2005-06-28 - 11:31 a.m.
What I'm listening to: some song by K-OS.
The discussion at the grad pub last week regarding romance novels has had me thinking a great deal since. Romance novels were presented to me as pornography for women. I remember asking if there's an added layer of race to this anaylsis. The response was, yes. Most of the protagonists are white, and there is a separate sphere of romance literature for African Americans.
So yesterday I'm at Zellers picking up a prescription for my aging parents. Not having been in a department store setting for some time, I decided to look around a bit at this one stop shopping venue. Around the corner from the prescription counter was the reading centre, with magazines, books, and somewhat surprisingly, romance novels.
So why would there be pornography at Zellers? What was even more interesting was that the romance novels were not found on the shelf in the main aisle, where one circulates en route to the different departments. They were in an aisle, somewhat hidden off to the side, but however in plain view. They were in the aisle on the end of the reading centre, on a kiosk across from the tall wall that separated the reading centre/prescriptions from beauty products.
Of course, looking at these books, giggling incesantly at the various titles such as "The Sheik's Bride", "Cowboy at Midnight", "Thrill Me", etc., I found it interesting how visual images and censorship work in popular culture. Pornography for women, in the from of narrative, is classified under literature, and I guess can work in more family oriented public spaces than pornography for men: visual images.
These visual images are restricted to the top shelf at convienience stores, hidden back rooms at movies stores, and banished to specialized cinema houses. What does gendered patterns of desire, censorship, and more importantly eroticism have to do with discursive spaces? Why are we so scared of sight, of seeing the uncovered human body sexualized and fantasized, but the eroticised narrative can circulate in family environments such as Zellers?
I'm not advocating that every nude image in the world should be circulating in public, or rather to have special 18 or over romance novels porn stores, or rather some form of gender conflation when it comes to desire-I don't expect men and women to desire entirely in the same way, because that line of thinking would negate different experiences of desire. But what I am curious about is images, and what is deemed restrictive to those of a certain age, and images that are commonly consumed by those of the male gender.
Actually a lot more questions are beginning to open up with these initial queries. For example-thinking about romance novels and their space in family oriented spaces of consumption, and also their allowance in areas for domestic consumption such as the grocery store, etc. Subject for a later post.
Next step: read a romance novel. It may begin to answer some of these initial questions....
