Romance novels are often perceived as intellectually inferior, reduced to their sexual content, and criticized for creating unrealistic relationship expectations among women. However, little research has examined how women understand their experiences with romance reading and how they share those experiences through online communities. This study explored how women romance readers on BookTok use romance reading as a form of identity work within a patriarchal social context. Using a qualitative research design, this study combined six semi-structured interviews with a qualitative content analysis of sixty-five publicly available BookTok videos. The data was analyzed using qualitative coding and triangulation. The findings show that romance reading functions as a form of emotion work, allowing women to renegotiate relationship expectations, explore sexuality, and challenge gendered norms. BookTok further shaped these processes by providing a space where reader identities were publicly performed. Together, these findings resulted in a process model of identity renegotiation that contributes to the sociology of reading, gender, and digital communities by demonstrating how romance reading extends beyond leisure and becomes a meaningful social practice within a patriarchal society.
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