Discussions of rape in popular romance have most often centered on how these scenes affect or reflect the lives of romance readers. Detractors of the genre have used its presence to support the notion that romance is a patriarchal and repressive literary form, while defenders have often pointed to the presence of the rape scene as a way for women to explore their sexuality. This paper advances an entirely different reading. It asserts that the presence of rape functions as a parodic parallel to the violence of falling in love. Divided into three types, the rape scene occurs as a result of the way the hero perceives the heroine and appropriates her identity. These types are: the Rape of Mistaken Identity, the Rape of Possession, and the Rape of Coercion or "Forced Seduction." Each performs a version of the epistemological and ontological questions that arise from an encounter with the Other.
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