Genre-savvy Protagonists in Queer YA Rom-coms

LGBTQIA+ characters (and their quests for love) are increasingly appearing in YA fiction, and more specifically in YA romantic comedies. The rom-com, particularly in its most mainstream and familiar Hollywood form, has long been rooted in heteronormativity, in so far as it rarely deviates from or offers any substantive variation of the boy-meets-girl model of romantic love. This is something that adolescent readers will surely be aware of. Likewise, many marginalised young adult protagonists are characterised by an awareness of these same conventions, thus placed by their authors in a metatextual conversation with the very genre they inhabit.

Read the full mini-article in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies!

Young Adult, New Adult (???) and the Weird Business of Demographics

What in the world is a marketing demographic? They’re something that often seems so simple, so based in real-life logic about how humans grow and experience things, that sometimes you can forget how constructed they are. And how much our idea of what is suitable for a demographic of young people—or, even what a young person is—can vary from person to person, publisher’s office to publisher’s office. Where are those lines drawn, and who is holding the pen? Is it authors? Is it agents? Is it marketing departments? Is it a confusing disaster with no concrete answer??

Genre-Savvy Protagonists in Queer YA Rom-coms

The rules of the romantic comedy are simple and easy to learn, especially when you’re in love with the concept of love… but what if you’re an LGBTQIA+ teenager and this formula has historically cut you out? Well, you have to tweak those rules to make your own.

Presented as a “podcast” for Deakin University’s online Concepts in Popular Genres symposium, 6 – 8 December 2021. A transcript is available here!

Alice Oseman and the Revolutionary Power of the Platonic Love Story

He laughed again and hid his face under the blanket. “Why are you so nice to me?”
“Because I’m an angel.”
“You are.” He stretched out his arm and patted me on the head. “And I’m platonically in love with you.”

Alice Oseman, Radio Silence (2016) p.108

In 2017—somewhere on the stumbling journey to identifying myself proudly and loudly as asexual—I read Alice Oseman’s young adult (YA) novel Radio Silence. When I reached the passage quoted above, I stopped in my tracks. It was the first time I had seen those words put together to such an effect. Friends could say they loved each other, of course, in a fleeting and fluffy sort of way. But to imply that you could be in love with someone in a purely platonic way? That you could refer to something as a love story even if it was about characters who were “just” friends, who never even thought about dating one another? It was a little bit revolutionary.

But that, of course, is the revolutionary heart of aromanticism and asexuality—the quiet, but resonant, revolution inherent in the articulation of different kinds of love, in the deconstruction of the dominant social narratives of romance and sex. As I kept my eye on Oseman’s forthcoming novels, it transpired that this revolution sits at the heart of her writing, making them deeply resonant for aro/ace readers even when not featuring the identities directly. And when they do feature aro-ace identity directly, the quiet revolution is front and centre, and the results are incredible and incredibly important.

Read the full article in AZE Journal!