The Introduction to the volume states that "Wendy Wagner considers the emerging popularity of lead characters with autism."
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increasing numbers of romance novels feature main characters who are autistic and also attain the ending expected by every reader of a romance novel: finding love. [...] Rarely in mainstream popular culture (television and film) do autistic love interests find love with someone who is non-autistic [...]. But in romance novels, the autistic character is more likely to find love with a non-autistic character. (150-151)
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Furthermore, while many early examples of romance fiction with autistic characters focused on autistic heroes, a recent trend in romance fiction is the autistic heroine. Helen Hoang's first novel, The Kiss Quotient (2018) [...] was preceded by two other romance novels with autistic heroines: A Study in Scarlet Women (2016), by Sherry Thomas, and A Girl Like Her (2018), by Talia Hibbert, published just two months before Hoang's novel. These three novels contain markedly different portrayals of autistic characters in love stories. First, the autistic main character is a woman, which is unusual in both mainstream popular culture and romance fiction. Second, these novels make the heroines' autism significant in ways that transcend issues of representation and calls for inclusiveness.
This essay draws from the feminist disability studies perspective articulated by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and the scholarship of Michael Bérubé on intellectual disability and narrative to show how these novels synthesize perspectives on disability, gender, and the genre of romance fiction to "confront the limits of the ways we understand human diversity, the materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations that interpret bodily differences" and "enhance how we understand what it is to be human, our relationships with one another, and the experience of embodiment" (Garland-Thomson 362-363). These three novels, in telling the love stories of autistic heroines, also interrogate patriarchal social norms. [...]
This essays explores the love stories of these three autistic heroines. (151)
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The visibility of characters with autism has increased in romance fiction [...]. Ian in Jennifer Ashley's The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie (2009) and Adam in Tracey Livesay's Love on My Mind (2016) are just two examples of autistic male characters in well-regarded romance novels. [...] The ways that impairment of social skills in autistic men appear as arrogance, rudeness, and need for control bear a strong resemblance to the characteristics of many romance heroes of 20th-century romance fiction. [...] The situation is much different for autistic heroines in romance fiction. (152)
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In the following discussions of romance novels featuring autistic heroines, I will [...] show how these novels develop alternatives to patriarchal social norms through telling stories about building and maintaining love relationships. In particular, these novels explore ideas about consent in intimate relationships, gossip and "slut-shaming," and women and work. (155)
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Sections on each of the 3 autistic heroines are on pages 155-163.
The Introduction to the volume states that "Wendy Wagner considers the emerging popularity of lead characters with autism."
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Sections on each of the 3 autistic heroines are on pages 155-163.