Labors of Love: Black Women, Cultural Production, and the Romance Genre

Here's the abstract:

“Labors of Love: Black Women, Cultural Production, and the Romance Genre” examines Black women as both the producers and subjects of romance narratives across television, novels, and podcasts in the U.S. and U.K. over the past decade. During the time period my dissertation covers, both the representational politics of the romance genre and the media and cultural industries have been in flux. My research probes how Black women have (and have not) made space for themselves within both the media industries and the discourse of romantic love as new
media platforms and technologies have reshaped cultural production. Using frameworks from Black cultural studies and critical political economy, my project makes two primary interventions. I nuance the assertion that new media platforms and technologies—streaming, self-publishing and e-books, and podcasting—increase access to cultural production for marginalized groups. Secondly, I demonstrate how shifting analyses of the romance genre to center Black women revises many long-standing theses about the genre’s relationship to capitalism, intimacy, and narrativity.

Through textual analysis and critical media industry studies, each of my three chapters brings together two case studies that elucidate the chapter’s arguments. My first chapter examines two self-published series by Black romance novelists, Rebekah Weatherspoon and Katrina Jackson, through how they articulate understandings of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Specifically, I illustrate how self-published authors—writing within a space that celebrates neoliberal, self-entrepreneurship—work through Black women’s position in the economic order through their protagonists. My second chapter uses the television series Chewing Gum (E4, 2015-2017) and the podcast Thirst Aid Kit (BuzzFeed 2017-2019, Slate 2019-2020) to analyze Black women’s historically fraught relationship to sexuality and eroticism. Through close reading I demonstrate how the romance genre’s thematic preoccupations alongside the formal innovations of the series and podcast create an intimate public for Black women watchers/listeners, where they have the space to revel in their sexuality rather than shield it from others. Finally, my last chapter contends with the romantic comedy’s relationship to temporality. Through Hulu’s adaptation of High Fidelity (2020) and the series Lovesick (Channel 4 2014, Netflix 2016-2018), I engage with how Black protagonists affect the genre’s relationship to temporality in three registers: how both series speak to the “post” of post-romantic and post-race, how the series’ engage contemporary feelings of temporal instability through nonlinear narrative structures, and, finally, how contemporary romantic comedy ruptures the genre’s reliance on the happy ending. Across each of my dissertation’s chapters, I demonstrate how Black women’s recent increased visibility in romance has produced a range of complex, sometimes contradictory, representations that expand understandings of the genre and its possibilities.

The Internet Archive link may or may not work. It said it had archived the content, but when I tried to see it, I was told it couldn't be archived.

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My first chapter examines two self-published romance series by Black authors Rebekah Weatherspoon and Katrina Jackson through the genre’s relationship to capitalism. More specifically, I analyze how both series’ Black heroines navigate increasing precarity, and more generally, how contemporary Black romance is grappling with the effects of neoliberalism. In Weatherspoon’s series of Sugar Baby novellas, she chronicles the relationship between Kayla, a down-on-her-luck 20 something, and Michael, a billionaire CEO. Building from scholars who have examined the subgenre of billionaire CEO romance novels, I demonstrate how Weatherspoon’s sugaring novellas align with the genre’s further embrace of neoliberal capitalism. Unlike the white romances other literary scholars examine, Weatherspoon’s work highlights the racist dimensions of our economic system; however, rather than advocating for a dismantling of the system she recasts Black women as the deserving beneficiaries and winners of neoliberal capitalism through meritocratic competition, aligning both professional and romantic success with the logics of the market. Conversely, Katrina Jackson’s Curriculum Vitae series, which follows faculty of color at a university in the Midwest, aligns romantic fulfillment with a rejection of neoliberal imperatives of “self-enclosed individualism” and hustle culture. Jackson, who is a history professor in addition to a novelist, uses the conventions of the romance to critique how the neoliberal university exploits its workers. I contextualize my close reading of both of these series within a larger publishing ecosystem undergirded by neoliberal discourses of self-entrepreneurialism and freedom. While my textual analysis takes priority, I integrate analyses of publishing as an industry to enhance my explanation of neoliberalism within the texts of the novels. (18-19)

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Through Black female protagonists both series demonstrate how economic systems have racialized outcomes, but while Weatherspoon aligns professional ambitions with romantic milestones, Jackson, especially in Office Hours, argues that romantic fulfillment actually hinges on rejecting neoliberalism’s pressures of optimization and constant work. (24)