Teaching Feminist Cultural Studies Using Popular Romance

Publication year
2025
Journal
Journal of Popular Romance Studies
Volume
14
Comment

When my department asked me to reshape parts of the cultural studies course into a shorter digital one, the popular romance segment stood out as an already condensed version of the course’s overarching theme. The breadth, longevity, and fraught history of the simultaneously popular and abhorred romance genre has created a multitude of tensions, variations, and paradoxes—in texts, in production, and in reader, medial, and scholarly reception. This, I argue, makes the genre ideal for illustrating the central but at times simplified or neglected tension in cultural studies: namely, the co-existence of elements of cultural dominance and opposition in most, if not all, popular cultural contexts. I believe this attention to both power and resistance forms the basis of any nuanced critical analysis of ideology in popular culture phenomena. I also find it helpful for trying to teach independent, open-minded, and exploratory thinking to others.