These are my notes from the PCA-ACA conference in 2010. Click here for contact information for the panelists in case you’d like to follow up. Please note that my notes are fallible, and attempt to communicate merely the gist of the presentations, not their entire substance.
Romance: Romance V: The Safe Spaces of Romance (4/1/10)
Session Chair: Pamela Regis, McDaniel College
“The Romance Community: A Room of One’s Own and Écriture Feminine”‖ Pamela Regis
Woolf – a room of one’s own means not just a physical room but all of the things women need to write at all
Cixous: women need to be free of men’s language
Claim: women have a room of their own in Romancelandia (she says this term was coined by SBTB which I never knew!) and ecriture feminine in the online community
Positions herself in relation to Woolf and Cixous as a reader, not as an expert. Sets aside voluminous commentary on both.
PR notes we still have attacks on the genre
For example, Lisa Fletcher’s book – uses postmodern theory to argue it is possible to read some of our culture’s most sexist and homophobic texts differently, especially historical romance novels
Online romance community evidences ecriture feminine, albeit not in a dialect she would recognize
Romance writers, mainly women, help create the space in which the romance community gathers
A virtual room which the SB’s furnish.
Uses 10 texts, from her keeper shelf, including Bet Me, Indigo, The Sheik, A Civil Contract, and Again as a sample.
Summarizes Cixous. “Break up the Truth with laughter”. , i.e. the old truth. The received truth.
She focuses on Herendeen’s Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander.
The romance community is big.
They celebrate romance while subjecting it to scrutiny (cites Cassie Edwards scandal, which was reported by SBTB and caused CE to lose her contract).
Logos, ethos, pathos and humor all found at SBTB
Cites Veatch’s account of humor. Requires simultaneity – feeling normal about a violation of our affective commitments. Says whole blog works on principle that affective commitment that romance is trash, is bashed into the normality, evidenced by the existence of years of posts, reviews, and comments.
Romance readers are not cool, but Sarah and Candy are cool. [Edited to add: I think the idea here is that the perception is that romance readers are not cool. SBs have found a way to break up this received truth with humor. They are romance readers, yet cool.]
Cites Beyond Heaving Bosoms – heroic wang, etc.
Sentimental themes in romance novels, track norms in culture: home, affection, sympathy, kinship
But SBs talk about sex scenes, while invoking sentimental basis of romance novels. We need to talk about those.
They furnish the room constructed by romance writers. They break up the phallocentric ideology.
Jane Litte, Blogger, Dear Author
Claims her position as a reader. Cites Superwendy, Rosario, and Maili as inspirations.
Notes different viewpoints based on different cultural and sociopolitical backgrounds and how important that is to the blogosphere.
Online community emboldens readers to be proud of their love of the genre. Meets a need unmet in real life. That is the safe space, the woman’s place we have created together.
References Hilzoy’s Obsidian Wings, who claimed, a few years ago, that romance novels are not books, but tools for relaxation or porn.
Responses to Hilzoy were numerous and quick. Showed she actually had a lot of romance readers among her blog readers.
Fast forward to 2010 – Laura who blogs on the front page of Daily Koz, prominent left wing political blog, passionate defense of romance. Represented seismic shift. Jane attributes this to online romance community.
“Growing Intentional Communities: The Popular Romance Project”‖ Laurie Kahn, Brandeis University
Romance fiction as a financial powerhouse – unknown to many outside romland
Many also do not know about proliferation of romance subgenres
Her life’s work is to explore the lives of extraordinary ordinary women who have been dismissed and/or overlooked.
Has done documentaries on A Midwfie’s Tale and on Tupperware.
Now working on The Popular Romance Project for PBS
PBS seeks new model: documentary with ancillary website as an afterthought is old news. Need new concept, multimedia, web 2.0
Four interwoven cross-platform programs:
- Documentary film Love Between the Covers (she will write, produce, direct and write) – about romance readers writers bloggers editors agents cover art – an attempt to convey the world of romance novels.
- Library of Congress Center for the Book one day academic Symposium
- Nationwide Library Program with the American Library Association – nationwide discussion group program as well as traveling exhibit
- Popular Romance Project Website, created by the Center for History and New Media
Wants to bring all different groups together. Truly multiplatform.
Aims to stepback and look at popular romance novels in the context of popular romance across time, culture, sand also romcoms, films, advice manuals, courtship manuals.
She’s been attending all the conferences. Will be at RT end of the month, RWA in July.
Has board of scholarly advisors: Tara McPherson, USC, editor of Vectors, Tricia Rose, Brown, Ronald Walters, Johns Hopkins, Mary Bly, Fordham, Jack Santino, BGSU
Folktales, advertisements, first person stories, video interviews, cover art,
She starts shooting this summer.
Lacking context, this statement’s a little puzzling.
Wow, I feel very heartened by this activity. I love the seismic shift Jane L. postulates. Hope it’s true! I can’t tell from deep inside here!
@Shannon Stacey:
I’m also confused by that statement. Just because they broke the Cassie Edwards plagiarism?
I should have done a better job connecting up the humor part of her paper with that comment about SBTB. I think it was the humor angle that led her to focus on SBTB, and also, I think that’s a blog she knows well and admires much, which is a good place for any scholar to start.
I think I personally was a little bit puzzled by the disjunct between the paper title — “the romance community”– and the exclusive focus on SBTB, but, you know, she is an amazing scholar and she’ll publish an amazing article on it.
I love the sound of the Popular romance project – especially the film. I’ve heard of that Tupperware film though I’ve not seen it. I think RfP mentioned it on her blog and it was all about the female economics of Tupperware – sounded really interesting.
Sounds like you’re enjoying the conference!
I think I’ve just fallen in love with Jane again. She’s absolutely right; it’s the online community as a whole that provides this safe space, allowing everyone to grow or assert while expanding their reading horizons. It was absolutely essential to the early days of the online romance community, which was constantly under attacks by those who had definitive (and destructive) ideas of how women/romance readers should behave online.
I’ma little disappointed/puzzled by Regis’s take, considering the title of her paper. Her take seems to be restricted to her own personal experience or ‘room’. I do love and respect SBTBs (it’s no secret that I worship Candy), but I think Regis does an injustice by failing to acknowledge the SBTBs’ origins, e.g. Mrs Giggles (truly the first to mock common tropes and bring snarkiness to reviews at a time when reviewers were expected to be zombie cheerleaders); RRA-L (probably the first to bring the ‘academic’ slant to book discussions about romance novels – I believe Jayne Ann Krentz was a co-founder of RRA-L, but Preeti (@romanticsf at Twitter) would know for sure (she’s definitely worth knowing as she was (and still is) a legendary figure of the rom community. Same with troutqueen Lisa, bevbb, jodywallace and a few others); LLB/AAR (not the first, but were definitely responsible for popularising a trend of discussing issues relevant to the romance genre in depth; if anything, AAR is an expansion of RRA-L, but with a bigger focus on reader’s perspective), and a few more (TRJ?).
I hope Regis will publish her paper soon, and that the “Romance readers are not cool, but Sarah and Candy are cool” comment will be clarified somehow.
And of course, readers themselves. They were amazing with their efforts in building the rom community, via their responses, comments, challenges (quite a few challenged my contempt for Scottish historical romance sub-genre, for instance, which forced me to explain and clarify my comments), and so much more.
‘Romancelandia’ was already in use, via RRA-L, by the way, so I don’t see how SBTBs could be the ones to coin it? I find this claim puzzling. SBTBs did coin ‘man titty’, though!
*cough* Long-winded as usual. Sorry.
Thanks so much, Jessica, for all these reports. Massive kudos to you!
@Maili: I absolutely swoon when you go into Romland history. I wish you would write a book on it.
Yes, Jane’s presentation was great, right to the point, but the point was a good one.
My sense is that Regis is not trying to give a history of Romland or a broad account of it today, but to make one specific point: that it is eh “room of one’s own” of which Woolf spoke, and also that it is a place where ecriture feminine is spoken. To make that claim, focusing on the biggest and best known site might make sense.
@Tumperkin: Laurie is amazing. I’ve gotten to talk with her a bit and I think she is the one we have been waiting for when it comes to a documentary on romance.
And yes, I am having fun! This is so stimulating. Being a nerd, I would rather listen to a bunch of great papers than do almost anything else.
I should clarify my comment: could SBTBs provide a ‘room of one’s own’ let alone exists if it wasn’t for the rom community? Hence my comment on SBTBs’ origins. But now looking at my comment, I did digress or took it out of context. (Is my ramble the romance-reader version of “Why, when I was at your age I walked to school 30 miles away whilst barefoot and in a snow storm!”? I’ll kill myself if it is.)
If there is anything I’d credit SBs, it’s their ability to provide a solid bridge between the rom community and the mainstream (especially the mainstream media) and with mucho humour. And Sarah is seriously an awesome media spokesperson, thanks to her amazing ability to provide fantastic soundbites that would make any journalist weep with joy.
I think I reacted because too often, media & academic figures gave many credits to high-profiled sites (and sometimes popular authors by attributing the ‘first’ claims to them) while ignoring ‘little people’, mid-list authors and especially, category romance authors. I think I was anxious to highlight these people’s significant contributions.
I mean, many innovative concepts within the Rom genre were usually found first in category romances, for instance, but many of these were attributed to single titles that were published much later.
Example: Zombies? Dorothy Daniels’sDark Island during 1970s. Yeah, there were many mind-fucks in category rom genre. Such as Kate Cameron’s The Awakening (which was classified as ‘Gothic Romance’, I think). Mallory Rush’s Kiss of the Beast. And many more.
I digressed again, didn’t I? *headdesk* Sorry.
I was thinking about this last night while I was supposed to be sleeping and was wondering if perhaps she was talking about outside perception of romance readers. You know–the sad, overweight, middle-aged housewife who can’t get any in real life image, which is decidedly uncool. A lot of women dealt with that misconception by buying book covers for their romances and hedging about their reading tastes.
The Smart Bitches website says romance readers are fun, smart, funny, and very, very cool and anybody who doesn’t like what they read can kiss their asses.
More like somebody outside of the romance community saying, “Romance readers aren’t cool, I thought, but Sarah and Candy are cool, intelligent women, so maybe my perception of romance readers as a whole was wrong.”
I could be totally wrong but, taking the entire theme of the talk into account, it would make more sense to me than “none of you are cool, but Sarah and Candy are”. *g*
@Shannon Stacey: That actually makes sense, and it’s true as well. Thanks for offering that angle.
I think I didn’t consider that angle because I noticed many who love SBs still condemn romance readers and the Rom genre as a whole, so I assumed they have contempt for SBs in a way as well. The like is, I think, due to misunderstanding SBs. Such as, they thought SBs were laughing at the Rom genre and its readers. But anyway, yeah, ‘rom readers aren’t cool, but Candy and Sarah are’ makes perfect sense. Thank you.
Thinking about it, I quite can’t blame them, really, because I had that impression as well when I read one part of SBs’ book that seems deriding “old skool” historicals. If I didn’t know SBs, I’d believe they were looking down on rom readers and authors of yesteryear. Even so, those people must be truly dense if they can’t see how much SBs respect the Rom genre.
I think part of it had to do with the way the “romance readers are uncool” message is a message everyone receives, even those of us who read and love romance.
Thanks for all these updates Jessica. I think romance readers, and the romance community in general, have some of the brightest and smartest people I’ve had the honor to know and talk to.
I’m very excited what the next few decades hold for this genre and the people who promote it.
[...] amazing talk by Pamela Regis titled “The Romance Community: A Room of One’s Own and Écriture Feminine” tying together [...]