"Better Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself"
November 29, 2022
This post was to be a musing on colorism as an ideology and why it requires an intersectionalist deconstruction within Premodern Critical Race & Critical Indigenous studies (two distinct fields that run parallel yet intersecting paths). Instead, I want to muse on why Romancelandia, like academia, may need to be disbanded and dissolved as a useful label for thinking about community, praxis (in the old-fashion historical materialist sense), and abolitionist work. This musing is for a white readership, white women in particular, and the white "silent majority" that populate "Romancelandia," but it should be an impetus for all romance authors, readers, critics, bloggers, reviewers, and sympathizers to reflect on your positionality within the so-called romance community labeled Romancelandia. Too much problematic behavior, similar to RWA’s whiteness, is surfacing with regularity.
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For two days, self-declared defenders of the HEA faith showed out on Twitter. A few posted sexist tweets (FYI: sexism doesn't work in just one direction) in response to a short thread inspired by the NPR 2022 best book recs. The thread asked whether a readership decline of historical romance and contemporary might be connected to different expectations about the convention of happily ever after. The poster then mentions two books that offered a different approach to crafting the HEA. The fallout was, sadly, inevitable. There was no discussion, thoughtful & meaningful, about why these books fit the romance genre. Instead, there was outrage and accusations that a "man was mansplaining." The poster's credentials as a historian of the modern romance genre and a collector suddenly didn't matter. "He was a man" engaged in "mansplaining," and predominately white women authors/readers weren't' having it. In the end, the flag was raised over the fiefdom proclaiming the HEA the law of the land.
Usually, I ignore much of the debate about the happily ever after. Why? It's pointless. The prescription of what constitutes romance conventions has been debated for centuries—every time a writer or writers take up the genre and make changes. The romance genre was born in prose, spent its adolescent years in a form akin to epic poetry, moved into dramatic form, then returned to prose form. Changes. These changes were generated by literary circulation and growing literacy rates. The emergence of women as authors of romance effected changes. Some are consistent with traditional patriarchal representations, some refuting or undermining those representations. Different ethnic communities, with their own social and cultural dynamics, also generated change within the romance genre. All this is to say that romance has occupied every literary fiction form--poetry, drama, and prose. Romance is a genre-defying Queen. It has introduced new conventions, tropes, expectations, and themes—never fully in stasis. The Twitter voices screaming their outrage are, in my opinion, antithetical to the success of the romance genre. They are as gatekeeping as the literary critics these voices decry come February or who "trash" romance as a non-literary form. In other words, reactionary purists.
What was more disturbing about the white reaction to the original post was their failure to consider how they lent voice to the racism that permeates Romancelandia: who's allowed a HEA, whose books get touted, whose books get ignored (mostly nuanced indie romance authors who happened to be Black, Native, Latine/x, Asian, & marginalized), who gets agented & contracted by trad publishing (the loudest screeches about HEA come from this group & their usually white readers—especially about books or authors they haven't read). Non-white romance authors/readers emerge from communities that are culturally and socially not white (FYI: we don't truly want assimilation into whiteness because, tbh, there ain't nothing there). The non-white romance authors (especially Black Romance authors—most often ignored by white readers, including author-readers) know who their accomplices are. It shows every time someone asks for a rec list of Black or Latinx/e or Asian or Native or LGBTIA+, or disabled romance authors. We see the same few names, mostly traditionally published or hybrid. Why?
To return to the HEA problem, the misperceptions about the romance genre and its conventions screamed from the rafters are exclusionary and anti-romance. I didn't say anti-love: I said anti-romance. To insist that white cishet men, or any man, are incapable of reading, musing about, and writing about romance is anti-romance. What should be critiqued is whether the reader offers a thoughtful, engaging, and comprehensible take on the genre or a novel. I will stand with those who resist misclassification. Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet is not a romance, although adaptations or revisions can be if the author so designates. Readers can resist or accept the authorial label.
The past two days continue RWA-infused discourse about the genre. Discourse long steeped in racism, homophobia, ableism, and whiteness rise on social media in response to a question about HEAS--a tenet that, within romance's genealogical history, is only one of several conventions. HEA is important but has never truly been the defining criterion for the genre. What defines a romance is attention to the community/communities, the family, the protagonists, the antagonist(s), and the resolution (the couple's agreed-upon relationship). HEA is a shorthand term for the latter.
As a romance reader, it is getting more and more difficult to keep some of the white romance authors whose work I've read and enjoyed on my TBR list. I don't see them promoting non-white authors who aren't "in-house." I don't see them doing the necessary work (research) to capture the diversity of the societies they write about in their world-building, especially metropolitan areas (London, New York, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, for example). I have no expectations that these authors can capture the "cultural capital" of non-white communities, but to have non-white or marginalized characters stroll by, live next door, visit the same shops, work alongside, be the master of their business…I could go on but you get my meaning. Thus, one of my favorite romance subgenres has fallen into disfavor.
This type of problematic response is why white romance authors (not all but most) must rethink their relationship with the various romance communities around them. Think why Romancelandia has failed non-white and marginalized romance authors. Why you didn't "get," "grasp," or "comprehend" the original thread that some of you viciously attacked because y'all don't truly read outside your circle. This is why I'll ride shotgun with the original poster--not you.
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