Affecting Genre: Women's Participation with Popular Romance Fiction.

Abstract

This study examines women’s engagements with popular romance fiction. Framing genres as sites of participation, it explores the digital, social, and literate practices women enact as they participate with and actively shape the popular romance genre. Popular romance reading is a common literacy practice for adolescent and adult women in North America. Thus far, the appeal of romance reading has been largely understood through a model of mass production and consumption, and largely explained as a solitary literacy practice whereby women use romance novels to escape to a fantasy love story. Drawing from interviews and book discussions with romance readers, interviews with romance authors, and analyses of four genre-sponsored websites, this study suggests instead that some women engage with popular romance fiction in order to connect to, as well as escape from, their social worlds. It demonstrates that women’s talk and writing about popular romance allow them to co-construct the genre, demonstrate readerly and writerly expertise, and engage in collective and civic action. It also illustrates that women’s affective and escapist reading practices produce a range of transformative, critical, and genre-specific knowledges. Drawing from rhetorical genre theory, feminist theory, and ethnographic methods, this study shifts the focus away from romance reading as a solitary and single literacy practice to romance genre participation as comprised of varied digital, social, and literate practices. By examining a specific genre in this way, this study aims to help composition scholars draw connections between academic and everyday literacies and encourage students to explore their own subjectivities and expertise within familiar genres as they learn to participate in new ones.