Tag: popular culture

As transformative work, fan writing always, in a sense, begins in the middle of a relationship, a conflict, or a world. Even in fan fiction where the story depicts characters meeting for the first time, those characters have a pre-existing relationship in the source-text and in the minds of readers.

Within commercial romance, a similar process occurs. In commercial romance, genre archetypes also serve as pre-existing types of characters and worlds for an individual story to build on. As with all literary genres, each romantic hero or heroine’s story leans a little on the ones that came before it. Like fan fiction, commercial romance sub-genres are also organized around common story-worlds and motifs (the regency, the paranormal, the contemporary western, etc.). Both commercial and fan authors rework these archetypes and storytelling traditions, contributing their own ideas about romantic conflict and their individual voices into these larger connected pools of stories. In this way, both styles of writing engage in the practice of remixing and transforming pre-existing work.

From Fandom Then/Now: Romance & Fan Fiction

What do you think? Do you buy the idea that the production process for commercial romance has such similar properties to the production of fan fiction/transformative work? Comment at Fandom Then/Now.

Hot Under the Bonnet | Bitch Media

Although technically “romance novels,” these books stand out in the genre. As much as they overlap in plot structure with more traditional romances, they diverge in sexual tone. In this, the books help readers process their experience of a sexualized culture, and allow them to retreat from that culture temporarily. The characters lead moral lives, wear modest clothing, and abstain from sexual expression unless they’re married. Descriptions of women’s physical attributes—the bedrock on which most romance novels are built—are almost absent, which offers a refreshing lack of body objectification. As one characters says of his fiancée in Lewis’s The Shunning, “Of course, a woman’s beauty was not the main consideration when taking a mate, but when a woman was as pretty as Katie Lapp, the spark was stronger.” Additionally, the text is written without even the suggestion of sex, in keeping with the preferences of the genre’s mostly evangelical Christian readership. On her wedding day, for instance, Katie is embarrassed to have to admit she had not remained “pure,” because she had kissed a boy a few years ago. Fifty Shades of Rumspringa, this is not.

So what lies behind the allure of the Amish among evangelical and mainstream audiences alike? Perhaps it’s that the Amish seem like a convenient vehicle for citizens of a quickly modernizing culture to process their own insecurities and the changes they see around them, especially in terms of technology, gender, sexuality, race, and religion.

Interesting take on the current popularity of Amish-themed romances.

Fifty Shades Of Grey reverses the normal sexual equation, putting a man in a position normally reserved for women: required to be intensely sexual and but open to potential ridicule for it. No actor, male or female, wants to be in that position. Fifty Shades is just a reminder that men have less practice at steeling themselves against the possibility.

What The ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ Casting Shakeup Says About Sex And Masculinity | ThinkProgress

Fifty Shades Of Grey reverses the normal sexual equation, putting a man in a position normally reserved for women: required to be intensely sexual and but open to potential ridicule for it. No actor, male or female, wants to be in that position. Fifty Shades is just a reminder that men have less practice at steeling themselves against the possibility.

What The ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ Casting Shakeup Says About Sex And Masculinity | ThinkProgress

Why female pleasure — not sex — is the real taboo on primetime television

The common defense of television censorship is the need to protect the young and impressionable. It’s all for the children. So why is it that a national broadcaster in the 21st century feels the need to bleep out a scene of a teenage girl masturbating, while the rest of television is stuffed to the gills with scenes depicting rape, torture, suicide, and sex between middle-aged adults and adolescents?

Why female pleasure — not sex — is the real taboo on primetime television

The common defense of television censorship is the need to protect the young and impressionable. It’s all for the children. So why is it that a national broadcaster in the 21st century feels the need to bleep out a scene of a teenage girl masturbating, while the rest of television is stuffed to the gills with scenes depicting rape, torture, suicide, and sex between middle-aged adults and adolescents?

The erotic herterosexual romance, with content that is sexually appealing and stimulating to a large number of women, came into existence during the 1970s, when the social climate combined with a distribution strategy that put these romances into retail outlets that legitimatized them for mass consumption by women… Their legitimacy was further enhanced by the fact that stories were allowed to evolve as erotica without much notice and under the guise of a different label—romance.

Carol Thurston (The Romance Revolution, 9)

The erotic herterosexual romance, with content that is sexually appealing and stimulating to a large number of women, came into existence during the 1970s, when the social climate combined with a distribution strategy that put these romances into retail outlets that legitimatized them for mass consumption by women… Their legitimacy was further enhanced by the fact that stories were allowed to evolve as erotica without much notice and under the guise of a different label—romance.

Carol Thurston (The Romance Revolution, 9)