https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6702-7214
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ABSTRACT
This article seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about whether popular romance novels are pornography or not. I argue that we might reframe the question and instead of focusing on kinds, we might, rather, focus on degrees. For instance, how might scholars of the romance draw upon beefcakes, pin-ups, and softcore in these debates? To these ends, I consider various scenes from several novels in which the hero/male protagonist is naked and argue for a softer and thus a softcore reading. These scenes are divided into two categories: in the first, the hero is seen naked or imagined naked; and in the second, the hero is in the shower. Additionally, I draw upon both male/female and male/male romance novels to show why nakedness matters in the novel.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 ‘Loc.’ refers to the location on Kindle editions of the books discussed in this article.
2 In October 2021, Harlequin Romance included its first gay male couple in its mainline of romance novels. The novel, The Lights of Knockbridge Lane by Roan Parrish (Citation2021), appeared as a Harlequin Special Edition as part of the Garnet Run series. This was followed by a Halloween-themed The Rivals of Casper Road by Parrish (Citation2022). In November 2022, His Christmas Guardian by Cindy Dees (Citation2022), a Harlequin Romantic Suspense, appeared.
3 For a longer discussion of Frat Boy and Toppy and the male/male popular romance, see Allan (Citation2016), wherein Allan focuses on anality.
4 There is much to be written about dreams in popular romance novels. In her dissertation from 1991, Deborah K. Chappel notes that ‘not long ago romances seldom, if ever, contained dream sequences or evidenced belief in the supernatural’ (Citation1991, 7). There is likely a study to be written here on the function of dreams in popular romance fiction, both as a formal and narratological aspect of a text, but also a psychoanalytic component of the text.