Recreating Readership
Recreating Readership
The technology of the internet is changing romance
Janice Radway wrote in the 1980’s that romance readers were a somewhat isolated group of housewives who read primarily for themselves and got recommendations from friends and bookstore clerks. While she may have been right in many areas, her characterization of the ‘desperate housewife’ as the sole reader of the romance genre appears far fetched and stereotypical. The modern reader of Radway’s very careful study of romance readers feels uncomfortable with her conclusions because the genre has expanded and grown since then, making some of her arguments obsolete. This is due mainly to the creation and mainstream acceptance of the internet in the early 90’s that immediately allowed these isolated groups of readers to converse and share favorite stories. The internet essentially liberated the romance reader from her favorite reading nook and enabled her to expand her reading selections, creating a more savvy and opinionated reader who affected the genre by making her wants known to authors and publishers.
The romance genre and the romance reader seem to have formed a symbiotic relationship since the creation of the internet. The reader uses the internet to explore new genres and let other readers know what they like to read, and the publishers and writers of the romance genre pay attention and if enough people create a demand, new books and subgenres are created. Even though such a phenomenon may have been more difficult in the early years of the internet, one fact that is true in 2009 is true for the early 90’s. The internet allows people to communicate with each other faster and in ways that would have been impossible to do before its creation. E-mail may have been the earlier form of internet communication, but a more modern, and seemingly very influential, form can be found in the blog. Romance blogs can be found in a number of different forms on the internet, ranging from romance writers talking about their latest project, to readers who critique every romance they read and share them with the online community. It is this second group of blogs that have affected gender identity the most within the technology of the internet.
Reader response and critique blogs of the romance genre act in a number of different ways when it comes to restructuring gender identity and how gender is viewed within the genre. To begin with, the majority of romance bloggers are fairly critical of the books they read and tend to give books that have weak, fainting heroines and misogynistic plots poor reviews. The modern woman wants a heroine that she can identify with, or perhaps hold as an ideal, a strong woman who knows what she wants, and most bloggers and their followers’ comments appear to agree with this sentiment. By making their opinions clear, bloggers and their followers are changing the romance genre, because publishers and authors are listening. According to a 2005 survey of romance readers by Romance Writers of America, the most preferred subgenre is mystery/thriller/adventure, where generally strong contemporary women solve problems and fight crime all while experiencing a passionate romance. Historical romance, a subgenre rife with feminine submission and helpless heroines has been placed much lower on the list, illustrating that someone has been reading the blogs and responding to the demands on the internet.
Another internet technology that has affected gender identities is the expansion of ‘e-publishing’ where someone can write a story and publish it on the internet for anyone to read. While the majority of the writing is not very good and is rather silly, there are some subgenres of romance that began online and as they gained popularity were picked up by publishers. The primary example for this is M/M romance, which began on the internet with a number of writers creating and publishing their works for a community of devoted followers. Gay and lesbian romance is another subgenre that, although already available in print, was affected by what writers were putting on the internet and the focus shifted from the voyeuristic gaze of the 1960’s to the relationship between the characters. In the case of hetero-romance, online writers made paranormal romance more mainstream and attractive and, like the bloggers, created a stronger heroine who takes charge of her own story. The technological practice of e-publishing affected how gender identities were being created in romance novels, by directly illustrating what the consumer wanted and creating a demand.
While gender identity within the romance has changed, creating new subgenres and stronger heroines as well as switching to the perspective of the male protagonist to create a different understanding, gender identities in the reading community are somewhat different. Women may be more educated (42% have a bachelor’s degree or higher) than readers in the 80’s and work outside of the home, but they make up the majority of romance readers. The male population of romance readers is growing very steadily – in the 2005 survey, 22% of readers were men, up from 7% in 2002. But men remain a small percentage of the whole, illustrating that while gender identities may have changed, the idea that romance novels appeal to women still holds true. Yet, it would appear that because of this jump in male readership in three years, something has been happening to get men more interested in the genre. Again, the reason is the internet. Male readers, like their female counterparts, are able to read the blogs and e-published books (and order what they find appealing) in the comfort of their own homes without being caught purchasing or browsing the romance section at their local bookstore. Additionally, since electronic readers, like the Kindle, have been made available, male readers are able to read wherever and whenever they like without the embarrassing cover. Does the introduction of these practices mean that male readership of the romance will increase? Will the ‘bromance’ become more popular as more men turn to the genre and subsequently write about what they like and want? Currently, it is difficult to see what will happen, but it is already happening – there are a few romance blogs that are written by men.
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Sugar Spice–
This paper builds on and steps off from your last, on Reconstructing Gender with the Romance Novel by focusing in on the role that the internet may be playing in the evolution of gender roles in romance. What is most striking to me, in your analysis, is the contrast created between the changing roles within the fiction and the still fairly fixed gender identities of its readers. Through most of your paper, you seem to be suggesting that the spectrum of possible gender positionalities is expanding, but you end w/ the very conventional image of male readers now indulging in a taste for romance only because technology has made it possible for them to do so “without being caught” or “embarrassed” by any public demonstration of their “feminine” proclivities. If that’s the case, how much is really “changing”? How much is the genre which so interests you actually contributing to expanding gender norms?
You say that the “internet essentially liberated the romance reader,” enabling her “to expand her reading selections,” but I’m not yet convinced. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the role that the internet has played in the evolution of various literacies.
Where this conversation gets really complicated and interesting for me is in the question of whether engaging with lots of different people on-line necessarily serves to expand our worlds in the way reading was once said to do/has always done for me–”opens up doors to places that you probably will never get to visit in your lifetime, to cultures, to worlds, to people”–or whether time spent on the web might actually rather-or-also result in the creation of multiple ghettos of the like-minded. Are we using the web to create new or larger social and intellectual networks? Or sites for closed groups who think alike? As Walter Ong describes the differences between the “oral” and a “literate” mind-set, the medium of the web is more likely to contribute to the latter. Ong’s argument is that the emotional responsiveness encouraged by oral and visual culture can short circuit the kind of skepticism that reading and writing exacerbates….
I’m not seeing that sort of skepticism, in your account of how the internet is working for romance readers….do you?
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Rather interesting. Has few times re-read for this purpose to remember. Thanks for interesting post. Waiting for the trackback.