Critiquing from Pleasure: Julie M. Dugger's " 'I'm a Feminist, But... Popular Romance in the Women's Literature Classroom"

I've been dipping with pleasure into the latest issue of Journal of Popular Romance Studies (4.2), with its dual themes of popular romance in Australia and a 30th-anniversary consideration of Janice Radway's groundbreaking study of romance readers, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. But it was an article in the "Teaching and Learning" section of the issue that particular caught my eye, an article about the difficulties students may encounter when reading genre romance in a broader course on Women and Literature. Professor Julie M. Dugger teaches a unit on popular romance in such a class, and writes about both the difficulties and the opportunities presented by such teaching in her article "'I'm a Feminist, But...': Popular Romance in the Women's Literature Classroom" (1).

As I often found when teaching college classes in children's literature, when students who have been trained in literary methods of analyzing a text are asked to analyze something other than canonical literature, they often have one of two reactions, neither conducive to productive learning. Some, committed to the critical literary reading practices they've learned and internalized during their college studies, assert that popular literature, unlike the literature commonly studied in the college classroom, is lesser, and thus unworthy of rigorous critical analysis. Others, more comfortable with popular reading practices than with literary analysis, practices focused more on the pleasure one takes in reading than in analyzing how texts work, object to applying the techniques of literary analysis to their favorite books. "You're overanalyzing this!" and "Don't ruin it for me!" were two common refrains in my children's literature classrooms, as I'm sure they are in any literature course that includes popular romance on its syllabus.

The situation becomes even more complicated when you add feminist literary theory to the mix. Many students are aware of the negative views many feminists have about popular genre romance, yet at the same time, those same students often take real pleasure in reading romance. As Dugger asks, "What is the women's studies critic to do when a genre dominated by women writers and readers appears to conflict with feminist ideals?" (1) Rather than attempt to ignore the discomfort that a student who is a fan of romance may experience when asked to analyze individual romances, or the genre as a whole, Dugger suggests, teachers should take advantage of this discomfort, for it "provides key opportunities for reflecting not only on romance, but on the assumptions in literary and feminist studies that might otherwise go unexamined" (1).

It's important to lay the groundwork for such an examination, though, to help students move beyond both discomfort and their refusal to engage. First, Dugger suggests, it is vital to explain that feminism has both criticized and praised romance as a genre.

The feminist case against romance:

• Romance endorses women's relational roles at the expense of their individual development
• Romance plots and characters validate abusive relationship patterns
• Romance novels are commercial, formulaic productions of very little literary value that perpetuate harmful media stereotypes (in particular, gender stereotypes) (6-8)


The feminist case for romance:

• Romances offer women a way to acknowledge their oppression and imagine a better future
• Romances challenge a male-modeled individualism
• Romance provides women with an alternative to a sexist high-culture literary canon (9-11)


Additionally, Dugger argues that it is vital to approach romance texts not just with suspicion—they are all sexist, and it's our job to point out their sexism—but also with an eye toward the pleasures they offer readers:  "If we really want students to analyze the narratives of romance—utopian as well as dystopia—especially when we teach in a culture that is so caught up in these narratives, we must enable them to work critically from their pleasure as well as their discomfort" (14).

Dugger offers the following suggestions as ways to critique from pleasure, ways that I think general readers of romance might appreciate, even outside of a college classroom:

• First, acknowledge that "all interpretive practices have strengths and weaknesses, and academic reading is no exception. Literary critical reading has its own limits, its own professional turf to defend, and its own forms of sexism.... Correspondingly, just as scholarly reading has its strengths, so too does pleasurable reading. We can encourage multiple modes of approaching a text."
• Use and integrate multiple venues of discussion (full class, small groups, online posts, etc.)
• Juxtapose high- and low-culture romances (to unpack why some texts are valued while others are not, and how a text or entire genre's association with women affects readers' perception of literary quality)
• Analyze pleasure: Why does a text give you as a reader pleasure? How do other readers of the same text talk about the pleasure it gives them? How does the text work to create such pleasure?
• Give air-time to both sides of the debate
• Don't be shy about announcing that you (in Dugger's case, the teacher) like romances (or admire people who do). Knowing that other smart women like romance can help readers confront the stigma often associated with reading such a devalued genre (14-16)

These practices both resonated with me, as things I attempt to do via this blog, and gave me food for thought about potential future RNFF posts. I especially appreciated Dugger's generous conclusion: "It cannot hurt to remember how often love is a positive force in human endeavor, whether it be romantic love for other people, or readerly love for the stories they tell" (17).


As a romance reader, do you find yourself conflicted over your reading? Are you able to read for pleasure and read analytically? If so, can you do so both at the same time? Or can you read in only one mode at a time?


Illustration credits:
Keep calm: Keepcalm-o-matic
Love 2 read: Read 2012

Wrestling with the B-word: Lucy March's THAT TOUCH OF MAGIC

Bitch: Feminist Responses to Popular Culture

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

Smart women with feminist leanings have long been attempting to reclaim the derogatory term "bitch," suggesting that the qualities which it points to as worthy of insult are the very qualities that women should celebrate. As author Laura Wild argues,

To me, someone calling me a bitch means they think I'm aggressive, asserting my control, in charge, whatever, and they're probably threatened by that. I am those things, there's no reason why I shouldn't be, and the shock attached to the use of the phrase by whoever's saying it that suggests I shouldn't be those things is what annoys me most.

Such reclamation projects were on my mind as I read the second book in Lucy March's light comedic paranormal series about the small town of Nodaway Falls, That Touch of Magic. Its brash, foul-mouthed, rule-breaking protagonist, budding conjurer Stacy Easter, could well be termed a bitch in the positive, reclaimed sense. Her typical way of interacting with others is through snarky, barbed sarcasm: she greets the sight of her friend (and soon-to-be sister-in-law) Peach "It's Rosie the Riveter, the spank-me version." Peach simply replies, "Yay! She's being mean. She's okay" (26). Stacy wisecracks her way throughout the novel, not afraid to speak her mind, to take control of a bad situation, or to protest, loudly, when others treat her or her friends poorly.

The only thing (or person, rather) who leaves her tongue-tied is her ex-boyfriend, Leo North, who, ten years before, in a drunken, grief-stricken mistake, slept with another girl then left Stacy to study for the priesthood. Back in town for Peach's wedding to Stacy's brother, Leo, it turns out, did not end up taking on the collar. And it also turns out he's not just back in town for the wedding; his therapist recommended that he see Stacy once again, so he'd stop "thinking of you as ... well. Mine. He said you'd be different. He said those feelings would go away, and I'd be able to finally let it go and move on" (70). To Leo's chagrin, his therapist had it wrong: he's just as drawn to Stacy as he was ten years ago.

And Stacy knows her feelings for Leo are just as strong as they ever were. But tough Stacy isn't as ready to mend fences as Leo is: "I wanted to throw my arms around him, kiss him until neither of us could see straight. Bring him to my bed and keep him there forever. But that was weakness, and if loving Leo had made me anything, it wasn't weak" (72). Intriguingly, though, it turns out that Leo's transgression isn't the only thing standing in the way of a joyful Stacy-Leo reunion. Turns out that Stacy's embrace of reclaimed bitchiness is not as unambiguous as she makes it seem.

Stacy herself often deploys the b-word; it appears 16 times in the book, most often spoken by or thought by our protagonist. She uses it to describe her over-the-top narcissistic mother after Mrs. Easter insults Peach during the rehearsal dinner ("You have captured my son's heart, and he's a good man,, so there must be some great virtue in you.... It is my sincere hope that you will find your way back to Jesus, and repent of the poison you have injected into my good boy with your whorish ways"): "She's a hellbitch, Peach" (50-51; 56). When Mrs. Easter tries to return to the rehearsal dinner to spew more vitriol, Stacy uses the word again, threatening her mother with a pretend potion: "If I hear one word from anyone about you being a bitch to anyone, not just Peach... if I see one expression on your face that isn't kindness and delight, all I have to do is get a drop of this on your skin, a single drop, and your face will break out in wrinkles they can see from space" (62). In this sense, being a bitch is being selfish, being completely uncaring of the feelings of those around you.

Stacy also deploys the male form, "son of a bitch," when she wants to insult men who act in a similar, unfeeling way. Initially, when Leo first attempts to explain and apologize: "You slept with someone else, then left me to become a priest, you son of a bitch!" (68) and "You son of a bitch!... You left me" (69). And later in the story, when she discovers that Desmond Lamb, a fellow (male) conjurer has less than benign intentions towards her and the other women of Nodaway Falls, she uses it on four separate occasions to signal her contempt for his selfish, unfeeling attempts to use others for his own gain.

Yet despite her contempt for those who do not feel for others, tough, brash, rule-breaking Stacy is really worried that it is not her mother, or any of the unfeeling men in her life, but Stacy herself who is the true bitch. And that a bitch, even of the reclaimed variety, is not someone whom anyone can love. She attempts, mid-book, to apologize to Leo for their breakup:

     "It's... me.... I'm ugly.... Not physically, okay. I know I'm pretty physically. But inside, where it matters. I'm an ugly person."
     He huffed in the darkness. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
     "You should have left.... You saw me for what I really was.... Oh, come on. You saw me. When I was screaming at you, when I was throwing things at you... I saw the look on your face.... I scared you.... When I get angry, I get ugly. I know that. And once someone has seen that... I mean, how can I expect them to want to be around me?" (180-81)

Stacy has internalized the cultural message (and her mother's message, too) that her emotions—in particular, her anger—are bad, hateful, making her worthy only of being shunned. Over the course of the novel, then, Stacy will have to go beyond a surface reclamation of "bitch," digging deeper into both the sexual and emotional connotations of the earlier derogatory usage before she can rest easy in the reclaimed, celebratory sense of the word.

According to the OED, the word "bitch" stems from the Old English bicce, or female dog. But by the sixteenth century, the word was just as commonly used as an insult aimed primarily at women, in particular at "lewd or sensuous" women, women whose sexuality was seen as threatening because uncontrolled. Today, its connotations include both this earlier sense, as well as a more general sense of a "malicious or treacherous woman"; when applied to an object, it also indicates something "outstandingly difficult or unpleasant."

Significantly, it is during Stacy's sexual reunion with Leo that she is finally able to channel the magical power which Desmond inadvertently granted her. And only after Leo challenges her, mid-sex, to reject the assumptions that derogatory bitch-hood projects ("I'm not ugly. I'm not vicious.) and embrace instead the strength inherent in reclaimed bitch-hood ("I'm powerful") can she take control of that magic. Viewing both her emotions (especially her anger) and her power as equally worthy of celebrating, Stacy comes to reject the construction of bitch that argues that a powerful woman can only be powerful if she lacks sensitivity to others.

Only after fully embracing reclaimed bitchiness can Stacy counter the unfeeling Desmond when he lofts the b-insult (in its earlier sense) in her direction during their final showdown. And only by forcing Desmond to reconnect with his own detached emotions, rather than shunning the power of her own feelings, can Stacy ultimately prevent Desmond from harming the people she loves.


Do you think "bitch" as a word is worth reclaiming? Are there other romance novels which use the word in a feminist, rather than a derogatory, way?


Photo credits:
I'm Not a Bitch: Life Inspiration Quotes
Leymah Gbowee: Working Women in Aid and Development blog

Lucy March

That Touch of Magic

St. Martin's, 2014

Romance Novels and Male-Centered Sexuality

I'm in the midst of reading sex educator Rebecca Chalker's The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips, a fascinating, polemical look the seat of female sexual pleasure, and it's making me wonder about the sex scenes in romance novels. Chalker points out how much more attention is paid in Western culture to the clitoris's male counterpart, the penis, in both popular culture and in the medical and scientific literature, and how this bias in favor of the penis has important implications for female sexuality. Though Chalker's book was written in 2000, her claim about the cultural attention paid to the cock as compared to that paid to the clit seems just as true nearly fifteen years later; a basic Internet search reveals

Google search for "penis":     14,700,000
Google search for "clitoris":    2,230,000
(a ratio of 6.9:1)

The statistics are even more skewed when it comes to scientific research, as a similar search of the online medical articles database PubMed reveals:

Pubmed references found when searching for "penis":    41,777
Pubmed references found when searching for "clitoris":   1,967
(a ratio of 21:1)

This penis/clitoris imbalance is not just an amusing sign of male arrogance, Chalker argues; this difference in attention has serious consequences for women and their ability to experience sexual pleasure. Because of Western culture's singleminded focus on the penis, the heterosexual male pattern of sexual response—quick arousal, erection, vaginal intercourse, single orgasm—has come to be perceived as real "sex." A female pattern of sexual response—slower arousal, pleasure stemming from the clitoris rather than from the vagina, the ability to orgasm multiple times—is "considered second rate, not 'real' sex," argues Chalker.

While reading Chalker's arguments, I began to think about how sexual arousal and response are portrayed in romance novels. Since romance novels are written primarily by women and for women, do they do a better job at portraying a female patterns of sexual arousal and response than our culture at large? Or is the male-centered heterosexual model of sexuality so ingrained that it serves as the basis for the sex depicted in this woman-centered genre?

Would you like to join me in a little experiment to consider this question? Take the last romance novel you finished, and examine each of its sex scenes. Do they follow the pattern that Chalker terms the male heterosexual model of sexuality? Things you might look for:

• vaginal intercourse as the centerpiece of sexual activity, the primary goal
• a single orgasm, rather than multiple orgasms
• orgasm as the end of the scene (climax reached = goal accomplished!)

Or do they follow a different script? If so, what does that script look like?

Looking forward to hearing the results of your explorations...

Late Bloomers? K J Charles' THINK OF ENGLAND and Sarina Bowen's THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR

Reading the posts on the Queer Romance month web site, and reading KJ Charles' and Sarina Bowen's latest books, brought back the memory of a conversation I had with a fellow student from a writing class I took a few years ago. The two of us had bonded a bit, feeling like the only two outliers in a fairly conservative and conventional group of writers: me, a feminist who vocally protested the lack of gender diversity in our class readings; he, a quieter but insistent voice for sexual and racial diversity. His style of dress, as well as his talk of his partner, suggested that unlike the rest of us in the class, it would not be safe to assume he was among the heterosexual majority. And yes, when we met outside of class for coffee one day, somehow the topic of his sexuality came up. "When did you know you were gay?" I remember asking, and we talked about his sheltered upbringing, and how he didn't really cotton on to his sexual preferences until he was far older, not until he was in college.

"When did you know you were straight?" What would I have done if my fellow student had asked me this in return? It's not a question heterosexuals get asked very often, given the heteronormative assumptions upon which our culture is based. For queer-identifying folks, though, "when did you know" gets asked on a fairly regular basis.

According to both popular and medical wisdom, most kids begin to develop a general interest in sex around the ages of 12 or 13, at the onset of puberty. Some progressive groups or communities may recognize and openly discuss with teens that such interest may turn not only toward those of the opposite sex, but for some, towards those of their own, but most Western societies are largely built around heteronormativity, the assumption that everyone will be attracted toward someone of the other sex. Though some queer folk report feeling "different" as early as elementary school, growing up with the assumption that you (like everyone you know) will of course be straight may lead adolescents and young adults, like my classmate, to not recognize or even to ignore their own sexual desires until far later in life than that 12-13-year-old norm.

That proves to be the case for one half of each romantic pairing in two recent male/male romances, Think of England, an Edwardian-period piece, and The Understatement of the Year, a contemporary New Adult. England's Archie Curtis, whom author K. J. Charles audaciously and amusingly imagines as the nephew of the fictional Sir Henry Curtis, one of the three male adventurers in H. Rider Haggard's classic of Victorian imperial masculinity, King Solomon's Mines (1885), seems on the surface to be the epitome of decent English gentleman-hood. White, an ex-army man, and former Oxford boxing champ, he's come to a house party in search of evidence that will implicate his host in the production of the faulty guns that killed, maimed, and injured more men of his company during two minutes of practice firing than in all of the previous six months' fighting. Despite having lost three fingers in the melee, Archie is tall, broad, and blond, as attractive as a "Viking," according to fellow houseguest and poet Daniel Da Silva. Unlike Archie, Da Silva is everything a gentleman is not supposed to be: a Jew, a "dago," and, most obviously, a "bloody pansy," one of those "poisonous decadent types" Archie had spent his years at Oxford avoiding (Kindle Loc 183, 140).

Archie's not the most self-reflective sort; it is only after he and Da Silva find themselves forced to engage in a sexually compromising situation to throw off suspicion after almost getting caught searching in their host's office (it seems that Daniel, like Archie, may have other reasons for attending the house party) that he starts to wonder just why he found the situation—and Da Silva himself—so compelling:

He had been in exclusively male company at school, of course, and at college. He could have sought out female companionship at Oxford, as many did, but he had been occupied elsewhere, concentrating on his sporting career and, as a poor second, getting his degree. He had joined the army straight out of university, and from then on he'd mostly been in one or another part of Africa, at least up until Jacobsdal. He had, in fact, spent his life with men. And if, in those circumstances, one played the fool with other fellows, as he had at school, and college, or had a particular friend as he had in the army, well, that was only natural. Men had needs. Today's business with Da Silva was very far from his first time with another chap. It was simply the first time he'd been forced to think of it.  (1261)

Because he has always embodied the characteristics that describe the average, normal English gentleman, Archie cannot read his own acts as anything that could rightly be labeled "queer." It takes some time, and some delicious flirting and spying with Daniel, until Archie gradually comes to realize that his own definition of "queer" might be a bit too narrow to encompass both himself and Daniel and "this—whatever it was, between them that he wanted to pursue" (1477).

The Understatement of the Year's Michael Graham is a bit more self-aware about his sexual desires than Archie Curtis. Unlike Archie, who simply thought himself too busy to pursue a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, Graham actively courts the college girls who pursue him and the other the hockey players of Harkness University (a thinly disguised Yale—yeah, alma mater!). But he has to be pretty drunk to persuade his body to "get it up for a girl" (363). As his new teammate and former friend Rikker realizes, "it didn't take a genius to see that Graham had decided that he was a straight guy now. Or at least deep in the closet" (157).

Graham has the luxury of hiding from his sexuality, but Rikker doesn't, not since his former coach at his Catholic college kicked him off the team after a disgruntled sex partner sent pictures of the two of them having sex. Two men having sex. Though it is against ACAA rules to discriminate against players on the basis of their sexual identities, the Catholic college backs up its coach, and Rikker finds himself playing at a new school. For a team on which his first love, and first sexual partner, Michael Graham, has a leading—and straight—role (Both young men are presumably white).

Graham's fears of his own sexuality are deep-seated, with multiple roots, including his guilt over betraying his first love, Rikker, when the two were in ninth grade. Their past history makes it next to impossible for Graham to interact civilly with his new teammate, while Graham's avoidance only goads Rikker to provoke him. It takes Graham far longer to come to terms with his sexual orientation, his self-hatred, and his feelings for Rikker, than it took Archie. Lucky for Graham, Rikker is willing to cut his former friend—and secret hook-up—a lot of slack. None of that "be honest with yourself and everyone else or I won't be with you" stuff on Rikker's part here: "See, just like I know you can't help being gay, I also know that you can't help being twisted up over it. I never blamed you for that, G. I get it" (Loc 3468). Rikker isn't happy about it, but he's patient, and loving, and ready to accept the slow pace that Graham needs. And because of his patient love, Graham finds himself ready to be there for Rikker when his lover faces a crisis of his own.


When did you first realize you were gay/straight/bi/queer/trans? And what other romance novels would you recommend that depict difficult coming-to-terms with one or both partners' sexual identities?


Photo credits:
Yale Hockey Players: Yale University Athletics

K. J. Charles

Think of England

 Samhain, 2014

Sarina Bowen

The Understatement of the Year (The Ivy Years #3)

Rennie Road Books

2014

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...

Unsuitable Reading?

If you happen to be in the Durham, North Carolina area this coming Monday, October 20, consider stopping by the Duke University campus and joining me and other romance devotees in a conversation about "Women, Fiction, & Popular Perception." I'm honored to have been asked to join historical romance novelist Maya Rodale and professor Rachel Seidman (whose students created the Who Needs Feminism? project) for the inaugural event in Duke's Unsuitable series, a speaker series intended to engage students and members of the wider Durham community in a discussion of women's interests and popular fiction. Duke professors Laura Florand and Katharine Brophy DuBois, who both also have flourishing careers as popular romance novelists (DuBois under the pen name Katharine Ashe), will be joining forces to teach a newly developed seminar on the history of the romance novel this coming spring, and hope to open the conversation beyond the classroom through this innovative series.

The other panelists and I will be giving brief presentations about our work, but the majority of the evening will focus on the questions and ideas that audience members bring to the table. This event is free, open to the public, and includes a buffet dinner! I hope to see a few RNFF readers out in the audience.

For those not in NC, I'll be reporting back about the panel in next Friday's post. In the meantime, those eager for more romance recommendations and reviews should check out the Queer Romance Month blog/website. I've been filling up my e-reader with recommended authors and titles, and am looking forward to reading and writing about ones that share feminist concerns with RNFF readers.

Facing Male Fear: Kat Latham's TEMPTING THE PLAYER

Masculinity in romance is typically all about the brave. Romantic suspense heroes ready and eager to face terrorists' bullets or criminals' fists to protect the women they love.  Historical romance heroes endowed with equal parts gentlemanly valor and laboring-class muscle. New Adult bad boy heroes who never back down from a challenge. Even so-called beta heroes often end up having to prove their courage before their narratives deem them worthy enough to win the hearts of their beloveds.

Maybe that's why I found Kat Latham's contemporary romance, Tempting the Player, such a refreshing change. Twenty-eight-year-old (presumably white) Englishman Matt Ogden has a job that practically screams "tough guy": fullback on London's professional rugby team. In his younger days, Matt's prospects looked promising, even more promising than that of his father, the most famous rugby player of his generation. But ever since a messy divorce and ugly meltdown in front of teammates, Matt has been plagued by an embarrassing, emasculating fear: the fear of flying.

Matt's not just a little anxious when it comes time for the team to take a trip across the English Channel or the Irish Sea; he's knee-knocking, cookie-tossing, faint-in-a-dead-heap terrified. Taking anxiety meds can get him on a plane, but they don't do much for his performance on the field. And now, five years after being traded from his hometown team to the London Legends, Matt's once-promising career looks like it just might be ending on the bench.

The one bright spot in Matt's life is his neighbor and good friend, thirty-four-year-old (presumably white) Libby Hart. Though the two often serve as each other's plus-ones, and even share ownership of a dog, Matt hasn't ever told Libby about his fears:

He couldn't explain why he'd hidden it from her. Something about letting her see where he was most vulnerable made him itch like hives. He'd been vulnerable to a woman one before, and he hd the scars to prove it. He enjoyed Libby's admiring looks and the easy manner of their friendship. Being around her was an escape from his anxiety, so why taint it by releasing all the pent-up shite in his head into their friendship? He didn't want to bare himself to her—not like that, not when she could judge him and find him lacking, or lose respect for him because he struggled with things that weren't rational.  (Kindle Loc 689)

Men are supposed to be rational; to be irrational is to feminine. That Libby has broken through gender barriers in a positive way—by working as an airline pilot, a profession dominated by men—only makes Matt's desire to keep his anxieties a secret from her even stronger. No way does he want to make a fool of himself in front of the one person who thinks he's a carefree, fearless athlete/playboy.

Matt's understandably angry, then, when teasing teammates let the cat out of the bag to an unsuspecting Libby. And he's petrified when a teammate's family tragedy means that he can't hide out on the bench any longer, fear of flying or no.  His coach advises him to see a counselor to work with him on overcoming his anxieties, so he can make a more positive contribution to the team. Matt agrees that he needs help, but isn't quite ready for therapy. Instead, he decides to face his fears head on: by asking Libby to teach him how to fly.

Libby's long been attracted to younger Matt, but knew he'd never fit the bill for the stay-at-home-dad she envisioned as her ideal future mate. Yet when Matt's anxieties have him literally running in the opposite direction before their first lesson, Libby comes up with an unusual stress-relieving distraction: kissing. Her move works so well that Libby decides to repeat it: "Why don't we make a deal, then? Every time we do something new and scary for you, we can unwind afterward by doing something you'd really like to do" (Loc 1172). Something that might just involve a lot more than kissing. Offering a distraction that emphasizes Matt's masculinity does go a long way toward helping Matt overcome his fears. But battling deep-seated anxiety isn't easy, and Latham's story does not suggest that all Matt needs is the love of a good woman to overcome fears years in the making.

Lots of feminist moments pop up as Matt and Libby struggle to overcome Matt's anxiety, and to negotiate the transformation of their friendly relationship into something deeper: Matt self-denigratingly suggesting that Libby call him "Pukey" or "Puss—," only to stop when he remembers how "she wouldn't approve of that last one. She'd had a go at him once for saying it, telling him that women's bits were anything but weak" (Loc 980); Matt and Libby's discussions about the different effects dirty talk during sex have on each of them; Matt's gratitude for "Libby's expectations of mutual pleasure—and her willingness to show him how to deliver it" (Loc 3218). And both Libby and Matt have to make serious choices, about both their careers and their personal lives, in order to face not only Matt's fears of flying, but their own worries about risking their friendship for a chance at love.

I'd not read any romances by Latham before, but I'm looking forward to checking out the earlier titles in this series. And I loved finding her blog post, Confessions of a Feminist Romance Novelist. Cheers to Latham, and to other romance writers who openly declare a commitment to bringing feminist ideas and ideals into the genre.


Photo credits:
Airplane window: Carpool Goddess
Piper Warrior cockpit: Navy Annapolis Flight Center

Kat Latham

Tempting the Player

London Legends #3

Carina, 2014