How Romance Novels Center Marginalized Joy

Culture Study Podcast

Arts, Society & Culture

4.5 • 789 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After our GREAT discussion of A Court of Roses and Thorns we realized we wanted to talk a lot more about romance: about the so-called “boom” and what’s fueling it, of course, but also about various tropes (sick bed, forbidden romance, grumpy protagonist), race and cultural specificity, the level of “spice” and how it shows up on the page, and how to manage your own romance reading behavior. Melody heard Nisha Sharma speak at Romance GenreCon last year and knew she was the person to address so many of your questions. Whether you’re new to romance like me, don’t read it but are interested in why other people do, or have immersed yourself in the genre for years, I promise there’s something in this conversation that’s going to stick in your head for days.Show Notes:Nisha Sharma!!!! Follow her on Instagram and TikTok, and here’s links to all her recent books and upcoming eventsYou can pre-order The Letters We Keep and Marriage & Masti at Bookshop.org— promo code CULTURE gets you 10% offOr for pre-order swag, order from Doylestown Bookshop Maya Rodale’s Dangerous Books for Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained“Canon building is empire building”Janice A. Radway’s Reading the RomanceLee & Low Books Diversity Baseline SurveyMONSTER THEORYA very fun round-up of Fabio romance novel covers, by the numbersA 2018 piece on cartoon covers “tricking” people into reading romanceAND NOW, A LIST OF EVERY BOOK RECOMMENDED IN THIS EPISODEThe Proposal by Jasmine GuilloryFor Real by Alexis HallThe Candid Life of Meena Dave by Namrata PatelYou Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke EmeziThe Roommate by Rosie DananThe Partner Plot by Kristina ForestQueen Takes Rose by Katee RobertDestiny’s Captive by Beverly JenkinsDouble Exposure by Rien GrayBeach Read by Emily HenryBride by Ali HazelwoodThat Prince is Mine by Jayci LeeA Rogue by Any Other Name by Sarah MacLeanSay You’ll Be Mine by Naina KumarRock Hard by Nalini SinghButcher & Blackbird by Brynne WeaverPower Play by B. P. GilmoreCollide by Bal KhabraOut on a Limb by Hannah Bonam-YoungChloe Liese for disability representationKimberly Lemming for cozy monster romanceMorning Glory Milking Farm by C. M. NacostaWe’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:Sydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-houseTrad wives, featuring a co-host who used to be oneFor our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE and ROMANCE BOOKSTORESArtificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)Contemporary ideas of self-careBuy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand marketAnything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segmentYou can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)For today’s discussion: We could’ve kept this podcast going for another three hours. So let’s do more of it here. What other tropes do you want to unpack? What didn’t we talk about — or what did we miss?

Transcript

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0:00.0	When we're talking about the romance genre, where romance is the central component, where it is about happily ever after, happily for now, it's important to also remember that, like, we're talking in a lot of ways about marginalized positions.
0:24.8	So way back in the heyday, when romance really began to be a big part of traditional publishing, there was a slogan, we'll call it a slogan
0:33.2	that was often shared about romance. And that is it is for women by women.
0:39.4	And women at that particular moment were viewed as like a very specific,
0:44.9	marginalized perspective because women, to this day, in a lot of spaces,
0:51.4	experience systemic oppression through work, through social class, whatever.
0:59.0	It centers this marginalized joy.
1:02.8	It centers their happiness.
1:05.2	It centers their experiences.
1:07.6	And that's kind of where this four women by women began.
1:12.5	But we are in the process of going through a social justice revolution now.
1:20.3	We've seen feminism change.
1:22.9	We've seen the way that our rhetoric around race has changed. And romance, continuing to center
1:32.1	marginalized perspectives, is also changing with that. And so it's not so much as a chicken
1:40.9	before the egg. Like, does art imitate life, Life imitate art. It's more of a, like,
1:45.8	romance is having a conversation with what's happening right now in our world.
1:56.0	This is the culture study podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I am Nisha Sharma, a young adult and contemporary romance writer.
2:04.5	So for this episode, we are talking about trends that we're seeing in romance novels
2:08.8	within the reading and writing community.
2:11.2	And one of those trends is just like more, right?
2:15.1	There's just more romance.
2:16.7	And there's a lot more willingness for people to
	...

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