Drawing on four years of ethnographic research with romance novel writers, we show how their affiliation with romance—a literary genre known for stories containing sexual content—prompted outsiders to sexually stigmatize them. Our work examines both the application and management of this stigma. We describe how outsiders applied the stigma in two ways: by conveying blatant disapproval through “sneering” and inviting writers to display a highly sexualized self through “leering.” Writers interpreted outsiders’ sneering as slut-shaming rhetoric and responded discursively to manage the stigma; leering, however, sent a more complicated message that was harder for writers to manage. In revealing how these interactions threatened to strip writers of their sexual agency, our analysis suggests gender may be a primary mechanism by which stigma is applied and managed, which has theoretical implications for the stigmatization of women’s sexual selves.
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