How Damsels Love: The Transgressive Pleasure of Romance

Abstract

In this article, I look at contemporary romances as a source of transgressive pleasure that may inspire its audience to reject patriarchy. I focus solely on romances between a man and a woman with emphasis on the psychological dimension of the female character upon her trajectory from an object of desire to the man’s ideal partner. I argue that the pleasure of romance is, indeed, a means towards the dismissal of patriarchy. Drawing on feminist theory, I contend that romance constitutes a nucleus of a feminine ideal that women may use as a comparative reference point for their real-life relationships, revealing any problematic and inadequate behavior of real-life partners. Even though romance pertains to the prescripts of patriarchy, I argue that it can be seen as an intertext: a product of the interlanguage used to translate the male discourse to the female bodily experience. In producing and consuming the romance, women can contrast this experience of the feminine ideal with the lack of pleasure patriarchy entails for them. In this respect, the romance possesses a transgressive power that may facilitate women’s realization of their dissatisfaction and the refusal of their role as emotional labor.