This is the introduction to a special issue of Porn Studies.
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In the 1979 article ‘Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different’, American feminist scholar Ann Barr Snitow laid the groundwork for what became something of a perpetual debate: is the romance genre pornography? For nearly 50 years, scholars, commentators, authors, publishers, and fans have debated this question with no clear consensus. Some readers of the genre favour the comparison while others dismiss it as inaccurate or pejorative, perhaps out of a ‘wish to avoid the stigma attached to porn’ (Vivanco 2024, 6). Popular romance texts and pornography have been both aligned and maligned, with romance novels variously celebrated or dismissed as ‘porn for women’ or even ‘mummy porn’. [...]
One way to approach the connection of the two terms is to think creatively about the affinities between their study – not to compare porn and romance texts, but porn studies and popular romance studies. Here, the relationship between pornography and romance is framed in methodological terms. What fruitful relationship exists between their modes of inquiry that benefits both fields of study? Strikingly, these two fields – popular romance studies and porn studies – have had little to do with one another. We say strikingly because there are similarities and similar challenges for those who engage with the two genres: readers and consumers can be quickly pathologized; discourses of addiction and addicted consumers populate debate about the genres; and authors and performers may be pitied or treated as if what they do requires little talent. For those who engage in research in these fields, both porn studies and popular romance studies can be seen as a kind of ‘dirty work’ within the academy, associated with obscenity, transgression, or the all-too lowbrow (Irvine 2014; Roach 2024).
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As a concluding observation about porn and romance, we highlight Laura Vivanco’s point that ‘romance, like pornography, is a “body genre”’. Vivanco quotes here film scholar Linda Williams on how body genres provide ‘the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion’ (2024, 12; quoting Williams 1999, 269). The romance genre features characters ‘who experience love intensely’ and provokes in its readers such correspondingly intense engagement that the genre might even be called ‘emotional porn’ (Vivanco 2024, 13). Both porn and romance are interested in sexual pleasure, whether through explicit depiction, as in porn, or through a spectrum ranging from pleasure merely implied in a happily-ever-after ending to on-page sweet to spicy sex scenes, as in the popular romance genre. (When a romance features lots of sex, it risks being called porn. When a porno features lots of romancing, it risks being called boring.) More broadly, the genres share an interest in the relationships people have with one another. While popular romance foregrounds love and intimate relationship, and pornography foregrounds desire and sex, these categories all overlap – or, as Eve Sedgwick might say, ‘interdigitate’, which sounds both pornographic and romantic (2003, 145)!
Overall, these media texts affect the reader and viewer. We luxuriate in the bodies before us; we can fantasize about that ideal lover; we can laugh or cry because of how ridiculous a scene might be; and we can be disgusted, disturbed, and offended by a text that others love. As guest co-editors, our previous research expressed a wish for more scholarship on the relationship between pornography and popular romance (for example, Allan 2021). With this special issue, the outcome we most hope for is such ongoing reflection.
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The items from the special issue which I've included in this database are:
This is the introduction to a special issue of Porn Studies.
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The items from the special issue which I've included in this database are:
Balle, Mary, Danny Valdez and Tori Sciara. "Adeline’s Desire: Conversation between Paranoid and Reparative Readings of Eroticism, Relationships, and Sexual Behaviours in the Dark Romance Haunting Adeline."
Deane, Katie. "Dark Romance: an Introduction."
Monier, Mel. "Reading the dark romance: exploring audience engagement with sexual power dynamics in dark romance novels."
Nicholls, Georgia. "Between the sheets: physiological sex acts in the contemporary romance novel."