Busting Textual Bodices: Gender, Reading, and the Popular Romance

Abstract

mid-teens that 51 percent of romance readers begin to acquire their taste for the genre, a taste, if statistics are credible, that is seemingly voracious. Danielle Steel has sold over 100 million copies of her novels in North America, grossing an estimated $25 million a year. Two hundred million Harlequin novels, available in twenty-three languages, read in one hundred countries, are purchased worldwide annually. What might it mean for young women in the throes of negotiating their own social and sexual relationships to consume this genre in cultures in which social and sexual objectification and violence against women run rampant, despite the efforts of feminists, equity educators, and lobbyists to the contrary? Several years ago I began to note in multiple ways in my culturally diverse urban high school how gender was experienced by both male and female students. Two of my female students dropped out due to the stress of coping with ongoing harassment from former boyfriends. Seven of ten young women chose to write their major research essay on abortion, raising questions and considerations that suggested they'd previously been granted too little time, space, and material with which to explore the complexities of the subject. The word faggot was frequently uttered by certain male students to terrorize or moderate the behavior of those they perceived to be less macho than themselves. In a survey to determine student comfort level with the school