#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family
- PDF / 546,470 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 175 Views
#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family Jodi McAlister1 · Claire Parnell2 · Andrea Anne Trinidad3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract #RomanceClass is a community which encompasses the authors, readers, actors, and artists who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published English-language romance fiction in the Philippines. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in 2019, this article explores the key characteristics of #RomanceClass, including the ways in which positions itself in relation to the dominant North American conception of the romance novel and publishing industry, so as to build new understanding of how romance fiction is created and negotiated outside of this hegemonic context. It finds that #RomanceClass operates as an “intimate public” [Berlant in The female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture, Duke University Press, Durham, London, 2008], which intrinsically affects the community’s texts and practices. Keywords RomanceClass · Romance fiction · Romance publishing · Intimate public · Genre world
Introduction In early October 2019, FeelsFest 2019 was held in Ortigas Center, a central business district in Metro Manila. The setting was, on the surface, unremarkable: a fairly standard coworking space on one of the top floors of an office building. Over the course of the day, though, it became clear that the event itself—a live reading event held by #RomanceClass, a community which encompasses the authors, readers, actors and artists who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published * Jodi McAlister [email protected] 1
School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, VIC 3125, Australia
2
School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
3
Department of Filipino, School of Humanities, Loyola Schools, Ateneo de Manila University, Manila, Philippines
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Publishing Research Quarterly
English-language romance fiction in the Philippines—was anything but unremarkable. The theme of FeelsFest was Slumber Party, and people trickled into the venue in pyjamas, onesies, and robes. These clothes, designed as they are for private domestic, rather than public, wearing, were symbolic as well as thematic, demonstrating the profound level of comfort that the attendees had with each other. The #RomanceClass community is one which is highly professionalised, but also tightly bound on an affective level, regularly describing itself as a found family. The texts, practices, and rituals of #RomanceClass are specifically local to the Philippines, but also operate under the broader auspices of popular romance fiction, a genre which occupies something of a paradoxical space (paradoxes which #RomanceClass both embodies and negotiates, as we will discuss in detail in this article). Romance publishing is a billion-dollar industry, and the sheer volume of romance novels published is something often emphasised in s
Data Loading...
