Pushing Boundaries in Romance Fiction: How Erotic Romance Became Mainstream

How, and why, do genre boundaries change? In this talk, I focus on one particular case: how erotic romance became a recognized subgenre of mainstream romance. In the early 2000s erotic romance upended heteronormative conventions with explicit and sometimes unconventional sex. How did this category, which faced some initial resistance from the romance community, become mainstream? This talk draws on interviews with writers and industry professionals, conference ethnography, and textual data like Romantic Times Book Reviews and Romance Writers Report to examine the social process of boundary change. I find that debates over erotic romance’s inclusion in mainstream romance involved the negotiation of three boundaries: acceptable/unacceptable sexuality, professional/amateur writing, and traditional/new publishing formats. The subgenre became fully institutionalized when the industry was forced to confront all three debates at the same time. This incorporation was accomplished without the market definition of romance changing, demonstrating the symbolic nature of genre boundaries. Classificatory possibilities are constrained by implicit social norms, so genre classification should be understood not as one boundary but the nexus of multiple boundaries. I theorize that genre boundaries are most likely to change when related boundaries are simultaneously negotiated.