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Agency in the Romance Genre
So, just some random thoughts swirling around in my head that have been induced by NaNo this year.
You all know that I love romance as a genre. I find relationships fascinating and most of my writing revolves around how two people fall in love and actually get a relationship to work (or don't). That being said, I have big issues with the romance genre at large, primarily with what I read as power dynamics between men and women in the traditional tropes of 'romantic' fiction. I don't like it when recognizable characters are taken, plugged into a relationship, and then changed in order to fit romantic stereotypes. Being in love or in a relationship shouldn't fundamentally alter people's personalities. In fact, if they do, I would wonder as to the healthiness of what is going on in that relationship. But, boy is that a can of worms I have no intention of opening here. My point really, is this: I don't like it when women characters are dumbed down, domesticated, emo-fied, or generally schmoopified just to fit some notion of what our culture has deemed 'romantic'. I don't like the idea that a woman is 'completed' or 'fixed' somehow by entering a relationship with a man (do they make each other better people by being in a relationship together? Great, awesome, that is how it should be ideally. But a woman being 'fixed' by love? No.), or that she will automatically become the passive participant in that relationship even if it is already established that she is rather forceful and dominant in her characterization. (If passivity is part of her characterization, then sure, run with it.)
So when I set out to write an original novel for NaNo last year, I thought I might experiment with gender roles and power structures and dominance. I wondered if I could write a romantic story where the woman was in a superior position both socially and romantically and in terms of power, and if I could write a man in an inferior position that I actually found attractive and believable in a romantic setting, or if it would all just fall apart when I tugged the wrong string. I wondered if my brain could handle something like that, or if I would just blindly fall back into more accepted tropes.
What I found was that in trying to consciously keep the man from taking over a dominant romantic position (perhaps overcompensating and being overly sensitive to his part in the plot/story), what I actually did was just switch the roles entirely. I didn't reinvent, just swapped. Because in the end, he just wasn't working for me, no matter how hard I tried, and it took me a while to realize that this had nothing to do with the fact that he wasn't an alpha male, that he didn''t sweep in and save the girl, that he didn't initiate the romantic relationship, but rather that in my ignorance, in my flawed experiment, I had simply written him like a woman. I gave him no agency.
I don't want the men in my story to disappear, to have no purpose other than to serve as a foil for the female characters, because that is exactly what bugs me so much about the majority of characterizations of women in the traditional romance genre as it stands. When we keep talking about "strong women characters" (which I think we all agree by now is poorly phrased--"strength" really having nothing to do with what we are looking for), what we really mean is that we want women with agency. We want all of our characters--male, female, people of color, children, secondary characters, and villains--to have their own interests and concerns and actions that have nothing to do with anyone but themselves. Because isn't that really the bare bones, basic equation for what makes a good character?
So it is only when I stepped back and gave my lower-on-the-power-balance-scale male love interest his own agency and actions and purpose (not power or position or superiority) that he finally became a character. And I think it's interesting that if the roles had been reversed, I doubt the average casual reader would have even thought there was anything wrong. We are used to reading women with no agency (sadly. though probably less commonly around here, as a lot of you are very thoughtful readers. I love fandom.), but put a man in that position, and our discomfort is heightened even if we have no idea why. Enough so that I might have mistaken it for discomfort with the atypical power imbalance, but I don't really think that's the case in the end.
It's been a crazy interesting little experiment that I am really glad I tried, no matter how aggravating it can be.
(No, I am not avoiding actually writing my NaNo, why do you ask? ;)
You all know that I love romance as a genre. I find relationships fascinating and most of my writing revolves around how two people fall in love and actually get a relationship to work (or don't). That being said, I have big issues with the romance genre at large, primarily with what I read as power dynamics between men and women in the traditional tropes of 'romantic' fiction. I don't like it when recognizable characters are taken, plugged into a relationship, and then changed in order to fit romantic stereotypes. Being in love or in a relationship shouldn't fundamentally alter people's personalities. In fact, if they do, I would wonder as to the healthiness of what is going on in that relationship. But, boy is that a can of worms I have no intention of opening here. My point really, is this: I don't like it when women characters are dumbed down, domesticated, emo-fied, or generally schmoopified just to fit some notion of what our culture has deemed 'romantic'. I don't like the idea that a woman is 'completed' or 'fixed' somehow by entering a relationship with a man (do they make each other better people by being in a relationship together? Great, awesome, that is how it should be ideally. But a woman being 'fixed' by love? No.), or that she will automatically become the passive participant in that relationship even if it is already established that she is rather forceful and dominant in her characterization. (If passivity is part of her characterization, then sure, run with it.)
So when I set out to write an original novel for NaNo last year, I thought I might experiment with gender roles and power structures and dominance. I wondered if I could write a romantic story where the woman was in a superior position both socially and romantically and in terms of power, and if I could write a man in an inferior position that I actually found attractive and believable in a romantic setting, or if it would all just fall apart when I tugged the wrong string. I wondered if my brain could handle something like that, or if I would just blindly fall back into more accepted tropes.
What I found was that in trying to consciously keep the man from taking over a dominant romantic position (perhaps overcompensating and being overly sensitive to his part in the plot/story), what I actually did was just switch the roles entirely. I didn't reinvent, just swapped. Because in the end, he just wasn't working for me, no matter how hard I tried, and it took me a while to realize that this had nothing to do with the fact that he wasn't an alpha male, that he didn''t sweep in and save the girl, that he didn't initiate the romantic relationship, but rather that in my ignorance, in my flawed experiment, I had simply written him like a woman. I gave him no agency.
I don't want the men in my story to disappear, to have no purpose other than to serve as a foil for the female characters, because that is exactly what bugs me so much about the majority of characterizations of women in the traditional romance genre as it stands. When we keep talking about "strong women characters" (which I think we all agree by now is poorly phrased--"strength" really having nothing to do with what we are looking for), what we really mean is that we want women with agency. We want all of our characters--male, female, people of color, children, secondary characters, and villains--to have their own interests and concerns and actions that have nothing to do with anyone but themselves. Because isn't that really the bare bones, basic equation for what makes a good character?
So it is only when I stepped back and gave my lower-on-the-power-balance-scale male love interest his own agency and actions and purpose (not power or position or superiority) that he finally became a character. And I think it's interesting that if the roles had been reversed, I doubt the average casual reader would have even thought there was anything wrong. We are used to reading women with no agency (sadly. though probably less commonly around here, as a lot of you are very thoughtful readers. I love fandom.), but put a man in that position, and our discomfort is heightened even if we have no idea why. Enough so that I might have mistaken it for discomfort with the atypical power imbalance, but I don't really think that's the case in the end.
It's been a crazy interesting little experiment that I am really glad I tried, no matter how aggravating it can be.
(No, I am not avoiding actually writing my NaNo, why do you ask? ;)