Happily Ever After for Whom? Blackness and Disability in Romance Narratives

Abstract

I N THE UNITED STATES, PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES ARE OFTEN REPREsented as nonsexual, having either no desire or no capacity for sexual interactions. This stereotype is supported by both the lack of mainstream representation and by the historical denial and punishment of the sexualities of people with disabilities through eugenics, forced sterilization, institutionalization, exclusion from sex education, and more (Wilkerson 193–94; Stevens 6–11). In contrast, the sexuality of black people has been abundantly represented as a problem that needs to be controlled. Black feminists argue that sexuality and gender are always already racialized, and sexual-racial stereotypes, like the Jezebel, dominate contemporary cultural representations of black women. While the sexualities of black people have been more often represented than the sexualities of disabled people, these representations have typically been oppressive nonetheless. Positive, perhaps even liberatory, scripts of black and disabled people’s sexualities are largely nonexistent, especially in mainstream culture. As a result, writers of popular fiction have sought to depict black and disabled people’s experiences in the popular romance genre. Harlequin, the most recognizable of romance novel publishers, has a fairly robust line of African-American romance novels that are published separately under a different imprint called Kimani romance—a strategy common in romance fiction publishing. While there is no exclusive line of disability romance novels from any publisher, in 2010, the Romantic Times Book Reviews labeled disabled heroes and heroines a “hot trend” in romance fiction and Emily M. Baldys noted “the romance genre’s growing obsession with disability” (Fielding