The XO Interview: Jayashree Kamblé
Looking at the romance genre with an academic lens
When I was writing Dangerous Books for Girls, one theme I kept coming back to was the need for academia to study the romance genre because critical attention to how the stories work and the important role they play in our society would go a long way toward the genre being taken seriously. So I was thrilled to meet Jayashree Kamblé at romance bookclub (of course!). She is one of the smartest people I know about the romance genre, especially at analyzing how and why a story works (she is also very fun to have lunch with).
When she is not at romance book club, she is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College at the City University of New York and President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. She is author of Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology and editor (with Eric Murphy Selinger and Hsu-Ming Teo) of The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction.
In this XO Interview, we talk about her new book Creating Identity: the Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Preservation, how romance novels are “reading the news” and the revolutionary portrayal of heroines in romance novels.
How did you first discover the romance genre? Which book was The One for you?
Through the Mills & Boon romances on the bookshelves of my older cousins in our extended family home in Bombay, where I grew up. One of my favorite novels from that time was Ann Charlton’s Summer Rain, Winter Sun. It’s a contemporary Australian romance, with somewhat Gothic and Beauty and the Beast shades. There’s a reclusive ex-tennis star who retired under mysterious circumstances and the interior designer who’s hired to re-do his home must contend with his past. One of their dates is on the steps of the Sydney opera house. Swoon.
We mostly have this idea that romance novels are books for fun (and they are) but that’s not all. As an English professor and academic, why is it important to look at these books with a critical, academic point of view?
Popular culture texts, like romance novels, tell us about both contemporary and historical desires and fears in an accessible way. One can think of them as reading the news rather than reading an academic treatise that has taken years of writing and review. Romance novels are also in dialog with the current moment, both reflecting as well as shaping its community’s viewpoints. This dialog concerns issues that affect our emotional and physical well-being, be it sexual consent, gender presentation, financial sovereignty, professional etiquette, or racial justice. While many romance novels focus on only one aspect of romantic intimacy (and it’s valuable to study that academically), it is just as important to study the ones that have a broader scope and ambition. After all, how can a form that has such a large readership be overlooked in a truly thoughtful society?
Your new book is Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine's Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation and it’s about how the romance genre is a space that can upend the false binaries women are often forced into (careerist vs mother, feminine vs fierce). Can you give us an idea of how the romance genre does this, more than anything else?
In most forms of literary and media culture, female characters are told to pick one of two options that are presented to them as mutually exclusive. You can be a mother or you can be a sexual being, you can be a homemaker or you can be a professional, etc. But romance novels routinely reject this idea. As my study shows through examples, romance fiction consistently models relationships and larger structural changes that facilitate its female protagonists’ road to multiple kinds of selfhood: a spy can be loyal to different communities across man-made borders; a person who wears feminine clothing can be intellectually powerful; an egghead can be a warrior; a writer can keep her professional life after marriage; a woman of color can become a princess and continue to be a scientist. Over and over again, romance novels show us what kind of partners, professional and personal, and what kind of societies are necessary (and quite feasible) for women to live full lives.
The book focuses on ten romance heroines. Who are a few of the heroines you look at and in what context—aka what is our reading list? ;-)
By chapter :-)
Sexuality: Love in the Valley (a Pocket-Venus chef who is a virgin convinces a ponderous lawyer that he should risk falling in love) and Dark Desires After Dusk (a software programming grad student fights paranormal forces who want to force a pregnancy on her and conquers her own sexual inhibitions with a demon’s help)
Gender: Darkfever (a cute Southern belle struggles to outmatch Other-worldly creatures while searching for her sister’s killer in an alternate-universe Dublin) and To Die For (a Barbie-like gym owner and former cheerleader figures out who’s trying to kill her and shows her cop boyfriend she’s more than a pretty face)
Work: Naked in Death (a homicide detective in mid-21st-century NYC straddles class lines after marrying a billionaire) and Dreaming of You (a novelist in 19th-century England is determined to be a writer instead of a village housewife)
Citizenship: My Beautiful Enemy (an Anglo-Chinese gentlewoman with a secret life as a warrior in Qing China reunites with a former lover/British foreign agent when she comes to England on a mission) and Spymaster’s Lady (a disabled French agent hunted on both sides of the English channel during the Napoleonic era claims ownership of her citizen status)
Intersections: Indigo (an activist on the Underground Railroad understands that she can have love while fighting chattel slavery) and A Princess in Theory (an orphaned Black epidemiologist learns that she’s a lost princess from an African kingdom).
How do romance novels bring you joy?
So many ways!
I love seeing female characters find joy—in their sexual, romantic, financial, intellectual, professional, and community lives.
Romance novels show me a vision of a practical utopia—where female desires are seen (even anticipated!), acknowledged, and fulfilled by an entire community (parents, partners, colleagues, friends, and broader socio-economic systems).
They give me joy when they admit and address issues of consent, reproductive justice, racial inequality, and gaslighting.
They make me laugh, they make me sigh, they remind me to keep fighting.
Indie author here; having a difficult time marketing my book. It's a coming-of-age story with two main threads of romance (two MCs) and a double HEA. It's contemporary and has LGBTQ content. It's called The Sun and The Moon, by Willa M Scantlebury. Great reviews on Amazon but apparently not enough. Any recommendation...To get it to the next level? It seems the mash up of genres has muffled it.