romance discoursing (#2)

talking about how we talk about romance

Recently, a creator I follow posted a kind of disappointing substack about her fondness for romance novels. She spends a lot of the essay talking about romance novels like junk food. She compares them to Doritos, then writes “These books are laced with the literary equivalent of MSG. I know they’re not that substantial and might even have other things in them that are kinda bad for me, and I’m not even entirely enjoying them, but I just can’t stop consuming.”¹ Let’s set aside the fact that I didn’t think people still talked about MSG like that, given the discourse about anti-MSG messaging being unsubstantiated by science and linked to anti-Asian propaganda.² The substack is actually about how she no longer regards romance as a guilty pleasure, no longer thinks of herself as frivolous for reading romance, and found romance to be rehabilitative to her capacity to read after years of graduate school. It’s supposed to be complimentary, I think?

Obviously, far be it from me to tell anyone how to write about or feel about romance, but it is always sort of startling to encounter people who so clearly love romance but can’t seem to talk about it without treating it like an unfortunate and inconvenient lapse in judgment. Part of my irritation stems from the fact that shame (which is what I’m choosing to call this particular way of talking about romance) forecloses on the possibility of reading with care. She– and others– ask “why does this silly, frivolous thing hold my attention when I don’t approve of xyz about it?” but I don’t think they’ll arrive at meaningful answers to that question until the impulse to denigrate one’s own interests is challenged.

When I talk about reading with care I’m referencing the work of Karen Barad, a theoretical physicist & feminist theorist whose work I’m wading³ through right now. Barad developed a method of work they refer to as diffraction.⁴ In the simplest terms that I can offer, Barad contends that there is no standard account of quantum physics– rather, there are many competing interpretations of quantum physics, and so it serves Barad to read competing interpretations and observe patterns of difference in the construction of these interpretations. Such readings offer a more generative, rather than destructive, way of examining a body of work.

Barad is drawing on criticisms posed by Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist in his seminal 2004 essay "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" It’s a commentary on Latour’s own career spent critiquing the perceived unimpeachability of scientific knowledge, and his feelings of frustration regarding how his critique ends up in the same mushy stew as anti-science conspiratorial thinking which he finds abhorrent. The essay was deeply influential in the postcritique movement,⁵ which argued for other modes of reading beyond criticism because critique, as a method, seems to have outlived its usefulness. And so Barad presents diffraction as a more fruitful form of feminist analysis.

Barad is talking about quantum physics, but they’re also talking about basically everything else, as is the nature of theoretical physics. When lecturing, Barad makes a point of noting that their work is not merely analogical, but quite direct and literal.⁶ It’s from this brief detour that I come by my own position: that what passes for criticism in much of the book space is really inadequate because people find it difficult to read in generative, careful, even loving ways. Even when they supposedly love books.

Critique With Care

Recently my friend Jess made the observation that Booktube evolved out of beauty/makeup Youtube, whereas Film Youtube evolved out of education content, which sort of rewired my brain. It crystallized one of the primary issues with how we talk about books– romance, in my experience– online: books become commodities that we review in the way we review household appliances, but we’re still trying to pass off household appliance reviews for critical analysis. How many chili peppers? How many drying settings are there? What content is addressed in the book? How quickly does this cook rice? Was this “safe”? Is there an automatic “off,” if unused for 15 minutes? Is the representation “good,” or “problematic”? Is the plug compatible with European outlets? Is the cover discreet? Will this curling iron work on low porosity hair?

the threads post that spiritually preceded this substack, for reference

One of the many downsides of a commodity-centered approach to books is that the question rarely moves beyond “Should I buy this thing or not?” which I find tiresome and limiting.⁷ We’ve forged a culture wherein people are extremely skilled at selling a product, manufacturing artificial need, arriving at the point of sale. We are, however, sort of shit at expressing true love of a thing, articulating its beauty, revealing want well beyond the closing of the book. Even the more “social justice,” and “leftist,”⁸ approaches to criticism in bookish spaces seem mired in the desire to determine if your dollars are spent in the most ethical possible place.

I’m not trying to be naive about the fact that money is wrapped up into all of this by virtue of the world we live in. I am trying to say that counterproductively, much of this supposedly activist work inevitably ends up directing dollars and attention directly to the object of criticism– Silver Elite, ACOTAR, Fourth Wing, Colleen Hoover etc. etc.

I have my suspicions of why this is the case. In part, the rush of getting views for something is a hell of a drug, and this kind of content is a surefire way to get engagement. It’s hard for an audience not to be drawn into such content by good ole rage bait or even the quiet fear that one might have enjoyed a thing that is Bad. In part, I think it’s really fucking hard to talk about loving something. It’s vulnerable and exposing. It’s taxing to train the eye to examine one’s tastes. It’s excruciatingly difficult to actually articulate why you like something in a way that is interesting to others. It is costly for a critic to align their tastes with something: namely, it cedes authority. Loving a thing– really loving a thing is to allow that the thing has some power or influence over you. How annoyingly sentimental!

This is, I think, how we end up with people who talk about romance like the substack I referenced before. “I like this thing, but let me denigrate it a little first so you know that it isn’t that serious, and so you can’t hold my choices over my head as evidence of my poor taste.” Guess what! People are going to do that anyway! Such meager defenses aren’t thoughtful criticism, they’re cowardice.

I’ve been reading Becca Rothfeld’s All Things are Too Small, and her opening two essays⁹ explore a similar medley of ideas, though primarily through a critique of minimalism, which she suggests favors a nimble, detached approach to life and possessions over grounded attachment to objects. The movement passes off this lack of attachment to worldly goods as a kind of spirituality and virtue, prizing utility above all else. Art, however, defies the logic of minimalism. It cannot be evaluated in the way that a toaster oven is– functional or not functional, efficient or not efficient, essential or not essential. In Rothfeld’s words: “Art cannot but defy the declutterer’s utilitarian edict: it is superbly needless, for which reason it is anathema to the tactics of capitalists and declutterers alike.” Rothfeld advocates, instead, for excess and maximalism, attachments, mess. She argues that the realm of the superfluous is what makes us human, grants us taste, imbues us with a soul.

So, okay. The romance novel– any romance novel– is “needless,” and as a result, we’ve gotta move beyond questions of whether or not it is a good idea to acquire one. To quote Rothfeld again, “what is required in the aesthetic mode is not the sort of control we exercise in a decluttered room but a capitulation, a willingness to crash into something that is not in its proper place and that is therefore equipped to trip and torque¹⁰ us.” That romance novels are a part of my life is not a matter of necessity, it is a matter of the fact that I love them, and I have submitted myself to the project of loving them wholly and without reservation. I have given them power over me, ceded a kind of authority and detachment so that I may look at them closely, fondly, and with discernment.

Someone stands up in the bleachers. They hold up their megaphone. “Let me be a hater,” they declare. I stand, hands cupped around my mouth, and holler back: “Yes, absolutely!” Rothfeld writes that love is “nothing more or less than favoritism par excellence,” which charmed me. To love something is also to allow that you do not love other things. Expressing your taste is a declaration in the affirmative that implies the negative and vice versa, so being a hater and a lover are somewhat co-constitutive states. The trouble with this is that being an interesting hater, too, requires skill¹¹, because criticism (elastically defined), or diffraction, or whatever method of analysis you choose is evidence of having looked closely at something.

My favorite haters¹² are rigorous, careful, even hopeful. They’re also interested in questions beyond the commercial and moral. They’re interested in good stories and complicated truths and ambivalences and all the nitty gritty and inconvenient details. Something to aspire to, I think.

Loving Lately

Anyways, here’s some stuff I’ve been devouring as of late:

• Buffy The Vampire Slayer: I finished season 2 and it absolutely rocked my shit. Watching Buffy for the first time has been kind of odd because it’s a show I feel like I’ve watched already: 1) because, obviously, so much paranormal stuff that came after Buffy was trying to do what Buffy does, 2) because some deep, unexcavated part of me zoned in on Buffy like a sleeper cell activated by the appearance of mid-90s attire. Particular favorite episodes are: S1E7 (“Angel”), S1E8 (“I, Robot… You, Jane”), S1E12 (“Prophecy Girl”), S2E13 (“Surprise”), S2E14 (“Innocence”), S2E17 (“Passion”), S2E19 (“I Only Have Eyes For You”). I am, unsurprisingly, most interested in the episodes related to Buffy and Angel because I think those episodes are so chock-full of the boundary transgressions and complications I am deeply fond of in monster media: alive and dead, young and old, good and evil, sacred and profane. I find Sarah Michelle Gellar particularly talented for her ability to play a girl who is expansive and unruly and extraordinary but also A Sixteen Year Old Girl.

• August Lane by Regina Black: If you’ve ever watched those marble sculpting videos online you’ll know how I feel about Regina Black. Where I, a normie, see a block of marble, she sees a sculpture. She’s a chisel and a hammer away from the most photorealistic profile you’ve ever seen cast in stone. For me, August Lane is a book that is as insightful up-close and on a line level as it is far apart and on a structural one, in part because she’s zeroing in on something small with such a level of precision that it loops all the way back around and manages to be broadly identifiable. In this case, the specific topic is country music, which she uses as a prism to refract her core ideas on love, rupture and repair, art and the making of it, grief, race, class, beauty, America. Luke is a man who mows peoples’ lawns and fixes things around the house without being asked and August is a woman who carries around a notebook full of poetry and has a mean tenderness to her that I wish I could bottle for safekeeping. And then Regina hits you in the chest with something about how, in a world that is robbed of justice and inherent meaning, all you can do– must do– is make your art and make it well, with people who really care about that art too. It’s gorgeous work.

• Daddy Issues by Kate Goldbeck: When I think about Kate’s writing I think about some of the advice I got when I first started training as a therapist– we spend so much of our everyday lives trying to make people comfortable. Many of us spend hours of our day attending to the verbal and nonverbal cues of others, listening, processing, and adjusting ourselves accordingly so that people aren’t made uncomfortable. And that’s adaptive! We want people to feel comfortable with us, to like us. In therapy, however, a clinician is responsible for walking a client to that border between comfort and discomfort and placing them on that knife’s edge specifically because we hope to elicit a novel or unusual response in them that is revealing of what lies underneath pleasantries and smalltalk and niceties. Kate is so skilled at unearthing that in a reader or, at least, me. I think it’s why her work can sometimes be divisive amongst a subset of romance readers, but I also think it’s why I refute ideas of romance as pure escapism. If romance is pure escapism, we rob ourselves of the possibility of reading work that is this clever and funny about youth and success and art and labor and all the funky constellations of relations that people end up in.

• Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood: I cried reading this, which was truly perplexing given the marketing around this book as a lighter and more upbeat sibling to Not in Love, until I chat with Cat about it and she pointed out that the things I was saying about Hark and Maya made them sound like Simon and Eileen from Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney. Then I knew I was cooked, because unfortunately those two, and their spiritual predecessors in Mr. Salary, are very important to me.

I’d love to know what you’re loving (and hating) as of late.

1. I'm being annoying and not linking the substack because I do like her and think she means well and also I think she might be subscribed to this substack (for now) lol.

2. this is generally well-known at this point, but here are a few recent sources on the subject if curious
LeMesurier, J. L. (2017). Uptaking Race: Genre, MSG, and Chinese Dinner. POROI, 12(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1253

Wahlstedt, A., Bradley, E., Castillo, J., & Burt, K. G. (2022). MSG Is A-OK: Exploring the Xenophobic History of and Best Practices for Consuming Monosodium Glutamate. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 122(1), 25–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2021.01.020

3. Wading being the key word here. This stuff is not easy to comprehend, even in the simplest possible terms. As with a lot of theory, I find myself understanding things about 2% at a time, with new comprehension acquired through repetition and revisitation.

4. Some of the stuff I’m reading:

Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come on JSTOR. (n.d.). Retrieved May 30, 2025, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/48616359

Tuin, R. D. and I. van der. (2012). New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. New Metaphysics. https://doi.org/10.3998/ohp.11515701.0001.001

5. I don’t have overly strong allegiances to postcritique views, but I do think there are times when it serves me. In particular, when romance is stalled on the usual debates of if it’s ethical to enjoy age-gap romance or monsterfucking or whatever, I think postcritical perspectives are more fruitful.

6. If you haven’t read Daisy Hildyard’s short nonfiction novella The Second Body, she does a similar kind of thing in that to talk about climate change (among other things) that I quite like.

7. First of all. Get a library card. Why are you spending all that money to begin with.

8. Quotes are doing heavy lifting here.

9. I haven't finished the book, but the first two essays were so good I practically levitated off the subway reading them. I'll be honest I'm doing kind of a shit job at summarizing her thinking, which tussles more with egalitarianism and economic justice than I have the range for here.

10. the use of torque here!!!!! I am simply delighted.

11. A big part of what inspired this substack was a collection of things I’d been reading on criticism, one of which is below:

Can Criticism Survive Outside the University?

12. many of whom are recommended substacks <3