New Book: Jodi McAlister's "The Consummate Virgin"

Jodi McAlister's PhD thesis has now been published as a book by Palgrave. The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures 

explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a “good” female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of “the right one” and “the right time”.

It has chapters on historical romance and category romance which will be of particular interest to scholars of popular romance fiction.

New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: African Love Stories, Masculinity, Pirates, Pregnancy, Virginity and Some Romance History

Here's what's new to the Romance Wiki Bibliography:

Clasen, Tricia. 2017. 

“Masculinity and Romantic Myth in Contemporary YA Romance.” In Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel. New York: Routledge, pp. 228–241.

Gehrmann, Susanne, 2018. 

“Remediating Romance: Forms and Functions of New Media in Contemporary Love Stories from Togo and South Africa”. Africa Today 65.1: 65-84.

Harris, Racheal, 2018. 

“Really Romantic? Pirates in Romantic Fiction.” Pirates in History and Popular Culture, edited by Antonio Sanna (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Publishing), pp. 109–119. Excerpt

McAlister, Jodi Ann, 2015. 

"Romancing the Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Popular Literature in the West". PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2015. [Abstract and link to pdf]

 

Rosanowski, Annika, 2019. 

"Can She Have It All? Pregnancy Narratives in Contemporary Category Romance", Journal of Popular Romance Studies 8 (2019).

Waller, Philip, 2006. 

Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [See chapters "In Cupid's Chains: Charles Garvice" (681-701) and "Hymns and Heroines: Florence Barclay" (702-728).]

New to the Wiki: Virginity, the Hymen, Desire, Bodies, Blackness and Disability

Laura Vivanco

Burge, Amy, 2016. 

"‘I Will Cut Myself and Smear Blood on the Sheet’: Testing

Virginity in Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance." Virgin Envy: The Cultural Insignificance of the Hymen. Ed. Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr. London: Zed. 17-44.

Amy Burge's " 'I Will Cut Myself and Smear Blood on the Sheet': Testing Virginity in Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance," focuses on representations of the virginity test. Burge explores six sheikh popular romance novels, all featuring virgin heroines. She positions these texts alongside two popular English medieval romances, Bevis of Hampton (c. 1300) and Floris and Blancheflur (c. 1250). She analyzes the persistent reference in all of these texts to the virginity test used to prove women's virginity. Pointing out that these tests are easily manipulated, thereby highlighting their unreliability, Burge reminds us that the sole purpose of testing female virginity is to secure male ownership of women in a heteronormatively gendered society. (6)

Hirdman, Anja, 2016. 

"Speaking through the flesh: Affective encounters, gazes and desire in Harlequin romances," MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research 32.61: 42-57. [PDF available for free]

Drawing from the cross-disciplinary field of affect theory, the article examines the writing of desire in Harlequin romances through the delineation of gendered encounters. Against the backdrop of earlier feminist critiques of romance fiction, it argues that Harlequin’s intense focus on corporeal sensations and gazes encompasses a looking relationship that differs significantly from the visual mediation of gender and desire. With its use of an extended literary transvestism, a double narrator perspective, and the appropriation of a female gaze, Harlequin offers readers an affective imaginary space in which the significance of the gendered body is re-made, re-versed, and the male body is stripped of its unique position.

McAlister, Jodi, 2016. 

"Between Pleasure and Pain: The Textual Politics of the Hymen." Virgin Envy: The Cultural Insignificance of the Hymen. Ed. Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr. London: Zed. 45-64.

In [...] "Between Pleasure and Pain: The Textual Politics of the Hymen," Jodi McAlister explores the history of the representation of the hymen in Western literature romances. Her analysis ranges from the thirteenth century, with Le roman de la rose; to the seventeenth century, with the ballad A Remedy for Green Sickness (1682) and A Dialogue between a Married Woman and a Maid (1655); through to experts from "Sub-Umbra, or Sport among the She-Noodles" and "Lady Pokingham, or They All Do It" from Pearl (a magazine published in 1879-80); and up to examples taken from the twentieth century and twenty-first century, using Beyond Heaving Bosoms and recent autobiographical stories of virginity loss. By examining blood, pain, and (im)perforability - common motifs associated with the hymen - in all of these texts across such a vast array of periods, McAlister reveals the discourse over the female body across time. In doing so, she discovers that the perception of virginity loss (the rupture of the hymen) brings about a profound transformative change in women; it is the journey toward adulthood, sexual maturity, and pleasure. More so, from the earliest to the latest of these romances, McAlister argues that the role of women has greatly improved: the transformative change moves from being that imposed externally by the man to that becoming internal to the woman. Finally, and tellingly, McAlister's analysis, by moving from early literary texts to current autobiographical stories (a point of friction in her chapter between literary texts and real lives), shows that in the latter texts the hymen is less concrete: the broken hymen does not and cannot fulfill the expectation of the transformative changes long promised by our cultural imaginary. (6-7)

Schalk, Sami, 2016. 

"Happily Ever After for Whom? Blackness and Disability in Romance Narratives." Journal of Popular Culture 49.6: 1241–1260. Excerpt

In the United States, people with disabilities are often represented as nonsexual, having either no desire or capacity for sexual interactions. This stereotype is supported by the lack of mainstream representation and by the historical denial and punishment of the sexualities of people with disabilities through eugenics, forced sterilization, institutionalization, exclusion from sex education, and more [...]. In contrast, the sexuality of black people has been abundantly represented as a problem that needs to be controlled. Black feminists argue that sexuality and gender are always already racialized, and sexual-racial stereotypes, like the Jezebel, dominate contemporary cultural representations of black women. While the sexualities of black people have been more often represented than the sexualities of disabled people, these representations have typically been oppressive nonetheless.

Positive, perhaps even liberatory, scripts of black and disabled people's sexualities are largely nonexistent, especially in mainstream culture. As a result, writers of popular fiction have sought to depict black and disabled people's experiences in the popular romance genre. (1241)

New to the Wiki: Mary Renault, Louise Mack, Virginity and Sexuality

Laura Vivanco

Egan, Jesi, 2016. 

'Cultural Futurity and the Politics of Recovery: Mary Renault's Ambivalent Romances.' MFS Modern Fiction Studies 62.3: 462-80. Abstract

 

Fekete, Maleah, 2016. 

"Social Differences in Taste: Investigating Romance Reading." 2016 SURF Conference Proceedings [This is a conference paper but outlines the direction of a larger project in which the student is attempting to assess whether Radway's findings about readers looking to romance for nurturance were ever correct by speaking to modern readers (many of whom are reading books with similar elements to those preferred by Radway's readers). The student concludes that Radway was wrong and "the real reason women read is to feel sexually self-actualized - that is, reach their highest potential as sexually active women". However, given that this explanation does not explain the existence of a market for "sweet" romances, I feel it must be a generalisation which should not be assumed to apply to all romance readers.]

Gelder, Ken and Rachael Weaver, 2010. 

"Louise Mack and Colonial Pseudo Literature." Southerly 70.2: 82-95.

 

Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 2004. 

“Virginity Always Comes Twice: Virginity and Profession, Virginity and Romance.” Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars. Eds. Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys. Turnhout: Brepols. 335-69.

Past & Present: Greek Romance

Laura Vivanco

Since it's the last day of the IASPR conference, being held in Thessaloniki, here's a Greek-themed link to a recent article by Kirsten Day on the relevance of one of the oldest surviving romance novels, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe. The article argues that,

Despite a chronological gulf of nearly two thousand years, the second century C.E. Greek romance writer Longus and the early twentieth century Irish novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole were prompted to produce their best works by a similar motive: an urge to explore the world, and particularly the phenomenon of love and desire, from a standpoint of complete innocence. Although the resulting novels, Daphnis & Chloe and The Blue Lagoon respectively, have no evident direct connection, they exhibit surprising similarities not only in plot, setting, and characterization, but also in the values, perspectives, and worldviews they advance. The striking intersections between these two chronologically and geographically diverse works offer us a lens for examining persistent notions of “natural” versus learned masculinity and femininity, for exploring the dynamics behind patriarchal power structures, and for scrutinizing how these issues relate to ideas about the value and merits of civilization. [...] this comparison helps to drive home the persistence of ideologies and power structures that initially seem remote.

 -----
Day, Kirsten. "Experiments in Love: Longus' Daphnis & Chloe and Henry de Vere Stacpoole's The Blue Lagoon." Dialogue 1.1 (2014).

CFPs: Wisdom and Virgins

Laura Vivanco

A Wise Virgin

Love of Wisdom Vs. Wisdom of Love

3rd Comparative Literature Graduate Conference SUNY-BUFFALO, 2013

Insofar as philosophia concerns the “love of wisdom,” the possibilities and limits of wisdom and love call into question the possibility of philosophy. As love and wisdom are consciously and unconsciously unified in the philosophers’ pursuits of wisdom, could the wisdom of love have been supplemented, mixed or misled by the love of wisdom? Does it make philosophy as the result of philosophia problematic?

Fundamentally, this questions how philosophical wisdom negotiates the principles of rationality, sexuality, personality, relationality, pleasure, life stage, and the personal life process as a whole or temporality. Especially, feminist concerns, for example, women as agents instead of sexually desired love objects, have remodeled the above principles and problematized the philosophical relationship with truth built upon individuals and even philosophy’s claim to truth as a genre. Thus, this conference will reexamine how different loves, for example, agápe, éros, philía, and storgē are combined, supplemented, and, in some cases, oppressed, ignored, unarticulated, and even rejected. Furthermore, we’d like to ask how the relationship between love and wisdom is interpreted, (de)constructed, or played differently in western and non-western cultural traditions, for example, yin-yang as a sexualized characteristic of ancient Chinese wisdom.

Could wisdom become the object of love? Could we really pursue the understanding of love? Do wisdom and love share the same myth? Or, do they have to supplement each other? Then, how does truth go with them? By thinking about the relationship between the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love, our conference is hoping to explore a way to revive the relationship between philosophy and life in our contemporary context. 

More details here.
Submission deadline: 1 February 2013.

Virgin Envy: Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Virginity

Eds. Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos, and Adriana Spahr

Contemporary culture has seen a renewed interest in virgins, from Bella Swan and Edward Cullen to Anastasia Steele to Steve Carrell’s infamous 40-old-virgin to the rise of Purity Clubs. How do we understand these discussions and representations of virginity? Do these texts “re-invent” virginity? Or, do these texts merely repeat “standard” treatments of virginity?

This edited volume aims to work through the poetics and politics of virginity in narrative, poetry, cinema, and popular culture. This volume treats virginity as an area of theoretical, intellectual, and cultural concern in modern texts. The goal is to position virginity as an interdisciplinary matter that must be studied from the widest possible range of perspectives. The editors believe that any study of virginity demands and interdisciplinary and/or intercultural perspective precisely because it is inculcated by so many discourses: religious, cultural, psychological, sociological, anthropology, ethnographic, philosophical, etc. The volume will ideally include essays from the humanities and social sciences, but the editors would welcome papers from outside of the humanities and social sciences.

We welcome papers that recognize the complexity and diversity of virginity. We are especially interested in papers that move beyond normative definitions and understandings of virginity:

·      Purity Clubs, Abstinence, and the Silver Ring Thing

·      Celebrity Culture and Virginity

·      Queer Virginities (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, etc.)

·      Male virginities

·      Defining virginity lost (and found)

·      Hymenoplasty, re-virginization, vaginal rejuvenization, medical interventions

·      Cross-cultural analyses of virginity

·      Psychoanalytic, Psychological, Sociological, Philosophical Approaches and the study of Virginity

·      Virginity in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

·      Virginity and Identity, Identifying as Virgin, Epistemology of the Virgin’s Closet

·      The commodification of virginity, virginity auctions, virginity pornography

·      Virginity and confession, religious contexts, psychotherapeutic contexts

·      Virginity and Romance


Please send abstracts (500 words, including proposed bibliography) and a brief CV  (1-2 pages) by March 1, 2013 to csantos@brocku.ca, allanj@brandonu.ca, spahra@macewan.ca.

Completed article-length papers (5,000 words, MLA Style) will be due by August 1, 2013. All papers will undergo a peer-review process before final acceptance and publication. 


The image depicts the Fifth Wise Virgin, by Martin Schongauer (c. 1430-1491). I found it at the Web Gallery of Art where it is stated that "Images and documents downloaded from this database can only be used for educational and personal purposes." This is an educational, non-profit purpose.

PhD Students at Work

Laura Vivanco

I'm always keen to hear/read about forthcoming research on romance so I thought I'd mention some work that Jodi McAlister and Jack Elliott have been doing on some of the nuts and bolts of popular romance fiction.

Jodi, who's studying at McQuarie University, has been interviewed by Smart Bitch Sarah:

What I really want to do is work out how virginity functions as a narrative trope in romance, and how this is changed over time. You know those people that pull apart cars for fun to see how they work? I'm like that, but for stories. I guess I'm a narrative mechanic: I love pulling stories to bits to understand how/why/whether they work. I want to work out what function virginity serves as a literary device - how it drives plot, how it drives character, and why it pops up so often in romance in particular. To do this, I'm tracing the history of the virgin heroine in the romance plot - I take a bit of a tour through medieval romance, then through the rise of the novel and its shadowy twin the pornographic novel - before coming back to the modern romance. I'm really interested in what happened once virginity loss scenes started to be regularly represented on the page instead of behind closed doors, something that really kicks off once The Flame and the Flower ( A | BN | K | S | ARe | iB ) is published in the early 1970s. I'm looking at virginity loss scenes and comparing to them to autobiographical stories about virginity loss and seeing how they matched up, as well as trying to tie them back to a historical framework.

Jodi's also written a post for the Popular Romance Project about how Fifty Shades of Grey combines elements from the popular romance with some from "its shadowy twin, the pornographic novel":

it can be argued Anastasia and Christian’s happily-ever-after, if we think of this to mean “enduring long term commitment to each other,” occurs at the beginning of Fifty Shades Darker. And yet the series continues, with a growing emphasis on sex scenes. It would seem that the romance plot is co-opted into the pornographic structure—Christian and Anastasia’s relationship is used to engender the repetitive climaxes on which pornography relies. The romance plot is used to create what Steven Marcus calls pornotopia: a world in social institutions and textual events are used merely to create sex. 

Jack Elliott is studying at the University of Newcastle, Australia and he's also written for the Popular Romance Project. He's been taking a very close look at differences in the language used by European (mostly UK), Antipodean and North American romance authors and has come up with findings such as this: "North American writers prefer 'near' rather than 'close.'" and

look at the striking preoccupation with time in the North American novels! “Forever” and “anymore” are both words favored by North Americans—although the more workaday “afterwards” is not (that’s a European word).

Earlier this year he had a post up about changes in the titles of Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances.
---

• Elliott, Jack. "Around the World." The Popular Romance Project. 4 October 2012.
• -----. "Making Sense of Mills & Boon." Love2Read. 13 April 2012.
• McAlister, Jodi. "Fifty Shades of Genre." The Popular Romance Project. 8 November 2012.
• Wendell, Sarah. "Virgins in Romance: An Interview with Jodi McAlister." Smart Bitches Trashy Books. 12 November 2012.

The image, "Power House Mechanic," came from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain because it was created in 1920/1921 by Lewis Hine.

Out Now: JPRS 2.2

Laura Vivanco

There's a lot in this issue of JPRS so I decided to split my post about it into two parts. Here are the items which are not in the "Special Forum."

Editor's Note

Five years ago, at a hotel bar in Boston, Sarah S. G. Frantz and I sat down with a half-dozen scholars from the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere to plan a new era in popular romance studies. [...] Whatever our scholarly organization and annual conferences looked like, we decided that night at the bar, it should have room for the creators and editors and non-academic scholars of popular romance, in whatever medium, to join the conversation [...]. As Walt Whitman says, then, this issue is dedicated to “You, Whoever You Are.”

A Parody of Love: the Narrative Uses of Rape in Popular Romance - Angela Toscano

Rape in popular romance represents both the violence of love and the violence of understanding that attend the quest to know the Other. In many rape scenes, however, this quest is obstructed by the mistaken assumption that the Other is already known. This occurs because on some level the hero has already appropriated the heroine as an extension of his own desires, rather than having acknowledged her as a separate person. The rape is committed precisely because the hero wrongly believes that his knowledge of the heroine is sufficient and total. His certainty of the absolute authority of his knowledge—of his perception—allows the hero to behave as if the heroine had always already consented to the sex act. The rape reveals the inadequacy of this perception and exposes through its violence and its violation the false underlying assumption that one can know the Other by outward signs, by social role or public name, by the body and its presence, or (most elusive of all) by an access to the interior and singular self through discourse.

Francophone Perspectives on Romantic Fiction: From the Academic Field to Reader’s Experience - Séverine Olivier

This paper will examine why contempt for romantic fiction and for romance readers remains predominant in the French academic field, bringing to light the differences between the dominant construction of the genre and its readership in the French critical context and romance readers’ own perceptions of the books they like to read.

This article is in two parts. The first gives an overview of Francophone romance scholarship and the second is an interview with Agnès Caubet, "Webmaster of lesromantiques.com [...] the first and currently only Francophone website about the romance genre."

Review by Hsu-Ming Teo of Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010.

Review by Laura M. Carpenter of Kate Monro's The First Time: True Tales of Virginity Lost and Found (Including my Own). London: Icon Books, 2011.

Male Virgins: A Small Note

Jonathan Allan

I have written previously here and at The Educated Imagination about male virgins in romance. When I set out to write about male virgins, I was interested mostly in the nineteenth century, and truthfully, it was more of a theoretical exercise than anything else. Northrop Frye writes, "the prudery [about virginity in romance] is structural, not moral", and yet nearly every observation that appears about virginity in his writing on romance is about female virgins. So my question became: could the structure of romance hold if it were the male that was a virgin and not the female?

When I presented initial findings at the IASPR meeting in Belgium, my work focused on the Twilight Saga and perhaps the most famous of all 107-year-old virgins, Edward Cullen.

Now, however, I have new ideas and new concerns with male virgins in popular romance. For instance, though male virgins are not everywhere in romance, they are present enough. Many major writers of popular romance have included heroes who also happen to be virgins. The earliest male virgin in popular romance seems to be found in the 1970s and a few others appear in the 1980s. In the 1990s we see a rising interest in male virgins, and in 2000s the male virgin can be called a niche commodity.

In the 1990s, for instance, the male virgin is presented as more of a surprise for the reader. The author, in these instances, was playing with a trope, the hero, and seeing what would happen if the heroine were confronted by the fact the hero is a virgin. Of course, the virginal hero was also a surprise for the reader.

In Secret Admirer (1992) by Susan Napier, we read (toward the completion of the novel):

“Why, that it was my first time, of course.” And, as she continued to stare at him uncomprehendingly over the top of the cup, his smile gentled into a tender warmth.

“You were my initiation, Grace. I gave you my virginity; you gave me my manhood.”

It is only after the first time that Grace and by extension the reader learns that this was Scott's first time.

Later in Eloisa James’ When the Duke Returns (2009), the opening words of the novel are:

“He’s a virgin.”

“What!”

“He’s a virgin—”

“Your husband is a virgin?”

“And he won’t bed me.”

In James’ novel, the hero’s virginity is almost unbelievable. The opening of the narrative is a shocking one for both the reader and the heroine.

Today, nearly twenty years after Scott’s surprise virginity in Secret Admirer, virginity is not nearly the narrative surprise it used to be. In Cheryl Brook’s Virgin (2011), the hero’s virginity is announced in the first chapter (as are his thoughts on what the first time will be like). In Courtney Milan’s Unclaimed (2011), we read: “Sir Mark Turner did not look like any virgin that Jessica had ever seen before.” Indeed, even the marketing (which I noticed at Dear Author) for the novel reads: “In which a male virgin meets a courtesan.” And on her webpage, Courtney Milan explains: “All of my books get code names as I write them. The code-name I used for Unclaimed was Blasphemy. Because, you know, there’s a certain sense of blasphemy in seducing an upright moralist who also happens to be a virgin.”

I am now beginning to think historically – mostly thanks to Sarah Frantz and her very exciting work on the Alpha Male – about the male virgin in popular romance. I have ideas as to why the male virgin has appeared, but his place in the history of popular romance seems important given the fact there hasn’t been a year since the 90s in popular romance in which a male virgin has not appeared (and often enough we see as many as ten male virgins in a given year).

The question that continues to fascinate me is about the interest in male virgins. My interest was purely theoretical, at least initially, but what is the reader’s interest?

The First Time: An all too brief review

Jonathan A. Allan

I have spent a great deal of timing thinking about “the first time” and what precisely this means for the person about to have their “first time” or reflecting on their “first time.” To these ends, I want to briefly mention – and unabashedly recommend – Kate Monro’s The First Time: True Tales of Virginity Lost & Found (Including My Own) which was published by Icon Books in May 2011. Some people may already know about Monro’s work from her blog The Virginity Project, in which she presents the stories of virginity losses of many ordinary people who share their stories. Let me begin with the glowing recitals: as a scholar of virginity, Monro’s book is clearly one of the best volumes written to date on virginity and how precisely we define virginity (and, of course, its loss). Monro unlike earlier scholars also pays a great deal of attention to male virginity – a concept that seems to have eluded many critics and historians. Monro’s book, by my estimation, is worthy of sitting alongside Anke Bernau’s important Virgins: A Cultural History (2007), Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History (2007), and Laura M. Carpenter’s Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (2005). What Monro’s book does so extraordinarily well is that it polemicises our definitions of virginity and what precisely makes one person a virgin or not. Readers are presented with a narrative written by Monro and interspersed throughout this narrative are the tales of virginity losses of many people that she interviewed (and, of course, her own virginity loss story). The book is incredibly rich in its insights and observations on human sexuality and the recognition of how we become sexual.

Shortly, I will post on how this book will and can influence the ways in which we think about virginity in romance (and how it will affect my current work), but for now, I wanted to briefly acknowledge Monro's masterful, lovely, and absolutely thrilling book.