Diversity and Inclusion at RWA 2018

Diversity and inclusion were important themes of this year's Romance Writers of America conference. Avon have announced the creation of "The Beverly Jenkins Diverse Voices Sponsorship [...] to encourage Own Voices writers to be more fully represented at the RWA annual conference" in coming years. Prior to the event the RWA had announced that

In continuing its commitment to increasing diversity and inclusion within the organization and the romance industry, Romance Writers of America will hold its second Diversity Summit at the 2018 RWA Conference in Denver on Friday, July 20. The Summit is a meeting that gathers high-level publishing professionals, key contacts at major retailers, members of the RWA staff and Board, and selected committee and chapter leaders who are registered for the conference. A summary of the Summit will be provided to membership by August 6, 2018.

The Diversity Summit will once again be moderated by 2016’s Librarian of the Year recipient Robin Bradford. We'll be discussing the results of a survey RWA commissioned from NPD Book focusing on the buying habits of readers across ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation, as well as revealing initiatives within RWA to promote inclusiveness within our own organization and the industry. We will be inviting publishers to share their ideas, in-house initiatives, and ways in which RWA can be a resource for them.

Key speeches given during the conference were also indicative of the depth of the Board's commitment to "increasing diversity and inclusion".

The 2018 Librarians Day Luncheon Keynote Speech from award-winning author Sonali Dev (this is an audio file) called for librarians to think about the voices which have been silenced and pledge to help them to be heard, because librarians have power when they make decisions about which books to order for their libraries.

This is really important. We hope our library and archives colleagues take the time to sit and listen and then use our enormous power to take action. https://t.co/07YqewLXPj

— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) 26 July 2018

LIBRARIANS!!!!! This amazing speech is for you. #CollectionDevelopment librarians, this is ESPECIALLY for you. https://t.co/En8EEoPnXL

— Robin ⚾️🍹🎼📚 (@Tuphlos) 26 July 2018

From something Dev says in the speech, I think it was given after Suzanne Brockmann's Lifetime Achievement Award Speech (link to a transcript on Brockmann's website) in which Brockmann recounted how, at the very beginning of her career, she was asked by an editor to make a gay secondary character straight. She acquiesced, but vowed that in future she 'would not write books set in a world where gay people [...] were rendered invisible, [...] erased “because that’s just the way it was.”' Brockmann also referred to current US politics.

The video below is of the entire awards ceremony. The section relating to Brockmann begins at 45:35 minutes (Brockmann herself appears just after the 56 minute mark).


Lisa Lin relates that "During her speech, I saw some who did not appear to react well, and I have seen some negative reactions on social media". Lin is among the many authors who have responded online in support of Brockmann's speech. Nicki Salcedo's response includes examples of how her writing has been marginalised:

Much of the feedback on my books was related to race. There weren’t comments on plot or pacing. No issues with dialogue or themes. The feedback was:

“We don’t have an African-American imprint at this time…”

“Your manuscript might find a better home with [insert publisher of Black books in completely unrelated genre]…”

“Are your main characters Black?” [I pondered this for a long time before responding and decided to say yes. I did not get another response.]

“I find your main character completely unbelievable…” [She was Black from an affluent family]

“We don’t know where to shelve your book in the store…” [With fiction? Or maybe romance? Just a guess…Or somewhere near the Colored People’s water fountain?] [...]

and then there's this, about the different ways the same novel was treated when Salcedo

removed all references to race in the novel. I did not revise or alter my manuscript in any other substantive way. All I did was make the main character “not Black.”

In 2012, that same manuscript became a Golden Heart Finalist. I wish I could say I was surprised. But I wasn’t.

I submitted my manuscript for the final round of judging and included my characters as I intended. Black, brown, and white. At the RWA National Conference, I sat in an appointment with an editor from a Big 5 publisher. She was a final round judge for the Golden Heart Contest. “I read your manuscript,” she said. “I hated it.” This is a direct quote.

Individual contest judges who are biased would seem to be an ongoing problem. This year, for example, Alana Albertson reported that her inter-racial romance received a very low score for the ending:

Received my RITA scores. 1 "judge" gave my interracial romance, Invaluable, 2.9 out of 10, and checked no to the question
Is the resolution of the romance emotionally satisfying and optimistic? The book ends with him proposing to her. Hmm #Rita #ritassowhite pic.twitter.com/hRpzWwSzMX

— Alana Albertson (@AlanaAlbertson) 2 August 2018

The RWA Board had already made changes to the rules governing the judging of the RITAs but these will only come into force next year:

OK, this is the new RITA judging rules for next year. It contains a warning that judges can be asked to explain their scoring, and possible consequences of up to lifetime disqualification from the RITAs (and, one hopes, from judging as a PAN member also). pic.twitter.com/He36DNbqiU

— KJ Charles (@kj_charles) 2 August 2018

RWA responded swiftly to concerns about this year's judging process with the following post:

RITA scores went out to entrants last night and we have heard the concerns of those who believe their entries were subject to biased judging.  ​This year, one of the major focuses of the RWA Board has been to evaluate procedures for the RITA Contest in light of the existence of bias among some judges. This bias results in an unfair scoring of books representative of marginalized populations, and harms the integrity of the award. ​At the July board meeting, the Board passed a new policy that we hope will allow patterns of biased judging to be identified and for actions to be taken against those judges if deemed necessary. [...]

While these policies only apply to the 2019 contest and beyond, we can begin documenting judging patterns this year. If an entrant feels their submission was judged unfairly due to invidious discrimination against content, characters or authors​, we ask that the entrant reply directly to the scoring email with this information. Deputy Executive Director Carol Ritter will review the complaint and will make a record of possible biased judging. These files will be carried over each year and if a pattern is identified, action can be taken as set out in policy.

It is the Board's goal to create a RITA Contest that allows for fair and equitable judging of all entries, and we hope the changes made put us on a path to that reality.

Free Romance Conference, Open to the Public: Williamstown USA, 22 April 2017

Laura Vivanco

Reading for Pleasure: Romance Fiction in the International Marketplace 

Saturday, April 22 at 8:00am to 4:15pm

Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall, Bernhard Music Center 54 Chapin Hall Dr, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA

Free and open to the public.


8:00 - 10:00 am:  Panel 1:  Theories of Pleasure (Brooks Rogers Auditorium on the Williams campus)
Chair:  Leyla Rouhi, Williams College

• Laura Frost, Stanford University:  “Stories of O:  The Language of Orgasm in Women’s Romance”
  
• Julie Cassiday, Williams College:  “A World Without Safe-Words:  Fifty Shades of Russian Grey”
  
• Eric Selinger, DePaul University:  “Xenophile’s Paradox:  Reading for Pleasure Across the Great Divides”
  

10:15 am - 12:15 pm:  Panel 2:  New Subjects and Audiences (Brooks Rogers Auditorium)
Chair:  Alison Case, Williams College

• Sonali Dev, author:  “Genre Structure and Learning to Dance Within its Boundaries”
  
• Hsu-Ming Teo, Macquarie University:  “Tigresses, Tang Dynasty, and the Ten Commandments:  The East Asian Romance Novels of Jade Lee, Jeannie Lin, and Camy Tang”
  
• Jayashree Kamblé, LaGuardia Community College:  “When Wuxia Met Romance:  The Pleasures and Politics of Multiculturalism in Sherry Thomas’s My Beautiful Enemy”
  
• Len Barot (Radclyffe), author and publisher:  “Lesbian Romances and the International Market in the Digital Age”
  

2:15 - 4:15 pm:  Panel 3:  New Media Platforms and the Global Marketplace (Brooks Rogers Auditorium)
Chair:  Greg Mitchell, Williams College

• Mary Bly (Eloisa James), Fordham University, author:  “Romancing the World:  How and Where American Romance Sells”
  
•  Katy Regnery, author:  “From Stay-at-Home Mom to NYT Bestseller in 30 Months:  A First-Hand Perspective on the Digital Revolution in the Romance Publishing Industry”
  
• Sarah Wendell, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books:  “The World is So Big; the World is So Small:  The Global Community of Romance”
  
• Patience Bloom, Harlequin:  “Harlequin’s International Program:  A World of Romance Readers”
  

More details here.

Something Old, Something New (Romance Teaching 1/2)

--Eric Selinger

The "something old" is, well, me, evidently:  I'm currently marking my 20th anniversary as a professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, my 10th anniversary as a teacher of courses on popular romance fiction, and my 5th anniversary as Executive Editor of the peer-reviewed, open-access Journal of Popular Romance Studies.  (As Laura posted a few days ago, issue 5.1 of JPRS has just been published; you can read the table of contents in her post and catch up on back issues here.)

The "something new" would be the syllabus for my now-completed summer course on popular romance fiction, which was almost entirely composed of books I was teaching for the first time.  My regular-term syllabus had grown a little stale, and I wanted to shake things up a bit; in fact, I'm teaching yet another round of new novels in the fall term, starting next week.  What I want to do today is briefly recap my thoughts about each of the books I just taught, so that others who have the chance to teach courses on popular romance--either a full term on the genre or just a unit, with one or two books--can see at least a bit of what I did and how it went.

My romance courses are offered through the DePaul English department, and take what I'd call a "literary studies" approach to the novels: a lot of close reading, some literary history, some exposure to the critical debates that surround the genre. For the past few years I've built my courses around a spine of topics provided by Laura Vivanco's For Love and Money: the Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills and Boon Romance.  We read one of her chapters (the Introduction, Modes, Mythoi, Metafiction, Metaphors, the Conclusion), and then a novel that reads well in light of the terms and topics discussed in the chapter.  In the remaining weeks of the quarter I generally assign a bit more secondary reading--some essays from JPRS; some chapters from Thomas J. Roberts's An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction--but the heart of the class is the Vivanco text, which teaches (in my experience) extraordinarily well, both to general-education undergraduates and to more sophisticated and demanding English majors, MA students, and so on.

This summer I tried a different secondary text, which we read all at once at the start of term, and then a bunch of novels that I'd only read once, so that I didn't really know in advance how I'd frame them.  Here's how it all played out:

1) Maya Rodale, Dangerous Books for Girls: the Bad Reputation of Romance Novels, Explained. Unlike Vivanco's monograph, which is a work of literary scholarship, Rodale's book is a sort of apologia for romance fiction: a defense of the genre which draws on literary and cultural history, on some surveys she conducted, and on her own experiences as a romance reader and author.  It's written in short, lively chapters, and although they laughed at some memorable copyediting goofs--the sisters in Sense and Sensibility face a life of "gentile poverty"--students found the book quite readable.

• What Went Well: students who had no idea there was any opprobrium attached to the genre got a useful introduction to that disdain and its deep history, which has roots in enduring fears about female authorship and reading; students acquired a useful set of terms and talking points to use when discussing cover art, dominant heroes, and certain types of sex scenes; students found it interesting to test Rodale's claims about the "dangerous" aspects of the genre in general--a genre she frames as written by women, about women, and for women--against the particulars of the novels we read, including our one m/m romance (a subgenre she does not discuss at any length).  
• What Went Less Well: like Beyond Heaving Bosoms, the apologia by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan from some years ago, Dangerous Books for Girls worked best for students who knew something about the genre already, and who wanted their own fondness for it to be validated. Skeptical students--those with political concerns about the genre and those with aesthetic concerns--mostly remained skeptical as they read the book and in the discussions that followed; students who follow current blog and social media debates about diversity in the genre (sexual and racial / ethnic) thought that the book glossed over problematic issues; students were honestly puzzled, when we got to our m/m novel, as to why that subgenre had been discussed so little in our set-up material.  Starting with Rodale seemed to push the class toward discussions of why women read these books rather than the more literary approaches I prefer; in terms of those why women read discussions, I was personally disappointed with the negative way that Rodale talks about Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, since many of the ideas in Dangerous Books for Girls--ideas from Rodale and from the readers / bloggers / authors she quotes--ultimately have their roots in Radway's analysis.  
• What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  Because I'm mostly interested in literary approaches to the genre, I find the Vivanco a more amenable frame text for my class.  If I were to teach Rodale again, I'd probably want to teach it as a primary text in its own right, late in a quarter, as part of the romance apologia genre.  I might put it alongside Beyond Heaving Bosoms and Love Between the Covers, the documentary film from the Popular Romance Project, or beside Catherine Roach's forthcoming Happily Ever After: the Romance Study in Popular Culture, which is more critical but related in its "what's the appeal" approach.  In any case, I'd want students to have a few novels under their belts first, so that they'd be reading Rodale's book in light of the fiction, rather than reading the fiction in light of the Rodale.  

2) Laura Florand, The Chocolate Thief.  Laura Florand is one of the professor / authors who taught a course on popular romance fiction at Duke University last spring; The Chocolate Thief is the first of her novels set in and around the world of high-end chocolatiers in Paris.

• What Went Well:  The novel hinges on a romance between Sylvain, the French hero who makes artisanal luxury chocolates, and Cade, the American billionaire heroine who stands to inherit Corey Chocolates, low-end mass market confections sold at Walmart and drugstores (think Hershey bars). The Parisian setting and the chocolate focus were perfect ways to introduce and talk about issues of conventionality in romance culture (including romance fiction); the contrast between his chocolates and hers proved a lovely way to talk about the distinctions between literary and mass-market fiction, and the ways in which this particular romance novel negotiated between their respective appeals.
• What Went Less Well:  Not much!  This book taught extremely well.  Some students found the hero and / or the heroine a bit too genre-conventional for their tastes, but that can happen with any romance novel; some were troubled by the contrast between the heroine's topflight professional capacity and her enjoyment of being sexually dominated (in a pretty mild way) by the hero, but this actually fit very nicely with Rodale's chapters on Fifty Shades of Grey and with our class discussion of the romance marketplace, in which tropes that prove popular in one book have a way of showing up in others, deliberately or not. 
• What I'd Do Differently Next Time:  As I taught this novel, I thought of all sorts of connections between what it does with consumer culture and romance and what Eva Illouz talks about in Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.  I tossed a sheaf of quotes from Illouz at my students, but didn't require them or assign long passages from that book.  Next time I'd want to do more with this.  The novel also would "play well" (as they say) with Vivanco's chapters on Modes (there's a lot of modal counterpoint to talk about) and possibly Metafiction (via the chocolate as romance connection).

3) Sonali Dev, A Bollywood Affair.  This was the second time I've taught A Bollywood Affair, Dev's debut novel. I've been thinking a lot about my need to teach a more diverse array of romance novels, thanks in part to the #weneeddiverseromance hashtag campaign, and Dev's book brought some very interesting new material to my syllabus--a setting split between the US and India; a pervasive intertext of Indian popular film; Hindu characters rather than Christian ones, etc. I found it a charming book, and one which would give me the chance to talk about two sets of genre tropes: some from popular romance, and some from Bollywood film. Since I started watching those movies because of an Indian American student in one of my romance classes--"If you like these novels, you'l love these movies," she said--this seemed like a great way to close that circle.

• What Went Well:  Great discussion of the trade-paperback marketing of the novel, which contrasted nicely to what Rodale says about romance covers; great discussion of how the heroine, Mili, turns oppressive givens of her life to her advantage, working within those constraints (which we thought about in terms of genre constraints as well); great discussion of how an early reference to the Hindu Trimurti (Creator, Keeper--or "Preserver," as I learned it in the '70s--and Destroyer) informs our sense of the novel's hero; great close reading of the novel's epilogue as a recapitulation of the opening, which let us talk about repetition and variation as a structural principle in romance.  The novel's thematic emphasis on "freedom" made for a fine discussion of ideas from Pam Regis (whose Natural History) makes claims about "pragmatic freedom" and the romance novel in general.
• What Went Less Well:  I had students read Jayashree Kamble's early piece on romance readers in India--the one published in the Sally Goade anthology Empowerment Vs. Oppression and included as the final chapter of her dissertation, years ago.  Primed by this piece, which talks about arranged marriages, students sometimes failed to see that Dev's novel does not talk about arranged marriages, but about child marriage, which is a very different thing.  Some students did not like how the novel plays up the physical size of its hero and the diminutive body of the heroine, but this is a familiar trope in popular romance fiction (cf. Lord of Scoundrels) and made for a useful discussion.
• What I'd Do Diffferently Next Time:  As it happens, I'm teaching this novel again in the fall term, where I'm going to put it alongside Suleikha Snyder's Bollywood and the Beast and Alexis Hall's Glitterland to think more about romance fiction and romantic film.  At some point in the future I'd like to show students--or have students watch--one or two whole Bollywood films to give them that context, rather than just showing them trailers and excerpts. Someday!

I see that this post is getting awfully long, so I'm going to split my account of the class into a pair of posts.  See you soon in post #2!