Women, Violence and Postmillennial Romance Fiction

As far as I can tell, there isn't really a lot of engagement with the romance genre as a whole and the term "Harlequin romance" is used very loosely so I have not tagged this as being about actual Harlequin/Mills & Boon.

Here's the abstract:

This book interrogates the significance of the revival and reformulation of the romance genre in the postmillennial period. Emma Roche examines how six popular novels, published between 2005 and 2015 (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, Sharp Objects and The Girl on the Train), reanimate and modify recognisable tropes from the romance genre to reflect a neoliberal and postfeminist cultural climate. As such, Roche argues, these novels function as crucial spaces for interrogating and challenging those contemporary gender ideologies.

Throughout the book, Roche addresses and critiques several key attributes of neoliberal postfeminism, including a pervasive emphasis on individualism and personal responsibility; an insistent requirement for self-monitoring, self-surveillance, and bodywork; the celebration of consumerism and its associated pleasures; the prescription of mandatory optimism and suppressing one’s ‘negative’ emotions; and the endorsement of choice as a primary marker of women’s empowerment. While much critical attention has been devoted to those attributes and their pernicious effects, Roche argues that one crucial repercussion has been largely overlooked in contemporary cultural criticism: how these ideologies function together to effectively sanction gender-based violence. Thus, Roche exploits textual analysis to demonstrate the subtle ways in which neoliberal postfeminism can augment women’s vulnerability to male violence.

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Here's the abstract for the chapter on Twilight:

This chapter interrogates Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8) as a striking manifestation of neoliberal and postfeminist culture. Specifically, it highlights how the series fetishises and romanticises neoliberal and postfeminist ideals of subjectivity as empowering and pleasurable for readers by reanimating long-standing tropes and archetypes from the romance genre. At the same time, however, the narrative gestures towards the limitations of these ideologies – particularly the rhetoric of choice as empowerment. As such, this chapter aims to excavate disruptive moments in the text, which rupture the narrative’s endorsement of neoliberal postfeminism, exposing the pernicious effects of those ideologies on women.

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Here's the abstract for the chapter on Fifty Shades:

This chapter highlights how E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey series (2011–12) exploits the conventions of the Harlequin romance to endorse the hegemonic ideal of neoliberal postfeminism as empowering and pleasurable for women. Romanticising that ideal as aspirational, the narrative underscores how heroine Anastasia Steele’s capitulation to Christian Grey’s ‘neoliberal contract’ guarantees her success, happiness and sexual fulfilment. At the same time, however, tonal discrepancies in the affective register undermine or even subvert the series’s valorisation of that ideal, alerting readers to its oppressiveness. Thus, by excavating those affective discrepancies, this chapter aims to expose the contradictory nature of neoliberal postfeminism, posing a crucial question: are these purportedly empowering ideologies actually sanctioning and facilitating gender-based violence?

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From the introduction:

Marketed as disparate genres - domestic noir, crime fiction, psychological thriller, erotica and YA romance - I interpret these novels as contemporary reiterations of the popular romance formula, reanimating recognisable tropes from chick lit, the modern gothic romance and the Harlequin romance. As will be demonstrated, those tropes have been modified by and for a neoliberal postfeminist cultural climate. However, they are utilised in different ways and to different effects. Meyer and James exploit 'romance' to promote the hegemonic ideal of neoliberal postfeminism as empowering and pleasurable for women.