This is embargoed until 2029 and I was unable to archive the page in the repository containing details about the thesis. I can at least provide the abstract:
My dissertation uses digital ethnography and data-driven literary criticism to expand feminist research on communities of women readers and fans in the 1980s and 1990s. I show how twenty-first-century readers experience popular reading and purportedly low-brow cultural forms as sites of public digital learning and affective belonging in their lives. Popular reading and bookish communities have previously been explored through feminist literary studies, and I revise these research questions in light of the many new and emergent technologies of digital scholarship in our current media ecology, including social apps, sites where book lovers discuss literature, and other online communities. I highlight the ways in which feminist, queer, and BIPOC readerships use books and bookishness to build alternative, counter-patriarchal cultural communities and to develop practices of reparation and resistance. The stakes are multiple: I employ mixed-method Digital Humanities approaches that remain rare in feminist literary scholarship; I reflect on the affordances and limitations of “woman” as a category for empirical research; and I allow a tentatively hopeful and solidarity-driven vision of online community as a site of shared liberatory work centered on popular cultural objects. In Part I, my dissertation considers sites of reading and their feminist potential. I ground my chapters with a brief reflection on the life and work of Soviet politician and romance writer Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), whose theoretization of love in relation to social equality informs my thinking throughout. In chapter 1 and 2, I then offer Reese Witherspoon’s online book club (RBC) and the social media app Instagram’s niche for readers and book lovers Bookstagram as case studies. Using Goodreads data and a content matrix as well as surveys and interviews, I find that RBC presents itself as a site for individual self-improvement that will help women become successful subjects of a neoliberal world that substitutes individual responsibility for communal solidarity. In contrast, Bookstagram provides women with an opportunity for what I term ‘escapist labor,’ a creative outlet, site of connection, and vehicle of representation. Part II turns to the romance genre, first through ethnographic visits and interviews at specialized brick-and-mortar romance bookstores in chapter 3. Romance bookstores provide what I identify as a third space for women. In chapter 4, I analyze the literary texts of romance themselves, explaining the genre’s commitment to everyday life and women’s economics as prefigured by the work of Jane Austen. My fourth chapter identifies and critically considers an ongoing trend toward feminism, anti-racism, and sexual and gender non-normativity in contemporary romance novels that nonetheless detach these progressive values from a broader context of economic inequality. Reading two contemporary romance novels, Jasmine Guillory’s The Proposal and Sonya Lalli’s Grown-up Pose, I show the multiple interventions of this new iteration of the romance genre. What I call the new ‘romance of wealth’ creates characters who are racially diverse, have various sexualities, experience neurodivergence and mental health issues, and otherwise represent many categories of identity — and they are typically successful capitalists. My fifth and last chapter argues that historical romances, in many respects the origin of the genre, contain a small but significant corpus that goes beyond blandly incorporating feminist heroines by whose whiteness, wealth, and aristocracy as guarantee them a generic and individual Happily-Ever-After ending. The protagonists of Adriana Herrera’s A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke (2025), Beverly Jenkins’s Rebel (2019), and Cat Sebastian’s The Queer Principles of Kit Webb (2021), I argue, instead find happiness not only in the couple form, but also in community activism, mutual aid, and public service. My coda, finally, reflects on the status of romance by referencing what I call ‘pop up’ versions of romance novels in screen adaptations that are made for readers. The success of adaptations such as Bridgerton (2020-present), Heated Rivalry (Nov 2025-present), and People We Meet on Vacation (2026) shows the ever increasing dominance of bookishness and digital reading communities in twenty-first popular culture as both commercial and affective phenomenon. While my dissertation does not offer any easy narrative of cultural and feminist progress, it yet found much reason for hope.
This is embargoed until 2029 and I was unable to archive the page in the repository containing details about the thesis. I can at least provide the abstract: