hsu-Ming Teo, a lecturer in Australia, is an historian. While the current crop of academic critics of popular romance fiction studied in other topics and then came to romance after they wrote their dissertation or well into their career (Pamela Regis is an Americanist, Eric Selinger is a critic of poetry, I am an eighteenth-century scholar, for example), the current graduate students are writing their dissertations on popular romance and will hopefully get hired with that specialty, raising the profile of popular romance as a legitimate topic of study across academia.

One thing I thought of after I sent off the document two days ago is the truly international status of romance scholarship. It's not solely grounded in the USA, but is strong in the UK, in Europe, and especially in Australia and the surrounding island nations. This international focus is particularly exciting, because the readership for romance is so international, that it's important that the criticism is as well.

Online romance communities are both cause of and contributing factor to the increase in quality academic work on romance novels. Reader blogs like Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books and Dear Author, communities like All About Romance, individual writer blogs like Jenny Crusie's Argh Ink, and joint author blogs like Fog City Divas and Goddess Blogs, to name just a few, all contribute to an intelligent, respectful, and analytical conversation about popular romance. On the academic side, there is an active Romance Scholar listserv for up-to-the-minute discussions of issues affecting romance scholarship, a continually updated bibliography of Academic Romance Scholarship on the Romance Wiki, as well as Teach Me Tonight, a joint academic blog about popular romance fiction.

Finally, the three larger romance-related projects I will be pursuing this summer (in addition to the three individual articles about romance I plan to write) reveal the ever-expanding scope of current romance scholarship. The anthology of academic essays I am editing with Eric Selinger, The Mind of Love: New Perspectives on Popular Romance, has just been accepted for publication by McFarland, for a September 1, 2008 delivery date and publication (hopefully in soft-cover) in 2009. While editing the volume, I am also working to launch the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), attached to which will be the online, peer-edited Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS). Finally, Eric Selinger, Pamela Regis, and I will be working hard to complete a proposal for a Cambridge Companion of Popular Romance Fiction, which, if accepted, will provide a volume that will be marketed for classroom use across the English-speaking world, as well as providing the study of popular romance fiction much-desired academic legitimacy.

As an academic, it is literally a one-in-a-million chance to be able to build a field like this from the ground up, but that's exactly what's happening right now. The opportunity to be involved in that process, and to guide it to a certain extent, is both terrifying and exhilarating. But I believe that I and my colleagues are more than up to the task.


The image of the pink sunglasses is from GirlProps.com.

PCA 2008: Romance VI

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Romance Fiction VI: Friday 4:30-6:00pm
Beyond the Straight and Narrow: Power Exchange and Gay/Lesbian Romance

Chair: Sarah Frantz, Fayetteville State University

“BDSM to Erotic Romance: Observations of a Shy Pornographer” Pam Rosenthal

It was wonderful to meet Pam. As Molly Weatherfield, she wrote the BDSM novel Carrie’s Story and its sequel. As Pam Rosenthal, she’s written Almost a Gentleman among others. She also obviously has a long history with the feminist establishment in San Francisco, which added fascinating little tidbits to her presentation. Her presentation discussed how she came to erotica and romance as a writer.

Pam got started in the genre through conversations she overheard in the lesbian communities in San Francisco, including an article by Pat/Patrick Califia satirizing the political correctness of feminist culture. She came to realize that the utopian dream of sexuality which obviated hierarchy and domination/submission play were, in their own way, as repressive as the patriarchal mindset that the lesbian and feminist communities were trying to overcome. She is very thankful, however, for the lesbian and feminist communities for raising these issues in the first place, however subsequently misguided they may have seemed. Pam argues that Ann Snitow shouldn’t get a bad rap in the romance community, because although she was arguing that romances are soft-core porn, she was also arguing that women can and should be able to have access to porn. Porn, after all, isn’t not good for women. When she was writing Carrie’s Story, she was having internal debates with Andrea Dworkin about whether she was a good person or not. She argues that the SM novel has a simplistic episodic structure that follows a simple escalation of sexual experimentation. But in some respects, SM novels are also pedagogy novels, initiation stories, bildungsromans. The interesting thing, though, is that they’re told by the bottom, by the student, which throws into question some of the critiques of SM novels as objectifying the bottom, because how can they be objectified when they’re so damn chatty? Pam relates that the sexual escalation was easy, but the closure for the novel was difficult. In Carrie’s Story, the top finally spoke from his heart, forced to face his own subjectivity and the power balance shifted because it shows the moment when the person holding the power recognizes his own limits.

“Lesbian Romance: Identity, Diversity, and Power” Len Barot
Unfortunately, Len was not able to join us.

“Fetishizing Patriotic Lesbian Masculinity: Valiant Butches, Wanton Terrorism, and the Homonational Imaginary” Shruthi Vissa, Emory University
Combining nervousness about my own paper and the complexity, layers, and theoretical nature of Shruthi's paper, I absorbed very little of what Shruthi was saying. But here goes:

The original title of the paper was “Queering the Marriage Plot? Love and Heteronormativity in the Queer Romance Novel” but it changed as Shruthi’s writing progressed. She is examining the spectacular masculinity of butch lesbians, in which the lovers union makes possible the beginning of nationhood. Lesbian romances have been rarely studied, and they have never been studied in light of female masculinity. Shruthi examines Radclyffe’s Honor series with a patriotic white, uber-butch lesbian hero who is in the Secret Service who guards the President’s daughter, and they end up falling in love….

And that’s all I got. I’m so sorry, Shruthi, but I doubt I could do justice to your ideas anyway, as layered as they were. I know I thoroughly enjoyed the paper, and if you want to add a summary in the comments or email it to me, I'd be more than happy to add it here.

“Polysexuality, Power Exchange, and the Construction of Gender in Popular Romance Fiction” Sarah S. G. Frantz
I presented this paper with severe laryngitis—I figured if Diane Rehm could run a syndicated radio show with her voice, I could talk for twenty minutes. So, I did! I am lucky, however, in that I get to cut-and-paste bits of my paper for your edification, rather than having to remember what my notes mean.

By analyzing popular romance fiction through the lens of BDSM identities and practices, it is possible to interrogate more broadly and more deeply the ways in which popular romance fiction constructs gender and the power dynamics and negotiations between hero and heroine. (BDSM, of course, is a combined acronym that stands for the main components of the sexual practices and orientations more commonly, but wrongly, known as S&M: Bondage/Discipline, Domination/ Submission, and Sadism/Masochism.) I argue with Ivo Dominguez that BDSM is a sexuality and a sexual identity as much as Kinsey’s homosexual/heterosexual continuum indicates a sexuality. So rather than one axis of sexuality, there are multiple axes of polysexuality, all affecting each other differently. In Charlotte Lamb’s otherwise vanilla romance, Vampire Lover, the heroine ties up and rapes the hero; it is only the rather kinky act of nonconsensual bondage that allows the characters to break out of the traditional male dominant/female submissive gender roles that so terrify the heroine, allowing them enough individual control over their fate to strive for their happy ending. I then turn to examining female dominant/male submissive BDSM romances. But while fem-dom romances overturn the traditional gender roles, they reinforce the construction of gender—the heroes are more male and more alpha than other heroes, the heroines more powerfully female and comfortable with being female than other heroines, and the Alpha male submissives thereby serve as an exaggeration of the value of the final submission to love of normal romance heroes. But fem-dom romances also present another problem in that they seem to try to naturalize the concept of a essential, even compulsory connection between the axes of dominance/submission and sadism/masochism where dominance and sadism map together and submission and masochism are inevitably joined. Finally, however, the relationship between the submissive but Alpha male hero and the female dominant heroine is—the best word I can come up with is—consummated in a reversal of the roles, an exception that proves the rule and serves to solidify the female dominant aspect of the relationship. So, while on the one hand fem-dom romances experiment with power structures of gender roles in the sexual relationship by making the heroines the sexual Alpha--and pretty kick-ass the rest of the time too--these novels reinscribe both construction of gender (men as "real" men, women as "real" women) and the connection between Domination and Sadism.