Romance fiction has a complicated relationship with visibility. It is a genre with undeniable presence in the contemporary publishing industry in terms of output and sales, but has historically been hidden in personal, rhetorical, and material ways. Within the genre, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and erotic romance writers and their works experience a kind of hyper(in)visibility, a concept which describes how non‑normative identities and bodies are overlooked, ignored, and underrepresented, while simultaneously subject to intense scrutiny, surveillance, and stereotyping. Semi‑automated decision‑making technologies, including content moderation and search and recommendation algorithms, further compound these invisibilizing forces. Drawing on interviews with authors, metadata analysis, and critical discourse analysis of terms of service, this article argues that algorithmic systems maintain a politics of hyper(in)visibility for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and erotic romance authors and books, which risks exacerbation in light of the broader deplatfomization of sex online and current conservative political movements, particularly in the United States.
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as authors are rarely provided with explanations from publishing platforms when their titles are flagged as containing adult material, they often anticipate what is likely to be flagged and adjust their paratext to avoid potential negative effects. One such example is the development of Why Choose as a descriptor for books that feature MMF (male‑male‑female) or reverse harem relationships, a popular erotic romance subgenre, to avoid the use of MMF and harem phrases that are against Amazon’s advertising policy. (17)
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This research provides initial evidence that romance fiction is being caught up in the broader deplatformization of sex. The treatment of these books on publishing platforms is inextricably tied to the current social and political environment, particularly in the US, where conservative government policies, movements, and initiatives are exacerbating book bans against BIPOC and LGBTQ+ titles, grossly exaggerating what constitutes pornography to include LGBTQ+ and transgender identities, and generally promoting an orthodoxy of Christian nationalism. The experiences of authors in this research show how publishing platforms are complicit in this sociocultural trajectory. The experiences of historically marginalized authors provide important insights into the operations of these platforms by demonstrating the dynamics of visibility and discoverability at the margins. (19)
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