Academic Writing

co-authored with Amy Burge

What were women reading in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s? This book presents a major study of the “bonkbuster,” an incredibly popular genre of women’s fiction in the late 20th century.

The bonkbuster was an explosively popular form of women’s popular fiction in the long 1980s. Authors like Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Shirley Conran and Judith Krantz exemplified this genre, selling massive numbers of books over the course of their careers. However, where concurrent forms in media like soap opera and the romance novel have received critical attention, the bonkbuster has been mostly ignored by scholarship. The Bonkbuster: Women’s Popular Reading in the Long 1980s engages with these texts, their contexts, and their readers in order to explore the nature, impact, and history of the bonkbuster, offering the first in-depth critical definition of the genre.

Drawing on focus group and book club research conducted with British and Australian readers of bonkbusters in the 1970s–1990s, the volume explores the industrial and cultural history of the bonkbuster, investigating its lasting impact on readers. The books formed a significant part of sex and relationship education for many of them, providing their first notable textual representations of things ranging from sexism to the female orgasm.

The Bonkbuster concludes with exploring where the bonkbuster has gone in the 21st century. As a literary genre, it might have disappeared from prominence; however, its influence remains deeply felt.

Co-authored with Athena Bellas

Audio erotica is sexually explicit audio-only content, designed to arouse the listener and bring them fulfilment. While it has existed for a long time, it has achieved significant popularity in recent years, driven by apps like Quinn, Dipsea, Emjoy, and Ferly. Notably, these apps – and many like them – were founded by women and are predominantly targeted to female audiences, making audio erotica a fascinating form of “porn for women”.

Audio Erotica focuses on these four apps as the contemporary “face” of audio erotica. Through textual and paratextual analysis, it offers an overview of the types and genres of erotic content available on the apps. It situates audio erotica in histories and lineages of both pornography and erotica (and feminist thought about them) and audio media. Moreover, it situates audio erotica in the context of several key discourses, such as wellness, authenticity, and intimacy, as it analyses the ways in which the apps imagine their female listener and what she wants from sexually explicit media – which is, importantly, different from what men are imagined as wanting from pornography.

This is the first book-length study of audio erotica, making it a foundational resource for anyone doing research in the area. It offers a multifaceted understanding of the form and makes several key contributions to studies of sexually explicit media directed towards women and discourses around female sexual desire.

This academic book is a study of female virginity loss and its representations in popular Anglophone literatures. It explores dominant cultural narratives around what makes a “good” female virginity loss experience by examining two key forms of popular literature: autobiographical virginity loss stories and popular romance fiction. In particular, this book focuses on how female sexual desire and romantic love have become entangled in the contemporary cultural imagination, leading to the emergence of a dominant paradigm which dictates that for women, sexual desire and love are and should be intrinsically linked together: something which has greatly affected cultural scripts for virginity loss. This book examines the ways in which this paradigm has been negotiated, upheld, subverted, and resisted in depictions of virginity loss in popular literatures, unpacking the romanticisation of the idea of “the right one” and “the right time”.

The term ‘new adult’ was coined in 2009 by St Martin’s Press, when they sought submissions for a contest for ‘fiction similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult – a sort of ‘older YA’ or ‘new adult’.’ However, the literary category that later emerged bore less resemblance to young adult fiction and instead became a sub-genre of another major popular genre: romance. This Element uses new adult fiction as a case study to explore how genres develop in the twenty-first-century literary marketplace. It traces new adult’s evolution through three key stages in order to demonstrate the fluidity that characterises contemporary genres. It argues for greater consideration of paratextual factors in studies of genre. Using a genre worlds approach, it contends that in order to productively examine genre, we must consider industrial and social factors as well as texts.

co-authored with Claire Parnell and Andrea Anne Trinidad

The romance publishing landscape in the Philippines is vast and complex, characterised by entangled industrial players, diverse kinds of texts, and siloed audiences. This Element maps the large, multilayered, and highly productive sector of the Filipino publishing industry. It explores the distinct genre histories of romance fiction in this territory and the social, political and technological contexts that have shaped its development. It also examines the close connections between romance publishing and other media sectors alongside unique reception practices. It takes as a central case study the Filipino romance self-publishing collective #RomanceClass, analysing how they navigate this complex local landscape as well as the broader international marketplace. The majority of scholarship on romance fiction exclusively focuses on the Anglo-American industry. By focusing here on the Philippines, the authors hope to disrupt this phenomenon, and to contribute to a more decentred, rhizomatic approach to understanding this genre world.