Pushing the boundaries: Erotic romance and the symbolic boundary nexus

IF 2 2区社会学 0 LITERATURE

Poetics Pub Date : 2022-10-01 DOI:10.1016/j.poetic.2022.101729

Anna Michelson

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

How do contested emerging subgenres become legitimated and institutionalized? This case illustrates the meso-level negotiation of community sense (Wohl, 2015) as stakeholders of a genre (romance fiction) debate whether genre boundaries include a new subgenre (erotic romance). Erotic romance upended conventions by introducing explicit and sometimes unconventional sex into the traditionally heteronormative romance genre. However, opposition to subgenre inclusion involved more than sexual content. Drawing on interviews (n = 40) and text data from Romantic Times (n = 360) and Romance Writers Report (n = 180), I find that mainstream incorporation of erotic romance involved community negotiation of multiple symbolic boundary debates: (1) What is acceptable sexuality? (2) What is a real book? (3) Who is a professional author? Erotic romance was fully institutionalized after best-selling Fifty Shades of Grey forced the community to confront all three boundary debates at once. Each debate represents a different symbolic boundary around the mainstream romance genre, but the case can only be fully understood by examining how they intersect. I conceptualize that intersection as the symbolic boundary nexus and argue that analyzing genre classifications as a set of intersecting boundaries is a productive approach for understanding how cultural communities negotiate contested classification processes.

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推动边界:情色浪漫和象征性边界关系

有争议的新兴子类型是如何合法化和制度化的?这个案例说明了群体意识的中观层面协商(Wohl, 2015)，因为一个类型(浪漫小说)的利益相关者争论类型边界是否包括一个新的子类型(情色浪漫)。情色浪漫颠覆了传统，在传统的异性恋浪漫类型中引入了露骨的、有时是非常规的性行为。然而，对亚类型内容的反对不仅仅涉及性内容。根据《浪漫时代》(n = 360)和《浪漫作家报告》(n = 180)的访谈(n = 40)和文本数据，我发现色情浪漫的主流融合涉及到多种象征性边界辩论的社区协商:(1)什么是可接受的性行为?什么是真正的书?(3)谁是专业作者?在畅销的《五十度灰》迫使整个社区同时面对这三个界限的争论之后，情色浪漫被完全制度化了。每一场辩论都代表了主流浪漫题材的不同象征边界，但只有通过研究它们是如何相交的，才能完全理解这个案例。我将这种交叉点概念化为符号边界联系，并认为将流派分类分析为一组交叉边界是理解文化社区如何协商有争议的分类过程的有效方法。

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来源期刊

Poetics Multiple-

CiteScore

4.00

自引率

16.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Poetics is an interdisciplinary journal of theoretical and empirical research on culture, the media and the arts. Particularly welcome are papers that make an original contribution to the major disciplines - sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, and economics - within which promising lines of research on culture, media and the arts have been developed.