This chapter will discuss the geopolitical imaginary and the social as they are produced-defended and questioned-by romance novels written by contemporary US writers who focus on the relationship between ex-military men and women who belong to paramilitary organisations devoted to protecting national territory from within and abroad, either legitimately or illegitimately. Danger is both a plot device and a condition of possibility for the relationship to flourish and endure suggesting that the prevailing structure of felling is one of “low-level fear”, to quote Brian Massumi. Those novels set abroad critically address the personal and collective costs of a normalised state of perpetual war while simultaneously supporting US interventionism. In both settings, home and abroad, the novels explore the tension between lawfulness, civilian resistance as national defence and a patriotic coupledom that territorializes space in an effort to demarcate a safe zone in a social order experienced as increasingly threatened and precarious.
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This essay discusses how the geopolitical imaginary configures social life as it is imagined in romance novels focussed on the relationship between ex-military men belonging to US paramilitary organisations devoted to the protection of national territory, acting illegitimately or covertly for the US government, and the civilian women who enable their reintegration into mainstream life “stateside”. The white heterosexual couple enacts a distinctive US patriotism by embodying the virtues, beliefs, work ethic and character traits of a desirable citizenship defined against a racialised enemy at home and abroad. (347)
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