Roundtable Review: Guilty Pleasures

Abstract

This roundtable review of Arielle Zibrak's book Guilty Pleasures inaugurates what we hope to be a more dynamic, interactive format of exchange that works in tandem with traditional book reviews. In a (still not quite post–) COVID-19 pandemic world, new forms of cultural discourse have emerged, breaking down long-held, albeit already fluid, boundaries between public and private spaces; collective and individual identities; conventional and newly minted modes of interaction, communication, and scholarship. Guilty Pleasures brilliantly thematizes and embodies the need to revise the rigid boundaries of scholarly conversation. Hailing from the author's reflection on her own culture of reading femme fictions as a rite of passage into a world of “guilty pleasures”—such as romance novels, romantic comedies, and popular, female-centered television shows—Guilty Pleasures deftly weaves the nineteenth century with gender studies, cultural critique, and affect theory. With a candid, conversational style, the book bridges academic and popular writing in a way that engages the reader to do the same, broaching such important questions as the nature of pleasure, the experience of guilt, and structures of love, sex, and gender.In what follows, Sarah Danielle Allison (Loyola University), Rita Dashwood (Edge Hill University), and Melissa Gniadek (University of Toronto) join author Arielle Zibrak (University of Wyoming) in an incisive discussion of Guilty Pleasures.