When I first envisioned this project, I imagined a vast database of all types of conventional, genre novels—horror, detective, science fiction, romance, fantasy—systematically mined for the ways in which the ideological and formal confines of each genre played with and explored identity politics. I wanted to answer questions like, “how does the horror/fantasy/scifi/detective novel explore racism/sexism/heterosexism/transsexism/ableism? How does it embody racial/gender/sexual/disability/etc. discourse? What ideologies does it respond to and subsequently create?”
I was gently reminded time and time again that in order to actually properly complete this massive project, I’d need a team of 15-30 fast readers with lots of time on their hands and an endless supply of mass market paperbacks for them to devour. Without either of these things, any attempt to explore the popular novel at-large and its engagement with identity politics would be paltry, a disservice to the identities and genres at hand.
So, I was told to choose: choose one identity and one genre, and dig in. I resisted at first: I
thought that the whole point of the project was to create a massive database of sorts. I imagined a user would pick from a list of various identities and a genre category, and then my popular novel search engine would spit out examples of novels that sit at the intersection of that genre and those identities. The more I tried to hammer out the actual logistics of this undertaking, however, I realized it was impossible. Thus, I begrudgingly began the refinement process. I thought disability studies would be a particularly rich identity to explore. I find it to be woefully under-examined in most literary contexts. While it’s slowly becoming more of a consideration among literary scholars, I believe there is still a lot of fascinating work to be done in this realm — to name a few of my own concerns among many: excavating the tradition of disability as metaphor, thinking about representations of disabled bodies, and examining our own biases, habits, and vocabularies for subtle ableist rhetoric. I have a bit of background in disability studies: I took Professor Rifkin’s Disability Studies course last fall, and in my previous (undergraduate) life, I took a course called Queer Disability Studies with Professor Michael Gill, one of the foremost scholars working at the intersection of disability and sexuality. While Prof. Rifkin’s class provided a good introduction to the concerns and projects of disability scholars (themselves often working in the aforementioned literary context), the Queer Disability class really investigated the pervasive anxieties about disabled sexualities. I’m thus lead to the romance novel. The romance novel has always been a fascinating entity, one that I stumbled upon way too early. Though they’re not my favorite books to read, and not even necessarily my favorite conventional genre, I love the idea of them. I love the way that the novels’ covers promise frothy, ridiculous fun — poofy dresses and chiseled-ness, heaving bosoms and the highlands, dukes, Lords, rouges, and property rights galore. But of course, this is not all they are. According to Janice Radway’s revolutionary Reading the Romance, many women justify their voracious reading habit by arguing that they learn from these books (and that this learning is the form’s chief enjoyment): they learn about customs, cultures, and lives that are so remarkably different from their own. Radway also argues that these women, feeling the pressures of a society that tells them that male enjoyment of their bodies is the most important marker of worthiness (but not necessarily feelin’ the love from their husbands), return to romance novels time and time again to live vicariously through the novel’s heroine, whose supple smoothness drives pretty much every man wild with desire. When challenged by their husbands and children who argue that they’re wasting their time with this frivolous trash (when they could be helping the kids with homework or watching a sports game with their husbands), these women assert the value of these novels as a guide, as an entry point into to a patriarchal system, a way for them to jive with that system’s values. One can escape to the rollicking hills of Scotland for a few brief hours while the kids are at school, and then they’re ready, willing, and excited to be the best and most attentive mother/wife figure. Or, that’s the idea.
So, yes, I find the romance novel as a concept incredibly fascinating, as I would any piece of culture that is lauded and celebrated as liberatory and joyful on the one hand, and denigrated and reviled as cheap misogynistic garbage on the other. (I’ve internalized some of these negative biases as well. You need only look to the paragraph above, in which I claim not to like romance novels that much. I’m guilty of only picking up a romance novel when it migrates into the mainstream book world, i.e., when someone from NPR recommends it to me.) In a world where print is in a perpetual state of decay, the romance novel flourishes. Lots of scholars have asked the question, “What does the romance novel teach us?” What does it teach us about love, sex, values, women, men, relationships?
And in the case of romance novels about disabled people finding love and having sex: What does the romance novel teach us about the ways we’ve internalized abelism and our biases about disabled sexuality? How is disability being used as a plot device, so often a tool of atonement and betterment (see: the end of Jane Eyre)*, and what does that mean for actual disabled people, in actual relationships? What does the romance novel offer disability studies? How can we use the language and strategies of disability studies to excavate the romance novel (and vice versa)? How do the conventions of the form allow for/prevent/incite questions of identity and identity politics? And where does pleasure come into the picture? What kind of bodies do we perceive as being worthy of romantic love and sexual pleasure? What kinds of romantic love and sexual pleasure do we want to read about? How do authors navigate these questions in books like Flowers in the Wind and Simple Jess?
A former professor of mine, Carrie Shanafelt, recently articulated exactly what it is I’m thinking about in a Facebook post about 18th-century pornography:
No, you can’t read pornographic literature to find out how people had sex in real life. Don’t be ridiculous. But you can learn all kinds of stuff about what was possible to think about, or fantasize about, or want. In analyzing the discourse of sex, you can find out what individual people bragged about, used as status symbols, made excuses for, used as metaphors, etc.
What, then, can the discourses of disabled sex offer us in terms of the way that people think about sexuality, disability, and pleasure?
So these are just a few thoughts about the ways I’m utilizing constraints to hone in on a specific question and problem. I can’t do all genres and all identities, but I’m excited at the prospect of exploring disability and the romance, and I’m excited to think about what this means for genre, convention, and (readerly and sexual) pleasure more broadly. To the Highlands we go!
*Thanks to Emma Kiely for this thought!
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