Romance Novels as Resistance

We’re clearly in a hyper-conservative backlash against what has been billed progressive politics. In the US, we’ve seen attacks against trans people and queer people more broadly, against mixed-race couples, against women’s rights—and it’s getting worse. We’re seeing people pushing to get rid of not only abortion but access to birth control. We’re seeing the curtailing of internet access to not only pornography but to information about safe sex and queerness.

It’s clear that the state has decided it has a firm place in the bedrooms of the nation and beyond. Adults are having their rights circumscribed. Free expression is only okay if you’re male, white, and straight. The rest of us had better shut the fuck up and get back under the capitalist-patriarchal state’s thumb, so we can be ground down to dust.

At a time like this, something like a romance novel can seem … fluffy. Silly. Extraneous.

But books—and romance novels in particular—are actually an important site of resistance against the narratives the state is pushing.

Books Are Dangerous

Historically, books have always been considered a threat to power. The Catholic Church, for example, has seen scientific knowledge as threatening, with the result that works by scientists like Tycho Brahe and Galileo Galili were banned. I’m going to go straight to Godwin’s Law here and mention that the Nazis famously burned books. We can see the current rise in book bans as symptomatic of a political machine that wants to suppress the dissemination of knowledge.

Under fire right now is anything and everything related to sex—queerness, abortion, birth control, sex work. Divorce and marriage laws are being challenged, which threaten to roll back rights for marginalized groups. A systematic program of dismantling modern culture and rolling out an oppressive regime under the guise of “tradition” is underway.

Books are a site of knowledge, which means they can communicate information to readers. That is a threat to a regime that relies on an uneducated and misinformed population. Thus we see people challenging books more. Book bans are targeting books that spread knowledge about, for example, queer identities, female reproductive biology, and safe sex.

Romance Is Entangled with Oppressed Groups

But we’re not only seeing bans affecting theoretical books or scientific books. Fiction is also under fire. The biggest and best example of this is romance novels.

Certainly, we see queer romance is under attack. Anything that has any connection to queerness—no matter how tangential—seems to be fair game for this regime. We haven’t progressed to book burning yet, but there are clearly concerted efforts to erase queerness from the fabric of society. Book bans pull queer books from library shelves, suggesting they’re “inappropriate for children.” Lawsuits challenge retailers’ right to stock and sell books with queer content. And bills like KOSA have the potential to block information about queerness, safe sex,and more. To protect children, anything about sex is labeled pornography—even information about sexual health or birth control.

Queer romance—even when it’s clean—must also then be considered pornography. And, if it’s porn, it’s dangerous for children, and thus it must be banned. This is true whether the story contains sex or not. Under this political philosophy, simply being queer is equivalent to being pornographic in nature.

But this philosophy doesn’t stop at queerness in romance. Rather, it takes aim at romance novels at large. We can see books like ACOTAR, which are romance with sex in them, being challenged. And romance more generally will be challenged—whether it contains sex or not.

Why Are Romance Novels Dangerous?

The danger of romance novels—whether they’re queer or not—is how they often center and empower women or other marginalized individuals. Interracial romance novels are also under fire as the political regime considers axing the court cases that allow for mixed-race marriages.

Thus we can see it’s a broad spectrum of romance that is considered dangerous.

Why? Because it gives us ideas—ideas about not just sex but about things like safe sex and abortion. About marriage and divorce and how you should be treated in a relationship. It might give us ideas about how men should act toward their partners. Maybe they look at female sexual pleasure, which is a huge no-no under the current political climate. And they might give us ideas about how much control a woman should have.

In short, romance novels might empower the very people it wants to keep subjugated.

We can see how dangerous romance novels are in how hard the narrative works to demonize them. They’re for old ladies and bored housewives; they’re nothing but fluffy wish fulfillment. They’re not real novels; they’re not literature. Romance novels are just trashy books, even if we’re smart bitches.

This kind of talk is dismissive. And, yes, a lot of romance novels aren’t paragons of literary talent. Then again, Shakespeare was written for the masses, not for literary snobs. It doesn’t need to be high art or even good to be considered a threat.

Romance as Resistance

Thus romance is considered a serious threat to the regime. Women and other oppressed groups shouldn’t have access to narratives where the heroine can choose an abortion or worry about her birth control. Discussions of safe sex shouldn’t be on the page. Even “fade to black” is labeled pornography, because women shouldn’t be sexual. Don’t even hint at queerness, or watch your books end up in the “erotica” dungeon on the Big River site.

Even clean romance might be considered dangerous if it empowers the heroine or pushes for consent in a relationship. It might be dangerous if it talks about divorce or shows a mixed race relationship. And it must certainly be dangerous if it shows women that they could or even should expect more from their partners.

Romance novels are thus a threat to the current political regime. That also makes them a site of resistance. They have mass popularity, which means they reach readers in a way scientific treatises and theoretical musings (like this blog) never will. They are theory and scientific information enacted within a narrative.

Every act of a romance novel spells out its politics. A romance that ignores queerness or won’t discuss abortion or birth control probably has certain politics informing it, even if its author denies that it’s “political.” That right there tells you all you need to know.

By contrast, a novel that has its characters discuss safe sex, consent, birth control, and abortion is taking a different political stance. Some narratives might even show the heroine demanding these conversations and denying partners who won’t engage. And that’s where we find both the threat and the resistance.

How Romance Allows Us to Resist

As readers, we can resist state machinations by continuing to read romance and by continuing to demand discussions of safe sex, discussions of abortion, showcases of consent, and other features. And writers can resist the state by continuing to include these topics, among others, to show their characters engaging in them in good faith.

It doesn’t need to be overtly political to be political—as this shows. Reading and writing romance was always a political act, and it’s become even more radical in the current political climate.

It may not feel radical to go to your local bookstore or hop on Amazon and order a romance novel. You might even feel ashamed or embarrassed, and you probably won’t think of older women reading their Harlequin novels as revolutionaries, but we are. In this political climate, reading is a dangerous act, and reading romance in particular is an act of rebellion.

Writing romance is becoming more dangerous, especially for certain writers in certain genres, but most of us are standing in the same place, watching the walls close in around us—just as sex workers warned would happen almost a decade ago, when the laws started pushing back against them. If you ignored them then, you’re part of the problem that allowed us to get to this place.

Romance Novels Offer Us Hope

What matters now is that we push back against these narratives in any way we can. Romance novels might seem silly, fluffy, and inconsequential, but there is important work to be done in reading and writing them. If nothing else, their “fluffy” escapism can offer us something in a world that seems to have gone off the rails: hope.

In romance novels, there is always the hope that things can and will be better. There is always the possibility to showcase healthy relationships, to push back against toxicity and narratives that want to roll back rights and tell us oppression was better because it’s “traditional.” Tradition isn’t good simply because it’s tradition. That’s why “society” seems like it’s “falling apart”: the foundations of it were resting upon oppression that harmed a lot of people, and that house deserves to collapse in on itself. From its ashes, we can construct something better—a house that we can all live in.

And being able to do that starts with being able to hope and dream, to envision what that would look like. Romance novels allow us to do exactly that—hope and dream of what the ideal relationship could look like, how we could be treated, and how society could support that.

With every word, every book, every happily ever after, we’re building resistance to the narratives that would try to turn back the clock to “tradition.”