Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroines Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation

Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI) - The City University of New York (CUNY)

In Creating Identity, Prof. Jayashree Kambl examines the romance genre, with its sensile flexibility in retaining what audiences find desirable and discarding what is not, by asking an important question: Who is the romance heroine, and what does she want? To find the answer, Kambl explores how heroines in ten novels reject societal labels and instead remake themselves on their own terms with their own agency. Using a truly intersectional approach, Kambl combines gender and sexuality, Marxism, critical race theory, and literary criticism to survey various aspects of heroines identities, such as sexuality, gender, work, citizenship, and race.