• Seems to suggest one type of sci-fi (academic, world-building, exploratory, single character focus) before the sudden violence which suggests a different trajectory (violent, war-based, large-scale) before cycling back around to the academic, coming-of-age, nonviolent plot originally suggested
  • Unlike many others this story allows the negotiations to succeed thus further violence is averted in the narrative
  • Has clear allusions to and metaphors for current social issues - resists classification of genre (and sci-fi specifically) as purely escapist or disconnected from reality
  • Could also be read as a coming-of-age or YA story - questions about the intersection, (re)defining, and classification of genre
  • The Himba are a real people found in Namibia whose cultural traditions include the use of otjize, wearing anklets, and other elements written into Binti’s home life
    • Including these real people and traditions roots the story in Earth but also makes a statement on what elements of current culture will last into the distant future 

• Afrofuturism: “a movement in literature, music, art, etc., featuring futuristic or science fiction themes which incorporate elements of black history and culture.” (oxford dictionary definition) 
• Examples: binti, black panther. 
• Binti is very much focused on cultural pride and empowerment. 
• Since science fiction is relatively new compared to other literary genres, it is still in development, and is one of the genres branching out to birth more genres including afrofuturism. 

• This science fiction novel draws inspiration from the author’s own struggles as a black woman and through Binti she explores the complexities of race, religion and culture and their intersectionality.
• The poignant divide between Binti, and others makes the reader think about how we can affect positive change in our own society also.
• We had varying opinions on the impact of the ending of the novel: 
  • Some argued that the ending failed to represent an authentic ending by focusing on such an optimistic message, which doesn’t reflect the reality of our world. 
  • Whereas others argued that Binti still remained an outcast in the university alongside the meduse Okwu despite the progress made. They continued to be regarded ‘as a fascinating exotic human’ and ‘Okwu as a dangerous threat’.
• The question of whether Okorafor purposefully created an optimistic ending which is meant to inspire change and advocate for a more democratic, just society is a question which still remains. - Whether or not science fiction’s purpose is to inspire change in the real world by referring to futuristic possibilities is to be decided...
• Whilst the book evidently referred to racial and social problems within our own society, it cannot be said to be an accurate representation of our own world and literal allegory. The diverse (alien/species) board from Oomza university deciding what would happen to the stinger, fails to be an accurate representation of the majority of university boards and other institutions which are predominantly white males. 
• However, the social problems which this book tackles cannot be denied. The stinger placed on display, despite the important cultural significance and honorary role which it has for the Meduse, is incredibly poignant within the book. Worryingly, the display of precious and sacred items from other cultures is still very much a problem today. This problem is seen in real life, with the Pitts River Museum (which is part of the University of Oxford) who until 2020 displayed shrunken heads as well as other human remains to the public. This perpetuated racist stereotypes and has now been removed due to the ethical implications. 
• https://artreview.com/oxford-pitt-rivers-museum-removes-shrunken-heads-from-display/ 
• https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/shrunken-heads 

• We’re reading through a scholarly lens, reading in different ways to that of reading for enjoyment and possibly looking out for certain structures or archetypes.
• It is generally looked down on as a genre, we likely had some preconceived opinions towards the genre as a whole before reading the novels. 
  
  

• In the lecture, the happy ending that is a key component of the romance novel was described as a form of power. 
  • A way of fighting back against the constraints against women in the historical periods of the books and giving power back to them. 
• Lots of the social issues brought to light in the novels were consistent across the different texts we read, despite them being set hundreds of years apart. 
  • Again, giving power back to women and reclaiming the past.
• Amplifies the sense of escapism, another key feature of the romance novel.
  • The use of an entirely different time and place, with reviews suggesting readers enjoy the historical elements as much as the romance.
• The success of historical romance television series e.g. Bridgerton.

• One of the books included a male perspective
  • We felt this was quite unusual for this genre – typically, we expect a female perspective, perhaps to make it more identifiable for the largely female audience.
  • We questioned whether a male point of view would made it more ‘respectable’ as a genre?
• Being able to read something and not feel a sense of guilt about it not being 'feminist enough'. 
  • We felt this responsibility is often placed on women, and these books felt like a ‘safe space’ to indulge yourself. 
• These books also had lots of excellent reviews and were very well rated, alluding to their massive audience – we found this quite surprising, and it led into a discussion about how people read texts differently, and respond in different ways. 

• Published (and written) in 1980
• specifically refers to Harlequin romance (owners of and North American distributors of Mills & Boon) as a ‘subset of soft porn’ p.26
• ‘The timing of the Harlequins’ prodigious success has coincided exactly with the appearance and spread of the women’s movement, and much of its increasingly anti-feminist content reflects this symbiotic relationship’ p.26
• ‘As in male weepies and hard porn, female identities are obligingly so much tinder in the crucible in which male ego is to be reforged.’
• ‘Harlequins focus on one aspect of female experience, courtship: not courtship in the Jane Austen style with its intricate processes of choice, but coupling in the wary primitive modes of animal mating.’
• ‘The Harlequins last their stipulated 180-odd pages because the main protagonists are locked in a duel of sexual stupidity. Both are emotional illiterates. He is usually too angry, she too scared, to say anything honest about how they feel.’
• ‘The Harlequin girl must love the Harlequin man no matter how viciously he treats her; he can despise and abuse her (and other women) on the grounds that one woman once ill-treated him.’
• ‘In this totally anti-feminist world, the Harlequin heroine is fighting for the status of an exception; she neither wins nor wants the vindication of her sex: clearly a lost cause.’
• ‘She [our heroine] vibrates helplessly to the hero’s punitive mood swings: his hostile silences punctuated by sardonic put-downs and devouring, punishing kisses leave blood on her lips and awe for male authority in her heart’
• ‘The Harlequins are porn softened to fit the needs of female emotionality.’ p.27
• ‘Female, not male, consciousness is the most satisfactory repository and register for the forced acknowledgement of male power. The Harlequin heroines initially resist domination, but so do the hard-core heroines. Breaking down female antagonism is half the fun.’
• ‘Like hard-core porn and the male weepies, Harlequins are dramas of dependency.’ p.28
• ‘in soft porn, hard porn, and male weepies alike, the male ego is preferred, protected, stabilized. In the world of shifting sexual identities in current films, female strength must be siphoned to the male or shown run amok’
• Harlequins ‘concerned exclusively with the defloration and marriage of young girls’ are read by ‘“normal,” active women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s’ which Douglas proposes ‘provokes [...] serious concern for their women readers. How can they tolerate or require so extraordinary a disjuncture between their lives and their fantasies?’
• ‘the women who couldn’t thrill to male nudity in Playgirl are enjoying the titillation of seeing themselves, not necessarily as they are, but as some men would like to see them: illogical, innocent, magnetized by male sexuality and brutality. It is a frightening measure of the still patriarchal quality of our culture that many women of all ages co-sponsor male fantasies about themselves and enjoy peep-shows into masculine myths about their sexuality as the surest means of self-induced excitation.’

"Because while she hadn’t needed his help, the taste of his food and the slant of his frown served as a counterbalance as she sauntered onto the floor, helping to pull her shoulders back and her head high..."  p.56 

• the idea of balance/supporting each other vs 'saving the heroine'. Are the characters treated as equals to each other, or is someone trying to get the higher ground? Is the dynamic stagnant, or does it shift? What happens?
• the effect of other power dynamics on the romance, such as gender (a woman's experience vs a man's), business (Bertha as Amir's boss), social status (Bertha as a cabaret owner and her standing in society; Amir as an undocumented immigrant); you might notice that these power dynamics cause a lot of the problems that hold back Bertha and Amir's union! 
• how does this romance dynamic compare to the ones we see in Mills&Boon? 

...reminding Bertha that if she didn’t constantly lay down the path for how people, men especially, treated her, they’d see her as the path itself and walk right over her. [...] She pursed her lips and made a show of stepping closer to him, walking a circle around him and inspecting him like a cow at the market—the same way she’d been inspected by men with promises of work when she’d shown up in New York, ready to put her past behind her and start fresh. [...] This was her joint; she was the boss now and any man who worked for her would respect that. p.17 

"...he tried to push away the image that had lodged in his mind during their kiss and refused to budge. Bertha, sweat-damp and happy, holding a brown baby who had his eyes and her nose. Men weren’t supposed to imagine such things, na?"  p. 66

• with a female adopting 'masculine' characteristics and a male adopting 'feminine' characteristics, is one subversion more appealing/societally palatable than the other? Are there any double standards regarding these subversions, either in the text or during your reading experience? 
• are any of these subverted stereotypical characteristics in Bertha and Amir sacrificed/compromised during the course of their romance? Are they allowed to express characteristics usually stereotyped with their gender? What is the effect? A sense of shame, vulnerability, liberation? 
• How do these subverted characteristics in characters compare to the Mills&Boon romances - and do consider Mills&Boon books set in different time periods (eg. historical romances vs modern romances)! 

• Traditional masculinity is glorified in Westworld, and it’s an essential component of Western World itself. 
• “Westworld allows its male visitors to live out a hyper-masculine fantasy. The theme park appears to address just two supposedly masculine desires – sex and aggression – as though no others exist.” https://www.thehaughtyculturist.com/films/westworld-1973-explained/
• “Western World is a life of lawless violence, a society of guns and action.” (from the video advertising westworld in the movie)
• Guns are a huge part of the appeal and experience of Western World and gun violence is massively glorified; when one of the robots mocks Peter, John immediately encourages Peter to “kill him”. 
• While there are instances of violence in Brokeback Mountain— Ennis punching Jack, Ennis grabbing Alma’s wrist, Jack’s father— it isn’t idealised like in Westworld. The most significant examples of violence, Jack’s (likely) murder and the murder of Earl, are treated with an appropriate sense of horror.
• Homosexuality and masculinity are not mutually exclusive in Brokeback Mountain; they coexist. Jack and Ennis are also allowed to be sensitive (“the runt inside Jack’s coat, for he loved a little dog”) whereas in Westworld Peter’s sensitivity is treated as a weakness he has to overcome.
• (Worth noting that Brokeback Mountain was written by a woman!)

• Westworld itself is portrayed (in the movie) as an idealised utopia— “Here it is possible to relive the excitement and stresses of pioneer life to the fullest.”
• This links to how Westerns in general tend to be nostalgic, idealising the past. 
• In Brokeback Mountain, nature is very important but other aspects of the story related to Westerns aren’t idealised at all; for example, Jack and Ennis’s ranch work is just a part of their lifestyle and both of them want to escape (“he was crazy to be somewhere, anywhere, else than Lightning Flat” & “I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it.”)
• However, nostalgia as a general theme is present throughout Brokeback Mountain!

• “Physical sensations are the bedrock of the experience Westerns afford.” (from West of Everything: the Inner Life of Westerns)
• There’s strong imagery, and sensory imagery specifically, throughout Brokeback Mountain: “Dawn came glassy-orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis’s breakfast fire. The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows, and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite.”

• Whilst reading the short stories, we were surprised to discover that they were not horror stories in the traditional sense (with monsters or masked psychopaths with knives hunting down the main characters), but instead took a more psychological approach to the concept of horror. 
• Stories that featured real-life horrors were often scarier than the ones that featured dangerous supernatural entities → possibly because it's easier to understand the shock that comes from seeing something that could actually happen, rather than something that we know isn't real.
• The way you interpret a horror story can vary wildly depending on your mental state → if you are dealing with severe mental issues, a story that features psychological abuse inflicted upon the main character is going to have a greater effect on you than if you did not deal with these issues.
• Interesting that when we think of vampires, for many people, one of the first things that come to mind is Twilight → links to how many fictional vampires are often sexualised/presented as being romantic, dating all the way back to Dracula. 

• Many of the "horror" texts that we have studied at school and uni so far have prominently featured ghosts (e.g. The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting at Hill House, The Woman in Black to name a few).
• Interesting how books that feature ghosts are considered “high-brow literature” while books that feature supernatural creatures (e.g. vampires and werewolves) are considered to be either exploitative trash or "made for teenage girls", and are therefore "not literature". 
  • Could potentially be linked to the success of the Twilight saga, which in the eyes of certain readers/audiences, turned stories about vampires and werewolves into "something made for girls", therefore putting them off reading other stories about vampires. 
  • Could also be linked to their association with the Victorian era, a time that produced many literary classics. 

• Features certain tropes found in other vampire stories; someone who is perceived as strange or is ostracised by the community is discovered to be a vampire and said vampire bonds with a human. 
• A subversion of the traditional vampire story; while many stories that feature vampires (e.g. Dracula, Twilight, Interview with the Vampire), in which the vampiric characters are overtly sexualised, Eli does not fit into this category, as she is presented as a 200-year-old vampire stuck in the body of a 12-year-old → Eli is instead sexualised by her paedophilic guardian.

• Despite featuring a vampire, a well-known staple of the horror genre, Eli is not the most horrific thing about this novel → the horror comes from the psychological toll both she and Oskar endure due to their abusive home lives and feelings of loneliness.
• In both the 2008 Swedish adaptation and the American remake Let Me In (2010), Eli's (or Abby in the American reamke) sexual abuse is significantly downplayed and is implied rather than explicitly shown. While this serves to make the story less horrific; it also somewhat defeats the point of the story → the true horror of the novel comes from the psychological abuse that Oskar and Eli face, so downplaying that reduces the film to simply another vampire story in which the horror comes from the goriness of Eli's kills rather than the psychological torturing of the main characters.
  • This also presents an interesting debate on what is acceptable to show in a film vs. in a book → books can often get away with extremely graphic imagery, as the viewer can interpret it however they choose, whilst in a film, this imagery is decided for them; the viewer cannot 'soften the blow' for themselves.
  • Could also link to the fact that the author is Swedish → Scandinavian stories are well known for being uncompromisingly bleak and depressing, and having extremely graphic violence, both physical and sexual (e.g. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Snowman).

• Fantasy and romance are commonly paired together - one of the most popular and prevalent sub-genres. 
  • Outlander, The Princess Bride, Twilight, Vampire Diaries are some popular examples but can also be seen throughout mass published romance + fantasy texts
• Often fantasy tropes result in toxic or problematic relationships - ‘ageless’ or ancient creatures like vampires, fairies, even gods with young human love interests, magic resulting in dubious consent + power dynamics 
  •  e.g. Twilight - Bella and Edward - incredibly problematic age gap, Edward is incredibly controlling and possessive, etc.
• Often fantasy is targeted towards younger audiences so romanticised toxic relationships are more concerning
• Tropes surrounding fantastical characters e.g. Edward fits the mysterious, brooding, handsome type. These tropes seem to justify some of the more problematic undertones of fantasy because Edward is different and ‘not like other guys’. 
• It is possible that this association with ‘feminine’ elements is part of why fantasy (esp. YA fantasy) is looked down on - notably those which are respected tend to be separate from that (LOTR + The Hobbit lack of a romantic focus)

• Women characters are often sidelined, and male pov is very common in fantasy books. Women protagonists often have to rely on male characters to rescue them = problematic. 
• Although there are exceptions to this rule, e.g. in the Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon - This features a powerful woman heroine. 
• Due to frequent setting of fantasy in medieval-style settings, many tropes ‘justified’ as ‘historical accuracy’ including prevalence of and depiction of sexual assault + violence, adult/child relationships (particularly adult men + underage girls), lack of gender and racial diversity (esp. in positions of power), heteronormativity etc.
• One of the biggest issues with fantasy (romance fantasy in particular), as a whole, is the prevalence of particular tropes which can make fantasy novels very predictable. E.g. enemies to lovers, love triangle, etc. - This is one of the reasons that fantasy is often overlooked as a genre. 

• Fantasy is very popular in both children’s and YA fiction
• Children’s fantasy can be enjoyed by adult readers but is typically ‘elevated’ above children’s literature to validate this adult enjoyment e.g. Harry Potter, His Dark Materials (Both released with ‘adult’ covers), or sold as nostalgic modern classics e.g. The Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia
• YA fantasy is rarely even allowed these forms of elevation and tends to be dismissed, and actively mocked (e.g. Twilight, Vampire Diaries etc.)

• Fantasy occupies an interesting space in terms of high/low culture - compared to contemporary ‘non-genre’ fiction is still less respected as genre fiction but within genre, arguably more examples of fantasy classics or highbrow texts than horror, romance, sci-fi etc. - at least ‘pure fantasy’ e.g. LOTR, Alice in Wonderland, Chronicles of Narnia
  • Close links to children’s literature also complicates the idea of high/low culture because children’s texts can be elevated in nostalgia but YA is consistently disrespected and devalued
  • Fantasy’s very close links to romance could also link some of its unpopularity to this ‘feminine’ trope
• Although fantasy is more popular now, especially with the dawn of more tv and movie adaptations of fantasy books. There’s still a stigma around fantasy reading as it’s viewed as childish or as something which has no literary worth. 
• Fantasy, in particular YA fantasy and romance fantasy, is often looked down upon. 
• Most mockery + judgement of fantasy tends to lean to jokes about supernatural/human relationships, ‘the chosen one’ trope, and other similar elements common in YA fantasy and fantasy romance.
• The other jokes which often arise are about those hyper-detailed texts with maps, invented languages, and extreme levels of world-building and evokes ideas of nerdiness and over-investedness, linking to judgement of fans.

• http://fantasy-faction.com/2013/fantasy-gender-stereotypes

• His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman
• Discovery of Witches series by Deborah Harkness
• The Young Elites series by Marie Lu
• Seraphina series by Rachel Hartman