Porn Studies

Popular Romance and Sexuality/Erotica

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the journal Porn Studies focused on 

“Popular Romance and Sexuality/Erotica”

In “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different,” American feminist scholar Ann Barr Snitow laid the groundwork for what has become something of a perpetual debate: is the romance genre pornography? For nearly fifty years, scholars, commentators, authors, publishers, and readers have debated this question, and truth be told, after fifty years, opinions are divided and there is no clear consensus. In particular, some feminist scholars favour the relationship while others dismiss it as pejorative. This Call for Papers is interested not in answering the “is it or isn’t it” question but in thinking creatively about affinities between “porn studies” and “popular romance studies.” What fruitful relationship exists between these two fields of inquiry?

To this end, the Call for Paper seeks new approaches to an old and often antagonistic question. What if instead of comparing romance novels to pornography, the relationship was about the similar ways both genres are scrutinized, dismissed, and controlled? For instance, it is very common for concerns to exist about the potential harms of pornography to the viewer and society. Strikingly, the 1970 Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography includes lengthy discussions of pulp fictions, such as love stories with sexual content alongside the visual medium. The history of American censorship debates can be written alongside the history of popular romance novels. In 1973, Miller v. California appears only months after the first blockbuster romance The Flame and the Flower (1972). During the 1960s, newsstands became sites of potential crime. In 2024, “obscenity” debates have returned in the context of book banning, library wars, and battles over school sex ed curricula. Age verification for pornography is becoming normalized in various jurisdictions. How might these moves affect popular fiction, especially erotic fiction and popular romance? It is not difficult to imagine age verification as a requirement for access to sexually explicit fiction or queer romance—or indeed to texts that challenge heteronormativity, patriarchy, or white Christian nationalism.

The relationship between pornography and romance novels can also be framed in methodological terms. Both fields have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the sheer number of textual examples available for analysis. Porn studies has not generally been interested in close readings of textual examples but instead tends to work with larger numbers of material, while romance studies has, in recent years, gravitated towards the close reading of singular texts. Is there something to be learned here? Might porn studies benefit from close readings of metaphors, symbols, narratological aspects, etc.? How might both fields think through corpus selection in a field inundated by new texts daily? What is the role of self-produced materials?

This Call for Papers welcomes potential connections and collaborations between porn studies and popular romance studies, in the spirit of learning. By reframing the perpetual debate, new directions and lines of inquiry can benefit both fields of study. We invite contributions on a broad range of these and related questions, such as:

• Erotica: definitions, key texts, historical developments
• The role of sex and intimacy in the popular romance genre
• Obscenity, censorship, and the “prurient”
• Legal and judicial challenges
• Romance novels censored due to sexual content, past and present
• Sex scenes and seeing sex
• Narrating love and desire
• Same-sex romances and erotica
• Close reading as method
• Reader response theory, arousal, and “sexy texts”
• Discourses around sex in times of political polarization and turmoil
• Queer and feminist approaches and challenges
• Reading the porn scene as romantic
• Age-verification for consumers
• Sexuality and the YA (Young Adult) publishing market
• The mainstreaming of sex, love, and the erotic
• Historical comparisons and approaches
• Sex education, pornography, and romance texts
• Erotica as a subgenre of romance fiction
• Popular romance texts as a form of sexualized media
• Self-censorship or politics of the risqué: pushing boundaries, writing into taboos, romance studies as “dirty work”
• What it means to read/write/study romance in a pornified society

We are also very interested in approaches that bring together research and creation in the form of critical creative writing. Accordingly, the guest editors seek contributions for a forum to be included within this special issue that highlights critically informed creative work in popular romance and erotica. For this forum—potentially titled “What Does a Good Sex Scene Look Like in Romancelandia?”—we invite authors to submit their original short stories or vignettes of erotica combined with the author’s critical analysis of how this sexual encounter or experience of sensual intimacy comments on or pushes forward the role of sexuality in the popular romance genre. The sex scenes should be fully consensual and can be of any sort: solitary, LGBTQIA+, heterosexual, group, paranormal, etc., as “spicy” or “sweet” as the author wishes. We encourage attention to issues of body diversity around size, disability, age, race/ethnicity, and more. The goal is to use artistic expression and innovative experimentation to develop knowledge and pursue scholarly investigation. We aim to explore whether methods of ficto-criticism are especially capable of addressing research questions such as: What makes for a good sex scene? What is the work performed by sex scenes in the romance genre? What are the affordances of these scenes and what can they make possible (e.g., for literary goals of plot or character; for human rights and social justice goals of gender and racial equity, body acceptance, LGBTQIA+ rights, disability advocacy, and the end of sexual abuse)? The guest editors will frame the critical-creative erotica essays in this section with an introduction of reflective analysis about this methodology of creative arts research.

Abstracts will be accepted until December 1, 2024; the editors, however, will review abstracts as they arrive thereby providing authors with more time to produce full manuscripts. Please submit abstracts to: Jonathan Allan allanj@brandonu.ca and Catherine Roach croach@ua.edu.