It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World
Criticism isn’t tolerated in the romance industry, whether it be reviews of works or expressing valid opinions. Perhaps this is a result of the romance community spending 90% of its time convening online in comparison to other genres and their many, many conferences, but flame wars are prone to break out between persons of dissenting comments and communication is quickly broken down. What I find most amusing is the oft-used defense of “it’s fantasy”.
Yes, fiction is the figment of the author’s mind, but I find this tactic troubling as the defense mechanism for women. People tend to denigrate what they most cherish, and the fact that romance readers, who are mostly women, feel the need to do this while, on the other side, proclaiming that romance novels are a form of feminism borders on the ridiculous. Ever so often someone will abuse the genre and out come the banners and flame-throwers as fans of the genre gear up to defend romances–yet nearly every individual is utterly unable to express their opinions on it without feelings of what appears to be shame and practiced diffidence.
The fact that the two major events in the genre, the annual RT Convention and RWA Conference, devote themselves not to serious discussions between its members and its readers, but to continuing the delusion (ya know, all those panels and workshops and appointments can only help a writer so much…), shows that despite being the largest selling genre in the industry, it doesn’t get respect from its own.
Ironically, within the whitest and patriarchal genre of fiction, turmoil and change is festering within the SF/F community over the lack of diversity and feminist POV, while within the romance genre, we’re wrapped up in the latest gossip and anticipating the next flame war.
I also think there would be a hard time for the romance industry to engage in serious discussions about the romance genre(I mean really, people bring up that JAK book from fifteen or so years ago) in comparison to SF/F is because women’s rights (particularly white women) trumps racial rights. From what I’ve observed, the fight within sf/f is primarily feminist and then within that fringe is the POC feminism which is bundled together with men of color issues.
The romance genre is run by white women, so they feel the “feminist” issue–that is, the genre being matriarchal instead of patriarchal–has been successfully conquered, and since feminism is the sole fight white women have battled for over the centuries, they don’t see the need to fight for the rights of WoC, whom they see as “colored” first and “women” second (mainly meaning black women, since as evident by the success of Marjorie M. Liu and Nalini Singh, women of Asian descent can “pass” if they choose to do so–and Ms. Liu, though I love her work, is able to feature an African hero in an upcoming novel when a black author writing about an African hero is automatically shunted into the “AA” section and assumed to be inferior) and in treating WoC in such a manner, white women are able to assume the very mantle of “superior” they condemn white men of having worn for so long. As much as they assume they’ve come, they haven’t come very at all: white women were viewed as inferior by white men because of Eve and in turn, whites viewed PoC as inferior because of their dark skin.
2 comments June 1, 2007
