All about Conferences, including IASPR18 and Heyer conference summaries

The IASPR 2018 conference now has its programme online but prior to that appearing there was a lot of very thorough tweeting by a number of attendees, using #iaspr18. Since Kat (@BookThingo) has really comprehensive threads, I've used the threadreaderapp to bundle her tweets together and I'm linking to them below.

Session 1 - Romancing Australia, with papers by Amy T. Matthews and Amy Mead (Flinders University), Kate Cuthbert and Jodi McAlister (Deakin University)
SEE THREAD

There's more about changes affecting cover art, as discussed by Kate Cuthbert, here, from Claire Parnell via the @PopFicDoctors: Coverart and here's a podcast interview with Jodi McAlister in which she discusses her paper: Podcast. In addition, Renée Dahlia has written a blog post about the session.

Session 2 - Gender and Sexuality, with papers by Ellen Carter (University of Strasbourg), Christina Vogels (AUT New Zealand) and Andrea Anne Trinidad (Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines)
SEE THREAD

Renée Dahlia's written a blog post about this session.

Here's a podcast from New Zealand Radio with Christina Vogels about her PhD thesis, titled It's a masculinity sort of thing: Young men talk about the rules of (hetero)romantic relationships.

Session 3 - Places and Spaces of Love, with papers by Kecia Ali (Boston University), Jacqueline Jones (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York) and Vassiliki Veros (University of Technology, Sydney)
SEE THREAD

Renée Dahlia's blog post about this session and the following one.

A similar presentation by Vassiliki Veros on "Exploring library metadata and how it can marginalise romance fiction" is up on YouTube.



Session 4 - Keynote Panel on “Romancing Popular Fiction Studies: A Theory of Genre Worlds” by Beth Driscoll (University of Melbourne), Lisa Fletcher (University of Tasmania) and Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland)
SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, with more graphics: See thread

There's also a podcast recorded with the presenters in advance of this panel: Podcast

Session 5 - History and Romance, with papers by Stephanie Russo (Macquarie University), Jennifer Wallace and Francesca Pierini (Academia Sinica, Taiwan).
Kat had to miss most of this session, so the thread is by Jodi McAlister:  SEE THREAD

Renée Dahlia has written a blog post about the session.

Philippa B's summary of Stephanie Russo's paper on "Georgette Heyer’s Unruly Eighteenth Century" can be found here.

Phillipa B's summary of Pierini's presentation about "Italian timelessness" can be found here.

Jennifer Wallace writes romance as Jennifer Hallock and she's put her paper up on her website in two parts. Part one looks at how the bestsellers in historical romance are disproportionately: (1) set in Great Britain; (2) overpopulated with nobles; and (3) selective in their historical accuracy. Part two looks at how the aggregate impact of these chronotopes can be harmful to our understanding of history, to the romance market as a whole, and particularly to authors of diverse books. For links to more graphics and a way to help Jennifer crowdsource historical romances which differ from the chronotope she identified, go here and scroll to the end of the post.

Jennifer's been interviewed by Book Thingo (Kat) on a podcast which can be found and listened to here.

Phillipa B's summary of Jennifer Wallace's "History Ever After: Fabricated historical chronotopes in romance genre fictions" can be found here.

Session 6 - Power and Patriarchy, with papers by Heather Schell (George Washington University), Nattie Golubov (Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Therese Dryden (University of Newcastle) and Jayashree Kamblé (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York)
SEE THREAD

See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.

Philippa B's post about Heather Schell's "The Soft Power of Popular Romance" can be found here.

Philippa B's post about Nattie Golubov's "Dangerous loves endangered: nationalism, violence and territoralization in US paramilitary romance fiction" is here.

Philippa B's summary of Therese Dryden/Michelle Douglas's "The Single Mother and the Law: Romance novels making room for female voices in patriarchal spaces" is here.

And details of Jayashree Kamblé's “One of the Guys? Eve Dallas as a Masculine Worker Heroine in J.D. Robb’s In Death series", also by Philippa B.

Session 7 - 19th Century Legacies, with papers by Sarah Ficke (Marymount University), Steven Gil and Lucy Sheerman
SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.

Details here about Sarah Ficke's “House, Home, and Husband in Historical Romance Fiction", from Philippa B.

Steven Gil's "Beloved Monstrosity: Romance and Romanticism in Frankenstein" has been summarised by Philippa B.

Philippa B has summarised Lucy Sheerman's “Reader, I mirrored him: the recasting of romance tropes in Jane Eyre fanfiction" here.


Session 8 - Muslim and Middle Eastern Romance, with papers by Kathrina Daud (University of Brunei), Claire Parnell (University of Melbourne), Javaria Farooqui (University of Tasmania) and Amy Burge (University of Birmingham)
SEE THREAD
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.

Philippa B's posted about Kathrina Daud's "Muslims reading romance: Bruneian considerations of “Halal” and romance novels" here.

The abstract of Claire Parnell's “Reading and Writing Muslim Romance Online” and notes on the session by Philippa B can be found here.

Philippa B's post on Javaria Farooqui's “The Kitchen and Beyond: Romantic Chronotope of Pakistani Popular Fiction" is here.

Amy Burge's “Girls of Riyadh and Desperate in Dubai: Reading and writing romance in the Middle East" is summarised here by Philippa B.

Session 9 - Romancing Chinese Worlds, with papers by Fang-Mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University), Huike Wen (Willamette University), Jin Feng (Grinnell College) and Erin S. Young (SUNY Empire State College)
SEE THREAD (by Jodi McAlister)
See Renée Dahlia's blog post about the session.

The abstract of Huike Wen's “On the Way to a Better Life: Countryside themed romance in recent Chinese Television" and some additional comments from the paper are provided by Philippa B here.

Philippa B also provides these for Jin Feng's “Life Is Elsewhere: The Economy of Food and Sex in Chinese Web Romance”

and for “Romance in Chinatown: The Love Stories of Edith Maude Eaton” by Erin S. Young.

Session 10 - South/South-East Asian Romance Communities with a paper by Meghna Bohidar (University of Delhi)

Bohidar: young romantic couples are less concerned with caste and religious differences, however they still shape subjectivity e.g. through taste. #IASPR18 pic.twitter.com/QrvvM5tZFt

— PopFic Doctors (@PopFicDoctors) 29 June 2018

For those who can't read the text in that photo, it contains a definition of an important term used in Bohidar's paper: "Habitus is a set of microbehaviors consisting of a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions that are unconsciously ingrained based on one's class position"

SEE THREAD and Philippa B's summary of Meghna Bohidar's “Negotiating Romantic Love in India: Family, Public Space, and Popular Cinema"

The session then moved on to Kat Mayo's interview of/conversation with Mina V. Esguerra

Happening on Friday at 9am Manila Time! #IASPR18 ⁦@BookThingo⁩ ⁦@minavesguerra⁩ pic.twitter.com/3tuHF2EBVb

— Ansela Corsino (@anselacorsino) 27 June 2018

Here's Jennifer Hallock's thread on the Mina Esguerra conversation and a post elsewhere about/with #romanceclass authors.

Renée Dahlia has written a post about the whole session.

Philippa B's notes can be found here.


Session 11 - Subversions of Race, Culture and History with papers by Eric Murphy Selinger (DePaul University), Mallory Jagodzinski (Indiana University South Bend) and Johanna Hoorenman (Utrecht University)
SEE THREAD and, from Jodi McAlister, A SUPPLEMENTARY THREAD

Here's Renée Dahlia's post about this session.

The abstract of, supplemented by notes by Philippa B on, Eric Murphy Selinger's “The Wild Heart of the Continent: Love and Place in Sherry Thomas’s Silk Road Romance Novels”

The same, but for Mallory Jagodzinski's “Love is (Color) Blind: Race, Belonging, and Nation in 21st Century Historical Romance Fiction" is here.


Again, an abstract followed by comments by Philippa B, this time on “‘You stayed’: Love, law and the reservation in Jenna Kernan’s Apache Protectors series" by Johanna Hoorenman.


Session 12 - Love in Other Worlds with papers by Donna Hanson (University of Canberra), María T. Ramos-García (South Dakota State University), Athena Bellas (University of Melbourne) and Kristin Noone (Irvine Valley College)
SEE THREAD and coverage of the FINAL PAPERS in this thread by Jodi McAlister.

Here's Renée Dahlia's post about this session.

Philippa B's post about Donna Hanson's “Love in Outer Space: Science fiction romance — the ideal place to explore gender and love” can be found here.

María T. Ramos-García's “Representations of Otherness in Paranormal Romance: Nalini Singh and J.R. Ward” is summarised by Philippa B here.

I've now come across a couple of reports on the recent Georgette Heyer conference. Sophie Weston mentions that

A terrific paper from Vanda Wilcox made the point that, however precise Heyer’s grasp of strategic issues at Waterloo might have been, her officers “embody World War I values and leadership style”. At the same time Heyer’s other ranks (gorgeous Gideon Ware’s straight-talking soldier servant, for instance) are basically WWI Tommies in red coats, rather than Wellington’s rapists and pillagers. Convinced me completely.

Her full report can be found here. The evening discussion session is described here by Nicola Cornick.

On 29 June, at the Gendered Emotions in History conference held at the University of Sheffield there was a paper on romance, presented by:

Agnes Arnold-Forster (QMUL) - Gender, Emotions, and Professional Identity in Twentieth Century Medical Mills and Boon Novels

The EUPOP2018 conference will be held from July 24th – 26th, 2018. One of the keynote speeches is by

Professor Petr A. Bilek (Charles University, Prague)
Distant Encounters of the Third Kind: Why Is Popular Culture Not Popular within Central European University Curricula?

New to the Wiki: Death, Monsters, Migrations, Du Maurier and more

Here are the new entries, recently added by Christina Martinez and me.

Leonzini, Alexandra, 2018. 

‘“All the Better to Eat You With”: The Eroticization of the Werewolf and the Rise of Monster Porn in the Digital Age.’ Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture. Ed. Ina Batzke, Eric C. Erbacher, Linda M. Heß, Corinna Lenhardt. Bielefeld: transcript. 269-294. [“Starting her analysis with 19th-century horror fiction before moving to 20th-century films and 21-century romance and erotic literature, Leonzini traces the changes in the construction of the gendered and sexualized body of the figure of the werewolf” (12) and there is therefore quite a lot of reference to romance, which is deemed to have laid the groundwork for modern monster porn. Excerpt.]

Lowery, Karalyne, 2018. 

"The Militarized Shapeshifter: Authorized Violence and Military Connections as an Antidote to Monstrosity." University of Toronto Quarterly 87.1: 196-213. Abstract.

O'Mahony, Lauren. 2017. 

"Death and the Australian Rural Romance Novel." TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, vol. (Supplement 45), Oct. 2017, pp. 1-14. [Full text]

 

Salvador Miguel, Nicasio, 1995. 

¿Hay precedentes de la novela rosa? Letras de la España contemporánea. Homenaje a José Luis Varela, ed. N. Salvador Miguel (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos): 319-327. [Full text]

Suman [Sigroha], 2018. 

"Gendered Migrations and Literary Narratives: Writing Communities in South Asian Diaspora." Millennial Asia 9.1: 93-108.[Full text] [On "educated skilled women from South Asia who migrate as ‘trailing spouses’" and turn to romance-writing as an alternative, portable career.]

Turner, Katherine. 2017. 

"Daphne Du Maurier's Mary Anne: Rewriting the Regency Romance as Feminist History." University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities, vol. 86, no. 4, pp. 54-77. [Abstract]

Vitackova, Martina, 2018. 

"Representation of racial and sexual ‘others’ in Afrikaans popular romantic fiction by Sophia Kapp." Tydskrif vir letterkunde 55.1. 122-133. Abstract and link to pdf

Laura Vivanco

Romance VI: Risky Business: Love, Abuse, and Violence

Domestic Abuse and Violence in the Works of Nora Roberts

(Pavla Stefanska, Masaryk University)

Love overcomes everything. Everything is fair in love and war. There is a fine line between love and hate. These and similar sayings may evoke an impression that there is a close connection between love and violence. Apart from that, they also represent some of the beliefs which permeate western culture’s ideas of love and relationships. As people have the tendency to accept these sayings at their face value and rarely question where these ideas come from and how they affect their behavior, they seldom realize that these beliefs pose a potential threat to their intimate relationships.

Based on the article by Julia T. Wood “The Normalization of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships: Women’s Narratives of Love and Violence” in which she cites western gender and romance narratives as responsible for the high number of women who stay with abusive partners, this paper examines several novels by Nora Roberts, one of the most popular romance writers of our time, in which the author uses domestic abuse in hero’s or heroine’s past as a barrier which stands in the way of their HEA. The paper explores whether Roberts’ portrayal of the domestic violence corresponds to the narrative categories proposed by Wood, and is looking in more detail at the ways in which the after effects of the trauma caused by the abuse are dealt with in terms of reclaiming one’s own identity and re-establishing oneself not only within the narrative of a successful romantic relationship, but also within the much wider narrative of one’s place in community and society, to show that are differences at Roberts’ descriptions which mirror the changing trends in society and the de-tabooing of the issue of domestic abuse in the last thirty years. 


“It Felt Like A Kiss”: Violence and Violations in Jo Beverley’s An Unwilling Bride

(Angela Toscano, University of Iowa)

The title of this paper is taken from The Crystals’ 1962 single, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss).” This was a song that was not popular even in its own time, and it garnered criticism for its supposed endorsement of spousal abuse. Yet, the song is not simply an unthinking approval of domestic violence. Rather, it reveals something—both in its tonality and its lyrics—about how love and violence intertwine and tangle until one becomes the metonymic stand in for the other. Similarly, discussions of Jo Beverley’s 1992 novel, An Unwilling Bride, question whether the book simply endorses violence as being synonymous with love.

Somewhere, someone once called An Unwilling Bride a novel that puts “the alpha male on trial.” Yet, it this what is being tried? What Beverley’s novel tries are the boundaries between love and violence, passion and anger, anger and abuse. These terms are alternately collapsed and separated throughout the course of the novel. What distinguishes an act of violence from an act of abuse? What is abuse? How are both related to passion? While romance community discussions of the novel have focused on either the acceptability of the hero’s actions or the believability of the novel’s HEA, my paper will argue that the novel plays out the logic of violent love in order to untie that metonymic bond between the two terms.

The Witch Must Die---- Gaze, Female Transgression and Misogyny in Linda Howard’s Dream Man

(Adam Tang, Springly Seasons International Publishers)

Linda Howard’s Dream Man, published in 1994, highlights the issue of misogyny toward female transgression through a combination of thrillers and popular romances. The story focuses on a number of female victims whose occasionally ill manners offend the male serial killer and thus are doomed to death as punishment. Howard explicitly depicts the bloody murder scenes as well as the irrational gender-specific hatred, which is rarely specified in popular romantic narratives.

Death and murder has long been a part of romantic narrative since Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Unlike the detectives or mystery, however, popular romances focus on the relationship development between the heroine and the hero rather than the process or motives of the murder itself. Mostly, murder in popular romances is never the center of romance readers’ gaze, functioning only as the story background or plot stimulation. The purpose of death and murder in romance narrative serves for the protagonists to recognize their love for each other as well as for the readers to contrast the expected happy ending. Hence, the murder depicted in popular romances is usually personally motivated. The cause of death is comprehensible and definite, lest the uncanny death threat should shadow the happily ever-after.

Yet Howard’s Dream Man portrays an irrational serial killer whose victims have little personal involvement with him. Through the heroine’s psychic sight/ gaze, the readers are presented with detailed bloody processes of murders. The murders become the center of romance readers’ gaze and none of the deaths is out of personal causes but of misogyny. This essay aims to elaborate the treatment of murder and misogyny in Linda Howard’s Dream Man and how it celebrates the female strength through a modern version of witch hunting.

Fifty Shades of Anti-Feminism: The Distortion of the Fetish and the Romance Novel in Post-Feminist Culture

(Kalauren McMillan, Winthrop University)

Fifty Shades of Gray, an erotic novel by E.L. James, tells the story of Ana Steele, who is forced via her attraction and dynamic position into an abusive, pseudo-BDSM relationship with Christian Gray. In my paper, I argue that the novel promotes a harmful trend of disempowerment of women through distorting the BDSM lifestyle, glorifying an oppressed heroine, and textually placing Ana in forceful passivity to Christian.

I start my presentation by surveying how romance novels are traditionally seen as anti-feminist. However, scholars have proven that this is not a requirement of the genre. Romance novels may contain feminist facets. I argue that James does not incorporate feminist literary techniques, but has shaped aspects of the novel toward oppression. The BDSM aspect of the novel does not conform to the tenets of the lifestyle and distorts the subculture into a mode of abuse and feminine disempowerment. In addition, Ana has no defense against the aforementioned factors due to her naivety and lack of self.

I conclude that the impetus of this novel is the post-feminist movement. The rise of post-feminism has allowed James’ novel to gain popularity with many female readers. These women, as a result, exalt the characteristics that allow and encourage Ana’s oppression via Christian. In light of Ana idolizing Christian for aesthetic beauty and perceived perfection and ameliorating his abusive and non-consensual sexual tendencies, I conclude female readers of the novel now see this portrayal of the “ideal” man as a potential romantic partner. Seeing Christian as the height of sexual and relationship pleasure, women are encouraged through the novel to seek oppression and disempowerment as “happiness” and “liberation.”

On Target

Laura Vivanco

Jackie C. Horne has just put up a post at Romance Novels for Feminists  in which she takes a close look at what Linda Howard and Linda Jones's Running Wild has to say about guns and gun control. She concludes that,

In order for gun advocates to successfully deploy the figure of the woman in their rhetoric, they must balance between two apparently opposing visions of femininity. Women must be constructed as in danger, subject at any time and for no apparent reason to the violent behavior of marauding male criminals such as Brad. Yet they must also be shown as believing that gun ownership will empower them, will allow them to protect themselves and others from any such depredations. Howard and Jones demonstrate how conflating romance and gun ownership might just make this ideological tightrope that much easier for gun rights activists to walk.

I'd encourage you to read the whole of "Guns, Love, and Ideology in Romantic Suspense."

Paper Topics, part 2

Eric again!

A few days ago I posted the first round of paper topics for ENG 386, my current course on popular romance fiction. Those topics focused on our first two novels, Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation and Victoria Dahl's Talk Me Down. The second round of paper topics focused on the next three novels in the mix, each of which dealt in some way with the relationships between romance and religion. (No, we didn't read Frye's The Secular Scripture. One of these days.)

My other concern with these topics, as you'll see, was to make sure that my students did some close textual analysis. A number of the first set of papers found it hard to work closely with the works they chose, as though it were difficult for students to bring their usual novel-reading skills to bear on a popular text. Easier--all too easy--to paint characters or scenes in broad strokes, but in so doing, students often wrote papers without the nuance or insight that they clearly are capable of in other contexts.

Anyway, here are the topics.

1. In class, we spent some time discussing the epigraphs in Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love: those brief quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible, various poets, and other sources that open the book and then each chapter in it. Why are these there? What uses do they serve? Choose three of these epigraphs and write an essay about the relevance or importance of that epigraph to the chapter that it opens, or to how we read the book as a whole. Please note that to do this, you may need to look up the original context of the quoted passage, or think about its author and source.

2. One of the most striking passages in Redeeming Love comes at the end of chapter 30, when Sarah has a dream / vision and finally finds faith. Write an essay that gives a “close reading” of this passage, attending both to the details of her dream and to their sequence: what happens first, second, third, and last. What meanings and implications—about her character, about theology, about her relationship with Michael, or about the romance novel itself—can you tease out of those details? How successful is this passage emotionally and / or aesthetically, and why?

3) As we discussed in class, the world of False Colors is filled with violence and dehumanization: bodies and souls that are wounded, tortured, killed, or stunted by lack of love. There are many ways that we can understand all this violence, for example politically, as an expression of what patriarchy does to bodies, both female and male, philosophically, as a denial of victims’ humanity, psychologically, as an expression of repressed sexual desires, or even theologically, as an expression of fallen human cruelty, as opposed to divine grace or love. Write an essay on the novel that explores violence and its opposite—love and tenderness—from at least one of these perspectives. Be sure to focus, at least in part, on the final chapters of the novel, in which we see forgiveness, love, and sexual pleasure in action. Be sure to discuss passages in detail, attending to language and imagery, rather than simply discussing plot twists.

4) In a recent set of comments at the Teach Me Tonight blog (following the post "Are You a Ruthless Woman?"), a commenter named Angel observed that “there's discussion in fandom about how slash fiction written by women often focuses more on penis-in-anus penetrative sex, forgetting that gay men have a variety of sexual practices, and that some men simply don't like anal. I think maybe that's a byproduct of the cultural messages surrounding penis-in-vagina sex.” For this paper, go and read the comment thread (following useful links as necessary), and then bring the ideas from it about the symbolic meanings attached to various sexual practices to bear on ONE of the following topics:

• the sequencing of sex scenes in False Colors, with particular attention to the final chapter; OR
• the variety of sex scenes, sexual practices, and sexual orientations on display in Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander; OR
• a comparison and contrast of the two novels.

Remember, if you choose this topic, that you’re not simply trying to find and list the scenes themselves. Rather, you’re trying to use ideas from the comment thread to interpret the scenes and their importance in the novels, teasing out the symbolic (or other) implications of them. Feel free to disagree with the ideas you find in your on-line reading, and to bring up alternative sources or interpretations as needed.

5) As we saw in class, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander quotes, cites, and echoes a variety of precursors, including material from Shakespeare, the Bible, and Jane Austen (among others). Choose a small number of these earlier texts—a single allusion, the various sonnets, the closing Biblical passage from Proverbs—and write an essay on its importance to the scene in which it appears and / or to the novel as a whole. You may need to think about both the cited / quoted material itself, and about the cultural reputation of the source.

6) One of the structural features we have noticed about popular romance novels—it may show up in other genres as well—is the deployment of repetition and variation. Scenes and motifs, phrases or images recur, and the differences between the first and second (or even third) iterations of the material can be used to mark the evolution of a character, a relationship, or an idea in the text. Choose ONE of our three most recent novels where you notice a repeated / variety scene or motif, and write an essay on how the author uses repetition and variation in this artful way. What does she dramatize or enact for us, as readers, through her use of this device?

CFPs: Key Themes and Kindred Genres

Laura Vivanco

I've seen a number of calls for papers recently which, while not directly about the romance genre, may be of interest to readers of this blog.

2nd Global Conference: Revenge - Probing the Boundaries (July, 2011: Oxford, United Kingdom)

Revenge, so we are told, is a dish best served cold: a ‘sweet’ wreaking of vengeance on those who have – either in reality or in our minds – slighted, wronged or in some way ‘injured’ us and who are now ‘enjoying’ their just deserts by an avenging angel (or angels) on the great day of reckoning.

This inter- and multi-disciplinary research and publications project seeks to explore the multi-layered ideas and actions of vengeance or revenge. The project aims to explore the nature of revenge, its relationship with issues of justice, and its manifestation in the actions of individuals, groups, communities and nations. The project will also consider the history of revenge, its ‘legitimacy’, the ‘scale’ of vengeful actions and whether revenge has (or should have) ‘limits’. Representations of revenge in film, literature, tv, theatre and radio will be analysed; cultural ‘traditions’ of retaliation and revenge will be considered. And the role of mercy, forgiveness and pardon will be assessed.

For more information, click here and here.

"Virgin Envy: Contemporary Approaches to Virginity in Literature and Arts": Canadian Comparative Literature Association Congress 2011 (Fredericton from 28 May to 4 June)

Virginity has long been a trope found in literary and cultural texts, however, how do we understand virginity and why does it matter become two questions worthy of consideration. This joint-panel between the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and the Canadian Association of Hispanists aims to work through the poetics and politics of virginity in narrative, poetry, cinema, graphic novels, and popular culture. In many regards, though virginity has been studied, particularly in Medieval Literature, and aspects of Renaissance and Classical Literature, we have yet to see much consideration of virginity as a theoretical problem in modern texts. As such, we welcome papers that move beyond the Virgin Mary and the Virgin of Guadalupe and aim to consider virginity as an interdisciplinary matter that must be considered from the widest-possible range of perspectives. Papers presented in these panels may be considered for inclusion in an upcoming book of essays on the topic of virginity.

More details here.

Frothy, Frivolous, or Feminist?: Expanding the Critical Discourse on Chick Lit and Women's Fiction (2011 American Literature Association Conference, May 26-29 in Boston)

In the introduction to their essay collection Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young state that, “[o]n one hand chick lit attracts the unquestioning adoration of fans; on the other it attracts the unmitigated disdain of critics” (1). Indeed, chick lit is enormously popular, and its commercial success extends well beyond the literary world—the genre continues to influence the television and film industry. Chick lit is, as Ferris and Young point out, “big business” (2). However, the popularity and commercial success of chick lit all but ensure it is dismissed critically. In fact, respected novelists like Beryl Bainbridge and Doris Lessing have dubbed authors who write chick lit as the “chickerati,” and Bainbridge describes the genre as “froth” and a waste of time (1). The critical discourse on chick lit is largely negative, condemning the genre as “trivial” and dismissing the fans who claim it depicts the realities of contemporary single women’s lives (2). In fact, the critical treatment of chick lit—or, the lack thereof—seemingly dismisses the genre purely because of its popularity, and most critics’ unwillingness to take chick lit seriously is remarkably similar to the critical treatment of women writers of the late-18th and 19th-centuries. Writers such as Susan Warner, Sarah Josepha Hale, and E.D.E.N. Southworth, all of whom were enormously popular when originally published in the 19th century, have been largely ignored by the contemporary academy because their works are seen as didactic, sentimental, and unrealistic—all terms that have been applied to various works of chick lit.

They've been applied to the romance genre too, of course. More details here.

Call for Essay Submissions on Love in Film and Television Westerns

Call for submissions for an edited collection requested by Palgrave Macmillan Submissions for a collection of essays tentatively titled Cowboy Love: Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails in Western Film and Television.

Long before the release of Brokeback Mountain (2005), Cowboy Love was a complicated, and often conflicted, subject in Western film. Cowboys who would never run from a fight often run from love, and for good reason. Transgressive and titillating, love is one of the most hazardous of all frontier activities in the West. Its presence and absence establish and destabilize gender norms, raising social, political, moral and ethical questions. Simultaneously affirming archetypes of manliness and womanhood and challenging notions of American machismo, the narrative of frontier romance has contributed to the lasting popularity of the cowboy and the endurance of the Western as a genre.

More details here.

Guns and Soap

Laura Vivanco

"I'm also intrigued by some of the ideas brought up in studies of the relationship between colonialism and hygiene" (Evil Auntie Peril)

As you can see if you look closely at the advertisement for Pears Soap (on the left), the text reads

The first step towards lightening The White Man's Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pear's Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place - it is the ideal toilet soap.

The white man in the white uniform who comes to cleanse the dark continents is

Admiral Dewey, victor at Manila Bay, washing his hands on shipboard. Smaller images in the corners show: an American naval warship (upper left); a wooden Spanish ship (upper right); a missionary instructing an almost naked dark-skinned Filipino in the need to use Pears' (lower right); and a shipload of Pears' being off-loaded in Manila harbor. (McClymer)

So, what does an advertisement, which according to Wikimedia Commons dates from the 1890s (Kimberly Jensen specifies that it is from McClure's Magazine 13 (Oct., 1899)) have to do with the romance genre?

Well, I hope that will become very clear (not dark, opaque, or dirty) in what follows. This morning I came across a post by Tumperkin, in which she explained that

Over the years I've read posts about all sorts of difficult issues: forced sex, BDSM, controlling heroes Stuff that raises issues over consent, abuse, self-worth. And for me, I'm cool with all of it. No matter how much something might offend 'normal' mores, if the author can make it explicable with reference to their characters, I can be cool with it. I'm disturbed by reader comments that say authors 'shouldn't' write this or that character or scene or event in a particular way. I'm hugely protective of freedom of expression and I resent the attitude (whether partriarchal or matriarchal) that readers don' t have the wit to make their own judgements.

And so, until recently, I've been patting myself on the back thinking that I'm this uber-liberal, all cool with the morally ambiguous and questionable. The trouble is, I've recently had to admit that I do have a sensitivity. [...] And it's around killing/ punishment/ guns/ stuff like that.

Tumperkin's comment broadens the discussion we've been having over the past week which can perhaps be summarised as: "you already have politics in your escapist reading, you just don't notice it's there when it's got the slant you prefer." I don't want to dwell on the particular issue she brings up (although we did touch very, very briefly on gun control in response to my last post), but I would like to add a few more links and examples.

Smart Bitch Candy linked to a series of posts by Evil Auntie Peril (1, 2, 3, 4). EAP takes a closer look at dirt (and sometimes the lack of it) in the romance genre and one of the conclusions she reaches is that "Cleanliness = morality. H/H are good people. Disease, dirt and bad breath only happens to deserving villains or ex-partners (possibly tragically if its backstory, possibly because they are villains)." It's worth reading all four parts of the post in full.

Candy continues by looking at some other examples of how certain aspects of personal appearance and preferences are used in the genre as "short-hand for villainy and otherness." One example she gives involves food:

this detail was quite clearly used in a way to Show How Furrin the Chinese Are. It was a way to set up Chinatown and the Chinese as Other, as Exotic, as Not Who We Are, We Who Consume Mostly Muscle Meat and Turn Green When There’re Pink Bits In Our Roast Chicken. The details regarding the Chinese food and the roast ducks in the display window weren’t used to villainize the Chinese characters, in the way personal hygiene is used to villainize other people in historicals, but the hero and heroine’s squick reaction solicited a similar squick reaction in the reader, and hence empathize more with the characters.

Another example is

how authors use body weight, especially in male characters, as a way of indicating Super Duper Concentrated Villainy (Evil Nature Established in only 1/3 the Wordcount!) [...] I’m thinking back to other obese male villains I’ve encountered, and the ones that aren’t emasculated or desexualized tend to be portrayed as sexually perverse: they’re into extreme sadism, or pedophilia, or, I don’t know, clown-rape and gerbils, with an undertone that regular sex just isn’t good enough for them. Corpulent villainy is rarely garden-variety villainy. It’s Villainy Plus. The size of their bodies seems to represent the perversity of their souls, and this is a tried and true method in fiction in general: have the ugliness inside manifest itself outside.

These short-hands and other political messages are often difficult to spot, particularly if the person being cast as the "Other" is different from the reader. Because of this, it may be easiest to notice their presence in older romances. E. M. Hull's The Sheik is a text which includes disdain for foreign food/drink and a fat, dirty, smelly villain who is racially Other.

Lady Diana Mayo distinguishes between normal coffee and "native" coffee: "the smell of native coffee was heavy in the air" (105) and "Diana hated the sweet, thick stuff" (106). As for the fat, dirty, racially-Other villain himself, Ibraheim Omair has a "bloated, vicious face and gross, unwieldy body" (103) and in his tent

there was a close, pungent smell that was eminently native that she [Lady Diana Mayo] never experienced in the cool airiness and scrupulous cleanliness of Ahmed Ben Hassan's [the Sheik's] tents. Her sensitive lip curled with disgust, all her innate fastidiousness in revolt. (106)

The villain's race and his dirt are literally inextricable in the following description, and his physical size is, as Candy wrote, an indication of the extent of his evil:

This was, indeed, the Arab of her imaginings, this gross, unwieldy figure lying among the tawdry cushions, his swollen, ferocious face seamed and lined with every mark of vice, his full, sensual lips parted and showing broken, blackened teeth, his deep-set, bloodshot eyes with a look in them that it took all her resolution to sustain, a look of such bestial evilness that the horror of it bathed her in perspiration. His appearance was slovenly, his robes, originally rich, were stained and tumbled, the fat hands lying spread out on his knees were engrained with dirt, showing even against his dark skin. (108)

and

He reeked of sweat and grease and ill-kept horses, the pungent stench of the native. Her thoughts went back to the other Arab [the Sheik], of whose habits she had been forced into such an intimate knowledge. Remembering all that she had heard of the desert people she had been surprised at the fastidious care he took of himself, the frequent bathing, the spotless cleanliness of his robes, the fresh wholesomeness that clung about him, the faint, clean smell of shaving-soap mingling with the perfume of the Turkish tobacco that was always associated with him.

The contrast was hideous. (110)

This cleanliness is perhaps intended to be read as an early clue that the Sheik is not a "native": he "is English" (120).
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Hull, E. M. The Sheik. 1919. Project Gutenberg, 2003.