Part of our goal in creating a new workshop on rape culture was to force ourselves and our audiences through an unpleasant process of reassessing what we think we know in light of all of that privilege we would like to pretend that we do not have. More specifically, sexual violence is intimately linked to rape culture. Rape culture tells stories about how we (don’t) value people in our communities and how those types of value judgments create dehumanized figures that are perceived as “unrapeable.” It is important to convey that so much of our response to sexual violence has been conditioned by the legacy of slavery- enduring in our communal memory and vocabulary is the pernicious narrative of the black male rapist threatening white female purity and the horrific reality of white slaveowners raping black female slaves (while white women stood by, and even profited). The primaries have thrown much of this uncomfortable baggage into the limelight, and I’m ashamed to say that many women claiming the title feminist have deliberately refused to honestly engage with these issues.
These types of messages are particularly hard to get across on my campus, where an elitist-ironic post-everything vibe helps us distance ourselves from the consequences of what we do and say. After all, we know better, so we can do whatever the hell we want…
I find everything increasingly problematic and I feel horribly uncomfortable with most of the images and the narratives that I consume. And yet I often find myself at sea about which battles I need to fight and where it’s most effective to leverage my strength. Facilitating uncomfortable conversations has taught me that there are teachable moments and there are messy battles that will only alienate the person I’m trying to, if not convince, at least destabilize.
The connection to romance? As I caught up with Teach Me Tonight I stumbled across a blogworld debate about certain white feminists’ inability to be transparent about their own privilege as well as the intellectual debt they owe to women of color. Following a long trail of links (at one point I had about fifteen tabs open) led me in a circle right back to where I began, romanceland. Monica Jackson, whom I really respect for consistently asking hard questions of romance readers who would rather live in fantasyland, commented on this situation at length.
One particularly interesting quote:
I have long realized that the liberal, supposedly hip, and feminist romance folks don’t give a frick about black oppression.
“Then there’s Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, and any number of white feminists from the second and third wave that really ruin feminism for the rest of us. If they’re not insisting we put aside our “of color”-ness in favor of our woman-ness, they’re busy using their white privilege to marginalize, dismiss, silence, or otherwise treat us the way those pesky white men they’re so angry with do.” – Angry Black Woman
This is the way it works within romance too. The genre is dissed by darn near everybody literari, basically because it’s a women’s genre with plenty of pulp type fiction-but pulp SFF and mystery genre fiction don’t get the same treatment. Romance by and for black folk is treated just as badly or worse within the romance genre as literary folk treat romance.
Which then sent me thinking back to a collection of essays I just finished, Empowerment Versus Oppression: Twenty First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels. Perhaps most relevant to the above is the excellent essay by Guy Mark Foster entitled “How Dare a Black Woman Make Love to a White Man! Black Women Novelists and the Taboo of Interracial Desire.” However, being the hopeless NELC major that I am my thoughts instead turned toward Emily A. Haddad’s “Bound to Love: Captivity in Harlequin Sheikh Novels.”
Haddad describes the evolution of the captivity plot though several sheikh romances spanning the years before and after America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Haddad writes:
The conventional hyperbole entailed in the trope of captivity serves much the same purpose as the folktale’s supernatural villain; the heroines’ imprisonment does not violate the novel’s insistence on the “real,” yet it is extreme enough to remain potentially therapeutic. When such hyperbole begins to appear more likely than fantastic, captivity loses its tropic, figurative character and instead acquires an imminence that must prevent it from fulfilling its previous function. Events in Iraq since March 2003 have forced captivity out of the realm of the hyperbolic; fears engendered by the threat of Arab men’s aggression may have therefore exceeded the reach of the captivity-based romance plot… Instead of exaggerating the threats through fantasy in the manner of a folktale, they downplay them, shielding the reader from what scares her: foreign locations, still-populated harems, overly powerful Arab men (60).
Orientalism and the romance novel demands a whole new post; indeed, I am dying to write about As You Desire and Mr. Impossible. However, for now I want to stick with my stated theme, which is thoughtless consumption of images and narratives. I can never decide whether uncritically consuming awfulness takes a lot of work or is instead frightfully easy. On the one hand, I know many a person (myself included) who has exerted inordinate effort to deny what is directly under their nose. This generally takes the form of long and convoluted protestations that some racist material isn’t really racist or that a sexist joke is actually harmless. On the other hand, I myself thoughtlessly consumed romanceland’s racism-by-omission for years and never once asked myself why everyone was so damn white.
Is Haddad on the right track? Is racism such an active and powerful psychological threat to mental stability that white women cannot incorporate race into what John G. Cawelti labels “formula fiction”? That would be some pretty deep-seated attachment to privilege. In Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, Cawelti writes:
Formulas enable the audience to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across this boundary (35).
Monica Jackson notes:
Any other controversial issues are eagerly discussed in the romance community: Sexism, gays, plagiarism, kinky erotica, publisher bugaboos, conservative issues, but as a whole they really hate blacks and refuse to discuss black racial issues without hysteria and rancor.
I would expand upon this. I have read, for example, several “mainstream” romances that incorporated ambiguous constructions of sexual orientation into the courtship plot. Mary Balogh’s Slightly Tempted comes to mind, as does the more obscure Emma Holly Beyond Innocence. Even though these two authors are sympathetic towards their gay characters, it is also true that their gay characters function as plot-roadblocks to the happy heterosexual betrothal. It is worth continuing Cawelti’s next thought on stepping across the boundary:
This seems to be preeminently the function of villains in formulaic structures: to express, explore, and finally to reject those actions which are forbidden, but which, because of certain other cultural patterns, are strongly tempting (35).
Although the mechanism is different in Slightly Tempted and Beyond Innocence, the lesbian couple in the former and the gay couple in the latter do function more in villain territory than in secondary character territory. That is, these couples pose problems that must be overcome for the heterosexual hero/heroine couple to have their happily ever after.
So to end this rambling on consumption, what does it mean that black characters of any persuasion (ie hero/heroine, secondary characters, villain) seem to be lacking in “mainstream” white romance? Does absence, as Emily Haddad suggests, indicate deep and real anxiety so great it cannot even be mediated through the “therapeutic” aspects of genre fiction? What the hell is wrong with this picture?
Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Goade, Sally, editor. Empowerment Versus Oppression: Twenty First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.
I recently reviewed an urban fantasy novel to express my opinion that the paranormal explosion and growing popularity of sf/f romances allows white readers and writers to explore racism, classism, etc in a “safe” space. On one hand I do enjoy the questions raised in many of my favorite UF series, but on the other, it further frustrates me because 1) it seems like a combination of this, this and this
2) Minority writers of sf/f, paranormal fiction and urban fantasy who don’t “write white” are still marginalized and 3) it is incredibly insulting that white readers/writers can only handle these serious topics in a fantasy world that can be ignored the second they close the book (and honestly, I don’t think the average reader is even aware of that “safe” space) and to bring real life to their attention only makes them defensive.
Sorry it took so long to approve your post, blackromancereader! (my spam filter catches posts with lots of links, and I’m still feeling my way around all these new buttons and options.)
I think it’s really interesting that you referenced stuff white people like because it’s not only a critique of a certain blithe and self-satisfied ignorance, but a critique that seems (to me) to be directed at a very specific class of white people- well-off urban liberal hipsters. We’ve been passing the links around my campus and it’s awful and funny and uncomfortable all at once because UofC is a campus full of white well-off urban liberal hipsters who think that they’re going to save the world. Evaluating their own privilege and baggage would only slow them down. Even though I don’t like to think of myself as one of this crowd, my scarf and New Balance wearing-body might testify differently!
I agree that it is insulting that white readers/writers might like to engage with race in the mediated and comfortable environment of genre fiction but not in the real world. I haven’t really gotten to a lot of urban fantasy, so my critique missed this genre. However, in the romance that I have read to date, race is almost universally invisible- unless, of course, I walk over to Border’s African-American fiction section. What struck me about Monica Jackson’s post was that she notices that people tackle all sorts of anxieties both within and around the romance novel. (Whether or not these conversations translate into action in nonromanceland is debatable). Yet race seems to be *the* most uncomfortable-to-the-point-of-avoidance topic for almost every (not-black) romance reader and writer.
Perhaps most disturbing for me is that there is not even a space to bring up a critique of this state of affairs. Any mention of race brings up the affronted “are you calling *me* a racist?” and quickly shuts off any sort of reasoned or productive dialogue. This is, in my opinion, one of the sillier responses because no one in America really escapes imbibing race prejudice; if we cannot be honest about this, then what’s the point of having a dialogue?
Also, may I read this review? Was it online? I would be very interested in reading it and getting my toes wet in urban fantasy.
Thanks for coming over, too!
if we cannot be honest about this, then what’s the point of having a dialogue?
Which is why I’ve kept my online discussions on race in places where I feel “safe”. I can only imagine how Monica feels, having been fighting in the trenches for much longer than I have. The “safe” space created by the romance genre (or any genre of womens fiction) has bothered me for a while, and I’m still sorting out the trouble, but to put it succinctly, it feels like the mainstream feminist movement: the “safe” place is to keep the white middle-class reader “safe” from anything “disturbing”–which is why any discussion of race (or at least a discussion by someone avowedly non-white) raises hackles.
But I wrote the review here: http://blackromancereader.wordpress.com/2008/04/17/iron-kissed-by-patricia-briggs/
or. for example. in nora roberts’ current/modern world there are black characters who are throwaways – the vampire series anyone? i knew the character – whose name i cannot remember (king?) was going to die – because he was a black male character and would not find love/sex even as he moved through time!
….
while in j.d. robbs’ world – the future – there are multiethnic characters everywhere! in love, in power, reproducing, best friends. the very descriptions of the denizens of this multi-racial future are rich, lush, inviting and real.
i am a serial reader of her work and wonder what statement that makes? of her and us as readers?
*shrug*
I like fantasy for exactly the reason readerimarriedhim describes. It makes me able to enjoy the read without getting all political about it and sometimes it even makes me see an old issue in a new light.
Only very few exceptional individuals read and write with a neutral mind about real life.
Also, let’s face it, everybody only reads books that present their real world nation/opinion/plight in a sympathetic light and the other views as moderately evil and stupid.
When I feel like cursing the whole time or thinking “Take that, political stance X”, then I’m not getting the whole picture.
When I read about the enmity between dwarfs and elves and it is funny, then I’m able to think about the causes of racism and war and even evaluating my own opinions anew. Because I’m at ease, not fuming or triumphing.
I understand wanting to feel at ease, but issues like race simply don’t allow the marginalized to frequently feel at ease. In fact, I feel that it is that “ease” that allows things to continue the way they are. Sure a book may make you think, but do you act upon it? Did the knee-jerk reaction you typically had towards a person of color, born from stereotypes and the legacy of “whiteness”, disappear or did you catch it and check it? That’s proactive anti-racism.
(Sorry, slightly off-topic.)
I would love to read your post on orientalism with regards to the two books you mentioned in your post. Mr Impossible and As you Desire both left me feeling uncomfortable, but in a hard to articulate-without sounding-overly-sensitive and-think-skinned kind of way… Particularly the latter, because I really like Chase and felt let down a little by her caricatures.