“Love” and “Romance” are fraught categories for gender studies. Janice Radway, in her book, Reading the Romance, argues for the necessity of considering not only what a text is doing but also how it is perceived and read by readers; in conversations fraught with fears of essentialism, compulsory heterosexuality, and heteronormativity, arguing for a woman’s right for fantasy—and even more radically that women are capable of engaging in problematic fantasies and genres with critical awareness—is never in vogue and very rarely given due critical consideration. Eavan Boland states, “I know now that I began writing in a country where the word woman and the word poet were almost magnetically opposed” (Object Lessons, xi). Replace “woman” and “poet” with “feminist” and “romance writer” and Radway and Boland come into stark alignment. There is a tension when the language a writer wishes to use to remake the hegemonic discourse is always already loaded, shaped, and bounded by hegemonic discourse. In this presentation I propose to explore these tensions by attempting to map out what a feminist love story would look like. It is my contention that while there are love stories and there are feminisms, the two rarely—if ever—coexist in the same text. I hope to argue that love is always revolutionary when it is self-aware, regardless of the genre conventions that shape it.
About the presenterJessica McCall
Dr. Jessica McCall is a Professor of English at Delaware Valley University. She received her Ph.D. in Early Modern Literature from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas under the guidance of Dr. Evelyn Gajowski. Dr. McCall’s research interests involve the functions of myth and its intersections with gender, power, and who gets to be fully human. Her first monograph, “Myths of Warrior Women from the 16th Century to the Present” is forthcoming from De Gruyter.