Gender, Popular Culture, and Curriculum

Abstract

While various studies have lately acknowledged the importance of gender and schooling, few examine the power relations between the sexes or recognize how domestic and romantic concerns structure girls' decisions about their futures. This article is concerned with how adolescent femininity is constructed in 34 adolescent romance novels written from 1942–1982. In this romance fiction romance is presented as the transforming experience that brings heroines to womanhood, endowing their lives with meaning. Heroines' involvement in romance stimulates their interests in beautification which sexually objectifies them while simultaneously reporducing their positions in the sexual division of labor as consumers. The novels are structured around a dominant model of femininity, the “good girl,” who is characterized by filial obedience and adherence to traditional romantic conduct centering around males' control of interactions. Although the notion of femininity did not markedly change over the forty year period, the novels of the 1960s–1970s showed the existence of strain in gender relations primarily in sexuality. I suggest that narrative versions of femininity do not always closely match those in society, but are fictional rearrangements and recodings of social concerns. While teen romances hold out to readers traditional versions of gender identity, I argue that romance is an important relationship where the tensions surrounding gender identity become visible.