Popular Romance in the Classroom: Guest Post by Jennifer Wofford

Please join me in welcoming to RNFF Dr. Jennifer Wofford, a professor as well as a romance author, as she describes her recent experience of teaching first year college students through the "Category Romance Project."




My name is Jennifer Wofford. I teach writing and popular romance at Ithaca College in Ithaca NY. I also write historical romance under the name Giulia Torre. Along with Catherine Roach, I self-identify as an Aca-Fan, an academic who is also a fan of what she studies. I study romance while wholly immersed in it—reading, writing, teaching, and advocating for its importance and complexity on all fronts.

In the fall of 2017, in my first-year college writing seminar Reading Popular Romance, I piloted the "Category Romance Project," a classroom-based, large-group student research project that explored "vintage" category romances (20 years or older) from a social science perspective.

I proposed Reading Popular Romance as a social science course with the sponsorship of IC's Writing Department. Ever since the publication of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984), scholars have been using social science to analyze the genre. Social science was the most exciting thing to happen to my relationship to text since I read my first Bantam Loveswept romance in 1984.

I was introduced to social science methods by Brian Street through the field of New Literacy Studies. NLS takes an "ideological approach" to the study of literacy—to reading, to writing, and to text in all its forms and contexts. Through language we create, acknowledge, and most often presume mythologies and master narratives that in turn guide and make sense of our actions.

Community of Inquiry model

Because of what I learned from NLS, my approach to teaching is a theoretical framework called "Community of Inquiry," or CoI. Learning is social, and therefore relies on participation in a community. The CoI model turns the classroom into a site of literacy research. I've found that this approach gives students the skills for recognizing their own identity filters, for designing research questions that in turn create strong claims, for creating compelling arguments and finding something to say, and ultimately for developing their own authentic voices. Simply, students write better papers when they use the CoI approach.


STEP ONE: FIND A SHARED LANGUAGE

My first step in creating a community of inquiry around a classroom research project is shaking out students' funds of knowledge, getting everyone's cards on the table. During sessions designed to focus on students' transition-to-college issues, we discussed issues related to race, gender, sexuality, and mental health. Student panels and speakers trained in conducting such conversations came to the classroom to tell us their stories, so students had a way of talking about real world issues and their own identities without having to use themselves as examples.

Also during these sessions, I asked students to bring in examples of popular love songs as well as  their favorite romantic movies. Songs and movies are an easy way to get students talking about romance. They can also serve as good ice breakers: students feel a teacher is a bit more approachable after seeing her dance to Tina Turner during the first week of class.

These initial conversations about romance and about identity served as points of reference throughout the remainder of the course. For example, in one section of my course, 9 out of 16 students self-identified to the group as having been diagnosed with anxiety or depression or as having suicidal thoughts. Reading Alexis Hall's Glitterland in the context of these students' experiences was far different than in sections where students did not identify so closely with the mental health challenges of Ash Winters, Glitterland's protagonist.



STEP TWO: INTRODUCE CONCEPTS IN POPULAR ROMANCE

While students recognized and shared their own knowledge about romance, I also introduced new concepts that weren't already a part of their own systems. Students learned the difference between romantic and popular romance and romanticism, as well as the definition of "trope" (and key examples from genre romance). Weekly lectures gave students the language of Romancelandia, as well as some of the tools by which they could analyze individual romances and the romance genre as a whole. In addition, we discussed theoretical concepts, such as Lyotard's notion of "master narrative," a story that explains society and cultural norms while at the same time legitimizing the status quo. Master narratives make it difficult to understand reality in any other way than the "dominant" narrative. Popular culture often uses counter-narratives to make make alternative narratives visible. One of the more well-known master narratives in the United States if the history of Columbus "discovering" America. The word "discovery—and the master narrative it implies—wasn't challenged until relatively recently. We discuss the ways that the HEA (Happily Ever After) of romance is a master narrative.

STEP THREE: INTRODUCE THE CATEGORY ROMANCE

Quite simply, I tried to explain the category romance to this generation of students. My students had a hard time conceptualizing the category romance, even when faced with a large pile of examples. I explained that category lines represent subgenres in mainstream romance publishing, and that these sub-genres have rules about authors' use of tropes, archetypes, and plot lines, rules that readers come to expect and use to guide their reading choices.

There seemed to be nothing like the category romance in their world.

Showing students covers of books with the same trope helped.

STEP FOUR: INTRODUCE SOCIAL SCIENCE METHODS

As an entrance into the analysis of texts by way of social science methodology, we read Lily King's Euphoria (2014), a work of fiction inspired by the story of anthropologist Margaret Mead. Set in 1930s New Guinea, Euphoria tells of a love triangle between three anthropologists in the field, each of whom is struggling with varying degrees of failure to "see" beyond their own limited perspectives. The novel represents the social life of text in various forms. The female protagonist writes field ethnographies. All three scientists hunker down over a colleague's monologue draft mailed to them from back home. The antagonist searches for an artifact that will prove a primitive culture had a written language.

After students finished reading Euphoria, I learned that they originally thought the book was a romance. But this book has one of the most heartbreaking and haunting endings in my memory. As un unanticipated teaching moment, students got to experience the phenomenon of reader expectation (and the dashing of same) in commercial romance.

In addition to reading Euphoria, students read brief, introductory articles in the fields of New Literary Studies and social linguistics. Social science is a valuable process of alienation, or de-familiarization. One activity proved particularly effective in demonstrating this process of alienation. I asked students to draw a sentence from an NLS article, and we browsed the results, looking for patterns. They realized that we're ruled by rectangles—paper (everyone drew on lined paper), tablets, screens, desk tops, even the very room that we were in. Standardization is a master narrative. It's invisible, and we think it's valuable (cost-efficient, replicable, consistent) without even questioning what gets lost when we sit, write, and think inside boxes.

By reading about anthropologists at work, a fiction focused on a central love story, through the lens of social science, students become attuned to looking at rather than through the water in which we swim.



STEP FIVE:  DEFINE THE DATA SET

So what exactly was our data set? We started with three category lines:

• Harlequin Presents
• Harlequin Romance
• Bantam Loveswept

Perilous stack of vintage category romances
(buttressed with a Heyer and a Woodiwiss)

Why these lines? For me, they are my everyday. I own them in the hundreds. I'm familiar with the plot structure, archetypes, and authors. And I love the covers. Not only because cover illustration is a lost art, but because covers are a clear visual representation of how the mainstream West allowed love, intimacy, sex, and gender to be represented over time. Covers were indeed a favorite topic for students.

We restricted our reading to books at least 20 years or older.

Were there problems with this data set? You betcha.

Vintage category romances are white, there are no two ways about it. But the utter absence of characters of color is, in and of itself, a wake-up call. It's a way to understand the full scope and impact of whitewashing, as well as the privilege of reading while white.

This data set is also unarguably heternormative. These books tell the story of heterosexual romance. In the very first book in the Loveswept line—Heaven's Price by Sandra Brown—the heroine's first long-term romantic partner was gay, which provided the logical reason for her still being a virgin. But that's as queer as these books get.

After butting up against these limits, we decided to expand the data set. I assigned questions that charged students to research on diversity and diverse voices in popular romance. They returned with blog posts on the closure of the Kimani line and segregation in romance publishing, as well as information on Bold Strokes Publishing and women writing romance with queer male characters. This diversity research provided some of the most interesting discussions in the course, and many students ended up choosing final paper topics on issues related to their diversity explorations. Each student expanded their own data set, but the limitations of the larger set remained intact. To a significant degree, it was the limitations of the set that taught students the most, both about research and about master narratives in romance. That said, when I teach this class next year, the data set will at the very least include early books from Harlequin's Kimani and Arabesque lines, as well as a canon-busting assignment to expand the classroom library.


STEP SIX: SOLICIT RESEARCH QUESTIONS

When presented with hundreds of gorgeous, but designed-to-be-ephemeral books, students were mesmerized and astounded, sometimes even shocked. They started reading the back covers and inside blurbs, and then began to reach them aloud to one another. It was a very natural process for them to start to ask questions about what they were reading.

All questions were shared among students and between sections. An important element of the course is to share questions so that students can also share findings. But it has the added benefit of giving students an understanding of what makes a good question.

Through the simple act of considering what they would have to do to answer their question, students learned an important lesson: some questions are unanswerable, given the constraints of both our data set and of the time allotted to the project.


STEP SEVEN: DEFINE CODES

In anthropology, coding is used to chunk and classify concepts in the social scientist's ethnography: the field notes and rich description of her subject. Coding feels a lot like textual analysis. When coding is applied to literary texts, it functions to highlight the text's cultural dimensions. I created a starter list of codes—single words or short phrases to signal a theme or topic or question—and shared them with the class. These codes directly represented their specific questions. As new questions emerged, students were charged with creating and sharing new codes.

Students were then assigned code cards. Each student had to produce 10 cards to satisfy the larger category romance project assignment. I gave them time in class to read and search for codes in our data set books, and they also were allowed to use my books outside of class. Students also drew on the massive online library at the Romancewiki, as well as other online sources, such as Goodreads, AbeBooks, Amazon, and publishers' web sites.

As students turned in completed code cards, I scanned them front and back, and uploaded them to our online course site, saving them with titles that reflected the codes. As more cards were submitted, I continued to scan and upload. Students then had access to all other students' research on the codes or associated codes that provided responses to their chosen research question.

#metoo was very much in the headlines during the time we were working on this project, so students were encouraged by world events and by events happening on college campuses to ask questions about rape culture and consent, and their connection to romance reading.


CONCLUSIONS

In their final projects, students wrote on virginity, consent, race and ethnicity, sexism, and cover art. Some of the essays were outstanding; others were standard first-year fare. But students all walked away having grappled with important and complicated issues. Old school category romances are an on-ramp to complicated discussions of power: segregation in publishing; what it means for readers of color to be forced to read only of white characters; the prevalence of rape culture and "forced seduction," and the ways that popular romance reflects and reproduces that culture.

Happily Ever After is a master narrative, and I see this as one of the grand takeaways of this course. What happens to our personal narratives if partnership at the end of a story is removed? If it's not a (or the only) desired ending at all?

One of my students said during class one day, "Sometimes I think you hate these books, and sometimes I think you love them." YES. Her comment raises an important question: how can we acknowledge the historical moment in which these stories were written and respect their authors, while at the same time use them as examples of what not to do today?

The romance plot forces us to navigate ambiguity and complexity, to articulate this feeling of bothatonce (or many things at once). One thing is not ambiguous: popular romance is definitely female and almost universally denigrated. By studying popular romance in the college classroom, both scholars and students have the opportunity to develop language that acknowledges criticism but allows for imperfection, for our own sometimes conflicted ideas about the genre and ourselves as readers of it. Such study unambiguously asserts the importance of genre romance both as a body of writing and as one example of a communal representation of the female imagination.


Readers, if you had the chance to take a class on popular romance, would you? What research questions would you want to explore?


Note: This post is based on a talk given by Dr. Wofford at Bowling Green State University's Browne Popular Culture Library, at the Researching the Romance conference.

Happily Ever After: Catherine Roach's thoughts on the endings of romance novels

The third, and last, in my series of posts on Catherine M. Roach's Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture focuses, fittingly, on the endings of romance novels (see posts #1 and #2 here and here). "In romance, the ending is crucial," Roach notes in the introduction of her book's final chapter (165). That that ending be a happy one has become not just a given, but one of the key parts of the definition of the genre as a whole. Romance authors whom Roach interviewed "view the ending as a contract they have with their readers: No matter how wounded the characters are by plot conflicts in a book's middle, all will be well by the end" (166). What is the larger cultural meaning of the romance novel's HEA, or "happily ever after"?

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

The Merits of Romance: A Debate from Catherine M. Roach's HAPPILY EVER AFTER

In between reading romance novels, I've been gradually making my way through Catherine M. Roach's academic study of the genre, Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (see my post about the book's opening chapter here). Because Roach is in the unusual (although not entirely unique) position of being both a scholar and a writer of romance, her nonfiction study includes more than just straightforward analyses of individual books, or analysis of the romance genre as a whole. Instead, academically-oriented chapters are sandwiched between chapters that Roach describes as "more narrative in style, with passages of my own romance writing and with stories based on my time spent among romance communities of readers and authors" (15). One of the most curious of these chapters is Chapter 3, "Notes from the Imagination: Reading Romance Writing." The chapter stages an imaginary debate between the author's two romance-related identities: Catherine Roach, gender and cultural studies professor, and Catherine LaRoche, historical romance author.

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?

The Sheik and I: Academics and Authors On the Sheikh Romance

I've been reading my way through the latest issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, and my eye was caught by a pair of articles that focus on contemporary Sheikh romances. Reading the two side by side helped me understand why romance writers and scholars of the genre often find themselves at odds.

The first article, "Love in the Desert: Images of Arab-American Reconciliation in Contemporary Sheikh Romance Novels" by historian Stacy E. Holden, is far longer than the second, "Stacy Holden's 'Love in the Desert': A Response," by romance author Megan Crane—17 pages, plus 2 pages of "Works Cited" references, in contrast to Crane's less than 3 pages, with no sources cited. Academics are trained to point to past work that has been done in their field, and then build their own arguments in response. As one of the professors in my graduate English program once said, "You have to show how your work is intervening in the current critical conversation." Whenever a scholar writes an essay, s/he must show awareness of what previous critics have said about the topic, as well as explain how the argument made here differs from that previous criticism.

A book by Megan Crane (under her pen
name, Caitlin Crews)

Crane opens her response essay by making it clear that she, like Holden, has an academic background: "I was an avid and enthusiastic reader of romance novels long before I found myself pursuing my doctorate in English Literature" (1). Crane's essay, though, does not follow the scholarly model of drawing upon previous sources to build one's argument. Instead, Crane uses her own experience ("I feel"; "I'd argue"; "I'd argue further") to frame the arguments she makes. Academics are sometimes told directly, and are certainly trained indirectly by examples, to avoid using "I" statements, a practice which results in prose that often makes the person doing the arguing disappear, replaced by a faceless voice of authority. I'm guessing that many romance authors find that faceless voice annoying, frustrating, or even oppressive, and struggle against its claims to authority by highlighting their own experiences, their own "I"s. But academics, trained to cite their sources, are likely in turn to find Crane's "I" arguments, unsubstantiated by citations from scholarly sources, less than convincing.

Holden's article argues the increase in the number of sheikh romances published in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as well as the narrative patterns within them, "highlight the vast cultural differences between the Arab hero and the American heroine that will be overcome during the course of the book. In this way, they emphasize an implicit political fantasy that undoubtedly contributes to this genre's popularity in a post-9/11 world" (1). Crane takes issue with Holden's thesis, arguing that "As a life-long romance reader, former scholar of literature, and a current author of romances, I feel one could as easily substitute 'Scottish highlander' or 'Greek tycoon' for 'sheikh' and make many of these same arguments. Which is more persuasive? Your answer may have as much to do with your own background as anything in each of the essays.

Both Crane and Holden employ literary theory to ground their arguments. But the theoretical lenses they each don are often viewed as antithetical by contemporary literary critics. Crane takes a universalist view, one most commonly associated with Archetypal literary theory: finding "recurrent narrative designs, patterns of action, character-types, themes, and images which are identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even social rituals. Such recurrent items are held to be the result of elemental and universal forms or patterns in the human psyche, whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the attentive reader, because he or she shares the psychic archetypes expressed by the author" (Abrams 13). That is, archetypal critics tend to focus upon patterns that can be found across genres, across cultures, universal commonalities.

Though Crane cites no specific archetypal critics, she displays her archetypal leanings in statements such as these:

"The reconciliation fantasies that lurk within romance novels are between the heroes and heroines first and mainly, are not specific to any particular culture or even in some cases species, and are certainly not restricted to stories featuring sheikhs" (2-3)

"Romance novels are not the exclusive province of Americans or, indeed, Western women, and tus, the fears they strive to address lie more within the scope of human frailty and the darkness of the human soul than any purely Western, quasi-colonialist gaze on the shifting geo-political landscape" (3).

(emphasis in both quotes added by RNFF)

Old Skool literary criticism?

Archetypal criticism had its heyday in the 1950s through the 1980s, although many past and contemporary romance authors still embrace it (many of the writers in 1992's essay collection, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance drew on archetypal arguments in their championing of the genre). The last decades of the twentieth century saw this school of criticism come under attack, though, from many different quarters: from feminists; from New Historicists; from critical race theorists, and others. Such critics pointed out the ways that all too often what was viewed as "universal" by archetypal critics was far more often a Western norm than a human-wide pattern. Universalizing, what was once seen as a strength, is now more often viewed as a weakness. Current literary critics, then, would likely not be very responsive to an argument based on archetypal tenets.

Though Holden, like Crane, identifies patterns, she uses culturally-specific, historically situated lenses to explore the meaning of such patterns. Each section of her essay presents a specific sub-argument that works to support her overall claim. First, she references two previous studies that showed a sharp increase in sheikh romance titles since 9/11 (six in 2000, eighteen in 2002) to back up her claim that there is something different about sheikh romances published before 9/11 and those published after. Then, she notes how the fictional sheikh kingdoms in romance novels leave out the urban settings common in contemporary Arab countries, preferring to focus instead on desert settings. Third, she points to the pattern of cultural clashes in the novels she examined, clashes between male Arab sheikhs and their Western female loves. Finally, she analyzes how these clashes are resolved, finding that "The careful negotiation between sameness and difference... —ultimately, sameness is primary, though difference must be there—can also be found in any given sheikh romance's denouement, and in the political fantasy offered in it" (13).

Historically-situated literary theory

What makes Holden's essay particularly fascinating is that she does not just draw on the sheikh texts themselves, but also on interviews with eleven authors and two editors of sheikh romances, to back up her claims. Many literary critics have moved beyond the "intentional fallacy" (trying to read a text and guess an author's intentions) to Barthes' "Death of the Author" position—the belief it is a mistake to cede the interpretation of a text to its author, even if its author has openly stated what s/he intended when s/he wrote it. Holden, in contrast, finds value in an author's take on the text, so much so that she conducted interviews with eleven authors and three editors of sheikh romances to find out their thoughts on the works they had created.

Holden's interviews demonstrate that the authors of sheikh romances themselves typically intend their books to be culturally positive: "I would love to think that we are in some way getting people to look at other people and other places, and saying it doesn't all have to be, you know, American Velveeta cheese on white bread" says Sandra Marton (14). But at the same time, she uses her interviews as only one of many types of evidence she brings to bear in her analysis. And ultimately her analysis demonstrates that there is often a gap between what an author intends and the cultural work the text she produces actually accomplishes:

Marton and other authors express the desire to break free from the negative stereotypes of Arabs put forth in other media via the vehicle of romance, a worthy intention indeed. In order to accomplish this goal, however, authors sometimes suppress certain aspects of Arab culture and contribute inadvertently to Orientalist discourse" (14).

Holden concludes her essay by suggesting two possible readings of sheikh romances:

Read skeptically, against the grain, these novels present a fantasy in which autocratic leaders of the Arab world—those sheikhly heroes who love American women—embrace the values of their Western fiancées and wives, reconciling their two cultures in a way that secures and privileges American interests. But read more generously, in light of their authors' intentions, the sheikh romance novel does present a hopeful vision of the world, one which exchanges Huntington's Clash of Civilizations for a world in which the class between individuals from two worlds, now at odds, is ultimately an erotic clash: one which leads them to fall in love, resolve their differences, and live harmoniously together" (17).

In contrast, Crane's essay opens by reducing Holden's nuanced argument from two open possibilities to one closed interpretation:

"Do contemporary sheikh romance novels fetishize Arabs and subject the to the unwavering, privileged glare of the Western imagination as Holden asserts? Or is there a way in which all stories of the beloved fetishize and objectify the beloved—both heroine and hero in their turn, regardless of their cultural background or racial make-up, across all subgenres of romantic fiction?" (1)

Crane, then, misreads Holden, just as she claims Holden misreads sheikh romances. And just as many romance authors feel scholars of romance do...

The "archetypal" Western sheik:
Rudolph Valentino

I myself find Holden's arguments far more persuasive than Crane's. But then, of course, I was trained as a literary critic. I'm curious to hear whether other romance readers, those not familiar with the debates between and assumptions by academically-trained readers will feel the same.

If you're curious. both Holden and Crane's essays are available online:

Holden, Stacy E. "Love in the Desert: Images of Arab-American Reconciliation in Contemporary Sheikh Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies, August 2015.

Crane, Megan. "Stacy Holden's 'Love in the Desert': An Author's Response." Journal of Popular Romance Studies, August 2015.

I've also cited from M. H. Abrams' canonical A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th edition. Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth 2005.



Illustration credits:
Archetypal chickens: The Educated Imagination
Postmodern cross-dressing: Frank Grady syllabus

Marrying for Money: Financial Empowerment from Romance

The best laid plans of mice and romance bloggers...

The current spate of snowy weather in Boston laid waste to my plans to attend the What is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age conference last week. Luckily for me, and for RNFF readers, romance blogger and conference attendee Elisabeth Lane kindly agreed to share her thoughts on the conference. Take it away, Elisabeth...

This past week at the Library of Congress, romance readers, writers, and academics got together to talk about the romance genre. There was a sneak peak of a documentary, Love Between the Covers, by filmmaker Laurie Kahn, which set the tone for the two days of programing in its overwhelmingly positive and empowering vision of the romance genre. The following day, a conference on popular romance, What Is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age, featured panelists from academia and publishing, as well as writers, readers, and others involved in the romance industry. Romance writer Margaret Locke wrote an excellent recap of the film and the four individual panels from the conference. And romance writer and blogger Kiersten Krum storified the #poprom hashtag that was used during the conference. Both are great links for a broad overview of what was discussed at the conference.

What I'd like to talk about here, though, is something more specific, a common thread that struck me after watching the documentary film and after attending the conference the next day: the huge economic impact of the romance genre. As a romance reviewer, I typically think of romance in terms of its content: stories, characters, plots, themes. And sometimes in terms of sociological analyses of what we as a society say about the romance genre and what the romance genre says about us. But while I have always known intellectually that romance is a huge business (it’s a fact that gets repeated frequently by romance apologists), I hadn’t really considered its impact on individual women’s finances. During the film and the conference, the theme that romance is a genre “for women, by women, and about women” was repeated at least a half dozen times by various speakers. While in the spirit of inclusiveness, we know that’s not always the case, it is still very much true of the bulk of the romance industry. Not only is the romance industry in general for women, by women, and about women, it is also a business that accrues major economic benefit to women.

There were myriad examples of this in both the film and the conference. Historical romance writer Eloisa James, who was both interviewed for the documentary and was present at the conference, said in the film that she started writing romance novels to pay off student loans. Liliana Hart, a self-published writer of romantic suspense, made reference during a panel to trying (with difficulty) to raise four kids on a teacher’s salary prior to her success as a writer. Kim Castillo, an author assistant, has turned her love of romance into a business, handling administrative and promotional tasks for James and other writers. She was clear in both the film and on one of the conference panels that the business of romance novels feeds her family. Tara McPherson, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Studies at University of Southern California, discussed the contributions of romance novels to the bottom line of publishers and the success of soap operas (another medium created primarily for women) in keeping television studios in the black for many years. This doesn’t even cover all that was said by speakers and panelists regarding the benefit of romance to their personal bottom lines.

Maybe she should have
taken up romance writing
instead??

These examples are anecdotal, of course. The conference wasn’t explicitly about the business of romance and so there were very few specific dollar amounts cited beyond a million here (for some authors) and a billion there (for the industry as a whole). So I looked up some statistics on the RWA website, the trade association for the romance genre. In 2013, the total sales value of the romance genre was $1.08 billion, accounting for 13% of the sales share of the adult fiction book market. And, also from RWA, 84% of the romance readership is female. I couldn’t find statistics for the percentage of romance writers, editors, agents, cover designers, marketers or others who work in romance publishing, but attendance at the conference, which spanned every aspect of the industry, was overwhelmingly female. So a lot of women are making a lot of money in the romance industry. How much is “a lot” to each person varies widely, depending on specific and highly personal goals—recently contemporary romance writer Cara McKenna did a really honest post on Wonkomance about her earnings—but it’s clear that whatever money is being made makes a tremendous difference to women’s households. 

When we talk about romance, the question of both economics and personal household budgets are rarely discussed. We can talk about how we read romance or whether the content of romance is inherently feminist or whether it upholds a status quo that is inherently conservative, marriage-centric, and heteronormative. And those are all very interesting questions that I personally could think about and talk about all day long, every day. But whether romance is a feminist genre or whether it isn’t in terms of its content, a lot of women are making a lot of money in and from this industry. And it’s an industry that wouldn’t exist or be popular or be profitable without the work of women, the business acumen of women, and the community of women. Which seems to me to be an inherently feminist good.

Elisabeth Lane is a romance novel-loving housewife who writes romance reviews for food lovers at her blog, Cooking Up Romance. You can also follow her cooking and reading adventures on Twitter @elisabethjlane and Facebook.

Photo credits:

Dollar heart: Tim Maurer blog

Girl Without Money book cover: University of Otego

Reporting from the "Unsuitable #1" Panel at Duke University

It was a honor to be asked to participate in the first of Duke University's Unsuitable panels, a series of "open, frank, and informed conversations about women and popular fiction historically and today." Professors (and romance authors) Laura Florand and Katharine Brophy DuBois (pen name Katharine Ashe) are coordinating this speaker series in conjunction with the course they will be teaching in the spring semester, "The Romance Novel." Here's a brief recap of this first panel, for those who did not have the good fortune to attend:

Laura Florand and Katharine Brophy DuBois opened the program by jointly welcoming attendees and participants, inviting all interested parties to join in the conversation about why books aimed primarily at a female audience are often either ignored or denigrated. Audience members included romance writers, undergrad and graduate students, scholars from related disciplines, and readers of popular romance, a mix that suggests the goal of the series—to get people from different backgrounds but a common interest talking about the most popular (and most financially lucrative) genre being published today—is well on its way to being met.

Rachel Seidman, a historian who specializes in the history of women's activism, opened the program by talking about the "Who Needs Feminism" project that students in her "Women and the Public Sphere" class at Duke created in response to her call for final projects that engaged in activism on behalf of women's issues. Her students, recognizing that if you "identify yourself as a feminist today... many people will immediately assume you are a  man-hating, bra-burning, whiny liberal," decided to create a PR campaign on behalf of feminism, a campaign focused on erasing the assumption that we "no longer need feminism." The project was originally intended to extend no further than the Duke campus, but when students posted the photos they had taken to Facebook, "Who Needs Feminism" went viral. Now, people around the world are writing down the reasons why they need feminism and posting them to the tumblr site the class created.

Seidman spoke about the backlash against the project, initially primarily by men but more recently by women, too. While much of the male backlash was simply offensive or abusive, Seidman found it fascinating that the anti-feminism pictures posted by women often included arguments similar to those made by nineteenth-century women who protested against women's suffrage. Patriarchy often allows women a small degree of power, and feminism has had a difficult time, Seidman suggested, convincing women invested in the power patriarchy has offered in giving up that power in the hopes of gaining agency of their own.

Seidman concluded by asking "How much of this matters? Is this a breakthrough moment for feminism, or an empty gesture?" Seidman suggested that shifting the feminist discourse from "I am a feminist" to "I need feminism because it allows me to do x" might be a positive step, suggesting that those wary of identity politics might come to regard feminism as a tool they can employ to meet their goals, rather than a label they have to wear.

Romance author and scholar Maya Rodale spoke next, recounting the research she had done for her Master's thesis on the history of romance, and the reasons why the genre, and women's reading in general, has so often been stigmatized. She recounted her own mocking attitude towards the genre when she was a college student, until she thought to ask herself how she knew to mock romance when she'd never even read a romance novel? Digging into the history of both romance and women's reading, she discovered that reading, especially reading by women and by the poor, was considered dangerous. Romances developed a bad reputation, a reputation intended to frighten women away from reading that might call patriarchal and class hierarchies into question. 

Rodale points to four reasons why romance novels might be considered dangerous:

• Romance celebrates a woman's right to choose

• Romance focuses on independent women, in the period after they've left the domesticity of their family home and before they've begun to create domestic homes of their own. The "Sex in the City" years of a woman's life, as Rodale terms them.

• Romance asserts women's sexuality is not worthy of punishment, but of celebration. In literary fiction, women who have sex often end up dead (think Anna Karenina, or myriad other 19th century cannonical works). But in romance, women get to have sex and enjoy it. A scary thought for many...

• Romance insists on a happily-ever-after. Literary critics tend to agree with the opening line of the above-mentioned Anna Karenina: "All happy families [or lovers] are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." If a book ends happily, they feel, it must be formulaic, and thus lacking in true literary merit. Romance takes issue with this belief.

Maya is currently at work on a longer nonfiction project about the reputation of popular romance, but if you'd like the details of her past work, check out this uTube video she made summarizing her thesis.

Florand and DuBois saw my work as a bridge between the two earlier speakers' work, and thus asked me to speak at the end of the program. I recounted the genesis of the RNFF blog in my own history of reading"unsuitable" romances (see this early post for details), and then talked about the pleasures of the blog, in particular the cross-section of commenters that have posted thoughts, ideas, questions, and challenges over the two years of the blog's existence.

Katharine Dubois, Jackie Horne, Laura Florand,
Maya Rodale, and Jessica Scott

A short but lively discussion followed our presentations, a discussion which touched upon the state of sex education in our country, how constructions of masculinity in romance have changed far more slowly than constructions of femininity have, speculation about the reasons for the current resurgence in alpha males, the role of sex and sexual pleasure in romance, the tensions between feminism and capitalism, and just how stigmatized romance really is today. I want to thank the audience members for their thoughtful questions and insights; their ideas have given me much food for thought, and for future posts here at RNFF.

One thing I did want to clear up. While the writer from Duke Today who reported on the event quoted me as asking "Why is it that we have to hide our romance novels in our nightstand drawers or under our beds?" (I believe it was actually Katharine DuBois who asked this, and as a rhetorical question), what I actually said was that while as an adolescent I had kept my Harlequin romances in a paper bag in the closet, I now had several shelves in my office devoted to my single-title romance keepers, below my children's literature scholarly books and above my fantasy and science fiction collections.

It's the erotica I keep in the nightstand table...