See chapter 3, "Topping from the Bottom: Anne Tenino's Frat Boy and Toppy." A review was published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and it also received coverage in The Independent and The Guardian.
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If Underwood's gay men and anal eroticism offers a series of meditations on virginity loss and anal sexuality, the popular romance novel, particularly the recent manifestation of the male-male romance novel, might well offer one of the richest fictional treatments of these narratives. This genre often goes to extremes to provide an even more nuanced and complicated view of male virginity loss and sexual orientation. To be certain, this is a relatively new field of study that is expansive and remarkably understudied, and it comprises a significant number of works that explore the complexities of sexuality, gender, desire, and eroticism from a range of oriented and orienting possibilities. In this chapter, I pay attention to one romance novel, Frat Boy and Toppy (2012), by Anne Tenino. I argue that it is anally centred in its exploration of orientation and thus affords an interesting textual world in which we can think about anal eroticism. Popular romance novels remain widely underread in the literary academy, and this chapter seeks to show that they are rich with hermeneutic potential.
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It seems to be resoundingly clear that the male-male romance novel is never without gender politics and that perhaps, unlike the heterosexual romance, it can explore these politics in new or different fashions.
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The "paradigm shift" that Brad thinks about is twofold in a sense: first, it is about his sexuality; second, it shifts how we, as scholars, think about eroticism and sexuality. In other words, and I want to stress this, the focus is not on the phallus but on the anus. However, it is also not about the destruction or dismissal of the phallus. This is a paradigmatic shift in critical theories of gender and sexuality precisely because it recalibrates "the erotic monopoly traditionally held by the genitals."
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Tellingly, by 2010 anal sex had found its way into a Harlequin romance, Private Sessions, by Tori Carrington. Readers are encouraged to "learn" the complexity of anal eroticism, and not just as a mere inversion of heterosexual romance, as if the anus were a substitute vagina. More importantly, as will become clear, the introduction of anal eroticism also challenges how we think about gender scripts, one of the common criticisms of the genre.
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Brad, in many ways, is virginal with regard to his orientation, not just because he has yet to have sex with a man, but also because he has not learned "how to be gay," as David M. Halperin might have it.
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Frat Boy and Toppy, arguably, is more interested in the bottom than it is in the top or the versatile male. However, other male-male romance novels have made use of versatility, or the inversion of roles, as the key to living happily ever after, akin to the declaration of love.
See chapter 3, "Topping from the Bottom: Anne Tenino's Frat Boy and Toppy." A review was published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and it also received coverage in The Independent and The Guardian.
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