New Publications, an Exhibition on Romance, and Coverage in the Media

• Indiana University's Lilly Library has an exhibition (from August 19th 2024 – February 15th 2025) celebrating romance:

In 2021, the Lilly Library became the first major American special collections library to take romance seriously—and we owe the foundation of this visionary collection to author, scholar, and antiquarian bookseller Rebecca Romney, cofounder of the bookselling firm Type Punch Matrix. A romance reader herself as well as an expert on the history of the book, Romney set out to assemble a collection of 100 important works in the history of romance fiction from 1769 to 1999. Because some of the hundred entries in the catalog contain multiple titles (such as the first 1,500 Harlequin Presents romances), these substantial and carefully researched selections became the core of the Lilly’s new romance collection. One of the things we love most about Romney’s selections is her focus on diversity—the history of the romance novel has never been only about straight white men and women.

As we continue to add historical and 21st century titles to the collection, our focus remains on the importance of the romance genre in the history of the book, the ways in which it empowered readers and writers, and also on the potential the genre holds for those who are not taken seriously by people in power to tell their stories of finding a “happily ever after” ending.

• Women's Weekly has an article marking Harlequin Mills & Boon's Australia office's 50th birthday. The article on M&B's history heavily features IASPR's Dr Jodi McAlister. 

• Slate reports on a trend in anti-billionaire romance novels.

New books are questioning the ethics of billionaires, having the heir to a family fortune come out against his father’s unethical business practices, and (in the historical context) having the wealthy risk their place in society by supporting progressive causes like the abolition of slavery. At least one author is trying to put together an antibillionaire romance anthology.

• Time has an article on the evolution of romance covers. This complements their list of the best 50 romances to read, curated by author Casey McQuiston, who also wrote an article for them explaining why "Romance Novels are Literature."
  

Even at its cheekiest or darkest or most satirical, it’s a genre made of sincerity. Opening ourselves earnestly to an emotional experience feels dangerous, and danger makes us nervous, and when we’re nervous, we laugh.But if we don’t laugh, if we don’t turn away, if we stop pretending to be too cool or too intellectual or too ironic to acknowledge our own desire, romance has so much to show us about ourselves. Which is exactly what literature should do.

And here are the new publications I've come across:

 

Horst, Lauren (2024). "The Romance Novel." The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction since 1940, Ed. Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams. Oxford University Press. 468–483. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844729.003.0041

 

Horst, Lauren (2024). "Exemplum J. R. Ward, Dark Lover (2005)." The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction since 1940, Ed. Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams. Oxford University Press.  484–489. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844729.003.0042  

 

Kamrath, Kelly (2024). French Interwar Popular Romance and Ideals of Femininity: A Literary and Historical Study of Magali. Master of Arts, University of Nebraska. 

 

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "On the Racialization of the Moroccan ‘Other’ in Orientalist Romance." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.2:103–116.

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "The Discursive Formation of Ethnic Subjectivities and Identities in Popular Romance." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.3:106-119.

 

Stewart, Eowyn (2024). A Hero in Tears: How the Female Gaze Elicits Male Emotional Vulnerability in Romance Novels. Honors Thesis, Abilene Christian University.

New Publications: Migration, India, Gender, Consent, Libraries and Translation

Burge, Amy (2024). "Marriage migration, intimacy and genre in Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test (2019) and Brigitte Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. (2019)." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. [This is forthcoming, but a pre-print is available from the page I've linked to.]

Montebello, Sophie (2024). The Representation and Self-Representation of Anglo-Indians in Literature from 1885 to the Present Day. PhD thesis. The Open University.

Moussaoui, Abdelghani (2024). "Gender as a ‘Discursive Practice’ in Romance Discourse." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 6.2:654–665.

 

Speese, Erin K. Johns (2024). "Came for the Smut, Stayed by Consent: Desire and Consent in Sarah J. Maas’s Fictional Worlds." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Velasquez, Diane L. and Jennifer Campbell-Meier, Jennifer (2024). "Romance Genre and Collection Management in Australia and New Zealand Public Libraries." Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association. [Online first. Abstract here, with the article itself available only with a login.]

Vişan, Nadina (2024). "Untranslatability in Regency Romances: Explicitation or Implicitation?" British and American Studies 30:233-241. [Discusses translation from English into Romanian.]

A new book (on Ethel M. Dell) and other new publications

Riding The Tosh Horse: Ethel M. Dell, A Written Life by David Tanner, published by Brown Dog Books:

The largely forgotten romantic novelist Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939) published alongside Rudyard Kipling and other literary giants but was vilified by George Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse among many. Ethel was a recluse, and actively avoided marketing herself as a personality in any way, but her formula was successful. She reached a very large audience publishing 98 titles and earning, at the height of her career, about £4M annually in today’s values. Her plots included a popular and heady mix of heterosexual, implicit same-sex relationships, sexual deviances, gratuitous violence, death and exoticised notions of Empire and masculinity. The veneer of Ethel’s plots was used to communicate her philosophies, her views on life and on her family.

Although being publishing alongside literary giants she did not receive establishment acceptance because of her style and no doubt envy of her substantial earnings. With an escapist and non-literary appeal to a lower middle class reader universe Ethel used a very successful multi-media marketing strategy with magazine serialisation, hard copy books, film, theatre and radio to reach this audience in the UK, the United States, Europe and the British colonies.

A forerunner to Mills and Boon’s success Ethel was very influential in setting the scene for mass market romantic fiction. Barbara Cartland stated that Ethel was her greatest influence.

Befeler, Paige (2022), LGBTQ(NA), Queer New Adult Fiction: The Emergence of a New Genre and Its Impact on the LGBTQIA+ Community. Thesis for Honors in Comparative Literary Studies, Wellesley College.

 

Kluger, Johanna (2024). "'On Thursdays We Shoot': Guns and Gender Binaries in Regency Romance Novels". Ladies in Arms: Women, Guns, and Feminisms in Contemporary Popular Culture. Ed. Teresa Hiergeist and Stefanie Schäfer, transcript verlag. 163-179. [The whole volume is available for free at the link given.]

 

Kluger, Johanna (2024). "Post-Trump masculinity in popular romance novels." Neohelicon. Online First. Open access.

 

Parnell, Claire (2023). "Algospeak and algo-design in platformed book publishing: Revolutionary creative tactics in digital paratext to circumvent content moderation." Paper presented at AoIR2023: The 24th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Philadelphia, PA, USA: AoIR. 

 

Pérez-Fernández, Irene (2024). "Black British love matters: Asserting the transformative power of love in Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour: Mythical Tales Around the World Retold". Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Online First. Open access.

Ripoll Fonollar, Mariana (2023). Wording deeds: the figure of the suffragette in contemporary british fiction, Universitat de les Illes Balears. [This is a thesis which is not freely available. The abstract can be found here.]

New Publications and an Exhibition: Gender and Agression, Publishing and More

Lots of open access articles!

Golubov, Nattie (2023). "Female Warriors, Social Injustice and the Transformational Force of Anger in Jaye Wells' Sabina Kane Series." Esferas Literarias 6: 21-37.

Larson, Christine, and Ashley Carter (2023). "Love is love: Reverse isomorphism and the rise of LGBTQ+ romance publishing." New Media & Society.

Markasović, Valentina (2023). "Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Holly Black’s The Folk of the Air Trilogy." Breaking Stereotypes in American Popular Culture: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the Croatian Association for American Studies: 41-56. 

Miclea, Adelina (2023). "Colleen Hoover’s Formulas for Best-Sellers as Seen in Reminders of Him and It Ends with Us." Romanian Journal of English Studies 20.1:72-79.

Mulvey, Alexandra Hazel (2023). Gender and Sex Stereotypes in Sports Romance Fiction. Masters thesis, Macquarie University. [The link is to a pdf.]

Pierini, Francesca (2023). "Towards a Regime of Authenticity: Reading A Room with a View through the Lens of Contemporary Romance Scholarship." LEA - Lingue E Letterature D'Oriente E D'Occidente 12: 217-228.

And quite a bit less accessible, but no doubt still of interest to readers of this blog:

"Covering Romance", an exhibition and sale of romance novel cover art by John Ennis, will be taking place in Yardley, Pennsylvania, at the AOY Art Center Gallery from February 10th (Opening Reception), with viewing open to the public on 11, 16, 17, 18 February (12-5pm). More details about the party for the opening can be found here: https://www.aoyarts.org/event-5484048

 

New Publications: Masculinity, Race, Sexuality and More

There are a couple of anecdotes from 

Joshua Thorburn (2023). "Exiting the Manosphere. A Gendered Analysis of Radicalization, Diversion and Deradicalization Narratives from r/IncelExit and r/ExRedPill." Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

which I wanted to share. The whole article's open access, from https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2244192

Amusingly, one user on r/ExRedPill stated that his deradicalization journey was prompted by reading “soppy romance novels” targeted for women, while in concurrence, another replied that romantic poems and historical period dramas helped him question his red pill beliefs. Because this media focused on romance beyond sexual gratification alone, and the fact that it was either popular with women or targeted towards them, such materials again therefore challenged manosphere claims that women are exclusively driven by an innate desire for the physical attributes of so-called alpha-males. (17-18)

On the topic of men/masculinities, I missed Jonathan Allan's Men, Masculinities, and Infertilities when it first came out in 2022, but the good news is that it's also downloadable for free, from https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003010432 or https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/57071 and includes a chapter each on LaVyrle Spencer's The Fulfillment and The Trouble with Joe by Emilie Richards.

Giovanni, Chiara (2023). "Hetero Ever After? Romance Novels, Race, and the Limits of Social Dreaming." Post45. ["Chiara Giovanni shows that popular romance novels by and about women of color often indulge a positive orientation toward heterosexual desire. Giovanni calls this orientation "heteroidealism" and sees it as an adaptive strategy to forge solidarity between men and women along racial lines."]

Heying, Sarah M. (2023). "Sealed With a Kiss on Your Artery": An Archive of Southern Lesbian Desire. PhD thesis, University of Mississippi. [This isn't specifically about romance but it does have a chapter on Ann Allen Shockley. More details here.]

 

Kamblé, Jayashree (2023). "The origins of U.S. mass-market category romance novels: Black editors and writers in the early 1980s." The Journal of American Culture. [This hasn't yet been added to a volume, so the pagination available now isn't as it will eventually appear, but it's available (albeit behind a paywall) from here. I've collected some key quotes here.]

Leenstra, Lisa (2023). Covers of Lovers: A Multimodal Comparison of the Front Covers of Romance Novels in 2011 and 2021. Masters thesis, Universiteit Utrecht.  

Nichols, Sue (2023). "Love matters: the case for an inclusive, contemporary approach to romance themes and texts in subject English." The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. [This is about teaching YA romance/romantic fiction to future teachers of English.]

Stobaugh, Rebecca (2023). Halfway-Sexual: Exploring Demisexuality in American Literature. PhD, Louisiana State University. [This is embargoed until 2030 but apparently discusses Fifty Shades of Grey and Jack Byrne’s Ace. The abstract can be found here.]

New Publications: Beefcake, Bridgerton, Gender, Ecocriticism, Publishing, Adaptation

 

The full schedule of the 2023 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance is now online. The conference itself is taking place from 28-30 June.

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Here are the new publications, which I've added to the Romance Scholarship Database:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2023). "Softcore romance: on naked heroes and beefcakes in popular romance novels." **** Studies. [Some quotes and link here. I'm trying to avoid getting caught in a Blogger filter so I'm starring out words I think might trigger it.]

Davisson, Amber and Kyra Hunting (2023). " From private pleasure to erotic spectacle: Adapting Bridgerton to female audience desires."  Journal of Popular Television 11.1:7-25. [I've not been able to access this, but the abstract can be found here. It's part of a special issue about the television version of the Bridgerton novels.]

Hanson, Donna Maree (2022). Romance fiction as a bridge to understanding changing gender roles in society. PhD in Creative Writing, University of Canberra. 

[The dissertation is partly a discussion of two surveys carried out in 2016/2017, one with romance readers and the other with romance authors, with a view to understanding their attitudes towards feminism. The full dissertation is available via a link provided on the page to which I've linked above.] 

Pérez-Gil, María del Mar (2023). "Mass Tourism, Ecocriticism, and Mills & Boon Romances (1970s-1980s)." Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.

Reed, Eleanor (2023). Woman's Weekly and Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Culture in Britain, 1918-1958: Making Homemakers Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. [More details here.]

Sharma, Vishal, Kirsten Bray, Neha Kumar, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2023. “It Takes (at least) Two: The Work to Make Romance Work.” In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA.

This discusses the work involved in self-publishing romance. It notes that:

While white participants reported using pen-names to separate their writer identity from their personal one, our participants of color undertook much more significant identity management. In addition to adopting white-sounding pen names, they mentioned about how race influenced their story lines and characters. Digital platforms, and the need they create for writers to engage with readers, surface questions of how they become arenas in which some are excluded while others are privileged based on whether it is possible for everyone to engage equally (e.g. whether everyone can use video for conversations).  [...] Romance novelists continue to confront issues of racism within the community, and our research suggests another dimension to this reckoning, which shows how the tools writers use perpetuate or even exacerbate discrimination.

Wells, Juliette (2022). "Afterword: Sex, Romance, and Representation in Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last." Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond. Ed. Nora Nachumi and Stephanie Oppenheim. University of Rochester Press. Rochester, NY. 243-252. [Some quotes and links here.]

Censored and Scorned Books, Nora Roberts, Furry Protagonists and New Publications

I'm not keen on the use of the word "spat" here, as I think it trivialises what's going on, but the news itself is of interest to Romancelandia:

Romance novelist Nora Roberts donated $50,000 Sunday to help keep the doors open at a Michigan library that was defunded in early August in a spat over LGBTQ-themed books. (Bridge Michigan)

Note that, given how prolific and popular Nora Roberts is, "Patmos Library, serving a township of 10,000 people, has 144 Nora Roberts books in its collection, compared to about 90 total books with LGBTQ themes."

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Turning from censored books to ones with low status, Vassiliki Veros has written a very personal reflection, drawing on her family history, about the importance of

the uncatalogued, the unwritten metadata of popular romance fiction [...] romance fiction collections that remain undocumented, unregistered, whose transtextual elements have been obfuscated or not fully realised—those works that remain separate, independent, successful without institutional engagement and recognition. (The Aleph Review)

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In the latest episode of the Shelf Love Podcast

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke, a scholar of fairy tales and romance, is here to discuss hot wolf boys, brooding Byronic figures, pseudomarriage and pseudovirginity, hot villain discourse, and why young women need beastly men to unlock their sexuality.

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And now on to the new publications:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2022). "One Sexy Daddy: Desirable Dad 'Bods' and the Popular Romance Novel." Fashionable Masculinities: Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumbersexuals, Ed. Vicki Karaminas, Adam Geczy and Pamela Church Gibson. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. 83-??. [Excerpt]

Aravind, G. S. Dwivedi, Laxmi Dhar (2021). "The Representation of Female Characters in the Romances of Hawthorne: A Comparison with the Popular Romance Fiction of America in the Twentieth Century." International Journal of Mechanical Engineering 6.3:1703-1706. [I'm not sure how this was published in a journal on this topic!]

Hallett, Hilary A. (2022). Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood. Liveright Publishing Corporation. [Excerpt here. The prologue of the book makes a somewhat less sweeping claim about Glyn's relationship with the romance genre than the title does. Which, given that her most famous novel does not have an HEA, is probably for the best.]

Larson, Christine (2022). "Streaming books: confluencers, Kindle Unlimited and the platform imaginary." Communication, Culture and Critique. [Abstract]

Priyatna, Aquarini and Sri Rijati Wardiani (2022). "Naturalization and Romanticization of Violence in Indonesian Teen Lit Jingga Series by Esti Kinasih," Journal of International Women's Studies 24.5.

New (and one forthcoming) publications: Comics, Masculinities, Love, Readers, Happiness, Heyer and more

The Observer published an article about British romance comics of the 1950s and 60s, with mention of a forthcoming publication on the topic: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/29/mirabelle-valentine-and-serenade-the-forgotten-teen-romance-comics-that-defined-an-era 

Here are the new publications:

Eirini Arvanitaki's Masculinities in Post-Millennial Popular Romance (New York: Routledge) was published in mid May.

Belk, Jaime (2022). Save Our Love. Creative Writing Masters Thesis, Liberty University.

Fekete, Maleah (2022). "Confluent Love and the Evolution of Ideal Intimacy: Romance Reading in 1980 and 2016." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11.

Gehrmann, Susanne (2022). "Varieties of Romance in Contemporary Popular Togolese Literature." Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture, ed. Grace A. Musila. Routledge: London. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003080855-4

Golubov, Nattie (2022). "La promesa de felicidad: la novela rosa y el placer de la lectura afectiva." El placer de la lectura: cuerpos, afectos, textos. Ed. Nattie Golubov. Ciudad de México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 65-94.

Hernandez, Carmen E. (2022) Romance and Revolution. Master of Arts dissertation, Texas State University.

Jan, Jariah Mohd and Diana Abu Ujum (2022). "Negotiating Conflicts amongst Muslim Female Characters in Malay Romance Novels: A Narratological Perspective." Muslim Women’s Writing from across South and Southeast Asia. Ed. Feroza Jussawalla, Doaa Omran. Routledge. New York. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003248064-22

O'Brien, Lee (2022). "Telling Gaps and Domestic Tyranny: Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11.

New Publications: Disability, Folklore, Gender, Literature, Linguistics, Sexuality

The 2022 volume of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies is now being published (articles etc. are published throughout the year). At the moment, there is only one article available (by Bonnie White, see below) but there are also some book reviews.

Here's my round-up of recent publications:

Allan, Jonathan A. (2022). “ ‘A Most Unlikely Hero’: Disability, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Harlequin Superromance Novels.” The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter. Ed. Carmen Dexl and Silvia Gerlsbeck. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 215-235. [Abstract here]

Garber, Linda (2021). Novel Approaches to Lesbian History. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. [This is not just about lesbian historical romance, but there is a discussion which is particularly focussed on romance in the chapter titled "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lesbian Sex* *But Only In Historical Fiction." An excerpt can be found here.]

Ivanski, Chantelle, Marta M.Maslej and Raymond A. Mar (2022). "Empirical Approaches to Studying Emotion in Literature: The Case of Gender." The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion, Ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish and Lalita Pandit Hogan. London: Routledge.  [See https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/bibliography/empirical-approaches-studying-emotion-literature-case-gender for links. At the time of writing, the chapter was available in full via Google Books.]

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (2022). "Interpellation and Counter-Interpellation in the Novel." The Rhetoric of Literary Communication: From Classical English Novels to Contemporary Digital Fiction. New York: Routledge. [Excerpt here.]

Pierini, Francesca (2021). " “Sharing the Same Soil:” Sally Rooney’s Normal People and the Coming-of-Age Romance." Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere :141-166. [It argues "for the importance and validity of a genre and the field of expertise attached to it – scholarship of the (popular) romance – that has developed, during the last decades, and especially since the beginning of the current century, important analytical tools for reading and understanding the representation of love in literary as well as popular narratives. Despite the undeniable revitalisation generic forms of literature are currently undergoing, the romance – and its critics – tend to remain excluded from academic debates concerning such revival." ] 

Šmídová, Monika Markéta (2021). Five Thousand for Justice: The Use of English Folklore in the Novels of KJ Charles. Masters thesis, Masaryk University.

van Halteren, Hans (2022). "Automatic Authorship Investigation." Language as Evidence: Doing Forensic Linguistics.  Ed. Victoria Guillén-Nieto and Dieter Stein. Palgrave Macmillan. 219-255.

White, Bonnie (2022). "Freedom, Sincerity, and the Modern Woman in the Interwar Romances of Berta Ruck." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 11.

New at JPRS: Special Issue on The Sheik (and a bit about teaching romance in Sweden)

The final additions to issue 9 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies have now gone online and are (as always) freely available to read, both on the website and in downloadable pdf.

• Love in a Cold Climate? Teaching Popular Romance at a Swedish University
  Maria Nilson and Helene Ehriander
   

[Edited to add: JPRS have just added another article to issue 9

• Venetia: Georgette Heyer’s Pastoral Romance
  Anne Lancashire

 That was added on 22 December.]

In the Special Issue on The Sheik are:

Introduction to the special issue on The Sheik
Amy Burge

The Oriental Beast: The Sheik and Fairy Tales
Pauline Suwanban

Garçon manqué: A Queer Rereading (of) The Sheik
Jessica Taylor

Olive Skin Chocolate Eyes: Echoes of The Sheik on Descriptive Patterns of the Italian Romantic Hero in Harlequin Short Contemporaries
Francesca Pierini

Let’s Not Get Carried Away by The Sheik
Laura Vivanco

The Sheik and Modernism
Ellen Turner

The Depiction of Masculinity and Nationality in The Sheik
jay Dixon

In Defence of the Perverse: Reflections on The Sheik (George Melford, 1921)
Elisabetta Girelli

On Eligible Princes: The Medieval Modernity of Sheikh Romance
Amira Jarmakani

Review essay on The Sheik
Amy Burge and Rachel Robinson

On Teaching, Not Teaching, and Teaching The Sheik
Eric Murphy Selinger

Authors on The Sheik: A conversation with Liz Fielding
Elizabeth Cole

Some new publications: Romance and Italy, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, the USA; happy endings; Christianity; the RWA; Sherry Thomas

It hasn't taken long for the RWA crisis to be turned into a case-study:

Lawrence, Kelsey, 2020. "No Happy Ending: Leadership Falls Apart at the Romance Writers of America." SAGE Business Cases. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529741117 and here's the abstract:

This short case asks students to examine the controversy stemming from allegations of racism within the Romance Writers of America (RWA), one of the largest U.S. writers’ and trade organizations. Students will assess the organization’s response to the allegations, its subsequent change of leadership, and what this indicates about the overall culture within the RWA.

The crisis is also mentioned, albeit briefly, in the article by McAlister et al (see details below): "the implosion of the Romance Writers of America in late 2019 over issues of institutionalised racism demonstrated that the romance industry is still suffering from 'publishing’s diversity deficit'."

I'll take the opportunity, since I've brought up the topic of the RWA, to mention that the new Board of Directors issued an apology to members (archived here) and also to Courtney Milan:

The Board Members wrote:

Dear Courtney,

For our first and most important order of business, we, the members of the Board of Directors of Romance Writers of America, are writing to apologize to you. We acknowledge the improper, unfair, and wrongful handling by RWA of the ethics complaints filed against you. We offer our sincerest apology to you for what transpired. We object vehemently to the way the proceedings were conducted, and we are very sorry for the resulting impact on you.

As a result, in a unanimous vote as a new Board, we have expunged both the complaints and the ensuing proceedings from the record. This should never have happened, and the fact that it happened to you--someone who has worked so hard to champion diversity, inclusion, and equity for our members from marginalized communities--is a travesty.

While we regrettably cannot undo how your case was managed, we will be conducting a thorough review of the current RWA Code of Ethics and surrounding procedures, as well as the RWA Policy manual, to ensure that they best reflect RWA's current priorities and principles, and so that RWA can help avoid situations like this in the future.

We thank you for your years of dedicated service to RWA, and we will work hard to be worthy of that dedication.

And in other publications:

Adamenko, Olga and Olga Klymenko, 2020. "Communicative Behavior via Gender Identity (Based on the English language 'love stories')." Psycholinguistics 27.2. 44-70. https://doi.org/10.31470/2309-1797-2020-27-2-44-70 The abstract is in English but the paper itself is not.

Cassiday, Julie A., 2020. “A World Without Safe Words: Fifty Shades of Russian Grey.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Haruna, Alkasim and Noor Hashima Abd Aziz, 2019. "Towards an Understanding of the Efferent Reading Stance of Hausa Popular Romance Novels." European Academic Research 6.12: 6829-6839.

Johnson, Emily D., 2020. “Exploring His/Her Library: Reading and Books in Russian Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Kamblé, Jayashree, 2020. "When Wuxia Met Romance: The Pleasures and Politics of Transculturalism in Sherry Thomas’s My Beautiful Enemy." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Kamitsuka, Margaret D., 2020. “Prolife Christian Romance Novels: A Sign that the Abortion-as-Murder Center Is Not Holding?” Christianity & Literature 69.1: 36-52. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/752347

McAlister, Jodi, Claire Parnell and Andrea Anne Trinidad, 2020. "#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family." Publishing Research Quarterly. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-020-09733-1

Moss, Madi Markle, 2020. "Review: When Was the Last Time You Read a Romance Novel?" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 53.1: 189-193. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/dialjmormthou.53.1.0189

Paradis, Kenneth, 2020. “Types and Tropes: History and Moral Agency in Evangelical Inspirational Fiction.” Christianity & Literature 69.1: 73-90. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/752349

Pierini, Francesca, 2020. " “He Looks like He’s Stepped out of a Painting:” The Idealization and Appropriation of Italian Timelessness through the Experience of Romantic Love." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Schell, Heather, 2020. "After “I Do”: Turkish Harlequin Readers Re-Imagine the Happy Ending." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Schell, Heather and Katherine Larsen. “How the Story Ends: Gender, Sexuality, and Nation in the Happy Ending”, Writing From Below 4.2 (2019). https://writingfrombelow.org/happiness/how-the-story-ends-schell-larsen/
 
Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2020. "Cultural Authenticity, the Family, and East Asian American Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 9.

Papers that would have been given: BGSU conference

The Bowling Green State University romance conference would have started yesterday. Here's Wednesday's schedule: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/researchingromance/2020/4-22/

To help spread awareness of what colleagues are researching, at a time when people can only do this online, I'll post the titles of papers, including a link to the abstracts.

Carry Me Over the Threshold: Using Popular Romance Novels in Women’s and Gender Studies Classes to Teach Disciplinary Threshold Concepts 
Jessica Van Slooten, University of Wisconsin Green Bay

Finding a Family: The Genre World of #RomanceClass

Jodi McAlister, Deakin University, Australia
Claire Parnell, University of Melbourne
Andrea Anne Trinidad, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

The Need for Romance Reader Studies

Mary Lynne Nielsen
Keira Soleore

Black Romance as Liberation: Beverly Jenkins' Historical Romance as Black Feminist Praxis and Historical Pedagogy

Nicole M. Jackson, Bowling Green State University

That '90s Kind of Love: Pinnacle Books and the birth of the African American romance novel

Jamee Nicole Pritchard, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

“To Be Able to Love Is Freedom”: African American Historical Romance as Neo-Slave Narrative

Qiana Whitted, University of South Carolina - Columbia

Fan Letters to Betty Cavanna: How Canonical Young Adult Literature Emerged from the Cold War Condemnation of Romance

Amanda Allen

From Pulp Tragedy to the Romance HEA: The evolution of gay pulp fiction and queer romance at Avon.

Sarah Slocum

Roar and Crash: Romance Novels of the Jazz Age and Depression Era

Jessica A. Kahan

Rare Books and Ripped Bodices: Teaching Romance as Book History

Rebecca Baumann, Indiana University - Bloomington

Romance and the Rare Book Trade

Rebecca Romney

Here's Thursday's schedule: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/researchingromance/2020/4-23/

Appetizing Fare: a comparison of two eras in the history of Gothic literature

Malia S. Jackson

Georgette Heyer's legacy in historical romance research

Alexandra Sterling

The Problem of "Clean" Romance: Blurring the Boundaries

Lee Tobin McClain, Seton Hill University

Browsing is Hard, And Taxonomies Are Dead Sexxy

Sarah Wendell
Stefanie Hunker, BGSU

Pushing Boundaries in Romance Fiction: How Erotic Romance Became Mainstream

Anna Michelson, Northwestern University

The Cultural Significance of Indie Black Romance

Nicole Falls

Writing the Romance: Resilience and Solidarity in the Digital Economy

Christine Larson, University of Colorado Boulder

Cracked Mirrors: Mental Health Representation in Romance

Melinda Utendorf

Let’s Talk About Sex: Examining Language Choices in Contemporary Romance

Darcey Lovell, University of Rhode Island

Plus Ones: Romantic Heroines as Mathematicians and Scientists

Heather M. Schell, George Washington University

Lesbian Romance Novels and the Representation of Female U.S. Presidency

Kathleen Kollman, Bowling Green State University

Reading Alyssa Cole's "Agnes Moor's Wild Knight"

Maura Kenny, CUNY Graduate Center

The Embodied Borders of Gender, Race, and Disability in His Road Home

Trinidad Linares

An Author Reflects: Therese Dryden's PhD thesis on writing feminist romance

In 2011 Therese Dryden (who writes for Harlequin Mills & Boon as Michelle Douglas) came to Teach Me Tonight to discuss her masters thesis in creative writing. This year she completed her PhD and it's available online.

The PhD thesis has various parts. Since this is a PhD in creative writing, the first part is a novel. This is followed by analysis, drawing on the following corpus:

Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1997)
Blue Dahlia by Nora Roberts (2004)
Daisy’s Back in Town by Rachel Gibson (2004)
Shelter Mountain by Robyn Carr (2007)
Maid For Love by Marie Force (2011)
Somebody to Love by Kristan Higgins (2012)
Along Came Trouble by Ruthie Knox (2013)
Can’t Help Falling in Love by Bella Andre (2013)
A Single Kiss by Grace Burrowes (2015)
Stand By You by Sharon Sala (2015)

Some of these are discussed in more detail than others. The criteria shaping the corpus were publication within the past 20 years, the authors' US and New York Times bestseller status and the presence of a single mother heroine in the text. Dryden's analysis of the feminism in the texts focuses on single mothers and family law:

I explore the issue of female oppression and empowerment via the figure of the single mother heroine in the contemporary American romance novel. The situation of a lone woman raising a child on her own automatically brings to the fore questions surrounding gender roles, ideas of the family, and equality between the sexes. Referencing a corpus of ten contemporary romance novels, I investigate how these single-mother heroines are portrayed, and ask whether these depictions can be considered either empowering or oppressive to women. A granular analysis of the corpus revealed the ideological inconsistency of the genre. There were novels that provided a direct protest against patriarchal oppression by dramatizing the injustices a patriarchal society inflicts upon a single-mother heroine, while others subscribed fiercely to traditional gender roles and models, and in some cases there were novels that did both, highlighting the genre’s complexity. My research demonstrates that, while the romance genre is too big and unwieldy to be called either feminist or anti-feminist, it is possible for individual romance novels to incorporate a feminist ethos.

Finally, Dryden describes her own writing process and how it was changed by reflecting on this issues she'd uncovered in the previous section. She realised that in her published work she'd written "books that, politically, I do not agree with" (384). This she ascribes to the fact that

Writing a book is not a straightforward linear process. As a young writer (young in terms of how long I had been published) my focus was firmly fixed on writing novels that had an internal logic that held them together. That is, stories with strong conflicts, that were suitably romantic, and that incorporated heroines and heroes that readers could relate to and sympathise with. (384)

Bearing this in mind, she wrote her novel and then "reworked and edited The Valentine Wars in an attempt to create a complex feminist novel". Given the way romances sometimes have rather fantastic medical and legal situations (e.g. amnesia and wills that seem to be affected more by plotting requirements than realism), I was interested to see that realism did require adjustments to Dryden's plot:

I wanted to balance the fantasy elements of my novel with a realistic situation and set-up. After reviewing the legislation pertaining to family law in the state of Pennsylvania, it quickly became evident that the scenario I had created—one in which Ellen feared that her daughter’s paternal grandmother would sue and win custod—proved highly unlikely. Even though Ellen has few financial resources and Myra has the financial means to hire the most expensive lawyers money can buy, such a scenario is so improbable as to be almost laughable. (390)

The whole thesis can be downloaded here.Therese's website as Michelle Douglas, which gives details about her novels, is here.

CFP: Edited Collection on Consent, Diversity, Inclusion, etc in 21st-Century Romances

deadline for submissions: 

December 31, 2019

full name / name of organization: 

Susan Fanetti/CSU Sacramento

contact email: 

sfanetti@csus.edu

Not Your Mother’s Bodice Rippers: The Romance Genre in the 21st Century

Editor: Susan Fanetti

The enduring stereotype of the romance novel is the dramatic cover depicting the bare-chested, Fabio-modeled “hero” holding the swooning “heroine” draped over his arm, her wild hair flowing and her bountiful pale breasts swelling from her torn dress. Hence the term “bodice-ripper.”

But neither the stereotype nor the term have aged well. Though of course there are still stories written about brooding dukes and naïve duchesses, the genre contains multitudes. Romance is more diverse and dynamic than ever before and continuing to evolve in new, more inclusive directions.

Romance is the only literary genre dominated in every facet by women, and as such is often unjustly denigrated as “mommy porn.” However, its cultural influence is significant, and we would do well to take it seriously. In the twenty-first century, the romance genre is a billion-dollar industry—as big as the mystery, science fiction, and fantasy genres combined. It is an industry juggernaut, supported by and responding to a savvy, sophisticated audience that is culturally and politically aware, engaged, and active.

Moreover, while it is dominated by women, romance is not exclusively by or for women, and the industry itself is finally taking notice of voices outside the conventional cishet, white, privileged perspective the stereotype instantiates.

This collection will examine the position of the romance genre in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which romance responds to and influences the culture and community in which it exists.

This collection is under contract at McFarland & Company, with a planned 2021 publication date. It will be peer-reviewed.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• The impact of Fifty Shades of Grey on the romance genre and industry
• #MeToo and questions of consent in the romance genre
• Diversity, inclusion, sensitivity and #OwnVoices in romance writing and reading
• Broadening representations of gender and sexuality in romance
• Social media and the “Romancelandia” community
• The writer-reader relationship in the genre
• The place of fanfiction in the genre
• The rise of independent publishing and its effects on the genre as a whole
• The explosion of subgenres within romance and the influences from which they might have derived
• Issues of gatekeeping and claim-staking within the genre/industry/community
• Cultural analyses of specific authors/texts/etc., or historicist analyses of the genre as it’s evolved to the present

Note: The focus of this collection is romance in the contemporary moment. Submissions that do not engage that focus in some way will not be considered.

Completed manuscripts should be 6000-8000 words (not including Works Cited or notes) and should conform to MLA 8 style and formatting.

300-500 word abstract/proposals with current CV due: 31 December 2019

If accepted, complete final submission due: 31 August 2020

Send inquiries and/or submissions to: sfanetti@csus.edu

From http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2019/11/01/edited-collection-on-the-romance-genre-in-the-21st-century (via the Romance Scholar Listserv)

PopCAANZ 2018: Byron, Disenchantment, FBI, Feminism, Gender, Italy, "Magical Negroes", Names, South-East Asia, Telenovelas, Twitter, YA

Details are available for the PopCAANZ conference which is currently taking place at Auckland University of Technology. This year there are lots of papers on romance and I'll include excerpts from their abstracts. The conference continues tomorrow, and I'll add links to Twitter threads as they appear.

Donna Maree Hanson - Popular romance fiction: flirting with feminism

popular romance fiction regularly depicts feminist social issues. In this sense, the concept of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ applies — ‘this partly unconscious “taking in” of rules, values and dispositions...’ (Webb, Schirato, & Dahanher, 2002, p. 44). Contemporary popular romance novels are set in the everyday context and as such cannot but help portray the world in which the authors and their characters exist, including social issues present in the mind of the author, whether consciously or unconsciously. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s and since, the woman’s movement has been politically active and concepts of feminism have entered into everyday discourse. [...] research indicates that writers as well as readers of popular romance fiction have no issue reconciling their concept of feminism with writing and reading in the genre.

Lucy Sheerman - “Exempt from all affection and from all contempt”: necessary evil and the figure of the Byronic hero in romance novels

Two hundred years since his first appearance in print, the Byronic anti-hero - ‘that man of loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’ - is a figure who continues to define representations of the hero in romance novels.

The influence of this angry and defiant fallen angel on the writing of the Brontës has been well documented. In my paper I will consider four Governess novels, published by Mills & Boon in 2016 as a homage to Charlotte Brontë’s iconic romance novel Jane Eyre, and the Byronic traces of the heroes who feature in them.

The romance novel’s continued preoccupation with the Byronic anti-hero is central to the genre’s staged encounters with otherness and its exploration of emotional affect. The literary device of the anti-hero shaped the development of romance tropes such as plot, conflict and point of view, and also (as I will argue) gave rise to the Byronic anti-heroine.

Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud - Cross-cultural romance, feminism and femininity in Southeast Asian fiction

In this paper, I explore how the negotiation of cross-cultural romance also elicits a particular Southeast Asian feminism in three texts: Zen Cho’s The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (2012, Malaysian), Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls (2016, Singaporean) and Ayisha Malik’s Jewel (2017, Bruneian). [...] I argue in this paper that these novels construct a feminist femininity that allows the heroines to remain connected to and sanctioned by their individually patriarchal heritages, while also allowing them to critique and expand existing expectations of feminine identity through the negotiation of cross-cultural relationships.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread on Hanson, Sheerman and Daud's papers.

Ellen Carter - What’s in a romance hero/ine’s name? a corpus study of gay and straight romance character names

The first names parents give to their female versus male children have different phonological (sound) characteristics. My work extends this from the real to the fictional world, studying names given by authors to their romance heroes – gay and straight – as well as to straight heroines. My corpus contains 2,536 contemporary romance novels: 1,668 with a male/female pairing and 868 with a male/male couple, resulting in 3,404 heroes (1,668 straight; 1,736 gay) and 1,668 (straight) heroines. My results demonstrate that the phonological characteristics of names given to gay heroes are statistically significantly less masculine/more feminine than the names of straight heroes. Given that gay romance is a fast-growing romance sub-genre predominantly written and read by straight women, I explore possible cultural implications of this finding and how it may feed stereotypes and shape perceptions within (straight and queer) societies.

Carter: striking result - male characters much more likely to have names with /k/ sounds, especially male characters in M/F romance. #popcaanz18

— Jodi McAlister (@JodiMcA) 2 July 2018

Eden French - Loving invisible bodies: transgender representation in popular romance

The few novels that do feature trans heroines and heroes — niche even in small LGBTQ presses — are hailed as daring simply for permitting trans protagonists to be plausible subjects of love and desire. [...] romance’s historically heteronormative politics of gender has constrained writers and even scholars from treating transgender themes; mainstream discussion around trans bodies still manifests routinely in fetishistic and dehumanising ways. Moreover questions of embodiment (for example, the politics of gender-affirming surgery) remain contested even in the trans community. Speaking as a scholar and writer, I will discuss existing examples of trans embodiment in romance, and outline possible reconciliations for the challenge of bringing trans love into the mainstream.

French has found disclaimers and disavowals in some of her corpus which make it clear that the assumed readership is entirely cis. #popcaanz18

— Jodi McAlister (@JodiMcA) 2 July 2018

Francesca Pierini - “He looks like he’s stepped out of a painting”: The idealization and appropriation of Italian timelessness through the experience of romantic love

Marina Fiorato’s The Glassblower of Murano (2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots. Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be the timeless life and culture of Venice. At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). [...] Within narratives centred on this notion, “falling in love in Italy” occasions the appropriation of a privileged relation with history and the past, often contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern places, people and lifestyles of England and North America. Through a discussion of two Anglo-American historical popular novels set in Italy, this paper proposes an exploration of the notion of romantic love as a force reconnecting displaced and fragmented souls with a supposedly timeless and unbroken society; a society perceived as holding a privileged relation with ancient traditions and the past.

Pierini has a paper freely available online which is quite similar, though lacking the focus on romantic love.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread about Carter, French and Pierini's papers.

Maria Ramos-Garcia - This is not a romance novel but a telenovela”: metafiction and bilingualism in Jane the Virgin

Jane the Virgin, based on a Venezuelan telenovela, is at the same time a parody and an homage to the popular Latin American television genre. Among the many unusual features that contribute to the originality and success of this TV series are an omniscient narrator, a metafictional discourse, a bilingual and bicultural setting and an unapologetic, unabashed, and explicit use and abuse of the conventions of the soap-opera, with a touch of Latin American magical realism. [...] This paper will provide an overview of the series, concentrating both on the Latino socio-cultural aspects that rarely make it into mainstream US television, and on the metafictional discussions of the telenovela and the romance novel — both as genres and as philosophies of love — that permeate the narrative.

Angela Hart - Combating the romance genre stigma: reading romance in the digital age

Avid readers of the romance genre can find their voices in the online sphere using social media platforms such as Twitter, utilizing the hashtags #amreadingromance and #romancelandia. Romance readers utilize the technological affordances of the platform to form groups, post about novels, and find relevant information on their specific genre. By using anonymous user login information, unidentifiable profile pictures, and unique hashtags, romance readers are turning to Twitter.

Jodi McAlister tweeted a thread about Ramos-Garcia and Hart's papers before stopping so she could present her own.

Jodi McAlister - Not quite YA, not yet adult: the short but complex history of “New Adult” fiction

This paper will trace the history of the new adult genre category, using the notion of the “genre world,” as theorised by Lisa Fletcher, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins (2018). [...] this paper will explore the generic roots of new adult fiction in young adult fiction, popular romance fiction, and fan fiction, and how these parent genres have given shape to popular forms and structures of the new adult category. It will provide a much-needed scholarly framework for understanding this emergent genre category, its gradual formation, and its complex place at the borders of several different genre worlds.

Eric Selinger - Disenchantment and its discontents: Weber, Illouz, and popular romance fiction

Modernity and romantic love make uncomfortable bedfellows. As Max Weber explains, modernity is marked by “disenchantment,” not just of the natural world, but also of the inner life and of interpersonal relations. Building on Weber, Eva Illouz argues that we now live in an “ironic structure of romantic feeling, which marks the move from an ‘enchanted’ to a disenchanted cultural definition of love” (Why Love Hurts). This talk will look at how several contemporary authors negotiate and resist “disenchantment.” Of particular interest will be Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan is Not Obliged and The Other Side of Happiness, a pair of “hijabi chick-lit” novels that take both sides in this great debate, Courtney Milan’s Hold Me, which casts a cool, modern eye on romantic love without yielding to the irony that Illouz describes, and/or Alexis Hall’s Glitterland, which deploys religious discourse to redeem both love and popular media culture.

Nattie Golubov - The surveillant gaze in FBI romance

This paper is my first effort at thinking through several issues recurrent in the subgenre of the romance police procedural: the configuration of the spaces of home, homeland and nation as domestic territories, besieged not by a foreign but a home grown threat that violates the integrity of the boundaries between private and public, interior and exterior; the role of individual trauma as a mark of the vulnerability of the self and the foundation of an affective investment in the protection of national territory; the "Americanness" of the values and practices that govern social dynamics in the workplace, the self-chosen family and the couple. National character is defined in opposition to the rendering of the criminalised enemy and, together with collective, institutional agency and cooperation, is also the best safeguard against social disorder. Eventually I intend to show that this romance subgenre mediates and manages social fears and anxieties by highlighting the strengths of a systemic framework and ignoring the negative aspects of surveillance: anxiety and fear lie at the heart of romantic relationships and the novels offer a means of managing them with the emotional investment in family and trust in law enforcement.

Jodi McAlister's tweeted a thread about Selinger and Golubov's papers.

Kecia Ali - Writing while white: black martyrs as “Magical Negroes” in Nora Roberts’ novels

Roberts’ heroes and heroines are nearly always white; occasional Black characters are typically what Ikard (2017:94) describes as “magical negroes ... whose raison d’être in white redemption narratives is to support/heal/enlighten/inspire the white character(s) in crisis.” This paper explores four Roberts’ novels in which the violent murder of a Black character serves as the catalyst for vital emotional developments between a white couple or among a team of white characters [...] the single-title adventure romance Hot Ice (1987), the category romance Convincing Alex (1994), the stand-alone mystical romance Three Fates (2002), and Morrigan’s Cross (2006), the first installment of a paranormal romance trilogy.

Call for Papers: Happiness

This is a call for papers from Writing from Below:

Emergent research into happiness is still largely situated in fields such as sociology, psychology, and neuroscience. Traditionally the uncontested domain of the Humanities, the question of “How should we live?” is too rarely approached in contemporary literary and cultural studies. Indeed, even in a thriving field such as affect studies, research still largely focuses on negative emotions, ugly feelings (Ngai), shame (Probyn), paranoia (Sedgwick), failure (Halberstam), and the cruelty of optimism (Berlant). But perhaps the critical tide is turning. Scholars are beginning to theorise the end of our well-rehearsed “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and conjecturing what comes after (Felski). They are mapping the potential path for a “eudaimonic criticism” (Pawelski & Moore) and an “ethics of hope” (Braidotti), looking towards a more positive future (Muñoz). Critical and historical studies on empathy (Meghan; Keen), joy (Potkay) and happiness itself (Ahmed) are also emerging.

Inspired by the growing body of scholarship on optimistic representations or gender, sexuality, and queerness, Writing from Below enters the fray with this invitation to explore and interrogate positive, successful, fulfilling, life-affirming expressions of gender and sexuality in contemporary or historical literature, culture, and society.

Papers could engage with (but are not limited to):

• Pleasure, joy, jouissance, delight, splendour, enchantment, empathy, and kindness
• Love, passion, and amour fou
• Middlebrow pleasure
• Living the queer life, and queer(ing) happiness
• Eudaimonia, mindfulness, and wellbeing
• Eudaimonic reading, and the eudaimonic turn in cultural and literary studies
• The hermeneutics of suspicion, paranoid and reparative reading, and their aftermath
• Ethical criticism, the ethics of hope, and hopelessness
• The body as site of happiness, joy, pleasure, etc.
• Affect, the theories and/or histories of positive emotions
• Celebration, and celebration as protest
• Burlesque, clowning, circus, carnivals, and the carnivalesque
• Kitsch, camp, and drag
• Sex and play, sex lives, fun
• Vitality, verve, vigour, and liveliness
• Biological life, bios, zoe, survival, sur-vivre [living-on], affirmation
• The utopian tendencies of gender studies and queer theory
• The (queer) future, queer futurity, and happy endings

Gender studies and queer theory are located across and between disciplines, and so we welcome submissions from across (and outside of, against and up against) the full cross-/inter/-trans-disciplinary spectrum, and from inside and outside of conventional academia.

Do not be limited. Be brave. Play with form, style, and genre. Invent, demolish, reimagine.

Submissions

The deadline for submissions is 29 May 2017.

To submit, visit our website: www.writingfrombelow.org.au

Written submissions, whether critical or creative, should be between 3,000 and 6,000 words in length, and should adhere strictly to the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.

All submissions—critical, creative, and those falling in between; no matter the format or medium—will be subject to a process of double-blind peer review.

For editorial enquiries, or queries about unusual submissions (we adore the unusual, the unexpected and unfamiliar!), please contact our guest editor, Dr Juliane Roemhild: J.Roemhild@latrobe.edu.au

The call for papers can also be found here.