Making the Invisible Visible: Lesbian Romance Comics for Women

Abstract

Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 293 Andrea Wood Making the Invisible Visible: Lesbian Romance Comics for Women In 2012, romance novels generated $1.35 billion in sales, making romance the top-grossing genre in the North American publishing industry.1 While clearly among the most successful of popular genres, it still remains one of the most reviled forms of literature. Feminist critics in the 1980s made significant strides in establishing the validity of the genre as a subject of academic inquiry while skillfully repudiating the historically masculine tendency to denigrate romance and its readership as silly and frivolous, part of a longer patriarchal tradition of dismissing women’s writing as lacking literary value and being unworthy of critical inquiry. However, despite their efforts to recoup romance as having something meaningful to say about women’s experiences in culture, early feminist studies nonetheless codified the genre and its readers as exclusively heterosexual. Although research on lesbian romance novels has emerged over the years, often attempting to redress the normativizing tendencies of previous scholars, broader studies of the genre have yet to integrate critical engagement with lesbian or other GBTQ romance texts. As a result, feminist research on romance literature reifies a resolutely heterosexual episteme and has not progressed significantly since 1. Deirdre Donahue, “Romance Genre Sweeps Readers Off Their Feet,” USA Today.com, July 28, 2010, http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/201007 -29-buzzplus29_ST_N.htm. 294 Andrea Wood the 1980s—in point of fact, Tania Modleski’s and Janice Radway’s 1980s studies on the genre remain the definitive texts in the field.2 While the work of Modleski and Radway is still significant, it cannot adequately account for changes occurring in the genre and among romance readers. Even Modleski has acknowledged that future romance research must take into account “the enormous changes that necessitate ever more sophisticated, challenging, and wide-ranging approaches to popular culture in the mass-mediated global economy.”3 Yet, as Modleski also notes, in the current feminist debates on romance, “thoughts about methodology have waned among certain relatively youthful portions of the population .”4 I would add to this the fact that queer theoretical concepts, which can offer productive intersections with feminist methodological approaches, have remained conspicuously absent from most studies of the genre as a whole, although Lisa Fletcher’s Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity is a notable exception.5 At the same time, feminist research on romance remains statically orthodox in its almost exclusive eye on the mass-market paperback as the epitomizing marker of the genre. Limiting critical considerations of romance to Harlequin Romance novels and their ilk imposes yet another exclusionary boundary that ignores how changing media practices and modes of consumption are affecting the genre and its readers today. I do not want to suggest that studying mass-market paperbacks (or even eBooks) is no longer relevant; however, I do argue that expanding our scope of assessment to adequately account for the protean nature of romance and its currently evolving multimedia dimensions is critically imperative. Consequently, this article engages with and builds upon feminist methodological approaches to popular romance to analyze the ways in which women artists use the medium of indie comics, defined here as comics published by independent or small presses, to 2. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982); Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 3. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), xii. 4. Ibid., xxi. 5. Lisa Fletcher, Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (London: Ashgate, 2008). Andrea Wood 295 craft different visions of lesbian romance through a medium that intersects and overlaps the written and the visual. Like the work of Thierry Groensteen, my analysis of lesbian romance comics focuses on “the primacy of the image” and comics as “a predominantly visual narrative form” (italics in original).6 We live in a visual culture, which, as Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, “does not depend on pictures themselves but the modern tendency to picture or visualize existence.”7 Lesbian...