New to the Romance Wiki Bibliography: Feminism, Love, Heyer and Orientalism

Laura Vivanco

Arvanitaki, Eirini, 2017. 

"Postmillennial femininities in the popular romance novel." Journal of Gender Studies. Published online: 28 Aug 2017. Abstract

McAlister, Jodi, and Hsu-Ming Teo, 2017. 

"Love in Australian Romance Novels." The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia. Ed. Hsu-Ming Teo. North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, pp.194-222.

McLeod, Dion, 2017. 

"'Try-error-try-it': Love, loss, and the subversion(?) of the heteronormative romance story in Will Grayson, Will Grayson." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 25.1: 73-94. Abstract

And in the section of the Romance Wiki bibliography for items in languages other than English:

Bianchi, Diana, 2017. 

"I gentiluomini si prendono per la gola: cibo e identità nei romanzi di Georgette Heyer". Lingua, Traduzione, Letteratura 1: 75-89. [Diana wrote to me to notify me of the publication of this article and her translation of the title is: "The way to a gentleman's heart is through his stomach: food and identity in Georgette Heyer's novels."]

林芳玫/Lin, Fang-mei. 

"性別化東方主義：女性沙漠羅曼史的重層東方想像/Gendering Orientalism: Women's Desert Romance and the Multiplicity of Oriental Imagination." Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, vol. 13, no. 1-2, 2016, pp. 174-200. [There is an abstract in English, even though the paper is not.]

New to the Wiki: Shades and The Sheik

Laura Vivanco

I've decided I should put up a post whenever I add (or someone else adds) an entry to the Romance Wiki bibliography because items are added quite frequently and I don't tweet or blog about them all individually, so people may not be aware of how often new items are added or what they are. In today's post, I'd like to draw attention to an issue of Women: A Cultural Review which should be of interest to romance scholars. I haven't actually been able to get hold of copies of these articles myself but the argument in the article about Heyer, in particular, seems controversial:

Deal, Clare H., 2015. 

"‘Throbb[ing] with a consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her’: Embodiment and Female Subjectivity in the Desert Romance", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 75-95.

Here's the abstract:

This article examines the relationship between the desert and embodiment in E. M. Hull’s international best-seller The Sheik (1919). This novel, a desert romance, has been the focus of feminist scholarship for decades because of its controversial rape narrative. Drawing on theories of embodiment, in particular the work of Elizabeth Grosz, the author interrogates how the desert is paradoxically presented as a space of liberation and oppression within which female sexuality could be explored despite the gendered violence of pre-existing patriarchal frameworks. Ultimately, the author provides a reading of Diana in terms of her transition from an androgynous ‘girl’ to a sexually desiring, seemingly feminized ‘woman’, and examines the connotations associated with this. The author establishes a connection between the transient nature of the desert and the liberation offered to women within this liminal space. Through an in-depth examination of the protagonist Diana’s corporeal subjectivity over the course of the novel, the author positions The Sheik as offering a voice to female sexuality and erotic fantasy, demonstrating Hull’s depiction of the desert as an appropriation of that space through which to explore female desires. This opens up new understandings of what constituted innovative literature in interwar Britain and marks Hull’s book, with its overtly erotic content and specific focus on female desire, as a political and social departure.
 

Gillis, Stacy, 2015. 

"The Cross-Dresser, the Thief, His Daughter and Her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 57-74.

Here's the abstract:

When romance fiction consolidated as a genre in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of generic conventions concerning the heterosexual imperatives came about. This article considers how these heterosexual imperatives function as a mask for queer desire in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926).  Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the article identifies in the novel a detailed account of male–male desire through arguing that while the romantic narrative is concerned with the Duc of Avon and Léonie, his former cross-dressing page, the substantial sexual tension in the novel occurs in the meetings and exchanges between Avon and Léonie’s biological father, Henri Saint-Vire. While These Old Shades ends with the presentation of Léonie by Avon as his duchess, it is male–male desire which has (queerly) driven this romance plot to its ‘natural’ conclusion of marriage.  The article thinks through what happens when the rivalry, explicitly about desiring a woman, is an implicit homosocial bond and how this functions within the heterosexual imperatives of the romance novel. The article questions how desire functions in the romance novel and, more crucially, how romance fiction can be read as resisting, at least in part, that which has been traditionally understood as their raison d’être—the heterosexual imperative.

And in the same issue there's another item which may be of interest, though I won't be adding it to the Bibliography because I've not been adding Fifty Shades scholarship to it unless there's a clear link made to romance novels:

Booth, Naomi, 2015.

"The Felicity of Falling: Fifty Shades of Grey and the Feminine Art of Sinking", Women: A Cultural Review 26.1-2: 22-39.

Here's the abstract:

This article explores the frequent faints depicted in the Fifty Shades novels in the context of a long history of feminine swooning in the popular novel, and in light of Alexander’s Pope’s famous description of bathos as ‘the felicity of falling gracefully’. Pope’s satirical treatise describes not just a sinking from the high to the low, but from the present to the past, through a process of bathetic literary travesty. The author argues that the Fifty Shades novels travesty their literary precedents, troping in particular on past moments of female powerlessness and producing bathos through depictions of the fainting female form. The novels depend in particular on (mis)readings of Tess of the D’Urbervilles: their celebration of Tess’s abjection strips Hardy’s novel of its most complex and disturbing elements, euphemizing a bloody and tragic struggle as a swoon of ecstatic submission. At stake in this discussion is the question of how popular fiction deals with its past—in this case, how the novels deal with a history of exploited femininity iconized in the swoon. The Fifty Shades novels simultaneously invoke and deny the past, celebrating female abjection in a manner that disavows the specificities of that abjection, and denying the materiality of the materials they draw upon. E. L. James’s approach to her historical referents is contrasted with Angela Carter’s, through which the texture of the past (and the motif of feminine fainting) is vividly engaged with in an attempt to transform the future.

 

Quotes from CFPs: Reading, Pop Culture, Medievalism, Gay Marriage

Laura Vivanco

Reading has had numerous meanings for different people at different times and places. From reading an animal’s tracks, or a street sign, to reading Derrida, the act of reading has referred to a wide range of activities. People have read for practical purposes (for information, for knowledge, or for material gain), for holy ends (the Quran said “Read in the name of your Lord”), for political and social reasons (“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free,” said Frederick Douglass), for entertainment, etc. In the age of computers, cell phones, and the Internet, traditional notions about the significance of reading, its function, and value seem to be challenged in various ways. (From Cover to Cover: Reading Readers, Ankara, Turkey, November 7 – 9, 2012)

In recent years, popular culture has come to be considered a valid and fruitful point of academic inquiry, helping to infuse more established disciplines, including English studies, with fresh life. Scholars have become increasingly aware of the broader implications of popular culture, which encompasses such diverse media as magazines, books, film, television, comic books/graphic novels, and internet content, for discourses mis/unrepresented or marginalized within the mainstream. (Motley, An English Studies Journal for Diversity)

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, popular culture finds itself at a crossroads: has the concept been drained of its meaning because of its overwhelming popularity? After the euphoria around the popular, what afterlife can be expected from it? Should we still be discussing the popular as opposed to high and folk culture? (International Conference "Report from the Pop Line: On the Life and Afterlife of Popular": 3-4 December 2012, Lisbon)

Medievalism – the reception and adaptation of the politics, history, art and literature of the Middle Ages – has burgeoned over the past decade, and is now coming of age as a subject of serious academic enquiry. (The Middle Ages in the Modern World, University of St Andrews, UK, 25-28 June, 2013)

the recent debate regarding the defense of marriage and the realities of queer, bisexual, transgender, asexual, same-sex, and nonmonogamous identities and experiences, have sometimes forced a reconceptualization of marriage and at other times uncritically perpetuated a heteronormative model linked to ideals and compulsions toward consumerism, entitlement, and conformity. (Panel titled Critical Representations of Marriage 44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) March 21-24, 2013)

Brushing Aside Criticism

Laura Vivanco

When one's a reader of a type of fiction about which sweeping negative generalisations are made, it can feel satisfying to respond with equally sweeping but positive generalisations. Some of those negative generalisations probably do deserve to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Others, though, contain rather more than a grain of truth and so, having recently come across a number of freshly written critiques of romance, I felt it was appropriate to share them here.

The first is Amanda Joyal's M.A. thesis, "From Victorian Literature to the Romance Novel: Disability and the Courtship Plot," which comes complete with its own counter-example. It

is largely concerned with popular romance novels as a site of criticism for disability because of its widespread popularity and locates Victorian fiction such as Jane Eyre and Olive as the predecessors of modern romance novels. Stereotypes of disability that pervade Victorian literature tend to be present in the modern romance; characters desire cures for their disabilities and operate as pitiable figures within the courtship plot. I analyze the ways in which the disabled protagonists of Yours Until Dawn, Stranger in Town, and Annie's Song must be rehabilitated by their partners in order to be a viable participant in the courtship plot. For male characters, this involves reclamation of their masculinity in order to compensate for the feminization of their disability. Disabled female characters seem to have very little involvement in their own rehabilitation and instead rely on their male partners. In contrast, the heroine of Mouth to Mouth needs no rehabilitation in order to be seen as a sexual partner. Laurel represents a unique case that disability scholars should pay more critical attention to.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any more detail about the thesis, other than that it was completed in 2012 at the University of Wyoming.
The second is by Cora Buhlert, who takes a closer look at the defence of romances which is based on the idea that they're "expressions of women's fantasies":

E.L. James [...] said [...] that the [Fifty Shades] trilogy is fantasy and portrays the sort of fantasy that people would not necessarily want in real life. We’ve heard this sort of explanation before as an apologia for the rapetastic bodicerippers of the 1970s and 1980s or for the continuing popularity of romances featuring ultra-possessive alpha males. And I cannot discount these explanations, because people have wildly different fantasies, as is their good right. But nonetheless, whenever I read another apologia that a book/film/series with stone age gender relations is just an expressions of women’s fantasies of ceding control, because they have to be so strong in real life all the time, I inevitably shake my head and think, “Whose fantasy exactly? Cause it sure as hell ain’t mine.”

I guess the main problem here is that a lot of what is considered romantic and swoonworthy in the Anglo-American part of the world, not just doesn’t do a thing for me, I actively dislike it. And I only wrote Anglo-American, because E.L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey, is British. But mainly, books like Fifty Shades of Grey or Harlequin Presents (which have several British authors as well) or the rapetastic bodicerippers of yesteryear are an American phenomenon and reflect the conflicted American attitudes about sexuality, namely that the only way a woman is allowed to enjoy sex without being labeled a slut is if she’s forced into it by an overpowering man. The old bodiceripper style romances were never as popular in Europe (including the UK) as in the US and most European readers I have spoken to actively hated them.

The third is from acrackedmoon at Requires Only That You Hate. The language is strong and I'm sure we could all think of romances which would serve as counter-examples. That doesn't invalidate her critique though: if anything, her "hatred and geekrage" seems to me to demonstrate the extent of the pain which romances can cause some people:

I don’t know about other queer women, but to me the prevalence of romance–not as a genre by itself, but romance as a pop-culture entity–fucked me up pretty severely [...] if you’re telling me that romance is categorically feminist, you’re contributing to this large damage in an insidious, silencing way. The proponents of romance-is-feminist school of thought like to pass such fiction off as inherently progressive because it is written mostly by women and targets women as an audience: it pushes the idea that reading these books is liberating and sex-positive and, what’s more, reading them is good for you. Because feminism! Liberation from the yoke of repression and sexual dissatisfaction!

Tell me this and I’ll kick you in the fucking teeth.

Yes, romance presents possibilities: as long as those possibilities involve finding a man. Yes, romance explores and depicts female desire: as long as that is a desire to have a cock shoved into your orifices. Yes, romance is about the “everywoman” whom we can all identify with as long as you can identify with a straight white woman from the first world. It reinforces the hegemony of what is normal, and what’s normal is straight sex, straight female desire, centering your life around the fantasy man, and being culturally rooted in the west. Romance enforces the hegemony of ethnocentricism, heteronormativity, and cultural imperialism. It’s not the only thing that does this: so does SFF, so does every other form of popular media.

Acrackedmoon is aware of the existence of lesbian and m/m romance; there are romances about people other than straight white women from the first world. Just, not a lot of them. Taken as a whole, popular romance fiction does marginalise certain kinds of stories and certain kinds of protagonists.

The image of various broom heads comes from Wikimedia Commons. It was originally published in the Dictionnaire encyclopédique de l'épicerie et des industries annexes (1904).

PCA/ACA 2012 - (4)

Laura Vivanco

Romancing the Monster: Authors, Audience, Steampunk, and Fan Fiction

Thursday, April 12, 2012 - 8:00am - 9:30am

“The Person Behind the Curtain”: Evolving Roles of Author and Audience in Paranormal Romance
Esther Guenat -  Temple College

When considering reader response criticism and its focus on examining literature and its readers in such a way that explores the diversity of readers’ responses to literary works, one might not immediately consider audiences of popular fiction, let alone audiences of romance novels. Readers of urban fantasy and paranormal romance are becoming much more diverse—both regarding who does the reading and those readers’ expectations—and the writing of each has evolved along with the audiences. While the use of supernatural aspects, sexual exploration, and urban locale were different standards of the two sub-genres, the conventional romance remained the same, as did reader expectation—heterosexual women sought out tales of supernaturally enhanced heterosexual relationships that ended in happily ever after. Recent reader-oriented critics have focused on how a given type of fiction audience’s expectations change over time; feminist and gender critics ask whether there is such a thing as “reading like a woman,” just as gay and lesbian critics ask whether there is a homosexual way of reading. Audience expectation of urban fantasy and paranormal romance has become much more diverse in its response—to gender roles, homosexual relationships, and even heterosexual relationships—and the formulas of these two sub-genres are no longer exact. Various authors have been able to somewhat adapt and evolve their writing so that it encompasses and allows for a more diverse following. Through this examination of works of various urban fantasy and paranormal romance authors, I explore the way the conventional romance novel formula is changing, how the readership of the genre is changing, and how authors of the genre are responding to and adapting to this change, thus creating a sub-genre of popular fiction that defies conventional ideas of romance and matches its audience in diversity.

"I am so over the whole vampires and werewolves and demons, oh my": How a Series of Steampunk "Romances" Offered This Romance Reader an Alternative to Paranormals
Glinda Hall - Arkansas State University

It is not difficult to acknowledge the popularity and role that the paranormal plays and has played within our culture, and especially throughout our literature.  For romance fiction, it is easy to understand the appeal because the paranormal allows for sexual expression and experimentation that readers may not dare fantasize about within mainstream and/or contemporary romance.  However, when I began my journey as a romance reader and scholar some 8 years ago, I also found paranormals appealing for this very reason; but now I have become disillusioned with the illusion.  Not to overplay a feminist approach to romance fiction, but (thanks to the saturation of the Twilight series) it seems the paranormal has outlived its usefulness in terms of its once used format for sexual exploration.

In my paper presentation, I will show how Gail Carriger’s steampunk series – Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, and Heartless – gives us a heroine, Alexia Tarabotti, that represents a strong, intelligent female, but also one literally immune to the supernatural that is a very real part of her alternative Victorian reality.  Alexia is an anti-paranormal protagonist, and this anti-paranormal plot schematic and characterization exposes devises used by romance paranormals and counters them.

Re-imagining the Heroine as a 'Slave to Desire': Power Games and (Hetero) Sexual Rhetoric in Labyrinth and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fanfiction
Danielle Lawson - Edinboro University

This paper explores the sexual rhetoric of power games, specifically representations of erotic power exchange in fanfiction written for the Labyrinth (Jim Henson) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon) fandoms. In particular, this research is concerned with the erotic power dynamic represented between the primary ‘romantic’ relationships in both original stories: Jareth/Sarah (Labyrinth) and Spike/Buffy (BtVS). Although the genres and intended audiences of the movie/tv show differ greatly, there are many similarities in the way the relationship dynamic between the characters is developed by authors of fanfiction. Using a combination of rhetorical analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study demonstrates how authors of hetero-oriented fanfiction re-claim the ‘dominant male/submissive female’ construct as an acceptable relationship dynamic. Moreover, the research presented shows that this re-claiming serves to build a subtext of feminine power, wherein the heroine is empowered (rather than oppressed) by accepting that they have the freedom to submit to their desires – even if that desire is to be dominated. In reaching this point, the male antagonists engage in a three phase power game: 1) Setting the Bait, 2) The Chase and 3) The Surrender. Other themes discussed include the disconnect between romance, power and ‘happily ever after’.