Romance novels have been justly criticized for either ignoring disability or for portraying disability in problematic ways, for example, as something that can be "overcome" by romantic love. This paper analyzes the representation of chronic illness in three contemporary romance novels which feature interabled relationships between heroines with disabilities and nondisabled heroes. It finds that they subvert dominant pernicious attitudes towards disability, in particular that people with chronic illnesses are not desired or desiring and that the "happily ever after" promised by the romance genre is impossible if one partner has a disability. The novels do this through an exploration of vulnerability. In each novel, the heroines move from a negative understanding of vulnerability as mere susceptibility to harm, to a positive view of vulnerability as a condition for the possibility of healthy and fulfilling romantic love. In doing so, they can be viewed as a positive literary response to the call by feminist disability scholars to conceptualize vulnerability as a potent force for ethical relations, the acknowledgement of which can destabilize the harmful binary of abled versus disabled.
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The twenty-first century has seen an increase in disabled romantic protagonists, but disability is often simply a barrier to the happy ever after, resolved via ableist tropes such as the “miracle cure” or the “supercrip.” Emily Baldys argues that the benefit of increased visibility in the romance genre is outweighed by these “containment strategies” that have the effect of minimizing or erasing disability (Baldys 2012).
This paper focuses on three contemporary romance novels that feature main characters with disabilities: Get a Life, Chloe Brown (2019) by Talia Hibbert, Always Only You (2020) by Chloe Liese, and Seven Days in June (2022) by Tia Williams. In contrast to the novels surveyed by Baldys, they are written by authors who have the same or similar disabilities as their main characters. These writers explicitly intend their books to have a positive social and political impact, demonstrating that the “happy ever after” promised by the romance genre can be achieved by disabled characters without ableist tropes or narrative prosthetics.
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Of course, no one novel can take up every aspect of ablest culture. All three heroines are multiply marginalized: they are disabled, they are women, Eve and Chloe are Black, and Frankie is neurodivergent. As a result of intersecting and overlapping norms relating to gender, race, and disability, ableism shows up differently for each of them.
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This paper argues that these romance novels subvert the notion that a “happily ever after” is impossible in the context of chronic illness. They do this first by characterizing the protagonists as desirable and desiring, and by portraying their sexual experiences as pleasurable and fulfilling for themselves and their partners. They also, more importantly, subvert widely held norms of vulnerability, in particular that vulnerability is a negative condition that besets an unfortunate person or group (especially persons with disabilities), and which should be avoided if possible. Vulnerability is presented in these novels as an essential feature of the human condition which can allow for a kind of openness to relationships that stimulates growth and transformation, and, ultimately, happiness. This revisioning of vulnerability chips away at one of the main sources of stigma and prejudice against individuals with chronic illness: that they are “other” because they are uniquely vulnerable and problematically burdensome, especially for romantic partners.
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Susan Wendell notes that the paradigmatic disabled person is “healthy disabled,” that is, someone with relatively stable, and often visible, functional limitations such as paraplegia (Wendell 2017). In contrast, the chronically ill are “unhealthy disabled” with fluctuating, invisible impairments such as fatigue, nausea, and pain.
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