News Juno Editor/Paula Guran on 26 Dec 2007 07:37 pm
Happy Holidays
Do hope you and yours are enjoying this holiday season. I am, really, taking some time away from the desk, but have also been catching up a little with the news and thought I’d share:
CBC article on how “[p]ublishing houses across North America are creating new lines of romances aimed at people of Asian and African descent.
A Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer who says ‘Mills and Boon’s Bombshell line, a 2005 release which introduced female martial arts experts and “kick-arse” lady cops to the genre, has modernised romance.’ The fellow and some other academics are also doing some research into modern romance.
Nora Roberts–who supposedly sells 21 books every minute — is starting a bed-and-breakfast in Boonsboro, MD.
Mills and Boon now has an office in Mumbai, India and will be printing books there — five new titles every month with plans to have more Indian settings and characters in the romances published from now on.
Julie Bindel, in the Guardian, expresses her “horror [that] the genre is not directed towards either the women who write or, indeed, read them. I do not believe in blaming women for our own oppression. Women are the only oppressed group required not only to submit to our oppressors, but to love and sexually desire them at the same time. This is what heterosexual romantic fiction promotes — the sexual submission of women to men. M&B novels are full of patriarchal propaganda.”
(We think she should read OUR books.)
on 26 Dec 2007 at 7:55 pm 1.Carole McDonnell said …
The only oppressed group forced to love and sexually desire their oppressors? Oh please! She hasn’t heard of black self-loathing, has she? From a black girl who grew up watching gorgeous white cowboys, I’ll have to challenge her on that. Not picking on feminism, mind you but I’ve always hated any kind of generality that uses the words “the only oppressed group.” Something in me just churns when i hear that kind of talk.
Yay, to the CBC -C
on 27 Dec 2007 at 2:48 am 2.KS Augustin said …
Yep, as a brownie myself, Carole (aka slope, gook, etc.), I can totally relate. Colonial and post-colonial societies, anyone?
on 27 Dec 2007 at 3:22 pm 3.Juno Editor/Paula Guran said …
I’m feminist. I’m also very aware of how some who are vocal about their beliefs and causes often forget the bigger picture. Julie BIndel seems to be of rather limited vision in many ways.
On one hand, this is all a ridiculous Western classist, racist, elitist topic. What does fiction of any kind really have to do with real oppression like, for instance, genital mutilation or “honor killings”?
On the other, such discussions are valid in our societies and lives.
on 28 Dec 2007 at 11:18 am 4.Stacia Kane/December Quinn said …
Didn’t the Bombshell line close, like two years ago?
on 28 Dec 2007 at 2:42 pm 5.Juno Editor/Paula Guran said …
Bombshell closed in the US, yes. I don’t know if this is a separate line in Australia or not. I checked the Harlequin Australia Web site and found no mention of it. No offense to academics, but they are sometimes out of touch with current publishing.
on 29 Dec 2007 at 3:26 pm 6.Carole McDonnell said …
I suspect fiction has caused some great changes in the political world.
When it comes to fiction and politics, the question is who has the power to tell their own story, who has the power to frame the conversation and finally who “in power” has heard these stories and because of the stories created in stories had the power to change some little part of their world.
There’s an African proverb: As long as lions can’t speak, we will always hear the stories of the hunters. Ms Bindel’s comment, for me as a person of color anyway, is asking the hunted female lioness to identify with the the female huntress because of the female issue. Heck, to me…the female huntress still has the power and still is the one who has defined the discussions. She can tell her stories.
As for blaming women for their own oppressions I, for one, have heard way too many arguments about the gilded cages of suffering women of the power structure. I honestly have to hear a feminist of Ms Bindel’s caliber admit that certain women (helped by the racial power structure) have benefitted from the oppression of other women. It’s always: “we couldn’t help it, we were oppressed also.” Bunk. Ms Bindel ought to read some works by black womanists such as Alice Walker to free her mind a bit more. There’s propaganda on the feminist sides also, not just on the patriarchal one.
Not that I’m defending patriarchy but a really good horror book could be made about the evils women perpetrate on other women. Evil plantation mistress boiling her husband’s black slave-mistresses in oil, anyone?
-C