Romance as genre can be the basis of writing which reflects on the 'trouble' surrounding femininity. According to Butler (1990) this dissonance can symbolize the conflicts between young women, their parents, and boys over gender-appropriate behaviour. It also can mark out the perceptions of women of color that there is something deeply disturbing about their positions within White patriarchal society. Gemma Moss's chapter focuses on the ways that Angelique, a 15-year-old Black student, uses the formulas of romance fiction to think about gender and race relations. Moss's analysis of a story Angelique wrote for a school assignment and her subsequent interviews reveal a young woman who has thought a great deal about what it means to be Black and female. In 'Again!' Angelique draws on her knowledge of romance from reading novels with White characters. She describes the problems of romance through the eyes of the character Angela who finally rejects her boyfriend when confronted with his disloyalty. Here Moss demonstrates that reading and writing are reflective practices mediated by young women's life circumstances and their previous literacy experiences. Writers, like readers, draw on various cultural literary, and linguistic resources which are transformed in use. Although Angelique uses many of the stock devices of romance fiction, these are changed through her awareness of how context shapes text. In the school story 'Again!' Angelique used 'standard' English and White characters, positioning herself as White. However, writing at home featured patois and Black characters. Angelique's literacy reflects her divided world. At school she must be careful and constrained, while at home she can recreate the world of her former inner London neighbourhood left behind in the move to the White suburbs. Angelique, like other young women described in these chapters, uses literacy to establish spaces where they can pose and explore questions of subjectivity, emotion and power. These subjectivities of gender, class, and race are not unitary and coherent, but plural and fragmentary. (6)
The text written by Angelique, "Again!" is also discussed in Gemma Moss's "The Influence of Popular Fiction: An Oppositional Text" in Media Texts, Authors and Readers: A Reader, edited by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett (Clevedon: The Open University 1994), pp. 180-199. Here's a link to that via Google Books. That seems to be an extract of a chapter from Moss's book Un/popular Fictions (London: Virago, 1989). There is a separate entry in the database for that book.
From the introduction:
The text written by Angelique, "Again!" is also discussed in Gemma Moss's "The Influence of Popular Fiction: An Oppositional Text" in Media Texts, Authors and Readers: A Reader, edited by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett (Clevedon: The Open University 1994), pp. 180-199. Here's a link to that via Google Books. That seems to be an extract of a chapter from Moss's book Un/popular Fictions (London: Virago, 1989). There is a separate entry in the database for that book.