Hope you will join me in raising a book in tribute to this amusing, intelligent writer. The romance community has lost a vital member, one who will be more than sorely missed.
Friday, May 27, 2016
Goodbye Jo Beverley
Hope you will join me in raising a book in tribute to this amusing, intelligent writer. The romance community has lost a vital member, one who will be more than sorely missed.
Friday, May 20, 2016
Happily Ever After: Catherine Roach's thoughts on the endings of romance novels
Roach's answer is two-fold:
(1) People have faith in love. The romance story functions similarly to a religious belief system that offers guidance on the end goal of how to live a good and worthy life
(2) The romance story is a reparation fantasy of the end of patriarchy. In this fantasy, the romance hero stands in for patriarchy itself in a vision wherein gender unfairness is repaired and all works out. (167)
I'm completely on board with claim #1. Romance, at least for many women, has become "the Highest Good," a replacement for (or, perhaps a supplement to?) Christianity, a religion that has been in steady decline in the West and the North since the 18th century (see chart at right). Traditional romance novels certainly demonstrate a "faith in the healing power of love" (169). And even romances that eschew the romantic love heals lovers paradigm do share with their less progressive counterparts an "underlying conviction" in "the power of love to make the world a better place" (169). In almost all romance novels, to love romantically is to want to strive to be a better person, a kinder person, a person who does good, rather than harm, both within the romantic relationship and without, in the greater world.
Claim #2, though, feels more iffy to me. To make her argument, Roach uses/revises the theoretical model constructed by literary critic Leslie Fielder in his famous essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" As Roach notes, Fielder's essay is
essentially about the literature of white male America as a homosocial reparation fantasy for racism. In this fantasy, the predations of racism are repaired through an interracial buddy story, a narrative of a white male and a colored male who share friendship and brotherly love. The story is offered with remorse and affection on the part of whites and read with pleasure by them, partly because the friendship offered by the characters of color implies forgiveness and absolution for white people's acts and attitudes of racism. (177)
Roach takes Fielder's model and turns it on its head, suggesting that the central fantasy of romance novels is offered not by the oppressors, but by the oppressed; not by the racists, but by the women who have been subject to patriarchy's sexism. Instead of a friendship and brotherly love of the oppressed, romance offers the emotional and sexual love of the oppressor: the "myth of the male beloved." In Roach's interpretation, the mythical male beloved figure, "the alpha male, the patriarch—loves with tenderness, devotion, and sensitivity, even while maintaining his alpha ways" (177). But not really. Because, Roach asserts, "the core appeal of romance fiction is this fantasy of the end of patriarchy in which the alpha male hero is revealed as the submissive"—submissive to the female, and submissive to a more feminine conception of gender relations, a conception based on love and connection (178, emphasis added).
When I was drafting the previous sentence, I initially added "not on dominance and oppression" to its end. But then I began to wonder: doesn't the idea of male "submission" by necessity imply female "dominance"? Can the hero be "submissive" by agreeing to a relationship that refuses a "dominant/submissive" binary? And if there is no refusal of a dominant/submissive binary, is there any real challenge to patriarchy?
This idea of alpha male submission echoes the arguments of many of the romance writers who contributed essays to Jayne Ann Krentz's 1992 essay collection, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women. These writers argued that romance's appeal lies in the way it inverts traditional gendered power relations:
Why is this ending so satisfying? Not only because love has triumphed, but because he has capitulated and she has won. He's willing, finally and at the very last minute and after much resistance, to do anything to keep her with him. This is the ultimate fantasy, the quintessential escapist fare. (Doreen Owens Malik, "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: The Hero as Challenge," 76)
He is the mightiest of the mighty, the strongest of the strong. But, because he has been tamed by our heroine, because she exerts such a powerful emotional stranglehold over him, his almost superhuman physical strength is now hers to command (Susan Elizabeth Phillips, "The Romance and the Empowerment of Women," 58).
The hero must be part villain or else he won't be much of a challenge for a strong woman. The heroine must put herself at risk with him if the story is to achieve the level of excitement and the particular sense of danger that only a classic romance can provide.
And the flat truth is that you don't get much of a challenge for a heroine from a sensitive, understanding, right-thinking "modern" man who is part therapist, part best friend, and thoroughly tamed from the start. (Jayne Ann Krentz, "Trying to Tame the Romance," 108-109).
In the minds of many of the contributors to Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, for a heroine to "win," a hero must lose: he must "capitulate," he must be "tamed." And in the books of many romance writers, such a vision of female winners and male losers still remains.
But many 21st century romance novels do not rely on this dominance/submission model. Instead, they push for "equality" between the hero and heroine, a relationship in which power is shared (and in the sexual realm, often played with), rather than wrested from the male by the female. I'm not certain how Roach's idea that romance is "a reparation fantasy of the end of patriarchy" applies to them.
Even if we limit her argument to just those novels in which gender relations are constructed as a win/lose, rather than a struggle toward equality and parity, I wonder just how reparation "ends" patriarchy? Roach takes the concept of "reparative reading" from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a type of reading in opposition to "paranoid reading," critical interpretation focused on uncovering "the violence hidden in texts and culture," concerned about "oppression and false consciousness," and working to "leverage the power of exposing injustice to bring about positive change" (178). In contrast, reparative reading is less about suspicion, and more about love: "The desire of the reparative impulse is to repair an object of relationship—say, the readers' relationship to the hero or heroine—that will then have resources to offer the self" (178).
What resources does romance offer the (female) self? Roach argues that "Women readers 'extract sustenance' from romance novels in the imaginative play of repairing the alpha male and of restoring gender relations" (179). This "repairing" of the alpha male "is one in which the domineering or uncaring patriarch becomes the good man" (182). A romance must still feature an alpha man, Roach suggests, because "if it is still a man's world out there, then for a woman to have a good man at her side is a good thing. A woman is safer from danger and has more resources to draw on, to the extent that she is in a committed relationship with, and thus protected and aided by, the good man" (182). This seems to contradict Roach's assertion that within the romance, patriarchy has "ended." The "good man" hero may no longer be sexist by book's end, but he is still enmeshed within, and benefits from, patriarchy, because patriarchy is a system, not an individual relationship. Both within and outside the book, patriarchy remains, no matter how "good" one's man becomes.
In discussing J. R. Ward's 2005 Dark Lover, Roach seems to comes to a similar conclusion: "The reader fantasy here is that patriarchy ends, yet patriarchy continues. In this end, you have the alpha-king for your own, since you have conquered him on the battlefield of love and taught him how to love" (187). There seems to be a vital "and" missing here: "and, because patriarchy continues, he still can behave with impunity like an alpha-hole to everyone else, and still reap the benefits of male power and privilege."
So yes, the traditional romance novel, invested in a binary conception of romantic power relations, does invoke a fantasy of female empowerment. But while gender unfairness may be repaired on the level of the individual couple, through the alpha male's "submission" to his beloved female, patriarchy as a whole has hardly been "ended." Because patriarchy isn't just about relations between an individual man and woman; it is "the predominance of men in positions of power and influence in society, with culture values and norms favouring men" (OED online). The fantasy, then, for a woman reader of traditional alpha male romance seems less about imagining the end of the system of patriarchy, and more about dreaming of becoming its unlikely beneficiary.
Or perhaps I am just too much of a "paranoid reader" to appreciate Roach's argument?
I hope you all have a chance to take a look at Roach's intelligent, provocative book, and talking about (and debating) its fascinating theories.
Photo credits:
Christianity chart: Pew Research Center, Religion and Public Life
Catherine M. Roach
Happily Ever After
The Romance Story in Popular Culture
Indiana University Press, 2016
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
(Gender) Coding for the Space Race: Barry & Turner's EARTH BOUND
 |
| From an 1967 Cosmopolitan magazine, extolling the new kind of work for women: computing |
Which was why I so enjoyed Earth Bound, the latest volume in Emma Barry and Genevieve Turner's "Fly Me to the Moon" historical fiction romance series. Unlike the first two installments in the series, which featured male astronauts and the women they fell for, Earth Bound focuses on the people behind the scenes, the engineers who drew on cutting-edge technology, including computers, to create the rockets that would send human beings into space.
Not a few of those behind-the-scenes people were of the female persuasion.
Eugene Parsons, Director of Engineering and Development at the ASD (American Space Department, Barry & Turner's fictionalized NASA) is caustic, demanding, and committed to the mission of landing an American man on the moon before the Soviets do. To make sure his country achieves that goal, Parsons insists on hiring only the best. And Dr. Charlie Eason, engineer and computer programming pioneer, is the best.
Even if she also happens to be a woman.
Parsons has no control over her job title, though, and Charlie is named Deputy Director of Computing. Though in practice, it is she, rather than the gladhanding Director of Computing, who directs the department. Everyone else at ASD's Houston facility quakes in their boots whenever Parsons steps in the room. Everyone else but Charlie, that is, a woman secure enough in her own accomplishments, and equally committed to excellence, to take Parsons' intensity in stride.
The tenor of their working relationship is set during Charlie's initial interview:
"I expect perfection. I know I can't have it, but I expect it." People hated him for that, but better their hatred weighting him down than the deaths of any of the men they were sending up.
Again, she wasn't put off. "You'll always have my very best. And my very best is better than everyone else's." (Kindle Loc 222)
Unfortunately for the uptight Parsons, Charlie is as physically stunning as she is intellectually. Something that makes him both angry and turned-on, because "he needed her to do this job, and his body refused to stop noticing hers" (193). But Parsons won't let anything distract him from the task at hand, especially not his own unruly desires.
Charlie is used to using her physical assets to catch the eyes of men—not because she wants to sleep with them to get ahead, but because she wants to distract them before they can dismiss her:
 |
| The 6 women classified as "scientists" who worked at NASA's Langley, VA location in 1957 |
Charlie and Parsons are both thinkers, both scientists, and excel at keeping their private feelings private. But since the narrative is told from their dual points of view, we as readers get to see inside, see the problems that make them both feel like outsiders not just at work, but in the world at large. Charlie has to cope with a family of scientists, parents who do not understand, and do not respect, her choice to pursue computing rather than the "pure" science of Physics. Not to mention her mother's resentment of her ability to pursue her own career, rather than act only as a supportive wife for another scientist. For his part, Parsons compartmentalizes his issues, issues related to social class and to guilt about the death of his elder brother.
Thus the low-level attraction that simmers between them during ten months of working together is never openly acknowledged by either. Charlie cooly bears the everyday sexist aggressions offered by many of her male colleagues (except for Parsons). But after a particularly galling meeting with the head of the program—"It would never be enough. No matter how many papers she authored, no matter how many projects she successfully completed, deadlines she met, or snafus she navigated, all they'd ever be able to see were the breasts" [870]—she feels even more like an outsider, more like a freak. Until suddenly she's struck by the idea that she's not the only freak in the Department. And perhaps, two freaks together might find some solace, if only of a temporary and intermittent kind.
At first, the two scientists are careful to keep their clandestine affair completely separate from their professional lives—"We never talk about this at work," Parsons demands before engaging in their first shockingly erotic interlude. And careful to keep their affair only about sex, not about anything as uncontrolled and messy as feelings. But as the tensions of work and the emotions stirred up by families begin to collide, it becomes increasingly difficult for both Parsons and Charlie to compartmentalize their growing need for emotional, as well as intellectual and sexual, connection. Even if neither of them is as close to being as competent with emotions as they are with engineering.
Especially when casual sexism puts their space mission in danger.
I'm a sucker for intelligent-heroine romances, especially when that intelligence is a major turn-on for hero in question. Earth Bound is compelling, intense, and sexy romance reading catnip.
Photo credits:
Cosmopolitan article: Backstory
Women at NASA: NASA History
Earth Bound
Penny Bright Publishing, 2016
Friday, May 13, 2016
Many Ways to be Gay: Amy Jo Cousins' HARD CANDY
"Culture is not a monolith," and "Internalized oppression is very real," two of Kowel's take-away points, really resonated for me in the context of reading the latest installment in Amy Jo Cousins' "Bend or Break" series, Hard Candy. Unlike some of the male/male romances that are popular with female heterosexual readers, those that feature hot, sexy, masculine guys who just happen to be gay, Cousins' books have included a broad variety of gay masculinities. And as Hard Candy's storyline points out, some of those gay masculinities are more acceptable to society at large, and even to some within the larger gay community itself, than others.
Victor Lim, first introduced in Level Hands (book #5) as one of a handful of gay male rowers on the crew team at a small, elite Massachusetts college, is uptight, caustic, and studious to the max. He knows he's not naturally smart, and that in order to do well in school he has to work his ass off. The only times he lets loose are after he finishes a big paper, when he gets drunk and has roommates-with-benefits sex with his best friend, Austin. But now that Austin has gotten tired of waiting to become more than an afterthought to Vinnie and has found himself a real boyfriend, Vinnie is at a total loss.
You'd think Vinnie wouldn't be able to exit such an embarrassing scene fast enough. But even when he's back in his own room, Vinnie can't help remembering Bryan's silk robe and shiny lip gloss. And really, really wanting to see Bryan again. Even though nothing about gay, black, southern femme dancer Bryan is "part of Vinnie's organized plan of attack on his student life. He stuck out in every venue like a sore thumb" (336).
Bryan, too, has his doubts about hooking up again with Vinnie: "Lots of guys only want to be with someone who can pass for straight, especially once they sober up, and, honey, that is never going to be me. I've made my peace with that" (257). And his previous experience with gay jocks suggests that Vinnie probably hasn't.
But Vinnie manages to persuade Bryan to give him a chance. And soon, before they even realize it, the two are spending serious time together. Boyfriend-like time together.
Even though Bryan is who Vinnie's body wants, his mind can't help worrying, especially when one of his crew teammates starts sprouting homophobic bullshit when Bryan and some of his dance squad friends come to cheer the crew team at their first race of the season. Though he tries to hide his reaction, Vinnie can't help but cringe:
It shouldn't bother him. It didn't bother him. He did not believe there was only one way to be gay. Or two ways. Or whatever. And nothing about the way he dressed or the choices he made was better or more valid than Bryan's way of living. It wasn't.
But, God, no matter how many times he repeated that in his head, he still braced himself every time he looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was staring at him.
It kind of sucked to realize he gave that much of a shit about what other people thought of him. (886)
Vinnie is gay, but his "gayness" is less obvious than Bryan's, less disruptive to conventional masculine norms. Vinnie's class position, as well as his cis-gendered looks and activities, grant him enough privilege that he has not been subject to the same degree of "crap" (i.e., homophobic taunting and physical abuse) that the far more feminine Bryan has. And straight-arrow Vinnie cannot help but feel amazed that "Bryan didn't feel the need to tone himself down in the face of it" (594).
Not surprisingly, internalized homophobia is not conducive to a happy romantic relationship. Vinnie's comes back to bite him during a fraught incident with Bryan, an incident that has Bryan feeling that Vinnie is just like all the other gay jock boys he's been with: ashamed.
But as Vinnie's roommates have all discovered (in previous books in the series), relationships have their ups and downs, their sweet moments and their failures, their fuck-ups and their make-ups. Now Vinnie has to decide if being a boyfriend—being Bryan's boyfriend—is what he really wants. And if he's willing to work on both on his relationship skills and on rooting out his own internalized homophobia to make it happen.
Photo credits:
Femme to Femme: Lambda Literary
Korean rowing team: Getty Images
Hard Candy
Bend or Break #7
Samhain, 2015
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
The Merits of Romance: A Debate from Catherine M. Roach's HAPPILY EVER AFTER
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The idea behind such a "performative ethnography," Roach argues in the introduction to this chapter, is to allow the reader to "have fun" rather than "drowning you in jargon and theory" (48). By making fun not only of herself, but of "certain conventions of sober analysis," Roach hopes to destabilize the "insider/outsider boundaries that can make conversation—serious conversation—difficult across the divide between academics and the general public" (48).
I have to admit, though, that I found myself frowning more often than laughing while reading Chapter 3, and not quite knowing why. Was I just not getting into the spirit of Roach's self-described "tomfoolery"? Or was there something else going on here?
When I went back to re-read the chapter, I found my eye caught this time not by the content of Roach and LaRoche's arguments, but by the stage directions and voice intonations Roche gives each of her two "identities" to perform. Can you tell which Roach/LaRoche's identity goes with which set of stage directions?
| Debator A | Debator B |
|---|---|
| sneering tone | sighing |
| more sneering | sounds of slurping coffee |
| sound of coffee cup slamming down | squealing noisily |
| bewildered | sounds of chair scraping |
| annoyed | pouting, sitting back down |
| sanctimoniously | sighing |
| whining | mockingly |
| grudgingly | pouting again |
| sarcastically | sounds of shuffling paper |
| with more sneer | laughing |
| bewildered, again | laughing |
| paper rustling noises that sound suspiciously like a woman fanning herself | sounds of slapping the table |
| humph | angrily |
| defensively | |
| goadingly |
(answer will appear in comment section below at the end of the day)
What stereotypes of romance writers, and of female academics, does each set of stage directions suggest?
Does deploying such stereotypes in the middle of a mock debate help call our attention to them? Or simply reproduce them? Can using them (and having readers notice you using them) help break down the "insider/outsider boundaries that can make conversation—serious conversation—difficult across the divide between academics and the general public" (48)? Or does it just invite readers to uncritically mock both sides?
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Making Fun of the Romance Reader
On a rare outing to the movies last month, a friend and I sat down to watch Sally Field in the newly released My Name is Doris. I didn't know anything about the film, but my friend's description of it—a middle aged woman who has lived with her mother all her life gets to explore her own interests after that mother dies—made it sound right up my alley. A coming-of-age story about a middle-aged woman? Bring it on!
Early on in the film, though, a single shot of Doris commuting to work from Staten Island to Manhattan told me that this movie was not likely to be an unequivocal celebration of an older women blossoming into independence and a new sense of self:
Can you see it? There, held in Doris's two slightly wrinkled hands. Yes, readers, Doris his holding a romance novel. A real-life romance novel, in fact: A SEAL at Heart by Anne Elizabeth, which was published in 2012.
Yes, Doris, our frumpy, out-of-touch, sixty-something heroine, is a romance reader. As soon as you see that paperback in her hands, with its hairless, bare chested cover model, sweeping ocean waves, and gorgeous sunset, you're supposed to make the leap: Doris reads romance, hence Doris has wildly unrealistic expectations about what her own romantic life can possibly be.
And the film goes on to demonstrate the inevitability of that linkage of romance reading with the usual clichés: Doris owns a cat; Doris is a secret hoarder; Doris doesn't have a boyfriend; Doris falls madly, ridiculously in love with John, a new coworker decades younger than herself.
Cue the laugh track.
Or, if you are a romance reader yourself, cue the gnashing of teeth.
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| Doris learning the ins and outs of Facebook from her best friend's 13-year-old daughter |
And of pity.
Stalking her handsome co-worker leads Doris to exploring (and abusing) Facebook; attending (and enjoying) a "Baby Goya and the Nuclear Winters" electronica concert in hip Williamsburg; and joining her crush's girlfriend in a lesbian rooftop knitting circle ("I'm not a lesbian, but they are just so welcoming, you know?"). Doris really enjoys said activities, and we are invited to take pleasure in her pleasure, to be happy for her as she tries new things and finds herself welcomed by new people. But at the same time, viewers, more aware than Doris herself, are also meant to catch the cultural critique of hip millennial culture her unsocialized eye reveals.
And we're definitely meant to laugh (and, perhaps, cringe) at her Walter Mitty-like daydreams, daydreams not about her own heroism, as are Mitty's, but about being sexily wooed by co-worker John. Daydreams that are informed by the tropes of contemporary romance, be it in rom-com or novel form. Tropes that Doris has imbibed by reading romances during her daily commute to work.
And, if we've been reading our romance novel symbolism correctly, we should also be prepared for the painful crash when Doris attempts to bring her romance-inspired daydreams into real life. Romance readers are, by nature, deluded, immature, in need of a good dose of wide-eyed reality, aren't they? Or so asserts knowing pop culture.
Today, though, fear has been transformed into humor: we are invited to laugh at poor Doris, inspired by A SEAL at Heart and other romance novels to pursue a wildly unsuitable romantic partner. But behind that laughter, uneasiness still remains. Uneasiness at female sexuality, at female desire, and a hope that both might be safely contained, if only women would stop reading those damned romance novels.
Keep reading, Doris, I say. A dangerous "re-creation," indeed.
Have you noticed the trope of romance reader = deluded, repressed, or laughable in other current-day works of popular culture?
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