This article discusses the author’s experiences of teaching the history of romance fiction to undergraduate students from 2013 to 2024, with a particular emphasis on changing approaches to teaching romance media that romanticises or eroticises sexual violence. The #MeToo movement is noted as marking an inflection point in the ways in which such texts have been approached and interpreted by students, reflecting the increased priority given to issues of consent in romance fiction. The article discusses some of the risks and difficulties inherent in teaching such material, and how a trauma‐informed pedagogy might be used to mitigate these in practice.
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I do not attribute the module's success to myself: rather, it reflects the conviction that our students hold regarding the genre's influence and importance. Ninety-eight percent of students on the module have been women, mostly in their early 20s, and the issues raised by romance fiction about gender, power, desire, and agency are matters that they contend with daily within their own lives. Students in my seminars have often argued that romance narratives shape the social scripts people follow in real life, and speculated on the extent to which such media has affected their own norms relating to love, desire, courtship, and marriage. Since #MeToo went mainstream in 2017 these discussions have focussed particularly on issues of consent, and this shift has prompted me to make a series of incremental changes to both the texts that we study and the ways in which those texts are approached within our seminars.
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Over the years I have spoken to many students who combined outspoken feminist politics with an enduring fascination with the aggressive, controlling heroes of popular romance fiction. I came into romance studies via Gothic fiction: I am acutely aware that many women use romance media, like horror media, precisely as a way of imaginatively thinking through their own relationships with male power and violence, and I am deeply uncomfortable with dismissing their efforts to do so as simply misguided or regressive.
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Today I no longer teach Gone With the Wind or Forever Amber. For a few years in the mid-2010s I taught Fifty Shades of Grey, because its cultural presence within the genre at the time was so overwhelming that it felt absurd not to cover it, but I never much liked the text and happily dropped it as its significance receded. For several years I continued teaching The Flame and the Flower, the novel which started the bodice-ripper craze of the 1970s, because I believed that if we were to understand why second-wave feminist writers had disliked romance fiction so much it was important for us to confront the bodice-ripper and everything it stood for. However, following the cultural shifts inaugurated by the #MeToo movement, I became less and less convinced that the intellectual pay-off was worth the anger and unhappiness that the text so clearly provoked in my students.
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despite my tremendous respect for [Kennedy] Ryan as an author and for Long Shot as a milestone in Black romance fiction history, I have taken the reluctant decision to remove it from the module, as I have come to feel that using my status as a teacher to encourage much younger female students to read about and discuss scenes of graphic sexual violence could, in itself, all too easily constitute an act of abuse.
Here's the abstract:
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