PCA 2013 (and a bit more about IASPR 2012)

Laura Vivanco

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association

2013 National Conference

Washington D.C., March 27 – March 30

Call For Papers: Romance Area
Area Co-Chairs: Eric Selinger and An Goris


Deadline for submission: November 30, 2012.

Love and romance are mainstays of popular culture, cutting across the great divides of medium, language, and historical period. From Beyoncé to Bollywood, Dan Savage to Sweet Savage Love, K-Pop to qawwali: if it’s about love, it’s a welcome topic at the PCA Romance area.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in 90-minute slots, typically with four 15-minute papers or speakers per standard session, with the remaining time available for discussion.

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 popular romance culture, please contact us!

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

• Love, Globally:  local traditions, transnational media, adaptation and translation issues
• Fifty Shades of WTF:  the reception of popular romance
• Romance Across the Media
• Romance High and Low (i.e., texts that remix or blur distinctions between “high” and “low” culture)
• Modern Love, Postmodern Love, and Romantic Nostalgia
• Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
• Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Kink romance
• Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
• Romance communities, IRL and on-line
• The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
• African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
• Young Adult Romance
• History of/in Popular Romance
• Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)

More details here.

The BDSM/Kink/Fetish area is chaired by Sarah Frantz and they're

interested in any and all topics about or related to the study of BDSM, sexual kink, or sexual fetishes in all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of BDSM, Kink, and fetishes 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. We also welcome any academic discussion of the real-life practice of BDSM, sexual kink, or sexual fetishes, as well as the lived experiences of people identifying as kinky.

The full details about that call for papers can be found here.

As mentioned earlier, Dr Nick Redfern posted his paper, on romance at the box office, at his blog. Now Remittance Girl has posted a summary of the conference. Jane Lovering, who "recently won the Romantic Novel of the Year 2012, awarded by the Romantic Novelist’s Association, for her book Please Don’t Stop the Music [... which] has also been shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance" (IASPR) spoke at a special session and she's got a brief comment about it at her blog.

IASPR's York Schedule

The conference schedule for the IASPR conference is now available. The conference runs from Thursday 27th September to Saturday the 29th and is being held in York. I'll post more details when the abstracts appear.

Deadline Extended for 2012 IASPR Conference!

The Fourth Annual International Conference on Popular Romance Studies

The Pleasures of Romance

York, United Kingdom

27-29 September, 2012

Deadline Extended to May 30, 2012

Competitive Travel Grants Available

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.

Roland Barthes

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

Oscar Wilde

In novels, films, TV, fan fiction, pop music, and other media, romance has been both consumed and derided because of the pleasures it imparts. Even those who deride or debunk romance may find, in that refusal, a pleasure of social distinction. Open to talks on any topic related to popular romance texts (in any medium) and to the representation of romantic love in global popular media, now and in the past, this multi-disciplinary conference will also highlight the vexed issue of “pleasure” in popular romance texts, popular romance fandom, and popular romance studies.

All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome, from affect studies and cognitive science to literary history, middlebrow studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and sociology. Proposals may focus on single authors, texts, songs, films, TV series, and marketing campaigns, or on broader, more theoretical approaches, including discussions of pedagogy. We are eager to receive proposals on older forms of popular romance (classical, medieval, early modern, etc.) and on love in Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American popular culture.

Submit proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations to conferences@iaspr.org by May 30, 2012. All proposals will be peer reviewed.

Travel grants will be available for presenters, on a competitive basis.

CFP: IASPR 2012

The Fourth Annual International Conference on Popular Romance Studies:
The Pleasures of Romance
York, United Kingdom
27-29 September, 2012

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
Roland Barthes

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Oscar Wilde

This conference asks one large question: What is the place of pleasure in popular romance? Popular romance—whether romance novels, romantic films, soap operas, fan fiction, advertisements, etc.—has long been both consumed and derided because of the pleasures they impart: pleasures of sentiment, pathos, comfort, arousal, satisfaction, identification. This conference will consider “pleasure” in popular romance texts and popular romance studies:

• Pleasure and/vs. Shame
• Sexual pleasure
• The pleasures of consumption
• The pleasure of scorn of romantic texts
• Pleasures of/in romantic texts
• Love as pleasure
• The pleasure of the sentimental
• The pleasure of melodrama
• The pleasure of romance: giving and receiving
• Love as pain/pain as love: the pleasures of BDSM
• The pleasure of the bittersweet and tragic love stories
• The rhetoric of pleasure
• Representations of the body in pleasure
• Pleasures of identification
• Pleasure and power
• Pleasure and relaxation (luxe, calme, et volupté)
• The devaluation of pleasure
• Paranormal pleasures / Pleasure and/in/of the paranormal
• Pleasure of the consumer / Pleasure in consuming
• The pleasure of the gaze

The conference asks the following questions:

1. What is pleasure? To speak about pleasure is to work with a large concept and thus we must work toward defining pleasure and also how it relates specifically to popular romance. What theoretical avenues can we use to understand pleasure?
2. How is pleasure represented in popular romance? How and why do characters experience pleasure? How is the characters’ pleasure connected with romantic love? How is the experience of pleasure in the text connected with the pleasure of consuming and/or viewing the text?
3. What are the pleasures of the “text,” whether visual, cinematic, literary? If romance novels, romantic films, soap operas, etc., are “pleasurable,” where then does pleasure reside within the “text”? One might consider how the text itself describes the pleasure of the romantic experience and how textual characters experience pleasure in relation to romance.
4. What are the pleasures of consuming a romantic text? How adequate are existing theoretical models, and what new research is available—from any field—that we might bring to bear on this question?
5. How do we theorize the pleasure of viewing and being viewed? There is much to be said about scopophilia, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and hiding in popular romance, but how do we as consumers of popular romance understand and consider these experiences? What are the ethical and moral problems involved in consuming the pleasure of others through the texts of popular romance? How do we account for the differences between being seen and seeing?
6. Who are the producers of the pleasurable romantic text? What creative industries produce romantic texts: film studios, television networks, advertising agencies, authors, publishers? How do they consider the pleasure of the consumer in their production of the text?

These are just some of the possible themes and questions that might be attended to by presenters. We welcome papers that consider popular romance in its many varied forms: the literary, the cinematic, and the visual. Additionally, papers that consider the “popular” in all time periods are especially welcome.

Please submit your proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations for peer-review consideration to conferences@iaspr.org by May 1, 2012.

Depending on funding, travel grants may be available for presenters.