Fan Fiction and Romance

Earlier this year, K. A. Laity wrote a guest post for Teach Me Tonight about Joanna Russ and slash fiction and since I recently came across Katherine Morrissey's 2008 MA dissertation, "Fanning the Flames of Romance: An Exploration of Fan Fiction and the Romance Novel," I thought I'd return to the topic. Morrissey found that

The majority of popular stories, the pieces of fan fiction which participants identified as their favorites, were nearly all focused on romantic stories. More significantly, most of these stories featured slash pairings. This differed from the broader reading practices reported by fans. When asked about their overall preferences, participants said that they read similar amounts of the major story types (specifically het, slash, and gen) and a smaller group of readers read femslash or lesbian focused stories. [...] While fans may be open to reading across categories, favorite stories, the ones readers return to and remember, were nearly all focused on male homosexual romance. This contrasts significantly with the focus on heterosexual pairings and female protagonists found in romance novels. (62)

This is something of a generalisation, given the long history of lesbian romance novels and the recent flourishing of m/m romance. Nonetheless, it seems safe to say that heterosexual pairings do continue to dominate the romance genre. Morrissey also found that despite the fact that "Romantic themes nearly always had a presence" in fan fiction, "most fans did not read romance novels. If they did, fan fiction stories were read more. For this population, fan fiction's approach to romance has significantly greater appeal" (78). Morrissey therefore compares and contrasts fan fiction with romance novels in order to answer the question "When fan fiction is examined side-by-side with romance novels, what are the textual similarities and differences that emerge in these romantic stories?" (2).

While it may be entirely correct to state that "Fan fiction and romance novels constitute two bodies of romantic literature being produced for and by women within dramatically different environments" (ii), direct comparisons between the two are somewhat problematic inasmuch as romance novels are not representative of all "romantic literature being produced for and by women" in the commercial fiction environment. If one were to seek out an area of commercial fiction which is comparable to romantic fan fiction, one should perhaps include all the commercial genres "produced for and by women," including "family sagas" of the kind written by Catherine Cookson, women's fiction, chick lit, the "bonkbuster," and "‘erotic fiction for women by women’ as exemplified by Virgin Publishing’s Black Lace imprint" (Sonnet)¹ or Harlequin's Spice imprint:

engrossing stories about women's lives, experiences and relationships, woven through with several explicit sex scenes that have context within the plot. We expect writers to be graphic—using the kind of frank language typical of the genre—as well as daring, exploring any and all sexual situations, even ones considered "taboo." [...] Spice Books are not traditional romances, nor do they require a happily-ever-after ending.

Despite the fact that Morrissey mentions Harlequin's Spice imprint, she nonetheless draws a distinction between romances and fan fiction based on

the fan's traditional comfort with the sexual content of their romance narratives. While romance novels have historically been careful to place sexual encounters within marriage (or the promise of an inevitable marriage), fan fiction textors [i.e. the creators of fan fiction] and readers happily produce stories in which sex may be enjoyed in a variety of circumstances and often write about sexual encounters without a larger courtship narrative accompanying them. (18)

By contrast, she suggests that romances,

By encoding sexuality and desire within marriage, motherhood, and heterosexuality, [...] adhere to dominant social norms and constrain the diversity of sexualities and practices represented. Readers seeking more explicit and open sexual texts may go directly to the erotica genre of literature instead. However, as erotic texts for women establish themselves and loosen social stigmas, romance publishers also adapt, as is indicated by their increased focus on erotic romance. (51)

However, not all romances encode "sexuality and desire within marriage, motherhood, and heterosexuality" and some people may choose to read erotica not "instead" of romance, but in addition to it.

Morrissey seems to hold certain basic assumptions which I think require a little bit more nuance. For example, Morrissey concludes that

Romance novels provide readers with fantasy experiences and an escape to happier or more exciting realities. The goal of these fantasy experiences is immersion. [...] While placing stories in historic settings or fantasy worlds far removed from a reader's daily life is an important method for initiating immersion into romantic fantasies, two additional storytelling techniques, focusing on food and costuming, cement this process and connect the reader's body to the heroine's. (48-49)

This seems to assume that female readers closely identify with the heroine and/or she becomes in a sense a "placeholder" into which they can insert themselves in order to share her experiences. This may be true for many readers but as I've mentioned before, it isn't true for me and I suspect I can't be the only one who adopts a more "fly on the wall" perspective. Indeed, Morrissey herself later writes that "The heroine may traditionally be offered as an identification point in romance novels but readers can choose to identify with the hero, both characters, or do something entirely different" (98-99).

The existence of romances about friends who become lovers and marriages in trouble seems to call into question Morrissey's assertion that

In romance novels, protagonists begin as strangers to each other. They may have been acquainted in the past, or in passing, but there is always sense of two individuals seeing and approaching each other for the first time. Contrasting this, in Stealing Harry, the two leads are life-long friends. (90)

It may well be true, as Morrissey states, that the most popular fan fictions

are significantly longer than most romance novels. They are also ongoing, updated over the course of years, another noticeable difference from romance novels, which typically focus on a romantic couple once and then move on. These contrasts with romance novels suggest that fan fiction readers may be looking for alternatives to romantic conventions, as well as more variety in the types of romance they consume. (64)

This does, however, seem to ignore the many romance series that exist, in which protagonists from previous novels in a series reappear as secondary characters in another, or secondary characters from one book are transformed into the protagonists of later ones. In addition, there are also series in which a single romance arc extends over various novels: J. D. Robb's In Death books, for example, are very popular with many romance readers, as are Dorothy L. Sayers's Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane novels, and Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.

Morrisey goes on to state that

Romance novels end with established, monogamous relationships. Partners marry, build homes together and create families, moving onto another stage in their lives. At the end of most romance novels, a relationship is permanent. (81)

whereas fan fictions

balance happiness and progress with a sense of realism. The message is that relationships are hard, they require work, but the characters are probably still up to the task. These less utopian endings present relationships a little bit closer to those in the real world. (84-85)

However, given that many people in the "real world" do form permanent romantic relationships, "marry, build homes together and create families," is the fact that romance protagonists also do these things really an indication of a lack of realism?

Morrissey also contrasts romances with fan fictions on the basis of statements made by

Commercial romance authors and defenders Ann Maxwell and Jayne Ann Krentz [who] discuss several traditional romance novel story types in their article, "The Wellsprings of Romance," and critique what they identify as two emerging modern hero archetypes or myths, the "househusband" and the "Alan Alda clone." One is a homemaker, the other a supportive partner and listener. Maxwell and Krentz acknowledge that these characters may have some attraction to readers, but issue a caution, "[...] these myths lack an ingredient that is vital to popular fiction: conflict." (85)

Morrissey therefore concludes that

The presence and popularity of fan fiction stories incorporating [...] more balanced, less aggressive and dominant characters challenge Maxwell and Krentz's assertion that these protagonists do not provide the right dynamics to entertain their readers. It is not that they stories lack conflict, as they suggest, the textors have just found different character journey's to build stories and relationships around. In many of the slash stories dramatic tension is connected to sexuality and societal expectations, in others the story setting and plot provide the characters with their challenge. [...]
The popularity of these different stories is an important reminder that the heroic alpha-male character does not hold romantic appeal to all readers. Instead, readers are interested [in] various depictions of masculinity. Stories can be written about partnership, family building, and a couple's growing understanding and connection through communication as well as conflict and power struggles. This does not mean that fan fiction stories cannot also play with power and control. Neither does it mean that conflict will not exist between two protagonists. It simply means that romance is not being limited to one particular relationship type. Again, within fan fiction stories, the romance formula is being broadened and diversified. (88-89)

I would suggest alpha male heroes don't appeal to all romance readers either, and that the reason Maxwell and Krentz were so trenchant in their statements was due to the fact that, at the time they were writing, there had been an increase in the genre of "hero archetypes" other than the alpha male which these authors preferred. Their statements, then, can perhaps be read as evidence that the romance genre itself is "diversified." I would go further, and claim that it has never been "limited to one particular relationship type": the beta hero

is not a recent invention. Edward Ferrars in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) is

too diffident to do justice to himself; but when his natural shyness was overcome, his behaviour gave every indication of an open affectionate heart […]. All his wishes centered in domestic comfort and the quiet of private life. (Vivanco and Kramer)

It should be acknowledged that Morrissey is aware both of some of the limitations of her source material, and of the dangers of generalising about genres which include vast numbers of texts:

The difficulty in writing about entire categories of literature is that there are always so many more topics to be discussed. For every generalizing statement, there are further contradictions to be accounted for or explained. Thousands of romance novels are published each year and a seemingly infinite amount of fan fiction stories are available online and off. Only a small sample of romance novels and fan fiction could be examined for this project. (105)

I suspect that Morrissey's conclusions are far stronger when they focus solely or primarily on fan fiction: they are based not only on a reading of a selection of primary and secondary sources but also on her survey of fan fiction readers which "received nearly 1000 responses in the first twenty-four hours alone and this pace remained steady throughout the two-week process. At close, the survey had 7,748 participants" (58). As mentioned, she discovered that "The majority of popular stories, the pieces of fan fiction which participants identified as their favorites, were nearly all focused on romantic stories. More significantly, most of these stories featured slash pairings" (62). She also discovered that "Most of [the] survey population was younger that that of romance novel readers. The majority of survey participants were eighteen, but the dominant age group ranged between eighteen and twenty-eight years of age" (65). It is probable that there are younger readers and writers of fan fiction who were excluded from the survey, since it stated that "You may NOT participate in this survey if you are under 18 years of age. By completing this survey you acknowledge that you are OVER 18 years of age" (109). She also found that there was a "near complete absence of men within the survey population" (66) and that while "The majority of the survey population was [...] heterosexual (68%), [...] over a quarter of the group identified as bisexual or homosexual (23% bisexual, 4% homosexual)" (66).

With regards to the content of the fan fictions, Morrissey claims that "without the publishing industry as a dominant gatekeeper, textors are able to engage in greater experimentation with story structure" (76). She gives as an example "the most popular [of the fan fictions mentioned in her survey,] Speranza's Written by the Victors (Stargate Atlantis) uses an innovative story structure. This story is presented in two formats. Half of it is told through excerpts from fictitious articles, book reviews, and academic debates, the other half is traditional fiction" (80). She also mentions that

As a form of literature now produced primarily online, fan fiction textors are taking greater advantage of the opportunities digital creation provides. There is a long history or fan art and video creation within fan communities. Now, these objects can be combined with stories to enhance the reading experience. Images and artifacts are created in photoshop to develop stories further. Textors do not need to limit themselves to describing a character's apartment, they may now link to pictures of it, and to the coffee shop down the street. Stories constructed in smaller sections can be linked together into a larger story in whatever order the reader wishes to place them in. (104)

Morrissey herself suggests that "recent changes in the romance publishing industry suggest that the opportunities found online may be influencing traditional publishers as well" (104) and this does indeed seem to be the case. Publishers have begun experimenting with incorporating a variety of features into books originally written for publication in paper:

E-books of the latest generation are so brand new that publishers can’t agree on what to call them.
In the spring Hachette Book Group called its version, by David Baldacci, an “enriched” book. Penguin Group released an “amplified” version of a novel by Ken Follett last week. And on Thursday Simon & Schuster will come out with one of its own, an “enhanced” e-book version of “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein.

All of them go beyond the simple black-and-white e-book that digitally mirrors its ink-and-paper predecessor. The new multimedia books use video that is integrated with text, and they are best read — and watched — on an iPad, the tablet device that has created vast possibilities for book publishers. (Bosman)

Harlequin, too, has been experimenting with enriching ebooks:

Have you ever read something in a novel and wished you could see a picture, find a definition, or learn more about it without having to look it up? Now you can with Harlequin’s Enriched eBooks. This special electronic book is enhanced with web links to information about the setting, ceremonies, and other unique elements in Hotly Bedded, Conveniently Wedded, along with an author note, recipe, and photos from author Kate Hardy!

Morrissey also suggests that unlike romances, in which the protagonists' appearances are often described at length,

within the works of fan fiction [...] descriptive moments were primarily limited to character makeovers. [...] The absence of these scenes within fan fiction stories may be explained by fan cultures' general familiarity with the appearance of the original characters. [...] No matter what the origin, however, the importance of awe inspiring, dramatic physical beauty is diminished within many of these stories. This leads to depictions of attraction in which physical appearance has a presence, but its role is not as strong, or as consistent, as it is in romance novels. (92-93)

This seems an interesting hypothesis, and I would have been fascinated to read more about it. If any of you are fans who also read romances, I'd love to know your opinion of this point. Many fandoms are wholly or partially based on TV shows and movies, and many actors are more attractive than average so I wonder if fans may already have formed their own assessment of the actors'/characters' physical attractions. On the other hand, jennygadget has commented that slash fictions are more likely to

describe men's bodies in a more submissive and wanton way, rather than as pervasively dominating. [...] The way men's bodies are objectified in romance seems to more mirror how they are idealized in comic books.

Morrissey also speculates that fan fictions with heterosexual pairings reveal an

ongoing confusion over women's power and agency within relationships and suggest similar confusion for women in the real world.
One way of circumventing these issues is to eliminate the male/female dynamic and replace the woman with another male. Suddenly moments of aggression, parenting, empathy, action etc. do not carry with them the attachments and ramifications they have within the male/female dynamic. (87)

This is a hypothesis which might also be relevant to the study of m/m romances.

Finally, since this has been a post about slash fiction, romance and an MA thesis, I thought I would take the opportunity to mention another, but much more recent MA thesis: Meredith S. Faust's ""Love of the purest kind": Heteronormative Rigidity in the Homoerotic Fiction of Ann Herendeen" (2010), which is available online from here. To date Herendeen has had two novels published. She has stated that the first, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander (2008), "was inspired both by my reading of historical romance and by [...] “slash fiction.”" However, as far as slash is concerned, Herendeen finds that

there's one aspect of them that doesn’t appeal to me: it’s all “look but don’t touch.” Here are women writing about men having sex with each other, for the delectation of women readers, but all the main characters are men and the women never get any of that action.

In her first novel, therefore, she

slashed a genre, not a specific story or set of characters. And then, I slashed the slash. I introduced the hero as gay from the beginning, and showed him in love with a man and attracted to men—that's the first slash. But then I slashed again, writing a heroine back into this all-male paradise.

Her second novel also includes both heroes and heroines, but this time she isn't slashing "a genre": her Pride / Prejudice: A Novel of Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, and Their Forbidden Lovers (2010) is quite explicitly based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
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• Berens, Jessica. "She's gotta have it." The Observer, Sunday 10 September 2000.
• Bosman, Julie. "E-Books Fly Beyond Mere Text." The New York Times, 29 July 2010.
• Faust Meredith S. ""Love of the purest kind": Heteronormative Rigidity in the Homoerotic Fiction of Ann Herendeen." MA Thesis, Department of English, DePaul University, 2010. [Pdf downloadable from here.]
• Morrissey, Katherine. "Fanning the Flames of Romance: An Exploration of Fan Fiction and the Romance Novel." MA Thesis, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University, 2008. [Pdf downloadable from here.]
  
• Sonnet, Esther. "‘Erotic Fiction by Women for Women’: The Pleasures of Post-Feminist Heterosexuality." Sexualities 2.2 (1999): 167-187. [Abstract]
• Vivanco, Laura and Kyra Kramer. "There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).
  

1 Interestingly, slash fiction is known to have influenced at least one of the books published by Black Lace. In 1999 Black Lace's editor, Kerri "Sharp edited Wicked Words, a collection of erotic short stories that became the first British book to introduce slash lit to mainstream publishing" (Berens). It includes work by

Kitty Fisher. Her short story 'Shadowlight' was modified for Black Lace, but reflects the traits of slash in that it is a sci-fi narrative about an affair between two men.

Gay Writes: Sarah Frantz and GLBT Romance

Laura Vivanco

What does seem clear [...] is that the struggle over the romance is itself part of the larger struggle for the right to define and to control female sexuality. (Radway 17)

That was the assessment made by Janice Radway, writing in 1991 about "writers who are trying to incorporate feminist demands into the genre" (17), but it seems no less applicable to the genre today, except that nowadays the struggles related to sexuality are not solely about "female sexuality" but about a much wider range of sexualities. For example,

In what appears to be yet another line drawn in the sand between conservatives and liberals in the broader cultural debate on LGBT rights, a letter from Romance Writers of America member Janet Butler, published in the July 2006 issue of the Romance Writers Report, asks that the RWA redefine the romance genre to include only love stories between one man and one woman. [...]

In her letter, Butler responded to a letter printed in the May 2006 issue of RWR on redefining romance. She argued: “Romance isn't about just any ‘two people' celebrating ‘love in all its forms.' [...] What brought romance fiction to its present level of success is a collection of decades' worth of one-man, one-woman relationship stories, in all their richness, variety, and power. RWA should be the first to endorse that, rather than attempting to placate fringe groups trying to impose their standards upon the rest of us. If anyone's in danger of being ‘censored' here, it's believers in ‘what comes naturally': one-man, one-woman romance.” (Lo)

Dear Author isn't censoring anyone; this week it's giving away "more than 125" books with LGBT protagonists as part of its “Gay Writes” campaign. Here's Sarah Frantz, explaining why, in a video posted as part of the It Gets Better project, begun

by Dan Savage in September 2010, in response to the suicide of Billy Lucas and a number of other teenagers who were bullied because they were gay or their peers suspected that they were gay. Its goal is to prevent suicide among LGBT youth by having gay adults convey the message that these teens' lives will improve. (Wikipedia)

I was interested to find out more about Sarah's view of her role as a literary critic of the genre, and she's agreed to be interviewed for Teach Me Tonight.

Laura: In the video you say that

One of the reasons that I’ve always had faith that it would get better is because I read romance novels. Yes, romance novels, like these... with the mantitty [...] … but increasingly romance novels like these … about two women, and romance novels like these … about two guys. In fact, I love these books so much, and I’ve learned so much from them about how everyone deserves their happy ending that I’ve made a career out of them.

A lot of people would scoff at the idea that one could learn anything useful from a romance novel. Could you mention just a few of the things that readers can learn from romances?

Sarah: I have always claimed that I learned everything I know about communication in a relationship from romance novels. I learned to make sure both partners get heard, that we keep talking until no one feels resentful anymore, to make sure that both partners figure out how to talk to each other. And it's served me well for 20 years. But I have also learned that everyone deserves love, no matter their past traumas, past relationships, or how they're viewed by society. And of course, reading romance is a way to gain sexual knowledge in a way that demystifies a sexual practice. These, of course, combine to demystify all sexual identities, GLBT and BDSM.

One of the reasons for National Coming Out Day, among all the other fabulous reasons, is that the most important thing a GLBT person can do to help gay rights is to come out, because the thing that changes people's minds about gay rights more than anything else is knowing someone who is GLBT. So when the homophobes scream about how gay people in the media are normalizing the homosexual "lifestyle" and making it more acceptable to the general populace...they're absolutely right. So, GLBT romances, or GLBT characters in heterosexual romances, can expose readers to the fact that GLBT people are just people. And that's a wonderful thing to learn too.

Laura: Would you agree that "the struggle over the romance is itself part of the larger struggle for the right to define and to control sexuality"?

Sarah: Yes, but I think the opposite way Radway means it. I'm not clear whether Radway's talking about the struggle during the romance narrative, or the struggle over the romance genre itself. I'm talking about the romance genre: I think, fundamentally, romances are about female pleasure. And part of that pleasure is sexual pleasure, but it's also the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of choice. People don't tend to engage in activities they don't enjoy, that don't bring them pleasure. So romance's ability to bring pleasure to its readers is very important and, I think, utterly untheorized.

I recently had a frustrating discussion with a colleague who seems stuck in the reductive Second Wave feminist belief that all heterosexual romance must diminish female power (however that power is defined) because heterosexual romance is so deeply implicated in patriarchy. So any discussion of romance is a discussion about patriarchal power and any romance is by definition destructive. I once saw Naomi Wolf speak and as much as I might take issue with what she writes in some of her books, she had a really important thing to say. To paraphrase: "women are told that the penis is their enemy, that the penis is out to control them, but lots of women go home at night after a hard day's work thinking of the penis as their friend." Romance, in all its many forms, can be problematic, but it's something most of us in the Western world want, whether we're gay, straight, kinky, or otherwise identified. And the fight over the romance genre is one about power and choice and sexuality.

Laura: Do you see some of your literary criticism as activism?

Sarah: I absolutely do. This became very clear to me during #amazonfail. My championing of romance is a championing of the normativity of sexuality and women's pleasure. And my championing of GLBT and BDSM romance is the championing of the normativity of alternate sexual identities, and I think all that's pretty important.

Laura: You mention in the video that you started writing reviews for Dear Author "specifically to review romances about characters with alternate sexualities because [...] everyone deserves their happy ending and because there are some brilliant GLBT romance novels out there." Are you currently writing any literary criticism of some of these novels?

Sarah: Heh. Short answer: yes. I'm deep in an article on the construction of the submissive male in Joey Hill's Nature of Desire series. One of those books is a m/m romance, all of them are BDSM books. I have a not-so-secret desire to write an analysis of Anah Crow's Uneven, which is the very book for which I started writing at Dear Author, and that's a m/m book. My book project, Alpha Male: Power and Masculinity in American Popular Romance Fiction, will have a chapter on m/m romance (perhaps combined with a discussion of BDSM romance, perhaps separate from it). I feel my post on historical accuracy in m/m romance counted as a form of literary criticism, or at least literary commentary.

But yes, I plan to write about these books as often as I can, because I think it's important to the literary world to know that romances are deserving of study; I think it's important to the romance world to acknowledge that GLBT romances are a thriving, vital sub-genre, and I think it's important to let GLBT people know that there are romances out there for them, too.

Laura: Thanks very much for answering my questions, Sarah.

If you head over to Dear Author you can read more about their Gay Writes week, organised by Sarah.

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• Lo, Malinda. "A Romantic Brouhaha." AfterEllen.Com. August 16, 2006.
• Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Soft Men? Hard Women?

Laura Vivanco

In an essay I co-wrote with Kyra Kramer for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies we explored how social values are expressed through descriptions of protagonists' bodies and we noted that when the hero's penis is being described

in romances there is frequent “use of the personal pronouns — me, he, him, himself — to signify this body part […]. The seemingly unavoidable use of these pronouns is a […] curious euphemistic practice because it equates the man’s penis with the man himself” (Johnson-Kurek 119). The sentence “She cradled the rigid length of him in her palm” (Castle 172) is an example of this kind of writing: the part seems to become the whole. Conversely, when the reader is told that a hero’s body has “Long, long legs, […] a broad back that went on forever, all golden-skinned and rock-hard” (Lindsey 47), the allusion to another part of the hero that might be long, broad, and hard is not subtle.

As Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan have observed, "Heroes are never soft. They are hard. Everywhere" (94). The hardness of a hero's physique isn't just a metaphor for his sexual "hardness": it also implies that he is socially, politically, and/or physically strong. Indeed, the word "hardman" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning "a tough, aggressive, or ruthless man." Hardness, in other words, is used metaphorically to imply power of various kinds.

In her guide to romance writing, Kate Walker states that

the alpha male is strong, powerful, forceful, dynamic and successful ... add in all the rest of it - the cars, the money and the looks - and you have a romance hero. But at heart he's just a human being. [...]
If the hero is totally untouchable, how is he ever going to fall in love? What is it about the heroine that touches something in him in a way that no one has ever done before? [...] There must be a chink in his armour - the reason why he's doing something or the soft inner heart that he's trying to protect - through which your heroine can reach him. (109-110)

Softness, then, as in the phrase "soft inner heart," suggests emotional openness, and even if alpha heroes are allowed some emotional softness, softness is generally symbolically associated with heroines' bodies and their warm, nurturing personalities. The description of the soft and hard bodies is, then, often not simply a description of bodies, but also hints at the gender roles of the people whose bodies are being described.

Contrasts between a hard man and a soft women often serve to emphasise difference between the genders:

His body was rock solid against hers, complementing her softness, accentuating the fact that she was a woman and he was a man. (Carroll 43)

But are women's bodies really always softer than men's bodies? And what are the implications of a masculinity which requires constant "hardness" from someone who is "just a human being"?

The poet Richard Jeffrey Newman has been writing a series of posts titled "Fragments of Evolving Manhood" and one of them is a "slightly edited version" of "the conclusion to an essay about pornography called 'Inside The Men Inside "Inside Christy Canyon,"' that I published in 1994 in the now-defunct literary journal called 'The American Voice.'" In it he quotes a poem by Sharon Olds:

The Connoisseuse of Slugs

When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those gold bodies,
translucent strangers glistening along the
stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
but I was not interested in that. What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug forgot I was there
and sent its antennae up out of its
head, the glimmering umber horns
rising like telescopes, until finally the
sensitive knobs would pop out the
ends, delicate and intimate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.

Olds' poem presents men, and male sexuality, as soft and easily damaged. I found it interesting how the power dynamics shift when the male, instead of having a hard shaft which he will thrust into a soft body, seems soft and vulnerable, even as he grows hard: "the sensitive knobs" never threaten the "connoisseuse of slugs," and it is she who could represents a potential threat since she knows that "they would shrivel to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt."

I don't think slug metaphors will ever become popular in the romance genre, at least not unless readers decide that slimy invertebrates which damage garden plants are romantic (and even then there might be some prejudice against them because they're hermaphrodites), but heroes are sometimes shown to be physically vulnerable, and not just because they've been temporarily injured, but because that vulnerability, that softness, is an intrinsic part of their nature as men:

His skin was surprisingly soft. She was careful to avoid the wound. Men. They thought themselves invincible with their strong bodies. They armed themselves to the teeth and clattered about in their armour, banging their shields together, riding their great horses. None of them facing the fact that underneath it all there was this, warm, soft flesh. Beautiful flesh and muscle which, while it was wholly male, remained vulnerable - male flesh could be hurt as much as it could do hurt. Men. (Townend 2009, 212)

It's also possible for a heroine to be physically hard, like her hero:

"When I first met you, I wanted to do this. I told myself that someday I would, and that when I felt your flesh for the first time, it would be as hard and firm as mine is." He allowed her breasts to fall free [...] Then both hands were spanning her ribs, sliding down into the hollow above her navel as he dipped his head low and kissed her naked shoulder. "Your skin is perfect, not soft like most women's. Whoever said soft skin was sexy? (Spencer 173)

It's probably not a coincidence that when they play racket-ball, they do so as equals: "There were men who extended the courtesy of always letting ladies serve first. It had always peeved Winn. She'd win on her own merits or not at all" (135).

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• Carroll, Marisa, 1995. Marry Me Tonight (Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin).
  
• Spencer, LaVyrle, 1985. Spring Fancy (London: Mills & Boon).
  
• Townend, Carol, 2009. Runaway Lady, Conquering Lord (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).
• Vivanco, Laura, and Kyra Kramer, 2010. “There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre”, Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1.
• Walker, Kate, 2008. Kate Walker's 12 Point Guide to Writing Romance (Abergele: Studymates).
  
• Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan, 2009. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels (New York: Fireside).

The photo came from Wikimedia Commons. Dating from 1857, it was taken by Andreas Groll and shows a suit of armour.

Rape and the Romance Reader

Laura Vivanco

Janet/Robin at Dear Author has put up a post in which she explores the role of the reader, and in particular the reader's consent, in relation to rape/forced seduction scenarios in the romance genre. Given that, as Janet notes, "Traditional literary criticism of Romance [...] has not been particularly kind to the genre nor considerate of the idea that sexual violence has uses beyond mere escapism or sexual oppression," I think it's perhaps worth contextualising this discussion a little.

As Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan have written,

If there's a legacy that has lasted much longer in the popular conception of romance than its actual continued presence, it'd be the existence of rapist heroes in romance. [...] The truth of the matter is, although rape scenes have largely disappeared from romance novels published from the early 1990s onward, they were ubiquitous in romance novels from the early '70s to the mid-'80s. (136-37)

However, as was noted by Lynne Connolly,

For some reason, the “rape into love” types of stories have never been popular in the UK, never sold. So we missed the swathe of books in the early 1990's that depicted such scenes.

The romances Janet discusses in detail, "Christina Dodd’s 1997 A Well-Pleasured Lady," "Sara Craven’s 2009 The Innocent’s Surrender" (a Dear Author review, written by Jane, can be found here), and "Anna Campbell’s Claiming the Courtesan, published in 2007" (Janet's review of it can be found here) are relatively recent romances. Some readers may feel they contain rapes, but other readers may disagree; a discussion of rape in the romance genre is still pertinent because of the continued existence of "forced seductions," which for many readers are indistinguishable from rape. Janet acknowledges that

There is an ongoing debate in Romance-reading communities over whether a rape fantasy is the same thing as a “forced seduction,” but for the purposes of this analysis I am collapsing any potential differences because the very label of “forced seduction” echoes at least two, and perhaps all three of the clinical elements of the rape fantasy. [which Janet has previously listed as being "force, sex, and nonconsent” (“Women’s Erotic Rape Fantasies: An Evaluation of Theory and Research,” Joseph W. Critelli and Jenny M. Bivona, 2008)]

So, having got those details out of the way, I'll get back to Janet's argument. She explains in a comment that she was interested in

the way in which Romance seems to dance on the boundary between rape as a criminal violation against the heroine and the rape fantasy, which is purely a *sexual* fantasy.

In the first case, the power is firmly in the hands of the rapist, and we don’t speak of criminal rape as a sexual crime, but rather as a crime of violence and control. In the case of the rape fantasy, the power lies with the woman who undertakes the fantasy, and even when she appears to subjugate her will to the ravisher, she is cooperating and enjoying the encounter.

That there continues to be so much polarized discussion of which is which in what books ultimately forced me to shift focus away from the hero and heroine to the reader. What is is, in the reader, that makes a scene okay or not? What makes a scene criminal violence or sexual fantasy?

In the post itself, Janet suggests that:

the rape fantasy, as a romanticized erotic interlude between the hero and heroine, will function as romantically successful, empowering, or liberating to the extent that the heroine and/or the reader responds to the incident and interprets/values its consequences within the context of the relationship and the story itself. For me, the key element in valuing these rape fantasies (sometimes referred to as forced seductions) is the extent to which the reader consents on behalf of the heroine, not only to the hero’s forceful taking, but also to the happy romantic ending that the couple share. Whether these incidents of sexual force are politically liberating or limiting in regard to female sexuality and patriarchal dominance is a distinct if related question, and one to which I will posit the answer as both.

You can read Janet's post in full here.

----

• Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. New York: Fireside, 2009.

The image is of a section of Sandro Botticelli's Primavera. It came from Wikimedia Commons. The section shown here depicts a scene at the far right of the painting in which

the west wind Zephyrus tries to seize the nymph Chloris. Ovid's Fasti relates that Zephyrus raped Chloris, married her, and then transformed her into Flora, whom Botticelli depicts to the left of Chloris. Typical of "heroic" rape imagery, it depicts neither overt violence nor sexual intercourse. Indeed, Chloris seems to suffer no great harm.... (quote from this page of quotations from Diane Wolfthal's Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and its Alternatives (2000).)

The Scientific Study of Fiction

Laura Vivanco

I hadn't come across the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media (IGEL) before, and I thought some of TMT's readers might not have either, so here's a very short post about IGEL and the scientific study of literature. The society

is aimed at the advancement of empirical literary research through international and interdisciplinary cooperation. The principal duties of the Society are to support scientific projects through information and cooperation, to further personal contact in all areas of research supported by the Society, to support students and junior researchers in the field of empirical literary research, to press for the application of empirical results, and to organize international conferences.

The first issue of IGEL's journal, Scientific Study of Literature is due to appear in 2011:

Literature has an important role in human culture. Broadly interpreted, literature is defined as all cultural artefacts that make use of literary devices, such as narrativity, metaphoricity, symbolism. Its manifestations include novels, short stories, poetry, theatre, film, television, and, more recently, digital forms such as hypertext storytelling. This new journal, Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL), will publish empirical studies that apply scientific stringency to cast light on the structure and function of literary phenomena. The journal welcomes contributions from many disciplinary perspectives (psychological, developmental, cross-cultural, cognitive, neuroscience, computational, and educational) to deepen our understanding of literature, literary processes, and literary applications.

According to a post at OnFiction, that "first issue should appear mid-2011, and will include a number of short pieces from leaders in the field with their thoughts on the future of the empirical study of literature." OnFiction is

a magazine with the aim of developing the psychology of fiction. Using theoretical and empirical perspectives, we endeavour to understand how fiction is created, and how readers and audience members engage in it.

Articles are added twice a week, and we maintain archives of academic papers, magazine articles, film and book reviews, original fiction, as well as annotated lists of psychologically significant works of fiction and books on the psychology of fiction.

One of the more recent posts was about Janice Radway's Reading the Romance.

CFP: Journal of American Culture Special Issue

Sarah S. G. Frantz

Call for Manuscripts: Journal of American Culture
Special Issue: Love and Romance in American Culture

Ideas of romantic love suffuse our lives and guide our emotional experiences and behaviors. Romance comes in various forms of romantic entertainment--books, films, music--which affect and form our socially constructed notions of love, gender and courtship. These constructs of love guide public and private behavior, create judgments of values in relationships and control rules of openness or closure in expression. There is a variety of ways that American culture has understood and practiced love and romance. This special issue of the Journal of American Culture will present a conversation about romantic love and its representations which explores love and romance as a theme in art, life and culture.

We are seeking manuscripts which discuss contemporary and historical representations of love and romance, consider ways of showing love and affection and explore socially constructed notions of love, gender and courtship. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches and analyses (literary, sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological, etc) involving any variety of topics (race, gender, class, homosexuality and queer studies, place, region, structure) which consider emotional values, attitudes and behaviors considered appropriate to love and romance.

Submissions are welcome on topics which might include, but are not restricted to, issues and themes such as:

* romantic relationship events, rituals and ceremonies (weddings, holidays, festivals)
* dating and courtship rites (speed dating, personal ads)
* popular music and love songs
* depictions in the media and popular culture (e.g., film, television, literature, comics)
* romantic love in advertising, marketing, consumerism
* internet and cyberspace (blogs, texting, social networking)
* literature and fiction (genre romance, poetry, animé)
* amatory writings, love letters, courtship and self-help manuals
* types of relationships (marriage, gay and lesbian)
* feelings and emotions (intimacy, attachment, eroticism)
* types of love: platonic, philosophical, divine and spiritual romance
* neurobiology of love and biological attraction
* historical practices and traditions of and in romance
* regional and geographic pressures and influences (southern, Caribbean)
* material culture (valentines, foods, fashions)
* folklore and mythologies
* jokes and humor
* romantic love in political discourse (capitalism)
* psychological approaches toward romantic attraction
* emotional and sexual desire
* subcultures: age (seniors, adolescents), multi-ethnic, inter-racial

We suggest manuscript submissions of 4000-6000 words in length, double-spaced, in current MLA style. Send an e-mail attachment, in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format, to . Due to virus and security concerns, we do not accept zipped or compressed files.

Manuscript deadline: 30 November 2011
Publication date: March 2013

Address inquiries to: JAC.Romance@gmail.com
Maryan Wherry
Sarah S.G. Frantz
Darcy J. Martin

Translating IASPR 2010

Laura Vivanco

The romance website Les romantiques produces a webzine, and in this month's issue (September 2010 - N°34) there's a writeup of the 2010 IASPR conference written by Agnès Caubet. You can read it in Flash or as a pdf. Since it's in French, I thought a translation might be appreciated by some readers of Teach Me Tonight.

I'm appreciating the irony of all this translation (of papers presented in English, written up in French, and then translated back into English) which parallels the way that English-language romances are translated for global consumption. Although I couldn't compete with Harlequin's translators, I think I can do a slightly better job than Google Translate.

What follows is a slightly truncated version of Agnès Caubet's article: I have only translated the summaries of the various sessions.

-------------------
The first session on the 5th August took "international romance" as its theme. Natalie Pendergast of the University of Toronto (Canada) talked to us about comics and manga. The period 1945-54 was the golden age of US comics, but in 1955 a censorship committee was created which effectively killed off romance in comics, since all references to sexual activity were forbidden. By contrast, the genre has flourished in Asia, as demonstrated by the current boom in manga. Natalie spoke to us about a manga called Oniisama e (Very dear brother) and about the representation of love between two girls, which is perceived as a sort of danger-free trial run before launching into heterosexual relationships. Someone recommended Sequential Crush.

Eric Selinger, one of the founders of IASPR and a literature professor at DePaul University specialising in poetry, has taught a course on American romance authors, particularly Jennifer Crusie. He spoke about criticism of the genre and suggested that critics who believe women should feel ashamed of reading romances may do so because they believe that the purpose of art is to destabilise the reader and question certainties, not to provide optimism and happy endings. For such critics of the genre, romance is not literature but rather an easy pleasure which encourages intellectual laziness. Eric himself, it should be noted, is an ardent defender of the genre.

In the course of her research Magali Bigey of the Université de Franche Comté (France), had previously been in contact with the readers of La romantique. In her research for this paper she read an impressive number of books in order to study their word choices and discover which are most common. The results were amusing. For example, words used to describe heroes include "beard," "muscles," "jaw," "chest" and ... wrinkles ... but when heroines are described the words which are most often used are "bosom," "ankles" and "wrists." It would seem that in romances, men don't have joints! The words used to describe a heroine's reaction to her first encounter with her hero are often negative ones, such as "betray," "sadden," "irritate" and "hate." Clearly things don't begin well for the two of them!

The second session, on romance and history, began with a paper by Amy Burge from the University of York (UK), who discussed sheikh romances, a sub-genre that she placed in the tense political context of contemporary East-West international relations. She noted that the authors often create imaginary states, situated somewhere in the United Arab Emirates, that in contrast to other contemporary romances the heroines' virginity remains of great importance, and that the hero and his country are often described as being "medieval": "medieval customs," a "medieval-style palace," a "medieval mindset," etc.

Piper Huguley-Riggins of Spelman College, Atlanta (USA) discussed Beverly Jenkins, an author who has written about slavery while seeking to show her African-American characters in a positive light and give her readers a sense of pride in their ancestors. Although some nineteenth and early twentieth-century African-American authors had similar intentions, contemporary culture is dominated by Hip Hop literature which foregrounds Black criminals and creates a negative image of the African-American community.

Sandra Schwab of Johannes Gutenberg University (Germany) teaches English Literature but has also had three romances published in the US. She spoke about the role of dragons in the romance genre, and the ways in which that role has evolved. In the classic version of the story, the dragon threatens a damsel, and the hero kills the dragon and saves the damsel. There is, however, always the risk that the dragon will kill the hero. Nowadays the dragon may be the hero, as in Teresa Medeiros's The Bride and the Beast, and the heroine must transform him in order for there to be a happy ending.

The third session took as its theme paratextuality (a word used to describe all aspects of a book other than the text itself). Faye O’Leary of Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) discussed Nora Roberts, J.D. Robb and the fact that this authorial double identity finds a parallel in the problematic identities of two of her characters: Eve Dallas and Roarke. Eve has no memories which date from before her eighth birthday and doesn't even know her original name, while Roarke has no known surname.

William Gleason of Princeton University (USA) discussed magazines published at the end of the nineteenth century, and in particular Belles and Beaux (1874), which was specifically targeted at women and offered news and romance serials. Gleason has a particular interest in the items surrounding the romantic fictions, including advice columns, musical scores, and games to be played by groups of men and women on winter evenings to help them get to know each other better. He observed that if the articles were written by women, then the editors must have been men who didn't know much about the contents of the magazine, since one issue contains both an advert for hair-colouring shampoo and an article strongly advising readers against dying their hair.

Cora Buhlert of the University of Vechta (Germany) discussed Libesromanheft, the German format of romance which is flourishing, albeit the readership is ageing. The romances are published as little magazines or booklets. There are star authors and a number of sub-genres and series, including a Bavarian series which features covers illustrated with young people in regional costume. [Séverine Olivier informed Agnès Caubet that some of these romances are translated into French and sold in the same format, particularly to retirement homes, which may explain why Agnès has never come across them.] In order to get a foothold in the German market, Harlequin has joined forces with Cora, one of the publishers of Libesromanheft. In France, by contrast, local publishers of French romances (Max du Veuzit, Delly, Magali) completely disappeared after the arrival of the Canadian romance giant.

The day ended with a keynote speech by Lynne Pearce of Lancaster University (UK), author of Romance Writing. Pearce is not very positive about the romance genre, since she believes that both heroes and heroines should be changed by their experiences, and she thinks that in Harlequins heroines have evolved but there's a sort of annihilation of the heroes. [At this point Agnès Caubet admits that she may not have fully understood Pearce's argument.] According to her the romance genre doesn't insist strongly enough on women's liberation and the very existence of such a degenerate genre [LV - I'm not sure in what sense the word "degenerate" was being used; it could be being used literally, since the romance "genre" used to refer to chivalric romances] indicates that social conditions are unfulfilling. Her talk centered on the impossibility of repeating love, that is, the question of whether or not one can fall in love more than once. She also focused on whether the readers' need to read declarations of love over and over again suggests that ultimately such fictions are unsatisfying.

Friday the 6th of August began with a session on language in the romance genre. Stephanie Moody from the University of Michigan (USA) discussed her analysis of dialogue in Anne Stuart's Cold as Ice. In romance dialogue is very important because it has to be both spiritual and amusing, and seem natural even though, of course, it isn't. Having studied references to the heroines' weight and that of women in general, Moody concluded that female readers probably don't limit themselves solely to identifying with the heroine's point of view but instead take turns in identifying with both the hero and the heroine over the course of the novel.

Artemis Lamprinou, from the University of Surrey (UK) spoke about Greek translations of English-language romances. Romances must evoke the correct emotional reactions in the reader in order to be pleasurable, so translators must ensure that cultural norms are also translated correctly in order to create the same emotions in readers. She noted that translations into Greek tend to increase the emotional intensity of the texts: "anger" may be translated as "fury," for example.

Heike Klippel of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (Germany) analysed visual codes in German soap operas. Scenes in which the characters declare their love must included draperies and lighted candles, food or a champagne-like drink, and suitable background music. In scenes in which a character thinks about his or her beloved, that character must hold an object belonging to the beloved and look at their image, or their name on the screen of a mobile phone. Warmer lighting will be used when filming heroines, whereas heroes are apparently deemed more manly under bluish light.

The fifth session focused on male/female relationships. Pradipta Mukherjee from the University of Calcutta (India) discussed Devdas. It is a story which was first published in 1917 but more than ten Indian film versions have subsequently been produced. Mukherjee chose three of these films, including the 2002 version which is particularly well known by fans, in order to speak about the significance and depiction of the characters' gaze: lowering the eyes indicates submissiveness, whereas a direct look signals assertiveness. She also speculated about the basis of the continuing appeal of a story which is almost a hundred years old and whose plot depends on social constraints which are more and more distant from the daily lives of the audience. She suspects that the hero's self-hatred may seem attractive to teenagers.

Sarah Frantz, the IASPR president, gave a very interesting talk about the evolution of the alpha male in the romance genre. In the 1970s, the alpha male is a rapist, as in Kathleen Woodiwiss's novels, and this can be read as a critique of patriarchal society which can produce violence towards women. In the 1980s he becomes a tortured hero, as in Laura Kinsale's novels, and then in the 1990s the alpha male is transformed into a man who defies the conventions of his era. Finally, in the 2000s, he has become highly eroticised, as in Ellora's Cave's romantica and erotica. In taking as examples six romances whose popularity has been maintained since their publication in the 1990s, Sarah sought to show that in this decade some authors reacted to feminist criticism of the genre by seeking to describe an alpha male who would break the mold. In Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas, it's the heroine who kills to save the hero, who is a self-made man. In It Had to be You by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Dan is the opposite of a rapist while still being an alpha male. There is one love scene in which he stops repeatedly, because the heroine asks him to. In Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels, the plot resembles that of Beauty and the Beast, but it's really more like Cinderella, with the hero as the damsel in distress. He wants to protect his reputation as a scoundrel and it is the heroine who seduces him, feels jealousy and desire, and ends up ripping his shirt. In Dream Man by Linda Howard, the heroine can read the mind of everyone in the world, except the hero, which makes him mysterious but also restful. In Nora Roberts' [LV - sic] Naked in Death, the first in this series which was a novelty in the genre, Roarke is both dangerous and mysterious, but perfect for Eve. Finally, in the highly controversial To Have and To Hold by Patricia Gaffney, the hero rapes the heroine but in a new way: the forced seduction (to which we shall return later).

Finally Pam Rosenthal, an author of erotic romances, spoke to us about the troubled relationships between heroes and their male friends. In a genre which is evolving at high speed, she predicts that the next development will be the affirmation of many heroes' bisexuality. Thanks to this talk I [LV - i.e. Agnès Caubet] discovered a book published at the beginning of this year: Pride/Prejudice by Ann Herendeen, which imagines that Mr Darcy's wish to distance his friend Bingley from Miss Bennet might have been the consequence of a romantic relationship between Bingley and Darcy. Playing on the fact that Jane Austen didn't describe what happens between the heroines [LV - sic] of her novel, Ann Herendeen fills in the gap (if I can put it that way while writing on this topic) and creates a parallel romance which fills in all the scenes between the men. Pam finished by emphasising that the current proliferation of societies and brotherhoods isn't a coincidence and that the "brothers" aren't just there as sequel bait but also because of the relationships they have with each other.

The second keynote speaker, Celestino Deleyto, teaches English at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and specialises in romantic comedies, which were the subject of his speech. In this genre sexual acts are more often implied than shown; quarrels take their place and, in a sense, represent them. Arguments are therefore happy moments for the heroes. The majority of critics of romantic comedy comment negatively on the inevitability of the happy ending, but this in fact makes them more lifelike, putting love and desire at the centre of the plot, and their humour often hides deep explorations of various problems. According to him the failure of many romantic relationships has led to the genre moving towards friendships, which seem more credible, in the "man com," as in I Love You, Man in which the plot isn't centred on the romantic relationship but on the friendship between the hero and his best man.

Session 6 also dealt with films. Giselle Bastin of Flinders University (Australia) spoke about a number of TV biopics produced in the UK about Charles and Diana, and about the changes in them over the course of the couple's troubled marriage. At the end, the life of the royal couple had become a sort of real-life soap opera, with a new episode at every turn.

Roger Nicholson from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) discussed films about the relationship between Maoris and white colonists from a historical perspective.

Claudia Marquis (also from the University of Auckland) examined 10 Things I Hate About You which uses Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew to examine adolescence, an age which one has to survive and which can be considered the famous shew which has to be tamed.

The last session of the day about romantic comedies opened with a paper by Margaret Tally from the University of New York, who stressed that women go to the cinema a lot and that she's seen a new tendency for romantic comedies by Nancy Meyers to give important roles to actresses of Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton's generation and to explicitly appeal to a female public of over-45s who are becoming increasingly influential. In these films the heroine has a satisfactory professional and personal life, but she realises that she needs a man to feel complete. For his part the hero often needs to grow up; he's been stuck in a sort of extended adolescence and gains maturity thanks to the heroine.

Betty Kaklamanidou of Aristotle University (Thessaloniki) then spoke about how Greek cinema has assimilated the American romantic comedy to make a distinctive genre which includes local problems such as those caused by arranged marriages or the importance of family. Like Bollywood films, Greek romantic comedies underscore the importance of certain scenes by having the actors sing and dance.

Claire Jenkins of the University of Warwick (UK) then spoke about the role of single parents in Hollywood films, stating that their situation is perceived as one which must be corrected, as in Sleepless in Seattle. Families with two adults continue to be considered the norm. Since the objective of these films is to recreate a happy family, the closing image of the film shows the new couple with their children.

Saturday the 6th of August got off to a flying start thanks to the third keynote speaker, Pamela Regis, from McDaniel College (USA), who was the first literary critic to write a positive book about the romance genre: A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003). She began by painting a picture of the state of romance criticism in the US which was, frankly, rather discouraging, starting with what she called the four horsewomen of the apocalypse: Ann Barr Snitow, who in 1979 wrote that romance is pornography for women; Tania Modleski who in 1982 compared romance readers to drug addicts; Kay Mussell (1984), for whom romances reflected the way in which women are infantilised in patriarchal culture; and finally Janice A. Radway (1984), who deemed romance to be a tool of patriarchy, and its readers dupes who put up with their situation rather than change their lives. The situation hasn't improved much since, with Lynne Pearce whom I mentioned above, and Lisa Fletcher who, in 2008, accused romance of reinforcing heterosexuality as a social norm and preventing the description of more satisfactory relations. Yeah ... Pam Regis then made a list of what critics owed the romance. To summarise: a more impartial approach, based on a reading of a fair number of novels (bearing in mind that there are 8000 new titles a year, and one can't seriously claim to have studied the genre when one's only read ten books). The participants then debated the possibility of creating a "romance canon" or list of books which would be selected to represent the genre in all its diversity. There were said to be pros and cons to this, given that a canon can quickly become a prison which prevents change.

An Goris of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) responded to Pamela Regis, saying that it was important to situate the works cited in their historical context and that, even if their conclusions are displeasing, they are often all we have on which to base new research on romance.

Session 8 took as its theme sex in the romance genre. Ashley Greenwood of the University of San Diego (USA) said that she herself is a feminist and a lesbian, and also a fan of romances, particularly Nora Roberts'. According to her, virginity in the romance is never the result of submission to a patriarchal order but is rather a state chosen by each heroine. Furthermore, sexual experiences are explored from the point of view of the woman, who has an active role in sex scenes. Emotions are as important as the act itself and the heroine must give very explicit consent. To summarise: this is not patriarchal logic at all. QED!

Angela Toscano from the University of Utah (USA) spoke about rape in the romance and highlighted 3 broad categories:

• mistaken identity - the hero mistakes the heroine for someone else and rapes her
• possession - the hero is overwhelmed by desire of jealousy. He thinks all women are the same. The rape can therefore be seen as a way of exerting power.
• the forced seduction - the hero wants to provoke a reaction from the heroine. He tries to break down her willpower, and often makes her feel desire against her will. His aim is not to hurt the heroine, but to give her a way out of a dead end situation. He wants her to acknowledge or confess something. She must in a sense die in order to be reborn into freedom. The hero, in this scenario, knows the heroine better than anyone else does and sees beyond the barriers that she keeps up between herself and the world.

Angela concluded by observing that falling in love can itself often be felt as a kind of rape.

The last member of this panel was Jin Feng from Grinnell College (USA). She spoke about a blog created by Chinese people working in the US. They created a section on literature, initially in order to talk about the books they had read but they then began to use it to put online some novels which could be read on the site in installments or downloaded onto a mobile. In order to get the passwords to access these texts, one has to post some fiction of one's own. She spoke about one novel in particular to which the readers responded as it was posted. There were two possible heroes, one of whom would make a perfect father while the other was a mysterious mafia boss; some readers preferred one and some preferred the other. She stressed that the pleasure derived from reading was increased tenfold through discussions with other readers and with the author, and that the internet has changed the relationship between authors and readers.

Then it was time for our panel. Séverine and I spoke for about 45 minutes about romances in French. The responses were very positive and there wasn't enough time to respond to all the questions. There were readers in the room from Germany and the Netherlands and they could wholly identify with the difficulties which we encounter: a lack of translations, missing passages, series which remain unfinished, etc.

The last session was about vampires in romance and Jonathan Allan from the University of Toronto spoke about virginal heroes. Very few heroes in literature boast about being virgins, even if there are a few examples. In general, it's heroines who are virgins and virginity is to women what honour is to men (I'm quoting that, but I don't know who the author of that edifying phrase is!) He also emphasised that virgins often have magical powers. Of course, at the moment the best-known virginal hero is Edward Cullen, over 100 years old and still sexually innocent; it seems he even forbids himself masturbation.

Chiho Nakagawa of the University of Nara (Japan) then spoke about the evolution of vampire sexuality. The act of sucking blood has been compared to a sexual act. John William Polidori's vampire had homosexual tendencies while Bram Stoker brought the vampire back to heterosexuality with Dracula. In recent romances vampires are not treated as sexual deviants but rather as immigrants and they are losing their darkness. Edward, for example, is not a dark hero. He's a respectable kind of vampire. The presentation ended by suggesting that some of the appeal that vampires have for romance fans may dissipate if they lose their dangerous edge.

The final round table of the conference emphasised the differences between North American universities and European ones, with the latter feeling the need to have a more well-defined methodology which will give more credibility to their research, while the former have a tendency to study what interests them and disregard other issues a little. Others also noted the need not to be limited to a literary approach to the topic, but rather to invite researchers from other disciplines, such as sociology or psychology, to this sort of conference, and study not only the literary works themselves, but also the industry which produces them: authors, editors, readers, etc.

Agnès Caubet
-------------------

More details about the speakers, and abstracts of their papers, can be found here. Pam Rosenthal's summary of her speech to the conference can be found here.

CFP: Foreign Affairs: Romance at the Boundaries

Laura Vivanco

In 2011 the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) will be holding its annual conference at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver from March 31st to April 3rd.

Eric is organising a seminar on "Foreign Affairs: Romance at the Boundaries":

The 2011 ACLA conference theme invokes “the freshness, excitement, and, yes, fear of experiencing the ‘foreign.’” In the experience of love, that mix of emotions is also on display, not least when the “foreign” other turns out to be ourselves, “shattered” (in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms) by the impact of desire. This seminar will explore how literary and popular texts represent the transformative encounter of self and other, mind and body, old self and new, in romantic love.

How do texts enact encounter aesthetically, through contrapuntal discourses, genres, allusions, or traditions? From Ottoman lyric to Harlequin novel, the literature of love is often highly conventionalized. How have such texts incorporated the freshness of the “foreign,” renewed within—or slipping past—the boundaries of genre?

What are the politics of xenophilia, within or outside of texts? What ethics (and erotics) shape our acknowledgement, violation, or fetishizing of alterity? How does power shift when texts and tropes of love move from language to language, medium to medium, period to period, audience to audience?

Is scholarship also a “foreign affair”? What pleasures and shames shape academic encounters with popular romance, the abjected Other of “literature”? What happens when men study (and write) texts commonly construed to be “by women, for women,” or when women study (and write) male romance? As queer readers study heteronormative texts, and straight readers, queer ones—when East meets West, and South, North—might love of the “foreign” be read as a critical practice, or criticism, a practice of love?

According to the ACLA's submission guidelines:

The ACLA's annual conferences have a distinctive structure in which most papers are grouped into twelve- person seminars that meet two hours per day for the three days of the conference to foster extended discussion. Some eight-person (or smaller) seminars meet just the first two days of the conference. This structure allows each participant to be a full member of one seminar, and to sample other seminars during the remaining time blocks.

The deadline for proposing a paper is 1 November 2010. More details about this year's conference can be found here and proposals should be submitted via the ACLA conference website.

Deviant Monsters

Laura Vivanco

Maria Lindgren Leavenworth has observed that vampires are

creatures traditionally associated with breaking the norms of society and often linked to forbidden or deviant sexual desires. Although the vampire may be superficially gendered, its position outside humanity makes categorisations less applicable and it is often seen as occupying a position which slides between the poles of masculinity and femininity. (443)

Jessica at Read React Review recently wrote a post in which she summarises some of the sexual deviancy in Bram Stoker's Dracula, including the

suggestion of a threesome in this book. There was this exchange [...], when Van Helsing was transfusing Lucy. He mentioned Holmwood’s notion that exchanging blood makes Lucy his bride:

Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride… If so… Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone – even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist.

Everyone says Dracula is a book about transgressing boundaries — geographic, gendered, sexual, bodily, material and spiritual.

According to Leavenworth, J. R. Ward's vampires, however,

represent supernatural power, sexual prowess and, paradoxically, protection of humans, but their vampirism is not used to illustrate a potentially subversive position, on the contrary, the novels represent a worldview characterised by at times ambiguous but in the end staunchly heterosexual relationships. (443)

She therefore turns to slash fiction based on Ward's novels because "in the slash analysed, homoerotic desire is at focus and the sexual ambiguity often connected to the vampire as a literary trope is to an extent reclaimed" (443). Here she finds that

Assertions and definitions playing on the notion of (at least homosexual) virginity in slash label situations as out of the ordinary, signalling that the space outside the norm is created specifically for the purposes of these encounters. (454)

While Leavenworth mentions male virginity only briefly, it is the focus of Jonathan Allan's "Theorising the Monstrous and the Virginal in Popular Romance Novels." He suggests that it is Edward's virginity which permits the heterosexual vampire hero of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels to be considered a sexually deviant vampire: "It is not Edward’s vampirism that makes him monstrous or deviant, rather it is his virginity that makes him monstrous, deviant, anomalous" (6). Allan states that

male virginity would seem to fit within the realm of “defiant deviance” precisely because it extends beyond (or perhaps before?) an acceptable limit that has been established by the socio-cultural environment. Accordingly, I would argue that the virgin male is defiantly deviant when he chooses to maintain a virginal identity. The problem, it would seem, for which we must account is why female virginity is not deemed, at least in most scenarios, monstrous while male virginity is indeed quite monstrous, deviant or anomalous. (2)

Since the Twilight novels do not explicitly state that male virginity is monstrous, Allan quotes from Eloisa James's When the Duke Returns in order to demonstrate that this is indeed an attitude prevalent in contemporary society: “the heroine, after realising that her husband - they were married when she was twelve and he has been away for a decade or so - is a virgin, remark[s]: 'I’ve married a monster!' ” (2).

Female virginity, however, is generally perceived as unremarkable in the romance genre. A male virgin, then, may perhaps seem "monstrous" or deviant because virginity is so closely associated with femininity, and he is therefore "occupying a position which slides between the poles of masculinity and femininity" (Leavenworth 443). Although the sliding in itself might be seen as the cause of the deviancy, a further complication to this discussion of the monstrous and the deviant is provided by Kathleen A. Miller's “A Little Extra Bite: Dis/Ability and Romance in Tanya Huff and Charlaine Harris’s Vampire Fiction”. Miller observes that, as

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes [...] Aristotle sets up a masculine “generic type” against which all physical variation appears as different, derivative, inferior, and insufficient. This establishes the Western tradition of viewing woman as a “diminished man,” one who is monstrous, and is the first step on a “path to deviance.”

The view that woman are monstrous has manifested itself in many ways down the centuries, but I wish to mention just two instances which may recall aspects of the vampire. The first example, which perhaps calls to mind parallels with the deadly contagion of vampirism, is the medieval belief that "the female organism was capable of producing poison, in other words death or illness" (Jacquart and Thomasset 75). This found expression in

the story of the Venomous Virgin, dear to writers of the thirteenth century. A king who was mistrustful of the growing powers of Alexander brought up a girl whom he fed on poison. When the girl was completely venomous, the king sent her as a present to the young Alexander. [...] The poison that this slut was capable of getting used to was the secretion of her own organism; the death that she delivered to everything that approached her was the purest, most brutal, but also sincerest expression of an interiorized fear of woman. (Jacquart and Thomasset 191-192)

The second involves the medieval medical theory of the humours. It was believed that "in order for a woman to remain fertile she had to be kept moist, and the one way that nature had provided for women to be kept moist was through sexual intercourse" (Bullough 493). Women's need to absorb moisture from men could, however, have deleterious effects on the latter:

Three of the most frequently cited dangers of inordinate sexual intercourse were loss of strength, accelerated aging, and premature death. Medical theorists, preachers, theologians and even lawyers taught that coitus weakened the body. Aquinas explained that in wartime wise commanders cast women forth from their camps so that soldiers might not spend their strength in carnal indulgence [...]. Bonaventure, the son of a physician, argued that all sexual intercourse was dangerous to health and that the sex act helped to shorten one's life. [...] In general excessive coitus was thought to deplete the body of its natural moisture while increasing the heat in the body, a condition that quickly left the body dry. (Solomon 56)

In that cultural context, "staunchly heterosexual relationships" could perhaps be considered not unlike unions with a monstrous being who would drain one of life-giving fluid, and a man's decision to remain a male virgin might therefore be celebrated rather than taken as an indication of monstrous deviance.

It seems that who, or what, is considered deviant and/or monstrous may shift and change, but fear of the dangerous Other, mixed with varying degrees of sexual fascination, persists.

Academic fascination with vampires is also persisting; here are two recent calls for papers:

Fanpires: Audience Consumption of the Modern Vampire
[...] This edited collection will examine the cultural resurgence of the vampire. It aims to provide inter-disciplinary accounts of the reception and cultural impact of contemporary representations of the vampire evident across a broad range of mediums, including literature (e.g. Evernight, The Vampire Academy), film (e.g. Twilight saga), television (e.g. The Vampire Diaries, True Blood), graphic novels (e.g. Chibi Vampire) and games (e.g. Vampire Rain). The appeal of vampire mythology and its associated folklore for modern audiences will be examined in an age characterized by the transformative possibilities of the internet with both its low barriers to artistic expression and the erosion of the boundaries between author and audience.

The deadline (undead-line?) for submissions is October 29th, 2010. More details can be found here. And

Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture (Edited Volume and Special Journal Issue)
[...] The irony of creatures with no reflection becoming such a pervasive reflection of modern culture pleases in a dark way. Since their animation out of folk materials in the nineteenth century, by Polidori, as Varney and in Le Fanu and Stoker, vampires have been continually reborn in modern culture. They have stalked texts from Marx’s image of the leeching capitalist, through Pater’s Lady Lisa of tainted knowledge, to the multifarious incarnations in contemporary fictions in print and on screen. They have enacted a host of anxieties and desires, shifting shape as the culture they are brought to life in itself changes form. More recently, their less charismatic undead cousins, zombies, have been dug up in droves to represent various fears and crises in contemporary culture.

Essays are sought for a book-length collection on the theme of the undead—vampires and zombies—in modern culture and for a parallel special journal issue. The aim of the book is to relate the undead in literature, art, and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption, and social change.

More details here.
------

• Allan, Jonathan A. "Theorising the Monstrous and the Virginal in Popular Romance Novels." Draft Conference Paper for the 8th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous (Sunday 19th September – Wednesday 22nd September 2010 Oriel College, Oxford).
• Bullough, Vern L. "Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women." Viator 4 (1973): 485-501.
  
• Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
• Jessica. "Romance Roots: Dracula, by Bram Stoker (part 2)." Read React Review August 18, 2010.
• Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren. “Lover Revamped: Sexualities and Romance in the Black Dagger Brotherhood and Slash Fan Fiction.” Extrapolation 50.3 (2009): 442-462.
• Miller, Kathleen A. "A Little Extra Bite: Dis/Ability and Romance in Tanya Huff and Charlaine Harris’s Vampire Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).
  
• Solomon, Michael. The Literature of Misogyny in Medieval Spain: The Arcipreste de Talavera and the Spill. Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
  

The photo is of "Edward Cullen as portrayed by Robert Pattinson in the New Moon film" and is from Wikipedia.

Pam Rosenthal's Paper at the 2010 IASPR Conference

Laura Vivanco

At the recent IASPR conference, Pam Rosenthal gave a paper on "The Queer Theory of Eve Sedgwick at the Edges of the Popular Romance Genre." She's now put up a summary of the paper at the History Hoydens' blog. Here are a couple of quotes from it:

Brussels sounded like a great opportunity to think hard about something I've been wanting to understand better for a while now: the hot new trend of male/male or male/male/female romance -- written by women for women. [...] I took on this project because I wanted to understand more specifically how this new development of male/male love works in individual texts, and most particularly in Ann Herendeen's recent tour de force, Pride/Prejudice.

and

In the centuries since Austen, the romance novel (and sometimes the literary novel as well) hinged upon a simple, but incendiary, paradox: that a man occupies a primacy of position in the public world, but the power of the female subjectivity cannot be denied.

Until the 20th century, perhaps -- when in romance this changed again. when male power began to be understood as a fraught and painful thing -- with, I think, the tortured heroes of the 70s to the 90s. My own untested theory is that this occurred in a parallel development to Second Wave Feminism. We started seeing tortured lonely hero subjectivities in deep third person (Dr. Sarah Frantz of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance has often written and spoken on this, and I was delighted that she and I were on the same panel in Belgium).

To read more and/or join in the discussion, please head over to the History Hoydens' blog.