Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2014

After more than a decade as a feminist researcher and teaching women’s studies at tertiary level, I decided to investigate a new direction. Driven in part by the demise of women’s studies in universities – an international phenomenon – and looking for something completely different, I attended my first Romance Writers of Australia conference. To my surprise, the scene was all too familiar: predominantly female participants and presenters, a collaborative leadership model, a supportive atmosphere and lots of purple. In this article I muse upon arguments that romance is a form of feminism. Going back to its history in the Middle Ages and its invention by noblewomen who created the notion of courtly love, examining its contemporary popular explosion and the concurrent rise of popular romance studies in the academy that has emerged in the wake of women’s studies, and positing an empowering female future for the genre, I propose that reading and writing romantic fiction is not only personal escapism, but also political activism. Now also a published romance novelist, I chart my own Harlequin Escape from the ivory tower to the boudoir.

Traditionally the critical literature has dismissed popular romance as formulaic escapism, compensatory literature and insidious cultural programming that produces a false consciousness amongst its passive readership. These assessments have become more inflected over the last twenty years in response to research that shows that there are different ways of reading romance, and with the growth in Romance Association reader surveys, which indicate that popular romance is read by fans drawn from across all demographics. Significantly, these results reveal that up to 45 per cent of readers are tertiary educated, effectively destabilizing the dominant cliché of the romance reader as ‘uneducated, unsophisticated or neurotic’ (Struve 2011: 1289). A more nuanced understanding of the romance reader has emerged and this is evident in the type of readership imagined in the work of Harvard-educated, Fordham University Professor of Literature Mary Bly, who also publishes historical popular romance as Eloisa James. A New York Times best-selling author, James’s stories not only promise her readers romance, but her work is distinctive for its ironic and comedic narratives and an intertextuality that includes references to Socrates, John Donne’s poetry and Shakespearian sonnets. These cultural references are deployed to tell more interesting stories, yet they transgress the literary divides that have held in place the critical disparagement of romance and enable a broader imaging of the function and appeal of romance. Drawing upon James’s work, this article argues that one of the reasons that romance remains popular with a diverse readership is that the genre enables readers to rehearse how two people can learn to live together. This requires an imagined experimentation with identities, which is not only a pleasurable escape but also part of a broader cultural and social dialectic renegotiating women’s subjectivities.

A short story originally published in 1900 by writer and poet Henry Lawson captured the perceived incompatibility of women and life in remote Australia with its refrain that the bush ‘was no place for a woman!’. The suggestion in Lawson’s story is that the bush could easily prove fatal to women and for men it could undo them, mentally and spiritually. Now at the start of the new millennium, many barriers to women living and working in rural Australia have been challenged or removed altogether. Yet, recent sociological research, such as that undertaken by Margaret Alston, argues that gender inequality is an ongoing problem in rural communities. For example, one persistent stereotype is that men undertake the meaningful work in rural life while women watch from the sidelines, simply ‘help’, or see their contribution downplayed or downright ignored. This article explores how a new breed of bestselling novels, variously dubbed ‘chook lit’ or ‘contemporary Australian rural romance’, use a romantic structure to represent gender inequality in a rural setting. The article draws examples from Jillaroo (Rachael Treasure, 2002), The Bark Cutters (Nicole Alexander, 2010) and North Star (Karly Lane, 2011) to show the varying approaches to the romance plot that construct gutsy heroines, depict important rural issues and leave readers with endings that, as in other romances, offer ‘a utopian projection which expresses a critical evaluation of the contemporary patriarchal order’ (Cranny-Francis 1990: 191). This article argues that contemporary Australian rural romances raise questions about the romance plot while critiquing aspects of gender inequality specific to the context. In turn, such novels may encourage and inspire female readers (if they so choose) to do more in rural life than sit on the fence watching the men.

In the romance novels published by Harlequin Mills & Boon, sex and love are inextricably intertwined. The governing paradigm of the romance is a concept I have termed ‘compulsory demisexuality’. Someone who is demisexual only experiences sexual attraction to someone with whom they have an emotional bond. In the romance, this means that sex is only truly pleasurable when the partners are in love. The intersection of this paradigm with the notion of one true love means that the romance hero and heroine can only find real sexual pleasure with the other. This paradigm manifests differently between genders. Generally, heroines are demisexual, whereas heroes become demisexual. This change wrought in the hero is the key to understanding the romance text as a text of feminine victory: the ubiquitous happily-ever-after of the romance takes place in the heroine’s world. The way in which compulsory demisexuality has been realized within category romances has also changed over time. This article will discuss the historical evolution of the gendered relationship between sex and love in relation to two key texts, Denise Robins’s Shatter the Sky (1933) and Lynne Graham’s Desert Prince, Bride of Innocence (2009), focusing particularly on how the heroine’s sexual desire has complicated this relationship.

This article explores how contemporary romance can represent cognitive disability through a critical analysis of the representation of cognitive difference in the romantic comedy Addition by Australian author Toni Jordan. I argue that the novel presents a non-stereotypical representation of a protagonist with a cognitive disability who is still able to participate in a love relationship while experiencing significant impairment. I argue that such works of popular romantic fiction can act to challenge negative stereotypes around mental illness and encourage readers to reflect on their own beliefs and attitudes.

This article examines the way the latest Mills & Boon novels written by Indian authors exoticize and eroticize India for the native as well as the foreign audience. It will explore whether their romances, with the exception of Indian protagonists and the setting, are different from those published in the West. The article analyses how the authors have refashioned the present romance formula and enriched it with something particularly Indian. It will focus on how the use of Indian language together with English, wedding rituals, less explicit descriptions of sex, and a representation of Indian tradition and culture, hybridize the western romance genre.

The theme of the warrior woman – the woman prepared to fight – appears in popular romance and in multiple time settings. This article will explore the way in which Silhouette Bombshell’s Athena Force series presents a series of romance heroines who are professional, trained warrior women. Rather than presenting these characters as a radical alternative to the more ‘traditional’ romance heroine, it will be shown that they attempt to accommodate a range of ideas about gender; they extend rather than reverse conventional ideas about femininity. There are, however, significant implications for the conventional romance plot as gender roles are unsettled and reconfigured. How are relationships between male and female warriors in the novels characterized, and how does this distinguish them from other contemporary romance fiction? Warrior women in fiction may be seen to subvert gender characteristics traditionally linked to biological traits and the conventional binary opposition between male and female gender roles. By stepping outside the accepted behaviour of females, the warrior woman makes us question those norms we may take for granted and provides another intriguing sub-genre for romance fiction.

The English novel arose in the mid-eighteenth century as a cultural expression of a new middle class, a class that absorbed contemporary philosophies of individualism and democracy, and emerged within societies anchored in both representative government and capitalistic economies. Contemporary reality television gives us versions of the modern novel. Sometimes reality programmes, like the earliest novels, are episodic: each episode is linked by a single narrative voice or character and tells us about some issue. Sometimes these programmes present a season of episodes shaped by conventions of character, theme, conflict and resolution: together the episodes of each season form chapters in a story of ordinary lives so the audience can eavesdrop on others’ lives and draw life lessons. The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are typical of the latter kind of reality television. Generically, the programmes are related to the modern romance novel – they recount the story of finding ‘true love. Across nine months of staged presentation and accompanying interviews, they portray individuals looking for love, despite hostile adversaries, personal misunderstandings and disappointed expectations. This narrative arc leads to a climax where love is either found or missed, but either way it is represented as a complex synthesis of sexual frisson, friendship and respect. And all this occurs within the (occluded) context of someone winning $250,000. This article takes Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice ([1813] 1995) as a touchstone for understanding the appeal and meanings of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette as contemporary versions of the romance novel in order to explore how the idealization of love remains tied to not only notions of women’s individualism/liberation, but also to capitalism.

Climate change has been called the most boring subject the science world has ever had to present. Despite media stunts such as nude lie-ins to draw attention to the issue, recent polls show that the urgency of public opinion in relation to climate change has waned. This article argues that popular culture such as genre fiction can be an important communicative device in responding to climate change. It examines how a climate change theme can be developed in fiction and why romance and, in particular, romantic comedy, may be a suitable genre to make this issue relevant to the reader by connecting a global issue to its local effects. Climate change poses particular challenges to an author. My novel-in-progress, Melt (2013), is used as a case study of how these challenges may be met.

Building Upon History: An architectural review of the East Building at the St. Louis Art Museum and the Piano Pavilion at the Kimbell Art Museum

Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels, Hsu-Ming Teo (2012) Austin: Texas University Press, 352 pp., ISBN: 9780292739383, h/bk, $60

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, Brooklyn Museum, 25 October–23 February 2014