Browsing by Subject "Romance"

“Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar” examines an unexpected kinship between Boys’ Love, a Japanese male-on-male romance genre, and literary works by Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar, two mid-twentieth century authors who wrote about male homosexuality. Following Eve Sedgwick, who proposed that a “rich tradition of cross-gender inventions of homosexuality” should be studied separately from gay and lesbian literature, this dissertation examines male homoerotic fictions authored by women. These fictions foreground a disjunction between authorial and textual identities in gender and sexuality, and they have often been accused of inauthenticity, appropriation, and exploitation. This dissertation cuts through these critical impulses by suspending their attachment to identitarian thinking and a hierarchical understanding of political radicality in order to account for the seduction of fantasy in these texts.

Exploring narrative strategies, critical receptions, textual and extra-textual relationalities produced by the three bodies of works, this dissertation delineates a paradigm for reading cross-gender homoerotic texts that is neither gay nor queer, neither paranoid nor reparative, and instead focuses on fantasy and how it produces pleasure. Fantasy is used in two senses here: as a preoccupation with relationships in romantic fantasies and as a desire to depart from the here and now. By thinking through both forms of fantasies, I examine the misalignments between identity and identifications in Boys’ Love, Renault’s historical novels about ancient Greece, and Yourcenar’s cross-identifications with gender, temporal, and cultural otherness. Close readings of not only the texts in question, but also discourses around them reveal erotic relationalities both within and outside of male homoerotic fantasies. The end of the dissertation reroutes my discussions back to Japan and debates about gay authenticity in order to foreground fantastical connections that would otherwise be overlooked in a reading that focuses more on identity than disidentifications, cross-identifications, and relationalities.

Just over 300 years have passed since John Locke proposed that the basis of the individual was property and, in turn, that the labor which was the individual’s first property in his own person was the source of all property he accumulates. Labor, in other words, and the property it produces would transform the subject into the independent individual of the liberal imaginary. When we turn to the realist novel, however, labor is notoriously absent, as if to make us aspire to a way of life in which we do not work for money but our money works for us. While the novel suggests that, to become an individual with a story to tell, one must transcend the world of work; liberal political economic theory argues that it takes work, as well as our capacity and will to do it, to become a full-fledged individual. To turn principle into paradox, the novel draws on romance as the means of redefining work as the obstacle rather than the means of rising in the field of social relations. Romance incites the individual to find a position apart if not above work, often in a household where one finds self-completion in a union with an ideal other. In this way, romance provides the foundation for a domestic sphere that restores the individual’s body and spirit by means of the freely given labor of love. As it reimagined the single-family household as a site of social reproduction, the novels of the Victorian period also leant both tangibility and accessibility to an apparatus that ensured that the relations of capitalist production would be reproduced down through the generations. Labored Romance: The Contemporary Novel and the Culture of Late Capitalism begins by showing how a classic work of realism, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, stages a struggle between the necessity of labor as the foundation of value and the work of romance as the transcending of waged labor. If the struggle between work and romance is realism’s legacy, then contemporary fiction calls attention to the fact that romance is missing from the novels that vie for critical recognition today. At the same time, these novels put not only the protagonists but virtually the entire field of characters to work and, indeed, they do little else. Given that novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder are not only works of fantastic fiction, the question is why? In the contemporary novel, both traditional romance and the household that constituted a world apart—a space of love without labor—has all but disappeared while labor is all but impossible to avoid. Instead of a space of personal gratification and replenishment, these novels offer us a virtually boundless workplace that has subsumed both the trappings and functions of the home. On the other hand, the discourse of romance, at once indexed to and detached from the household, is attached to and integrated into waged work. How, in its appropriation of many of the reproductive functions once served by the household, does information work make use of the infectious properties of romance? What purpose does romance now serve if not to compel and sanctify the composition of the basic consumer unit, the heteronormative family? These are the questions that Labored Romance asks of three contemporary novels published during the first decade of the present century.

The Romantic Construal Model proposes that people interpret actions as romantic to the extent that they perceive that those actions take the receiver’s idiosyncratic likes and dislikes into account (personalization), are out of the ordinary in terms of either frequency or the manner with which they are enacted (specialness), and convey that the person values the receiver and the relationship (conveyed value). This model was tested in two studies.

In Study 1, 132 participants (67 men and 65 women) were instructed to modify generic behaviors to make them either more or less romantic. These modifications were then coded for personalization, specialness, and conveyed value. The results showed that higher mean levels of personalization, specialness, and value were found when participants were asked to make a behavior more rather than less romantic. Furthermore, regression analyses predicting participant ratings of romance for the modified actions were significantly predicted by the levels of specialness and conveyed value, but personalization was not related to romantic ratings.

In Study 2, 132 participants (67 men and 65 women) read 8 vignettes describing potentially romantic behaviors that experimentally manipulated all combinations of high or low personalization, high or low specialness and high or low conveyed value. Participants rated each vignette for how romantic they thought the behavior was; the degree to which the behavior was personalized, special, and conveyed value; and how good, committed, and loved would they feel if their partner enacted that behavior in their relationship. The results of Study 2 showed that although personalization and specialness were successfully manipulated in the vignettes, value was not. Furthermore, significant effects of personalization and specialness, but not value, were obtained on romantic ratings for half of the vignettes. In contrast, participants’ subjective ratings of the romanticness of the behaviors were predicted by their ratings of value but not personalization or specialness. The implications of this study for the Romantic Construal Model are discussed and evaluated within the context of previous findings on the communication of affection