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Labors of love: Black women, cultural production, and the romance genre

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Labors of love: Black women, cultural production, and the romance genre

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Content LABORS OF LOVE:
BLACK WOMEN, CULTURAL PRODUCTION, AND THE ROMANCE GENRE
by
Jacqueline Elizabeth Johnson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES
August 2024
Copyright 2024 Jacqueline Elizabeth Johnson

ii
Acknowledgments
It takes a village. Throughout graduate school, I have been fortunate to be surrounded with
brilliant and caring individuals; without their support this entire endeavor would have failed
before it truly began.
I have to start by acknowledging all of the love and support I received as an MA student at UT
Austin. I would like to thank Mary and Suzanne for serving on my thesis committee. In addition
to shepherding me through my first long-term research project, you were both excellent
professors and mentors. I would be remiss if I did not thank Jenn McClearen. Not only did you
teach some of the best classes I ever took as a graduate student, I still rely on your pedagogical
expertise years after being your TA. Since your first semester, you have continued to aid and
prop up the Black women in the department. For that, I will always be thankful. I met some of
my closest friends while in RTF. Thank you to Katrina for being my Day 1 grad school buddy
and my (almost) birthday twin. Thank you to Kathy for hosting Bachelorette viewing parties and
all of your wisdom. Thank you to Brett and Eric for all of the Austin shenanigans and some of
my best memories. Thank you to Travis for laughing at my jokes even when (especially when?)
they went too far. The best thing about RTF is all of the amazing Black scholars it brought into
my life. I appreciate everyone who welcomed me with open arms and all of the folks I have
become friends with even after leaving. I would be completely lost without the Unfriendly Black
Hotties. Lauren and Daelena, you are both two of the most important and essential relationships I
have built as an adult. Daelena, you completely changed the game when you came to UT, and I
will always admire your brilliance and clarity. When it’s easy to get wrapped up in the BS that
comes with academia, you and your work always remind me why we do Black, feminist
scholarship and its necessity in articulating a better future. Lauren!!!! I would not be here
without you. I honestly believe that your friendship has made me a better person and helped
shape the trajectory of my life. There is no one on Earth I would have rather had by my side in
this phase of life. You are as brilliant as you are kind, and I look forward to palomas on a patio at
happy hour, astrology discussions, and 2000s niche pop culture references for years to come.
There are far too many people to thank at USC; anyone I miss is entirely my fault. First and
foremost, I have to thank Tara. I truly cannot even conceive of a better mentor. Many people can
guide a successful dissertation, but few can claim to support their graduate students’ full selves
the way that you have. You made my work sharper, but more importantly you respected me as a
person. I will always be thankful for your support in my last year as I dealt with the many
cruelties of USC as an institution. Francesca, thank you for responding to a cold email from a
graduate student thousands of miles away and agreeing to be on my committee. Your expertise
and insights have helped make this dissertation a success. Nitin thank you for modeling the type
of intellectual curiosity I aspire to. Your support of my many disparate ideas has meant the world
to me. Thank you to Aniko for challenging me to articulate my ideas to the best of my ability. If I
am even remotely successful teaching classes on TV, it will be because of you and Ellen. Before
I even accepted my offer from USC, I heard stories of Ellen’s greatness. Ellen, I will never be
half as funny as you are, but I hope to emulate the care and attention you have given to your
students. Lan, being your TA is one of the most positive experiences I had at USC. You always
look out for the students of color and I can’t tell you enough how much I appreciate your honesty
and generosity. Thank you as well to Priya, Ben, and Henry whose courses shaped my thinking

iii
in more ways than I likely realize. No department can run without its administrative staff, and I
appreciate all of the work that Maria, Katherine, and Luci have put into making CaMS function.
Thank you to Simran for the writing groups, bagels, and advice. I would like to thank Karen
Tongson and the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture for setting me up
with TableCakes and supporting me financially for a summer. I would also like to thank Cory
and everyone at The Writing Center. I am a better writer and teacher because of my work with
you all. In 506 my first semester, J.D. told us all that the institution can’t love us back. This
remains the most important thing anyone ever said to me in graduate school, and I appreciate his
work as DGS.
USC also brought me some of the most important relationships of my life. To my cohort mates,
Dan and Laboni, I can’t imagine doing a PhD without the two of you by my side. You are both
brilliant and generous. I look forward to a future full of dinner parties, game nights, and debating
the merits of the film Cats. Max! Ray! Asher! There truly are no words for how important the
three of you are to me. Max, you are one of the kindest and smartest people I know. I cherish
every conversation we’ve had whether it be about labor, Megan Thee Stallion, or 2 Fast 2
Furious. Ray, you’re an icon, you’re a legend, and you are the moment. Now come on now! In
all seriousness, your friendship means the world to me. Asher, if any bit of this dissertation is
good, it is because of you. To anyone still reading, Asher has read every draft of every chapter
and offered countless notes. It is my greatest hope that we still edit each other’s work forty years
from now. You are one of the best friends I could ask for, the Gayle to my Oprah! Thank you to
Patricia; there is no one I would rather meet at a coffee shop and complain with before we
actually start writing J. Thank you, Charlotte, for being such a good friend and the foremost
Dance Moms scholar. You, alongside many others I have listed here, remind me of the joy to be
found in studying the pleasures we refuse to feel guilty about. Kallan, thanks for Bachelor nights
and book clubs and for always reminding me of the riches to be found in feminist media history.
Julia, Tania, and Sebastian, you are all so smart and capable, and I hope you all know how much
you enrich this place. While I am immensely proud of all of the research and teaching I did while
in CaMS, the graduate student union is a defining part of my USC experience. I would like to
thank the UAW and the Region 6 family. Bargaining the first contract for USC graduate students
will always remain one my biggest accomplishments. I want to thank Kavitha, Denton, and
Kiana for all of their work. The bargaining team and many of the organizers will always be my
bonus family. Special shout out to Anna x 2, Anand, Stepp, Sayan, Piril and my ride or die
Maile.
Despite its many pleasures, I found writing a dissertation to be one of the most isolating
experiences of my life. I cannot thank Katy Peplin and the community she fosters at Thrive PhD
enough. I would also like to share my appreciation for The Ripped Bodice, the baristas at bru, the
LA public library, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ scores for getting me through the writing
process. I would also like to thank all of the scholars ahead of me who have supported my work,
especially Al Martin and Beretta Smith-Shomade.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. I credit spending my childhood going to live tapings of
Moesha and rehearsing sides with my mom on the way to auditions with sparking the curiosity
that has led me here. My parents have always supported me and done everything they can to
ensure I have a fulfilling life. My younger brother and sister have turned into adults in the blink

iv
of an eye. Despite being older, I learn from you both every day. My parents have always insisted
that raising us took a village. I hope that everyone who has been a part of ours knows that I
would not be here without them.

v
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….. ii
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………….vi
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter One: You Better Work: Romancing Neoliberalism…………………………………….22
Chapter Two: The Pleasure Principle: Eroticism in Black Cultural Production………………...58
Chapter Three: Timing is Everything: Romantic Comedy’s Shifting Temporalities…………..109
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...152
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………....158

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Abstract
“Labors of Love: Black Women, Cultural Production, and the Romance Genre” examines
Black women as both the producers and subjects of romance narratives across television, novels,
and podcasts in the U.S. and U.K. over the past decade. During the time period my dissertation
covers, both the representational politics of the romance genre and the media and cultural
industries have been in flux. My research probes how Black women have (and have not) made
space for themselves within both the media industries and the discourse of romantic love as new
media platforms and technologies have reshaped cultural production. Using frameworks from
Black cultural studies and critical political economy, my project makes two primary
interventions. I nuance the assertion that new media platforms and technologies—streaming,
self-publishing and e-books, and podcasting—increase access to cultural production for
marginalized groups. Secondly, I demonstrate how shifting analyses of the romance genre to
center Black women revises many long-standing theses about the genre’s relationship to
capitalism, intimacy, and narrativity.
Through textual analysis and critical media industry studies, each of my three chapters
brings together two case studies that elucidate the chapter’s arguments. My first chapter
examines two self-published series by Black romance novelists, Rebekah Weatherspoon and
Katrina Jackson, through how they articulate understandings of contemporary neoliberal
capitalism. Specifically, I illustrate how self-published authors—writing within a space that
celebrates neoliberal, self-entrepreneurship—work through Black women’s position in the
economic order through their protagonists. My second chapter uses the television series Chewing
Gum (E4, 2015-2017) and the podcast Thirst Aid Kit (BuzzFeed 2017-2019, Slate 2019-2020) to
analyze Black women’s historically fraught relationship to sexuality and eroticism. Through

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close reading I demonstrate how the romance genre’s thematic preoccupations alongside the
formal innovations of the series and podcast create an intimate public for Black women
watchers/listeners, where they have the space to revel in their sexuality rather than shield it from
others. Finally, my last chapter contends with the romantic comedy’s relationship to temporality.
Through Hulu’s adaptation of High Fidelity (2020) and the series Lovesick (Channel 4 2014,
Netflix 2016-2018), I engage with how Black protagonists affect the genre’s relationship to
temporality in three registers: how both series speak to the “post” of post-romantic and post-race,
how the series’ engage contemporary feelings of temporal instability through nonlinear narrative
structures, and, finally, how contemporary romantic comedy ruptures the genre’s reliance on the
happy ending. Across each of my dissertation’s chapters, I demonstrate how Black women’s
recent increased visibility in romance has produced a range of complex, sometimes
contradictory, representations that expand understandings of the genre and its possibilities.

1
Introduction
My dissertation examines Black women as the producers and subjects of romance
narratives in television, novels, and podcasts from the U.S. and the U.K. over the past decade. If,
as Jayashree Kamblé articulates, the romance genre is a “barometer of the ethos of its time,” then
I ask what can an analysis of the romance genre in the past decade tell us about this
conjuncture?1 And relatedly, what is the relationship between romance as a genre or textual form
and romantic love as a discourse? The genre has been so centrally associated with the production
of white womanhood while Black women have been pushed to its margins. Further, Black
women’s relationship to romantic love has been articulated through social and cultural scripts
produced by and through white supremacy and misogyny. However, Black women have also
used creative mediums to resist the misogynoir embedded in Western formulations of love that
position them outside of its bounds. So then, this project asks: as Black women have created
more space for themselves within media and cultural production, how has their presence reshaped the genre’s form or the ideologies it is predicated on?
Through my analysis of a range of texts within the romance genre, I demonstrate the
strategies Black women use to resist the enhanced precarity of the culture industries and their
own marginalization in public culture. While feminist scholars in the 1980s made a critical
intervention in arguing for the importance of studying feminized genres, their work largely
elided race.2 My dissertation combines their formulations with work in Black feminist theory to
advance an understanding of how race shapes romance as a discourse and a textual form. Across
each of my dissertation’s three chapters, I challenge arguments about the genre’s ideological
1 Jayashree Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology (Springer, 2014), 21. 2 Tania Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, 1st edition (New York &
London: Routledge, 1982); Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature,
2nd edition (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

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conservatism, especially those related to capitalism, intimacy, and narrativity. While I do not
swing the pendulum all the way in the opposite direction and identify the genre as a liberatory
space for Black women, I demonstrate how their increased visibility in romance has produced a
range of complex, sometimes contradictory representations.
Further, my dissertation analyzes how Black female subjectivities are articulated in a
period of rapid change for the culture industries. New media platforms and technologies—from
streaming video to digital self-publishing—have transformed the ways that texts in multiple
mediums across the genre are produced and consumed. This project looks at novels, television
series, and podcasts primarily produced and distributed by technologies and platforms that were
developed or launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I am interested in the years that follow
the wide adoption of these platforms and technologies (post 2010), especially the “second age”
of podcasting (2012-), Netflix and Hulu’s production of original content, and the Amazon
facilitated self-publishing boom. This dissertation will examine television series from British
public broadcaster Channel 4, Netflix, and Hulu in addition to two self-published romance series
and a podcast initially produced through BuzzFeed’s now defunct audio division. I turn to
romance, rather than other genres like horror or science fiction, because I think romantic love’s
perception as an individual emotion untethered from ideological forces makes it an especially
fruitful site for analysis.
Popular Romance Studies
Developments in publishing in the late 1960s and the early 1970s led to an explosion of
romance fiction in the latter half of the 1970s. During this boom, feminist scholars such as Ann
Barr Snitow and Germaine Greer warned of the genre’s dangers, particularly the ways in which it

3
pushed women into accepting patriarchal ideas.3 In the introduction to her book examining
women’s popular culture, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women,
Tania Modleski describes this situation writing, “Women’s criticism of popular feminine
narratives has generally adopted one of three attitudes: dismissiveness; hostility…; or, most
frequently, a flippant kind of mockery.”4 In the 1980s, however, a small number of feminist
scholars studying culture sought to understand the genre’s popularity amongst women readers.
The publication of Modleski’s book in 1982, which examined gothic novels and soap opera
alongside romance, marked a turning point in feminist engagement with the form. Through a
close reading of the formula of Harlequin titles, Modleski builds on Lacan, Althusser, and
Marcuse to examine why these works gain popularity alongside the second wave of feminist
activism. Modleski contends that “a great deal of our satisfaction in reading these novels
comes…from elements of the revenge fantasy, from our conviction that the woman is bringing
the man to his knees and that all the while he is being so hateful, he is internally groveling.”5
Modleski’s analysis does not uncritically celebrate the romance novel, but she resists the
sweeping condemnations other scholars have put forth. Instead Modleski argues “romance
should lead one less to condemn the novels than the conditions which have made them
necessary.”6 Two years after Modleski published her book, Janice Radway’s Reading the
Romance took up and extended feminist scholarship’s serious analysis of the popular literary
genre.
Radway studied the romance genre through its readers, specifically an account of the reading
3 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: MacGibbon & Kee, 1970); Ann Barr Snitow, “Mass Market
Romance: Pornography for Women Is Different,” Radical History Review 1979, no. 20 (May 1, 1979): 141–61,
https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1979-20-141. 4 Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, 14. 5 Modleski, 37.
6 Modleski, 37.

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practices of a small group of women in the community of “Smithton.” Radway’s work
intervened in studies of the genre by taking the readers seriously and untangling how their
reading practices fit into the broader tapestry of their lives. Further, while scholars that preceded
her were especially concerned with what romance fiction, specifically the patriarchal ideology
embedded in the text, does to women readers, Radway articulated what romance fiction can do
for women readers. Radway argues that through frequent romance reading “women are
permitting themselves the luxury of self-indulgence while simultaneously providing themselves
with the opportunity to experience the kind of care and attention they commonly give to others.”7
In other words, romance reading can be compensatory for women who give so much of
themselves to the home and family without receiving similar levels of consideration and care in
return. Though Modleski and Radway did still have some reservations about the texts and
readers they studied, they ultimately made a significant intervention into studies of feminized
popular culture that other scholars would later take up and expand.
Other scholars in literary history and theory have sought to understand what textual features
structure narratives in the genre and the relationships between the discourse of romantic love and
its textual manifestations. In the 1990s, Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey positioned romance as
“a discourse with a structuralist heart.”8 Put another way, they argue that while romance’s
articulation changes with regard to the conjuncture it emerges in, romance is “known to us
through a set of conventions” that are “liable to perpetual re-writing.”9 Pamela Regis’s A Natural
History of the Romance Novel, argues that the romance is a very old form with key features that
define it. Specifically, she identifies eight essential elements—Society Defined, The Meeting,
7 Radway, Reading the Romance, 100. 8 Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey, Romance Revisited (NYU Press, 1995). 9 Pearce and Stacey.

5
The Barrier, The Attraction, The Declaration, Point of Ritual Death, The Recognition, and The
Betrothal (actual or implied). Examining works in the genre from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
in 1740—regarded by scholars as the first romance novel—to the popular romance fiction of
Nora Roberts, Regis looks at how the elements are developed in works from the U.K. and North
America across the genre’s history. In addition to taking romance seriously as a textual form,
these scholars stretched critical analysis of the genre through accounting for how the form has
specific tenets even as it morphs with the sociocultural conditions individual novels emerge in.
More recently, cultural studies scholars have expanded romance studies’ purview to examine
how the genre communicates broader cultural ideas about identity and power, in relation to but
also beyond gender. In her analysis of the desert romance novel, Hsu-Ming Teo builds on
Edward Said’s formulation of Orientalism to examine how popular texts construct a dialectical
relationship between the Orient and the Occident.10 More specifically, Teo examines romance
novels from the early twentieth century through the early 2000s in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and
Australia and the ways in which different trends within the subgenre illuminate how literature
works through geopolitical realities. Teo’s analysis of how the subgenre constructs discourses of
racialized gender through contact between white, Western women and Arab and/or Muslim men
is generative for my own analysis of how the contemporary genre produces discourses about
Black womanhood. Additionally, Jayashree Kamblé’s analysis of the romance hero examines
what she calls the many “masks” the romance hero wears; through this frame, she engages how
romance fiction “dramatizes ‘heterogenous’ narratives about capitalism, warfare and espionage,
heteronormativity, and white identity.”11 My analysis especially builds on Kamble’s
formulations about the romance’s relationship to capitalism and white, Protestantism. In addition
10 Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (University of Texas Press, 2012). 11 Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction, 21.

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to the work of scholars like Teo and Kamblé, this dissertation project builds from scholars who
have traced the history of the Black romance.
The Black Romance
Black literature and culture scholars have also taken up questions of how the romance
articulates the relationship between race, gender, class, and nation. Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing
Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist argues for an approach to
Black women’s writing that rejects essentialism and emphasizes understanding cultural texts and
their authors through the particular historical and social circumstances in which they were
written.12 Her analysis of the romance fiction of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins illustrates the ways
in which Hopkins utilized the genre to advance Black political agendas and provide critical
commentary on the primary political concerns of the time, from lynching to U.S. imperialism,
through genre conventions. Since Carby published her groundbreaking book, other scholars have
taken up the Black romance in literature and on screen. Belinda Edmondson’s essay “The Black
Romance” productively stitches together multiple threads about African American and AfroCaribbean romance narratives in fiction and film and the ways in which these cultural texts are
imbued with broader concerns about the relationship between Black subjects, personhood, and
citizenship. Edmondson argues that romantic, erotic love has been consistently fraught
throughout the history of Black cultural production in the Americas.13 As evidence for her claim,
Edmondson reads Black romances from the U.S. and the Caribbean alongside more “serious”
works of realism that were explicitly invested in a nationalist project. Central to her argument is
12 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford
University Press, 1987).
13 Belinda Edmondson, “The Black Romance,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1/2 (2007): 192.

7
the claim that “the boundaries between the conventions of popular and serious black literature
have always been permeable.”14 The logics of racial uplift, which many critics and scholars of
African American literature have attributed to “serious” cultural works produced within the
African diaspora, are also embedded throughout history in popular works that take up romance
as their focus. The key tension, she declares, in Black romance narratives across time in the U.S.
and the Caribbean is the negotiation between agape and eros. In the texts Edmondson uses for
her analysis, Black authors negotiation of agape, a public, community-oriented form of love, and
eros, or private desires, do not always reconcile, but how the tension between the two is
ultimately worked out speaks to the historical, material realities of the context in which Black
writers produced their work. Edmondson argues, “that early black fiction focused on romance as
a way in which black people could be more than objects.”15 This use of romance in Black fiction
from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, overwhelmingly downplayed eros
in favor of agape. As Edmondson articulates, Black women’s sexuality and potential position as
erotic and sexual subjects was deemed dangerous, writing “black-on-black erotic love…is a
problem for early African-American nationalists both male and female, one that must always be
subsumed within collective responsibility and restraint.”16 The early Black writers Edmondson
examines sought to use romance to advance Black claims to citizenship and personhood, while
simultaneously being wary of the ways in which colonial slave regimes invented discourses that
positioned Black sexuality as a threat to the social order. I take up these tensions in my second
chapter which examines contemporary romance narratives through the lens of Black women’s
pleasure.
14 Edmondson, 193. 15 Edmondson, 196. 16 Edmondson, 198.

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In addition to 20th century romantic and realist literature, Edmondson analyzes Black
romantic comedy films of the 1990s and 2000s to probe how the framing of Black love has
changed over time. Edmondson contends that Black love stories of the periods’ emphasis on
Black women as erotic subjects responds to canonical texts’ erasure of Black people from the
erotic sphere.17 A key feature of the Black romance films is how they activate the class positions
of the protagonists, especially Black women, and their emphasis placed on Black professional
success. Edmonson explains:
But unlike these early examples of the black romance, the new romance highlights not
just the social status, but the very idea of black love itself—the idea that black people,
too, can experience transcendent emotion, sublime emotion, and not just sentimental,
mindless emotion. In the old black romance the message itself was the point—that is, we
too are equal citizens. In the new black romance, we too are lovers, we too are erotic—
and professionals.18
In addition to Edmondson, film scholar Mia Mask has written on the Black romance films of this
period. As Mask argues, the move away from ghettocentric hood films to buppy (Black yuppy)
romantic comedies that followed upwardly mobile professionals came as a result of an economic
boom for African-Americans in the 1990s, representing more than just socioesthetic
development. Mask articulates, that these films “revel in the comic dating narratives of a
generation too young to remember segregation and too financially secure to be disaffected by
deindustrialization.”19 Mask’s analysis is generative for my own work examining how precarity
is a through line in romance narratives produced since The Great Recession.
17 Edmondson 202-203. 18 Edmondson, 207. 19 Mia L. Mask, “Buppy Love in an Urban World,” Cinéaste 25, no. 2 (2000): 41.

9
In addition to Carby, Edmondson, and Mask, my work is in conversation with Aneeka
Ayanna Henderson who probes print, sonic, and visual culture from the 1980s to the present and
reads these cultural texts alongside landmark legislation. Henderson’s text explains how
“neoliberal logics and legislation” construct the relationship between African Americans and
marriage.20 Henderson demonstrates that the U.S. government has offered (or enforced) marriage
as a solution to the social and economic plight of Black Americans since the establishment of the
Freedman’s Bureau at the end of The Civil War. Over a century later, after the U.S. moved into a
post-Fordist economy, marriage has still been positioned as a solution to the material disparities
that anti-Blackness and misogyny create and maintain. While neoliberal doctrine enforces free
market logics on real-life coupling, Henderson illustrates how it has also affected the cultural
texts that mediate our conceptions of romance, love, and marriage. Media studies scholars have
considered how the Telecommunications Act created the conditions for rapid conglomeration
within the media industries; however, Henderson argues that scholars looking at the
Telecommunications Act have mostly emphasized audio-visual media and the Internet over
publishing.21 The absorption of independent presses by large conglomerates and the restructuring
of the industry into the Big 5 had a direct impact on Black fiction.22 Publishers, now even less
likely to take risks, in many ways constrained Black fiction to fit a set of problematic parameters.
This directly affected what Black romance could and did look like in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Throughout my three chapters, I contextualize how my case studies’ representation of romance is
influenced by industrial conditions such as deregulation and conglomeration as well as
20 Aneeka Ayanna Henderson, Veil and Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture (UNC
Press Books, 2020): 7.
21 Though this has changed with recent publications such as, Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration
Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2023),
https://doi.org/10.7312/siny19294.
22 Penguin Random House recently tried to acquire Simon & Schuster and turn this into the Big 4, but their attempt
was blocked by the Justice Department.

10
technological advancements.
New Media Technologies and Cultural Production
This dissertation engages romance across mediums during a time of rapid change for
overlapping culture industries. Since the start of the convergence era, practices in the production
and consumption of television, novels, and audio media have shifted significantly. Formulated
by Henry Jenkins, convergence is
the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple
media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost
anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence
is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes,
depending on who's speaking and what they think they are talking about. In the world of
media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every
consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Right now, convergence culture
is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and
bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media
conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of
consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the
format they want.23
In the above quote and throughout his book, Jenkins makes clear that convergence is not merely
a technological process. Instead he contends, that convergence represents “a shift in cultural
23 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006).

11
logic.”24 The media scholars I build from echo and extend this framing, examining how
technological changes produce different ways of thinking about media from its inception at a
pitch meeting to its consumption on a tablet. In his analysis of convergence era television, John
Caldwell for example, illustrates how the internet’s upheaval of television created new media,
cultural, and industrial logics. For example, in explaining the move from speaking about
productions as programs to content, Caldwell writes “the term ‘content’ frees programs from a
year-long series and network-hosted logic and suggests that programs are quantities to be drawn
and quartered, deliverable on cable, shippable internationally, and streamable on the Net.”25
Caldwell published this essay in 2004; it is evident that his observations have only become more
entrenched in the television landscape. Critically, Caldwell traces how convergence television
creates new forms of textuality and narrative and aesthetic practices. This argument informs my
own reading of the texts I analyze, especially in my third chapter where I examine how
streaming’s detachment from scheduled time has influenced romantic comedy’s engagement
with temporality.
Beyond the practices of large media conglomerates, recent technological changes brought
about by the affordances of the internet have influenced production on a smaller scale.
Examining the rise of independent television production, distribution, and exhibition in the
2010s, Aymar Jean Christian’s Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web
Television demonstrates how web television has offered promise to marginalized creatives who
have historically been locked out of cultural production. Unlike traditional legacy television
production, Open TV is “digital, on-demand, and peer-to-peer, meaning any participant–a
24 Jenkins. 25 John Thornton Caldwell, “Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of
Conglomeration,” in Television after TV Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson,
Console-Ing Passions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 49.

12
producer, a fan, a sponsor–can directly connect to another at any time, eliminating the need for
legacy network executives.”26 In his work Christian is predominately excited by indie web
television’s ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers and open up space for new types of stories
and production practices. Christian is especially interested in examining series have expanded
the representational field for many groups marginalized in television including Black, Muslim,
and trans women. In the years since Christian published Open TV, but especially following the
historic WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the broader optimism about upstarts like YouTube has
tempered; however, Christian’s book is still generative for my analysis of works that are
produced after the early days of e-books, podcasts, and streaming television.
In addition to television, my analysis builds from analyses of new media technologies
effects on audio and literature. Scholars of podcasting trace the first use of the term back to an
article in the Guardian from 2004.27 Since then, podcasts have become much more widespread
and John L. Sullivan has traced the technological and industrial shifts that have moved
podcasting from a disaggregated form with many independent players to a more formalized
culture industry. He argues that because early podcasting development precedes the cloud and
social media platforms, the medium has a “decentralized technical architecture, whereby audio
content is stored all over the web and linked together via RSS… RSS is free and allows listeners
to locate, subscribe, and listen to new content without the necessity of visiting a specific storage
platform or website.”28 These features made the medium initially resistant to platformization;
however, Sullivan contends that podcasting is at a turning point as large tech companies like
26 Aymar Jean Christian, Open TV: Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television (NYU Press,
2018): 4.
27 Ben Hammersley, “Audible Revolution,” The Guardian, February 12, 2004, sec. Media,
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/feb/12/broadcasting.digitalmedia.
28 John L. Sullivan, “The Platforms of Podcasting: Past and Present,” Social Media + Society 5, no. 4 (October 1,
2019): 2056305119880002, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880002.

13
Spotify are working to create a central location for podcast “storage, discovery, and
consumption,” the three components of platformization according to Sullivan.29 Tracing the
medium’s history, Sullivan notes that in 2005 with the release of iTunes 4.9, Apple became the
first company to offer a central repository for podcasts. Podcasts were integrated into the iTunes
store, but unlike music, Apple made all podcasts available for free on iTunes. Sullivan notes how
this very early decision created the conditions for podcasts to become a medium that
overwhelmingly financially relies on advertising, though this is not to discount private funds
from creators, donations, and increasingly, subscription models. A key feature of Sullivan’s
argument is the move toward “platform enclosure” or “the creation of ‘walled gardens of content
only available to subscribers.” 30 For people interested in creating their own podcasts, while the
barriers to entry remain relatively low in comparison to other forms of media production,
decisions from tech companies and platforms can have significant effects on how content within
the medium is made, discovered, and shared. While my analysis is less invested in the
technological architecture of the medium, I build from the context for changes in the podcasting
industry Sullivan provides.
Finally, my work considers new media technologies and platforms influence on
contemporary book publishing. While the digitization of print predates e-readers, Amazon’s
release of the Kindle device in 2007 has been one of the most significant developments in the
production and consumption of books in their history. Mark McGurl extends this past the Kindle:
he asks, “Should Amazon.com be considered the driving force of American literary history?”31
The effects of the rise of e-books and the widening availability and purchase of e-readers are
29 Sullivan, 1. 30 Sullivan, 6. 31 Mark McGurl, “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3
(September 1, 2016): 447, https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-3570689.

14
especially pronounced in the romance genre.32 Returning to the cultural logics of the
convergence era, throughout my project, I am interested in how Amazon’s technological
disruption has revised or created new discourses around writing and authorship, literariness, and
romance. Chronicling the explosive growth of self-publishing Timothy Laquintano discusses
Amazon’s role as a cultural intermediary. While Amazon touts itself as giving full freedom and
control to authors, Laquintano illustrates how Amazon’s business practices still circumscribe
choices authors make even as the platform has ushered in an era of experimentation.33 For
example, since self-published authors have full control over their copyright, the book as a closed
or finished text is continually being renegotiated. Writers are known to change their books
metadata, covers, and even internal content after publication. Katrina Jackson, who I discuss in
my first chapter, has pulled, edited and re-released some of her novels. Ultimately, I outline
many of the industrial and cultural shifts brought about through new media technologies to
contextualize the contemporary media landscape. My readings of the texts my dissertation
centers around are informed by these new realities of media production, distribution, and
consumption.
Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks
My work builds from scholars in race and media who have used critical/cultural studies
frameworks to interrogate how media and popular culture is a site where struggles over power
are worked through. While there is a long tradition of scholars of race and media examining how
media’s positive or negative representations of Black people have broader social effects, my
32 Sarah Brouillette, “Romance Work,” Theory & Event 22, no. 2 (2019): 451–64. 33 Timothy Laquintano, Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (University of Iowa Press, 2016).

15
work draws from scholars who have complicated this representational framework thinking
through the multifaceted ways Black women’s images are produced, circulated, and consumed.
As Herman Gray argues, “we are experiencing a ‘waning’ in what a cultural politics of
representation can yield, as new discursive alliances, technologies of representation, techniques
of self-making, and affective practices arise, where race…[plays] a formidable role.”34 Put
another way, it cannot be neatly assumed that representation within media yields off-screen
economic, political, or cultural gains for a racialized group. In this vein, I have drawn inspiration
from scholars who have approached representation in dynamic ways through so-called
“negative” texts. Racquel Gates and Kristen Warner have both turned to “ratchet” reality
television, such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta or the Love & Hip-Hop franchise, to open up
new questions. In arguing that reality television shows’ placement in the “gutter” of the media
landscape allows them to explore aspects of racialized and gendered identities that “positive”
series might avoid entirely, Gates engages questions of possibility, affect, and labor rather than
visibility or representation.35 Warner’s analysis of how ratchet reality television shows can open
up an “intimate public” with Black women viewers is heavily influential to my reading of the
podcast Thirst Aid Kit.
36 In addition to analyses of reality television, I build from work that
examines another negative text: pornography. In her book The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading
Race, Reading Pornography, Nash asks what happens if we as scholars read for ecstasy, rather
than for evidence of injury.37 To expand, she states, “I use racialized pornography as a tool for
34 Herman Gray, “Subject(Ed) to Recognition,” American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2013): 771. 35 Racquel J. Gates, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press,
2018).
36 Kristen J. Warner, “They Gon’ Think You Loud Regardless: Ratchetness, Reality Television, and Black
Womanhood,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 30, no. 1 (88) (May 1, 2015): 129–53,
https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2885475. 37 Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2014).

16
shifting the black feminist theoretical archive away from the production and enforcement of a
‘protectionist’ reading of representation, and toward an interpretive framework centered on
complex and sometimes unnerving pleasures.”38 Nash’s theoretical and methodological
intervention are especially influential in my reading of how recent Black cultural production in
the genre engages questions of pleasure. Like pornography, romance, and its perceived effects,
has also been pathologized making this work a productive guide.
Methodologically, my dissertation uses feminist close reading supplemented by critical
media industry studies. My use of close reading is inspired by feminist scholars of media who
have examined how media’s aesthetic and narrative techniques have a mutually co-constituting
relationship to broader discourses about gender and other intersecting identities. For example,
Jane Feuer and Elana Levine have both probed soap opera form to understand how the genre
communicates ideologies of gender, marriage and the family in American culture.39 Writing
about the prime-time soap operas of the 1980s, Feuer illustrates how formal techniques like
freeze frames and repeated zooms use aesthetics to evoke excess and emotional intensity in a
similar way to the expressive mise-en-scène of film melodramas. In my second chapter, I
similarly examine how formal and narrative techniques like direct address are used to rupture
discourses about Black women’s sexual deviance. I utilize close reading as a methodology across
three different mediums examining features from character descriptions in novels to how the
hosts of the podcast Thirst Aid Kit accents and diction construct a racialized form of aurality. I
contextualize my readings of my corpus of media texts through examining the conditions of their
production.
38 Nash, 4. 39 Jane Feuer, “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today,” Screen 25, no. 1 (January 1, 1984): 4–17,
https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/25.1.4; Elana Levine, Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).

17
Frustrated with what they term the “jet plane” view of critical political economy’s approach
to studying the media industries, Timothy Havens, Amanda Lotz, and Serra Tinic develop
critical media industry studies as a research approach defined by
a “helicopter” level view of industry operations, a focus on agency within industry
operations, a Gramscian theory of power that does not lead to complete domination, and a
view of society and culture grounded in structuration and articulation.40
In addition to close reading, I analyze paratextual materials such as cast, creator, and author
interviews, social media posts, reviews, and promotional materials, in addition to industry
discourse through press releases, annual reports, advertisements, and interviews. Alongside
Havens, Lotz, and Tinic, I take inspiration from scholars like Herman Gray, Anamik Saha,
Aymar Jean Christian, and John Caldwell’s influential work in critical media industry studies.
This project’s methodology also emphasizes how discourses produced by both media industries
at a more macro, company level and by individual subjects who work within these industries is a
critical component of understanding the complex, contested, and even ambivalent ways these
industries actually function.41 Though my use of close reading is more dominant across my
analysis, media industries studies still heavily informs how I understand how each of the texts
articulate Black women’s place within romance as a discourse and a textual genre.
40 Timothy Havens, Amanda D. Lotz, and Serra Tinic, “Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach,”
Communication, Culture and Critique 2, no. 2 (June 1, 2009): 246, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-
9137.2009.01037.x.
41 John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television
(Duke University Press, 2008); Aymar Jean Christian, Open TV: Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web
Television (NYU Press, 2018); Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, 2nd ed. (U
of Minnesota Press, 2004); Anamik Saha, Race and the Cultural Industries (John Wiley & Sons, 2018).

18
Case Studies and Chapter Breakdown:
Examining self-published novels, network and streaming television series, and a podcast,
my analysis of the contemporary romance genre traverses different production cultures and
mediums to articulate how the genre’s themes have been retooled for a rapidly evolving media
and cultural landscape. One of the primary concerns of my dissertation is how new media
technologies have been utilized in ways that have challenged broader conceptions about what
makes a romance narrative and what groups of people can be conceived of as producing or
starring in romantic works. Throughout each of my case studies I highlight the tensions between
the utopian promises of new media technologies’ disruption of legacy media industries and the
realities of how misogynoir structures cultural production in self-publishing, public broadcast
and streaming television, and podcasting. Finally, I use a range of media featuring Black
women—from novels written by Black women with characters whose experiences are shaped by
their identities to blindcast series that largely elide direct engagements with race. I use this range
of case studies to create a more robust depiction of Black women’s rising prominence in the
genre.
My first chapter examines two self-published romance series by Black authors Rebekah
Weatherspoon and Katrina Jackson through the genre’s relationship to capitalism. More
specifically, I analyze how both series’ Black heroines navigate increasing precarity, and more
generally, how contemporary Black romance is grappling with the effects of neoliberalism. In
Weatherspoon’s series of Sugar Baby novellas, she chronicles the relationship between Kayla, a
down-on-her-luck 20 something, and Michael, a billionaire CEO. Building from scholars who
have examined the subgenre of billionaire CEO romance novels, I demonstrate how
Weatherspoon’s sugaring novellas align with the genre’s further embrace of neoliberal

19
capitalism. Unlike the white romances other literary scholars examine, Weatherspoon’s work
highlights the racist dimensions of our economic system; however, rather than advocating for a
dismantling of the system she recasts Black women as the deserving beneficiaries and winners of
neoliberal capitalism through meritocratic competition, aligning both professional and romantic
success with the logics of the market. Conversely, Katrina Jackson’s Curriculum Vitae series,
which follows faculty of color at a university in the Midwest, aligns romantic fulfillment with a
rejection of neoliberal imperatives of “self-enclosed individualism” and hustle culture.42 Jackson,
who is a history professor in addition to a novelist, uses the conventions of the romance to
critique how the neoliberal university exploits its workers. I contextualize my close reading of
both of these series within a larger publishing ecosystem undergirded by neoliberal discourses of
self-entrepreneurialism and freedom. While my textual analysis takes priority, I integrate
analyses of publishing as an industry to enhance my explanation of neoliberalism within the texts
of the novels.
My second chapter turns to a different production context and thematic throughline in the
genre. Here, I probe how recent works in television and podcasting contend with Black women’s
historically fraught relationship to pleasure. I leverage recent scholarship that theorizes a Black
feminist orientation to pleasure, including work from Jennifer Nash, Joan Morgan, and Shoniqua
Roach, to analyze the formal techniques of the British sitcom Chewing Gum and the podcast
Thirst Aid Kit. I argue that the creators behind both of these programs invest in a politics of
pleasure through curating intimacy with Black women viewers/listeners without disregarding the
still relevant histories of Black women’s abjection. In my analysis of Chewing Gum, I examine
how series creator, writer, and star Michaela Coel subversively redeploys sexual excess and
42 Julie Wilson, Neoliberalism (London: Routledge, 2017).

20
grotesquerie to imagine new ways to express Black women’s erotic and romantic desires outside
of the paradigm of respectability. Similarly, the podcast Thirst Aid Kit uses a racialized form of
aurality and fanfiction drabbles about the hosts’ celebrity crushes to create an intimate public
with Black women listeners where Black women are encouraged to express their desires rather
than shield them from others. Finally, I argue that the podcast’s use of romantic fanfiction
rescripts Black women’s place within the romance genre and expands the genre’s ideological
possibility.
Finally, my last chapter examines contemporary romantic comedy through the lens of
temporality. Building from Maria San Filippo, I start by exploring how recent romantic comedy
television, Hulu’s adaptation of High Fidelity and the Channel 4 turned Netflix series Lovesick,
represents the central tenets of the post-romantic age, marked by a broader sense of cynicism and
romantic disillusionment. I then argue that both series, in line with other recent romantic
comedies, deploy temporal rupture, namely through the flashback, to address contemporary
cultural feelings of temporal instability, an industrial climate where programming is increasingly
detached from scheduled time, and shifting romantic norms that eschew traditional milestones of
adulthood. My analysis also takes up feminist criticisms of the ways in which the genre’s
investment in a happy ending reifies white heteropatriarchy. In concert with textual analysis, this
chapter emphasizes how the industrial logics of contemporary television production makes the
genre’s depiction of a happy ending increasingly unstable. Lastly, I advocate for treating the
expanded narrative middle as even more of a defining feature of the romance genre than the
ending.
Taken together, the chapters of my dissertation illustrate the ways in which romance as a
discourse and textual form is influenced by changing social and cultural structures as well as

21
industrial shifts that control cultural production. Further, Black women’s place within the genre
cannot be neatly summed up as “advancing” or “challenging” earlier iterations or contemporary
white works in the genre. Through my analysis, I demonstrate the multifaceted ways that Black
women operate in the contemporary romance genre.

22
You Better Work: Romancing Neoliberalism
“I have the best advice for women in business. Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like
no one wants to work anymore.” - Kim Kardashian
When Kim Kardashian administered her sage advice to women entrepreneurs in a 2022
Variety profile, her comments garnered ire.43 Two years after the start of a global pandemic that
threw many lives into disarray and further precarity, most people did not want advice from a
woman whose family is often deemed to be “famous for nothing.”44 While this dissertation
chapter is not about the Kardashians, it is about cultural manifestations of neoliberal ideology,
and there are few better avatars of a neoliberal ethos than the Kardashians. Indeed, to varying
degrees of success, most of the Kardashian/Jenner siblings have taken the neoliberal directive of
self-enterprise to its zenith. Most resonant for my own analysis is the family demonstration of
how romance and work become intertwined and the ways in which working itself can be
romanticized. Within the romantic relationships of the Kardashian/Jenner families, the line
between the “private” relationship between two people and the public performance of the
relationship is intentionally blurred. In fact, the romantic relationships are the most fruitful
fodder for their reality show. In another recent viral moment Kim accused her sister Kourtney,
who got married in Italy to Travis Barker of Blink 182, of “stealing her fucking wedding
country.”45 Within the neoliberal logic of self-enterprise the relationship itself is work. The
43 Elizabeth Wagmeister, “‘Money Always Matters’: The Kardashians Tell All About Their New Reality TV
Reign,” Variety (blog), March 9, 2022, https://variety.com/2022/tv/features/kardashians-hulu-kris-kim-khloe1235198939/. 44 Joelle Goldstein, “Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner Dispute Claim Their Family Is ‘Famous for Being Famous’:
‘Lucky Us,’” People Magazine, October 13, 2022, https://people.com/tv/kris-jenner-kim-kardashian-dispute-claimthat-their-family-is-famous-for-being-famous/. 45 Liza Esquibias, “Kim Kardashian Hits Back at Claims She Was ‘Copying’ Kourtney’s Wedding: ‘You Stole My
F---Ing Wedding Country,’” People Magazine, July 6, 2023, https://people.com/kim-kardashian-hits-back-claims-

23
imperative to think of the self as human capital and in need of constant work does not just apply
to reality television celebrities who sell their own lifestyle. Indeed, the neoliberal logics that
undergird the rise of the Kardashian/Jenner empire permeate nearly all aspects of contemporary
life in late capitalism.
My first chapter examines two self-published romance series by Black authors Rebekah
Weatherspoon and Katrina Jackson through how these works articulate understandings of
contemporary capitalism. Specifically, I analyze how each series grapples with the cultural ethos
of neoliberalism. Rebekah Weatherspoon’s Sugar Baby series of novellas chronicles the
relationship between economically precarious twenty-something Kayla and tech billionaire
Michael Bradbury. After losing her job and struggling to find a new one, Kayla decides to try her
hand at the sugaring app Arrangements and winds up beginning a relationship with the app’s
CEO. As the billionaire CEO becomes increasingly popular as a romance hero, I build on
scholars like Jayashree Kamblé and Mark McGurl to untangle how this character “[personalizes]
the abstract economic force of the free market.”46 Through a close reading of the three novellas
in the series, I examine how Kayla and Michael’s relationship is illustrative of the genre’s
engagement with neoliberal ideology. Specifically, I analyze the characterization of the hero and
heroine and how their intangible traits make them compatible. I argue that Kayla and Michael’s
characterization and Weatherspoon’s construction of the narrative, which places the
protagonists’ romantic relationship and professional progress on parallel timelines, makes the
self-entrepreneur romantic love’s ideal subject.
My other object of analysis is Katrina Jackson’s Curriculum Vitae series, which follows a
group of faculty of color at a university in the Midwest. At her day job, Jackson is an Associate

she-copied-kourtneys-wedding-7557133. 46 Jayashree Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology (Springer, 2014), 32.

24
Professor of History at Bowling Green State University, and has stated that in writing the
Curriculum Vitae series and her other work From Scratch she wanted to create portrayals of
academics that looked like the ones she knew.47 The first novel, Office Hours, follows
Alejandro—tenured faculty in History who is widely considered to be the biggest catch on
campus—and Deja—a stressed Sociology professor on the tenure track who consistently lets the
demands of her job get in the way of her ability to take care of herself and have a thriving
personal life. The second, Sabbatical, chronicles the relationship between two of their close
friends, Toni and Mike, moving from professional acquaintances to a romantic relationship.
Building from her personal experience and that of her friends and colleagues, Jackson makes
plain how the neoliberalization of higher education affects those that work within it. Similar to
my analysis of the Sugar Baby novellas, I conduct a close reading and probe how the primary
characters evoke differing relationships to work and neoliberal institutions. Through Black
female protagonists both series demonstrate how economic systems have racialized outcomes,
but while Weatherspoon aligns professional ambitions with romantic milestones, Jackson,
especially in Office Hours, argues that romantic fulfillment actually hinges on rejecting
neoliberalism’s pressures of optimization and constant work. As I will illustrate, the romance
novel’s history is intertwined with the history of capitalism and through my analysis of these two
series, I demonstrate how the genre operates as a space for Black women writers to work through
Black women’s position within the larger economic systems that structure their lives.
I turn to self-published novels for my analysis because I contend that the explosion of selfpublishing facilitated by new technologies of book production, distribution, and consumption
celebrates a neoliberal ethos of self-entrepreneurship. While trade and indie published romance
47 Katrina Jackson, “About Sabbatical. About Me.,” Katrina Jackson (blog), October 31, 2022,
https://www.katrinajacksonauthor.com/mefromscratch/about-sabbatical-and-me.

25
novels also feature billionaire CEO heroes and academics on college campuses, self-publishing
has continued to rise and take over a larger share of the publishing ecosystem.48 Indeed, the selfpublishing sphere is a compelling site for analysis because of the ways practices that have
dominated there have also permeated more traditional publishing spaces.49 While the focus of
this chapter is on the close reading of both series and the arguments they make about romantic
love’s relationship to capitalism, I bring in the industrial context to flesh out my analysis. To
examine the relationship between the texts I analyze and the conditions of their production, I
supplement my close reading, particularly of Office Hours, with an examination of paratextual
material such as author websites and blogs, social media, and interviews they have given about
their books and careers. Ultimately, I chose self-published works by Black women authors
because I contend that the self-publishing boom is enmeshed with the increasing neoliberal ethos
of cultural production, which then in turn affects the articulation of capitalism within works in
the genre.
Class and Capitalism in the Romance Novel
In Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel, Pamela (or Virtue, Rewarded) a young maid marries her
wealthy, landowning employer and attempts to adjust to life in upper-crust society. The
framework Pamela sets up—of a couple’s path to marriage resulting in the economic security of
a heroine—has laid the foundation for romance novels produced in the centuries since Pamela
was first published. The novel popularized “the narrative link between marriage, love, and
48 Jim Milliot, “Self-Publishing Is Thriving, According to Bowker Report,” Publishers Weekly, February 17, 2023,
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/91574-self-publishing-isthriving-according-to-bowker-report.html. 49 Brouillette, “Romance Work.”

26
women’s economic success,” and as Jeanne Dubino writes, this narrative configuration had
appeal not just for servants who could dream of marrying their wealthy employers, but for
middle-class women who were increasingly denied a place in the economy.50 Many scholars
have traced how romance depicts marriage as one of the only viable means for a woman to
improve her standing in society. In her analysis of the genre in the 1980s Jan Cohn argues,
“Marriage was her only real economic resource; and marriage to a man socially and
economically her superior, her only real chance for upward mobility, her only recourse to
power.”51 Marriages across class have been dominant across subgenres and different periods
throughout the genre’s history. Amy Burge notes that on and off the page marriage is a
legitimately realistic way for women to gain more access to social and economic capital, but that
“there is, then, a tension between marriage as romantic endeavor, and marriage as social contract
of bargain.”52 In this way heroines of the romance come to represent a conundrum; to be the
beneficiary of the hero’s economic success she, as Jan Cohn and Tania Modleski argue, must
never appear to want it.53 This is a point I will return to in my examination of Kayla in the Sugar
Baby novellas as a neoliberal, romantic heroine.
In addition to marriage suturing class divides, romance novels also dramatize narratives
about class. While writers like Jane Austen examined the class stratification of the Regency era
they themselves were immersed in, since then writers of the genre have returned to the Regency
era and used the backdrop of aristocratic marriage rituals to work through the class anxieties of
50 Jeanne Dubino, “The Cinderella Complex: Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism,” The Journal of Popular
Culture 27, no. 3 (1993): 104. 51 Jan Cohn, Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-Market Fiction for Women (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1988), 8.
52 Amy Burge, “Class and Wealth in Popular Romance Fiction,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Popular
Romance Fiction, ed. Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo (London: Routledge, 2020),
402.
53 Cohn, Romance and the Erotics of Property; Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for
Women.

27
their own conjunctures. For example, Amy Burge argues that Georgette Heyer with her book
Regency Buck in 1935 popularized the Regency historical as a romance subgenre and that her
work was infused with class considerations.54 In her analysis of the Regency fiction of romance
novelist Lisa Kleypas, who sold her first novel in 1985 and still writes today, Jayashree Kamblé
illustrates how Kleypas uses industrialist heroes on the outskirts of aristocratic society to
examine the class anxieties of post-Fordist America.55 Romance novels written in the
contemporary moment also examine class and the economic milieu they are written in outside of
the historical subgenre.
My analysis of contemporary self-published novels draws on Jayashree Kamblé’s historical
overview of the rise and meaning of the capitalist hero in contemporary romance. Kamblé
explains how the all-powerful capitalist hero emerged and gained prominence alongside
Thatcherism’s decimation of Keynesian social welfare policies in the U.K. Further, across
romance novels published in the U.K. and North America, Kamblé identifies the increasing
visibility of the romance hero’s association with free enterprise and ownership of “land, labor,
and capital goods across national boundaries.”56 She is clear to note, however, that just because
the romance hero wears the “mask” of the capitalist does not mean that these texts propose an
uncritical celebration of the reign of free-market global capitalism; instead, romance fiction
always reveals fissures in the hegemonic system through conflict between the characters. In this
vein, my analysis of Rebekah Weatherspoon and Katrina Jackson’s work demonstrates how
romance fiction addresses wider cultural anxieties about neoliberal capitalism and widening
stratification.
54 Burge, “Class and Wealth in Popular Romance Fiction.” 55 Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction. 56 Kamblé, 32.

28
Neoliberal Culture
Since neoliberalism’s rise to prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century, its
organizing logics have become further embedded within cultural texts. Neoliberalism is, as
David Harvey writes,
a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can be best
advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an
institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and
free trade.57
Media and cultural studies scholars have also examined the ways in which “neoliberalism puts
competition at the center of social life”.58 As scholars like Julie Wilson outline, neoliberalism is
a political-economic project and a cultural one; these two modes are mutually reinforcing.
Within cultural production, moves to deregulate the culture industry and weaken the power of
trade unions for the sake of “competition” has consolidated legacy media industries and made
work more precarious for creatives. Simultaneously, neoliberalism props up an understanding of
the individual in which people are defined by their status as human capital. In other words,
“neoliberal individuals are selves who think of and relate to themselves as an investment, that is,
as subjects who are constantly working to appreciate the self and its value over time.”59 In
practice this manifests as a constant pressure to optimize the self so that markets can perceive
individuals as more valuable. The imperative to optimize the self is embedded within media
texts—reality television, for example, has been an especially fruitful space for scholars to locate
57 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. 58 Julie Wilson, Neoliberalism (London: Routledge, 2017), 2. 59 Wilson, 65.

29
neoliberal ideology—and it also structures the conditions under which these texts are created.
Within contemporary publishing, neoliberalism has affected the industry at the macro, policy
level, and the broader cultural ethos individual authors are expected to adopt. For example,
deregulation, like the Telecommunications Act of 1996, has accelerated conglomeration within
the industry and winnowed the number of viable publishing houses. Legislation that has had, as
Aneeka Ayanna Henderson argues, especially devastating effects for African-American cultural
production.60 Alongside rapid conglomeration, self-publishing, facilitated by mega tech company
Amazon, encourages writers to assume all risk in publishing in exchange for the “freedom” of
creative control and the opportunity to circumvent traditional gatekeepers. Amazon, specifically
the company’s outsized role in self-publishing, has foregrounded some of the key tenets of
neoliberalism in the creation of the book and of literary culture. Mark McGurl contends that in
“the age of Amazon” the writers acts as their own corporation. He states, “at the outset of his or
her career, the writer makes investments, absorbs losses, and may even take out loans. He or she
does so in hopes of future profits, yes, but also in hopes of realizing a state of autonomous
capitalist being.”61 As Sarah Brouillette illustrates in her essay “Romance Work,” romance
writers have been at the center of changing norms of authorship brought about by new
technologies; they, for example, dominate the e-book market.
62 In her analysis of romance selfpublishing, Brouillette critiques the neoliberal discourse of autonomy that Amazon propagates.
Speaking of Kindle Direct Publishing, she argues that it is, “hardly the dreamwork of unfettered
self-expression and fair remuneration. It is more accurate to observe a shift in the kinds of
60 Aneeka Ayanna Henderson, Veil and Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture (UNC
Press Books, 2020).
61 McGurl, Everything and Less, 456-7. 62 Brouillette, “Romance Work.”

30
mediating institutions with which authors are required to work.”63 This observation is echoed in
Timothy Laquintano’s analysis of how self-publishing requires authors to contend with a variety
of cultural intermediaries.64 Meanwhile, as Brouillette argues, romance writing relies on the
“love discount,” wherein passion is meant to partially compensate writers.65 Though new media
platforms like Amazon, or even Netflix or Hulu which I discuss in later chapters, brand
themselves as liberatory for creators of color, many of the actual mechanisms of platform
capitalism sideline or even exploit these same workers.
Nice Work if You Can Get It
In a 2018 ad for the sugaring dating website Seeking (formerly Seeking Arrangements), the
company launched their Sugar Baby University campaign. The ad features three young college
students who find gold coins, once they pick them up their drab student aesthetic transforms
through new access to money.66 The first woman, thin and blonde, trades her ponytail and
backpack for a fresh blowout and a Gucci bag. Next, a tan brunette transforms her empty fridge
to a luxe meal at a fancy dining room table. Lastly, a light-skinned Black woman drowning in
work at her laptop, picks up her coin and converts (presumably) into a woman who no longer
needs to work at a computer. The ad promises young (especially thin and conventionally
attractive) women that they have other options available to them. In the description
accompanying the ad on the company’s YouTube page, Seeking Arrangements remarks “Say
goodbye to college debt…and hello to a higher class education!”67 In a nod to crippling student
63 Brouillette, 453. 64 Timothy Laquintano, Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (University of Iowa Press, 2016), 7. 65 Brouillette, 455. 66 Sugar Baby University 2018 - SeekingArrangement, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP9gQ8IYVOk. 67 Sugar Baby University 2018 - SeekingArrangement.

31
debt and the rocky financial future that awaits college graduates, Seeking taps into the material
conditions of college educated women in the wake of The Great Recession.
Sugaring relationships or arrangements have a long history; however, they have recently
received greater attention in popular culture. I contend that the increased production and
visibility of sugaring relationships in recent years is tied to a continued experience of economic
precarity for young women. In their collection Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in
the Age of Austerity, Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker argue that “under new conditions of
financial exigency, women now face increased pressures to manage their own (and often their
family’s) economic survival without threatening patriarchal norms.”68 While the media and
cultural artifacts that are presented in their book as illustrative of recessionary popular culture,
such as Extreme Couponing or budget fashion blogs‚ are distinct from sugaring relationships,
these arrangements similarly point to a “postfeminist neoliberal culture in which [women] are
cued to undertake routine physical and emotional work on the self while cultivating
imperviousness to the decline of social health, democratic institutions, and meaningful
manifestations of citizenship.”69 As many scholars have noted, romance novels reflect and
comment on the economic conditions of the time period they emerge from. This section uses
Rebekah Weatherspoon’s Sugar Baby series of novellas to examine how popular romance is
addressing contemporary formations of neoliberal capitalism and gendered and racialized
financial exigency.
As I have discussed, since Pamela in 1740 the genre has worked through the changing
formations of capitalism and the relationship between gender and economic systems. As
68 Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds., Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) 26. 69 Negra and Tasker, 25.

32
Jayashree Kamblé argues, in the 1970s during the rise of the post-Fordist economy Mills & Boon
contemporary romance novels moved from heroes with white collar jobs to all-powerful
capitalists.70 In recent years this has further developed to capitalist billionaire heroes that control
global flows of commerce across national boundaries. Kamblé articulates “the genre presents this
economic system as a prerequisite to happiness by repeatedly endorsing a relationship between it
(in the body of the hero) and the petite bourgeoise or proletariat (in the body of the heroine).”
She goes on to state that of course these works fetishize unrestricted capitalist accumulation,
however, “it does not solely validate corporate capitalism.” 71 In the Sugar Baby trilogy,
Weatherspoon fetishizes the unending courtship the capitalist can provide through the sugar
daddy/baby arrangement but highlights the ways in which Black women have circumscribed
prospects within capitalist systems of romantic love. Relatedly, Aneeka Ayanna Henderson has
argued the ways in which contemporary marriage discourse is structured by economic conditions
with pernicious consequences for Black women. Using the term marriagocracy, she argues,
“marriageocracy suggests that a free, unregulated, and equitable romance market animates
marriage and the idea that it can be obtained with the cogent but misleading trinity of individual
hard work, resilience, and moxie.”72 I contend that Weatherspoon’s work advances this discourse
while also trying to illustrate its unfairness. While the novellas ultimately align with other works
in the genre that “domesticate” the reign of the free market through the symbolic billionaire
capitalist hero, in her work Weatherspoon embeds criticism of neoliberalism’s racist dimensions.
Despite this critique, the Sugar Baby trilogy ultimately celebrates a neoliberal, entrepreneurial
ethos across racial lines. I begin my analysis through examining how race structures Kayla’s
70 Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction. 71 Kamblé, 33. 72 Henderson, Veil and Vow, 8.

33
economic situation and the solutions she seeks out, and then I then demonstrate how Kayla
comes to be representative of the self-entrepreneur under neoliberalism.
So Sweet opens with protagonist Kayla in crisis. Readers meet Kayla as she drives home
from yet another failed job interview. In the opening to So Sweet, she states,
I was so numb, sitting behind the wheel of my car. The AC was cranked, blowing an
excessive amount of cold air across my face, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn it down.
Over thirty applications, and ten interviews, and I was no closer to finding a new job. My
savings were running low and I was one rent check away from kissing the rest of my
severance pay goodbye. Unemployment was helping, but if I didn’t find something
soon…
I knew what would happen. I’d worked so damn hard. Gotten my degree, landed a job as
a corporate HR clerk with one of the larger cellphone carriers. The job was boring as hell
and a complete waste of my education, but the pay was good enough to support my
lifestyle and I’d learned a lot about the corporate world. I was paying off my student
loans, living in a spacious apartment that I loved and, three weeks before they canned me,
I’d picked up my first new car.
Over the past few months I’d fantasized about going to the dealership and just giving it
back, like that sort of thing happened without adding major blotches on your credit.73
In this passage Kayla’s internal monologue illustrates how her responsible decision making has
not been able to insulate her from economic precarity. Kayla has arguably done everything right
73 Rebekah Weatherspoon, SO SWEET: A Sugar Baby Novella (Rebekah Weatherspoon Presents, 2015), chap. 1.

34
to be on the track of financial stability. She has a college degree, pursued a safe, good job that
made her financially comfortable despite not igniting her passions, and made sure to live within
her means. Though not stated explicitly here, Kayla’s race plays an integral role in her situation.
In this passage she mentions her student loans—the student debt crisis disproportionately affects
Black and brown students.74 Later, she laments not being able to ask her family for financial help
because not only did she previously make more money than her mother at her human resources
job, but her half of the rent in Los Angeles is more than her parents’ mortgage. Her lack of
access to a generational family safety net is also tied to her racialized identity. While the
financial fallout from The Great Recession has affected people across racial and gender lines, in
the U.S. Black households have been affected more acutely than their white counterparts.75
Kayla attempts to solve her situation through traditional avenues (i.e. looking for another job in
the formal economy); however, after repeated failures her roommate suggests they turn towards
the app Arrangements.
In addition to highlighting how her insecure economic situation has racialized
dimensions, so too do the solutions available to Kayla. From the beginning Kayla is skeptical of
her white roommate Adler’s suggestion that they try to find a wealthy man to take care of their
immediate, financial needs. While part of this is tied to Kayla’s insistence on self-reliance (a
point I will return to), she also recognizes that finding a wealthy sugar daddy may not be an
option for her. When Adler presses her about her reluctance Kayla states, ““‘Um let’s see.’ I
gestured to [Adler’s] slim figure, ‘Cute, petite white girl.’ Then I gestured to myself and my not-
74 Andre M. Perry, Marshall Steinbaum, and Carl Romer, “Student Loans, the Racial Wealth Divide, and Why We
Need Full Student Debt Cancellation” (Brookings Institution, June 23, 2021),
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/student-loans-the-racial-wealth-divide-and-why-we-need-full-student-debtcancellation/.
75 Fenaba R. Addo and William A. Darity, “Disparate Recoveries: Wealth, Race, and the Working Class after the
Great Recession,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 695, no. 1 (May 1, 2021):
173–92, https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162211028822.

35
so-perfectly tailored skirt suit. ‘Chunky-plus black girl. The type of rich guys I would attract are
still bitter about slavery ending.’”76 Here, Kayla articulates how race, skin color, and size
produces, as Henderson says, African American women’s “diminished and unequal capital”
within the free market of courtship.77 As Henderson argues, marriage has long been offered to
Black women as the solution to myriad economic and social issues stemming from racial
capitalism. Despite this, these same forces make marriage much more difficult for this group,
even as they are blamed for not attaining it. Even with Kayla’s reservations, she does decide to
attend the mixer. Her nerves push her to the outskirts where she meets the company’s billionaire
CEO Michael Bradbury. Over the course of the three novellas, Michael and Kayla’s relationship
grows, and they eventually marry and have children.
While Michael is physically attracted to Kayla, Kayla’s success within the dating
marketplace is credited to her internal qualities, particularly her authenticity and entrepreneurial
spirit. Throughout the first novella, Kayla continually expresses trepidation about the entire idea
of a financial arrangement with a sugar daddy. Michael’s attraction to Kayla grows as she
consistently asks questions and expresses hesitations. For example, when discussing what a
relationship between the two of them would look like Kayla states, “I’m not trying to drive a
hard bargain. I just have reservations. This is a little weird to me. Fine, I’m just gonna ask one
thing I know I shouldn’t, but it will kill me if I don’t. Are you looking for fun or are you looking
to settle down? I know we’re talking about a sugar arrangement, but I would like to know where
you’re really coming from.”78 In this exchange, Kayla is clear to separate herself from those that
enter these types of arrangements for pure financial gain; Kayla is interested in romance and
76 Weatherspoon, SO SWEET: A Sugar Baby Novella, chap. 1. 77 Henderson, Veil and Vow, 9. 78 Weatherspoon, SO SWEET: A Sugar Baby Novella, chap. 2.

36
wants to make sure Michael is too. Since sugaring intersects with sex work, this conversation
and the set-up to their eventual long-term partnership is also utilized to separate their relationship
from this denigrated form of labor. Kayla’s legitimate attraction to Michael and continued
interest in a long-term relationship demonstrates the character’s authenticity, which mark her as
worthy of the financial gains that a relationship with Michael will bring her. However, it is not
enough to ensure readers know that Kayla is not a gold digger, she also has to demonstrate the
cultural ethos of neoliberalism to be one its beneficiaries. At the start of their relationship,
Michael quickly begins to alleviate Kayla, and by extension her roommate Adler’s, financial
pressures. Kayla, however, is not content to sit back and let Michael take care of her. Instead,
Kayla is committed to finding a job. In an exchange with Adler after Michael pays their rent
through the end of their lease, Kayla expresses frustration that Michael paid her living expenses
without telling her. After Adler asks her about her time with Michael in New York, Kayla
expresses to the reader that she wants to complete some household tasks and restart her job
search rather than gush about her luxe vacation. She has just had her rent paid for the next
several months and Michael has given her more than enough money for groceries and other bills.
The insistence on starting a job search so quickly after these things demonstrates Kayla’s
worthiness and her investment in hard work. Even after her relationship with Michael progresses,
she still insists on working and budgeting. However, the key shift is that instead of finding
another desk job that covers her needs (though she no longer needs to do this herself), Kayla is
able to demonstrate self-entrepreneurialism through pursuing a more passion-driven career where
she works for herself.
Early on Kayla expresses her interest in graphic design and communicates her
willingness to expand her skill set, specifically learning to code. Kayla’s foray into graphic

37
design celebrates self-optimization and passionate work. She explains that while her degree is in
Political Science, she has no interest in working in that field; instead, her passion lies in design,
but she builds her skills after starting her relationship with Michael. For example, she does
online design tutorials to perfect her typography skills. As Julie Wilson and Angela McRobbie
argue, for many young women jobs within the creative sectors are discursively constructed as
part of the path to self-actualization, promising “individual fulfillment and gender freedom.”79
Kayla, however, unlike the young women Wilson and McRobbie discuss has the individual
financial safety net of a billionaire partner. With Michael’s financial backing, Kayla ends up
starting a greeting card business. Kayla’s entrepreneurship is framed in the series as part of her
authenticity and worthiness of having the security being with Michael provides. Neoliberalism
forces individuals to adopt a self-entrepreneurial ethos even as it corrodes the safety net to create
the type of stratification Michael, and by extension Kayla, benefits from.
At the start of the second novella, Kayla and Michael are happy together and their
relationship progresses on a parallel timeline to her career. In the first chapter of the second
novella, So Right, Kayla muses,
A year ago I didn’t know butt from crap about happiness. Now, I had a job I actually
wanted…With a little help from said billionaire, I was able to rescue my best friend
Daniella from her corporate job at Telett Wireless and together we had opened Cards by
K&D…Our first official line, Queer Cards by K&D, was due to launch in a few months
at L.A. Pride. I had no idea just how awesome it could be to work for yourself and that
made me pretty damn happy. And then there was Michael.80
79 Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries, Wiley (John Wiley & Sons,
2016); Wilson, Neoliberalism, 122. 80 Rebekah Weatherspoon, SO RIGHT: A Sugar Baby Novella (Rebekah Weatherspoon Presents, 2016), chap. 1.

38
Here, Weatherspoon illustrates that Kayla is in a good place both romantically and
professionally, but the structuring of the first chapter’s opening salvo is sure to articulate the
professional happiness is separately fulfilling for Kayla. The choice to italicize, and therefore
emphasize, “that,” makes this distinction clear. Within the logics of neoliberalism and its
emphasis on passionate work and hustling, working for oneself becomes the ultimate key to
happiness and fulfillment. This argument is extended further once Kayla tells her employees that
she is pregnant in the final novella. Amidst the excitement, one of her employees Brittany blurts
out that she is quitting that day and running away with an A-list actor she met at one of
Michael’s parties. Kayla and Daniella are dismayed that Brittany is not thinking about her future
and betting on a potential romantic partner’s wealth. Brittany states, “I know it sounds stupid, but
look at you to. You married your rich Prince Charming…Neither of you need this company.” To
which Daniella replies, “Stop…There’s a slight difference there though, Brit. Neither of us quit
our jobs to run after Duke or Michael.”81 Daniella and Kayla both express some offense that they
are painted as women who would no longer value hard work after gaining the interest of wealthy
men. In their exchange, Weatherspoon’s highlights Brittany’s naïveté. What she does not
understand is that Daniella and Kayla’s entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to working is
inextricably linked to their romantic success. Utilizing the conventions of the romance novel,
Weatherspoon aligns Kayla’s romantic and professional pursuits; thus, the series romanticizes
capital accumulation and neoliberal selfhood.
Kayla’s self-entrepreneurial ethos is also demonstrated through contrasting her to other
characters, namely her white roommate Adler in the first novella. From the beginning, Adler is
shown as not taking her and Kayla’s financial precarity seriously. While Kayla expends all of her
81 Rebekah Weatherspoon, SO FOR REAL: A Sugar Baby Novella (Rebekah Weatherspoon Presents, 2016), chap. 5.

39
energy budgeting and job searching, Adler remains much less committed. In chapter two Kayla
states, “Adler was gone when I woke up Sunday morning, Probably out hiking with her friend,
Sienna, or at brunch with Sienna, spending money she didn’t have.”82 In contrast Kayla stays
home and makes eggs even after meeting Michael and hitting it off. This dichotomy between
Adler and Kayla is continually deployed throughout the first novella, until eventually Kayla
becomes exasperated with Adler’s lack of drive, pettiness, and jealously. At a pool party Michael
hosts, Daniella, Kayla’s Afro-Latina friend and eventual business partner, hits it off with a pop
star. In response, Adler passive-aggressively expresses frustration in not capturing the interest of
someone wealthy. This all comes to a head at Michael’s birthday party when Adler offers herself
to Michael and accosts him. When Kayla confronts her the next day, Adler proclaims, “Kayla.
You don’t keep guys like this. You enjoy them and then you set them free.”83 Adler’s lack of
direction and tenacity with regard to her professional life is coupled with her jealousy and
inability to see Michael and Kayla’s relationship as real. Throughout the series, Michael and
Kayla’s many serious, direct conversations about their relationship and what it means illustrate
that relationships are also something that must be worked on. Adler’s lack of interest in formal
employment also tells the reader that she is unworthy of the partnership Michael provides
because relationships too require authenticity and an ethos of hard work.
Moreover, across the series it is white women who have the worst responses towards
Michael and Kayla’s relationship. In making white women the locus of disdain for Kayla and
Michael’s happiness, Weatherspoon is further unpacking the ways in which the market logics of
dating and romance are racialized. In the second book Kayla shows up at Michael’s office
unannounced where “the new receptionist in the ICO offices looked at me like I was fucking
82 Weatherspoon, SO SWEET: A Sugar Baby Novella, chap. 2. 83 Weatherspoon, chap. 8.

40
insane when I asked to see Michael. And no, I didn’t have an appointment and yes, I am his
girlfriend, a reaction I was used to from skinnier white women who thought they were cuter than
me.”84 In this interaction, and others like it, Weatherspoon places sexualized racism within the
white woman’s psyche. Racism within the series crops up as a result of thin, white women not
being able to grapple with someone who has been placed beneath them on the hierarchy of
desirability having a relationship with a handsome, white billionaire. These interactions share
similarities with other works in the genre by writers of color who untangle the politics of white
resentment. For example, in the Crazy Rich Asians franchise Kwan shows how elitist, white
characters underestimate the Young and Leung families only to be put in their place. In her
analysis of Kwan’s novels, Yuan Ding argues, “Kwan replicates the narrative of Asian
triumphalism that seals the status of Asian diasporics as flexible global citizens. In multiple
encounters between racist white characters and wealthy Asians, the latter emerge triumphant
through pure meritocratic competition, enacting the often self-fulfilling revenge fantasies of
(post)racial justice.”85 Similarly, Weatherspoon crafts a plus-size, Black female character who
emerges triumphant through meritocratic competition. The Sugar Baby novellas make the market
logics of dating explicit by foregrounding a direct economic relationship. Further, Kayla prevails
over her thin, white counterparts through showcasing internal qualities valued in a neoliberal
market economy. While Weatherspoon, more so than Kwan, is invested in highlighting the racist
dimensions of economic precarity, she ultimately celebrates a neoliberal ethos but recasts Black
women as the winners of neoliberal competition.
84 Weatherspoon, SO RIGHT: A Sugar Baby Novella, chap. 4. 85 Yuan Ding, “‘Asian Pride Porn’: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Narrative of Asian Racial Uplift in Kevin
Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy,” MELUS 45, no. 3 (September 1, 2020): 68,
https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlaa028.

41
The Billionaire Hero and the Fantasies of Capital
In recent years, the alpha billionaire hero has dominated contemporary romance. Jayashree
Kamblé argues, “in the mask of the capitalist, the romance hero allows the faults as well as the
attractions of capitalism to be represented by the corresponding off-putting or seductive traits of
the lover.”86 Similarly, in Mark McGurl’s analysis of the alpha billionaire subgenre he argues
that
in the real world this figure is often the repulsive grotesque; here in Amazonia he is a
sleek server of emotional needs. He is the desiring man, the subject of desire, conceive
and constructed as an object of desire, and suffused in that reverberating fantasy circuit
with unpredictably utopian as well as reactionary ideological spirits.87
In the case of Weatherspoon’s work, Michael Bradbury stands in for the free market under
neoliberalism. Here, I contend that what makes Michael a romantic hero is inextricably tied to
his financial position. While Michael’s personality differs from the alpha billionaires McGurl
writes about, notably Christian Grey of the Fifty Shades trilogy, Weatherspoon, like her peers in
the genre, uses the billionaire, capitalist hero to defang the threat of free market enterprise.
Similar to other billionaires in contemporary romance, Michael’s wealth derives from his own
brilliance and tenacity, rather than generational privilege. At the time that Kayla meets Michael
at an Arrangements mixer, Michael is the CEO of a mega corporation that owns nearly all major
dating apps and websites, a Yelp like service, and multiple media outlets. Weatherspoon’s
characterization also positions Michael as a boy wunderkind, starting his first dating venture
AskCupid.com (clearly OkCupid) in his college dorm with a friend. This characterization takes
86 Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction, 32. 87 McGurl, Everything and Less, 124.

42
inspiration from tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit).
In combining the tech entrepreneur with the romantic hero, Weatherspoon romanticizes capital
accumulation. In her construction of Michael’s character, Weatherspoon emphasizes traits that
make Michael feel like an “everyman” even as she describes the material conditions he lives in,
which remove him from virtually all readers.
Part of the fantasy a billionaire hero like Michael offers is the ability to prolong the courtship
phase and to produce the means for the fantasy of having-it-all for the heroine. After meeting at
the mixer, Michael wants to spend more time with Kayla, so he integrates her into his busy
schedule. Their first date is tacked on to his business trip in New York full of meetings. Though
Michael ultimately has to attend several meetings—stale and non-romantic—the romance is
injected into the story through showcasing how Michael’s wealth allows for Kayla to be wooed
indefinitely, which Kamblé articulates as a “space for unending courtship.”88 When Kayla
expresses trepidation at jetting off to New York at a moment’s notice, all of her concerns are
allayed with solutions that money can buy: the fact that she hasn’t packed any clothes for
example. In the early chapters of the first novella, Weatherspoon romanticizes the spoils of
capitalist accumulation. Michael takes Kayla to New York on his private plane and once there
she is assisted by a personal shopper with a day job at Teen Vogue. Readers are invited to
imagine how these types of perks can become routine for Kayla—who was introduced as
financially struggling, but worthy. Further, the billionaire romance fulfills a post-feminist fantasy
of being able to balance a career with home and family life. Kamblé notes that billionaire
businessman romances make “frequent mention of household and groundskeeping staff, security
personnel, assistants, and personal physicians [underscoring]…that the plots of romance novels
88 Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction, 34.

43
not only function on the basis of those monetary advantages but are also inextricably tied to this
economy.”89 Throughout the series, Michael’s staff are consistently woven into the tapestry of
Michael and Kayla’s lives. For example, at one point Kayla laments forgetting addresses because
she has been relying on Michael’s driver. Additionally, the characters Holger, Michael and
Kayla’s private chef, or Reuben, Michael’s assistant, are not just depicted as excelling at their
jobs, but instrumental in making both protagonists lives function. However, they exist as more
than just employees, they are also represented as close confidantes. Part of the fantasy for
presumably women readers is a life that allows for women to opt in to domesticity. Kayla does
not have to cook, clean, or run errands, so her time is spent on her relationship and her own
entrepreneurial ventures. When Kayla finds out she is pregnant in the final novella, she is
nervous, yes, but also able to fantasize about a version of motherhood where she has full control
over the competing demands on her time and is able to outsource domestic labor. The billionaire
romance creates multiple interlocking fantasies: of romance, of free time. Although they indicate
the actual amount of labor that goes into running a household and a business, through
romanticizing having staff, these works ultimately present the solution of having to balance everincreasing demands on women’s time and of their labor with capitalistic solutions of
outsourcing.
Across the trilogy, Weatherspoon aligns Michael and Kayla’s romantic relationship with both
protagonists’ professional endeavors. While Michael comes to Kayla already powerful, his
ultimate dream of owning an NBA team, the marriage of passion and business, comes to fruition
during the series. In the first novella Michael proclaims to be a lifelong basketball fan, and when
he and Kayla meet he is on the shortlist to be the next owner of the Los Angeles NBA team.
89 Kamblé, 36.

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Kayla and Michael’s next step after moving in together and adopting puppies, comes at the same
time as a scandalous shakeup in the Miami NBA franchise. As they are getting ready to head to
the pet shelter, they stop to watch the story of the current owner being involved in a contract
killing unfold on the news. Although Michael expresses some hesitation about buying a team
across the country and entering during a public relations nightmare, Kayla encourages him to
pursue his dream. Michael does later decide to buy the team, and the public announcement
coincides with their engagement. By mapping these two timelines onto one another,
Weatherspoon marries capital accumulation and romance. Moreover, this connection is extended
further through Kayla’s pregnancy coinciding with her greeting card company’s partnership with
a large retailer. Without the team Michael would still be a billionaire able to always provide for
Kayla and seduce her with endless gifts and a staff to see to her needs, but the romance also
requires forward motion. Therefore, Michael must acquire more. Both protagonists in this sense
become representatives of entrepreneurial spirit and passionate work under neoliberalism.
Weatherspoon, however, shows that the marriage of romance and neoliberal capitalism must
balance the economic with the emotional. Michael is attractive as a partner because of his
entrepreneurial spirit and his commitment to work, but not only due to these things. Kayla
frequently notes that despite his demanding roles and love of work, he still takes the time to
make her feel special. Kayla’s descriptions of Michael—readers are immersed in her point of
view—evidence Mark McGurl’s argument that the billionaire capitalist hero “is the symbolic
vehicle by which that system is ‘softened’ and made caring again in the little welfare state of a
loving marriage.”90 In this vein, embodying neoliberal capitalism without any notes of softness
would separate readers too much from the billionaire hero and make him undesirable.
90 McGurl, Everything and Less, 127.

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Weatherspoon works through this tension in the second book where Michael and Kayla have
their first real fight about what their relationship will look like. Michael proposes to Kayla in the
second novella and disrupts the balance between romance and free market capitalism by
proposing with a prenup. While works within the billionaire romance subgenre explicitly
intertwine money and love, a delicate balance must be achieved. The actual terms of the
prenuptial agreement demonstrate Michael’s insistence on taking care of Kayla and the
meticulous and forthright nature she fell in love with. However, his inability to move beyond his
analytic side to offer a truly romantic proposal and open up to Kayla about the depth of his
feeling at a critical moment cause the couple’s first real rift. Kayla spends much of the second
novella grappling with her feeling of uneasiness and disappointment and not being able to
effectively articulate them despite Michael asking how she is feeling repeatedly—
communication errors being the bedrock of conflict in the genre. When Kayla and Michael
finally confront the stifling tension in their relationship, Kayla states,
God you’re so businessy all the time. Like all the time. And it’s great and it works. It
works. But…Michael. That was the most unromantic proposal on the face of the Earth.
And the timing, baby, it was so shit. The idea of you and I getting married is so huge and
I feel like we can’t even think about it. When I try to put it our of my mind, so I can focus
on you and the team, someone asks me if they can see my ring or if we’ve picked a date.
I’m in this weird cycle of blessed and fortunate overload…
You caught me off guard in the best and the most awful way possible and since then
we’ve barely even been alone…I just wanted to talk to you about us—not like this, but
about us and our future and it seems like you don’t have time to do that right now. And
that’s fine. I’m glad you bought the team. I just wish you had actually carved out time for

46
us.91
This passage makes it clear that the balance between a softer, romantic side and the analytical
businessman must be maintained. In his reconciliation with Kayla, Michael illustrates how his
seeming detachment was actually the result of an overabundance of emotion. As Tania Modleski
has argued, within the genre the hero’s early boorish behavior can be recast by the end as an act
of love.92 While Michael is never ill-mannered, his detachment takes on new meaning at the
conclusion. By the end of the second novella, the two are back on track with a renewed strength,
and it ends with their engagement photo shoot. In addition to creating the balance of the two
sides of the hero, authors writing these heroes must also account for the inequality that makes the
billionaire hero possible without fully critiquing the hero and later heroine’s place within the
structure.
In the series, Weatherspoon recognizes the violence embedded in Michael’s social position,
but reconciles it through illustrating his authentic relationships with people beneath him on the
social hierarchy and his philanthropy. Further, Michael’s attractiveness lies in his blend of
entrepreneurial spirit and down-to-earth personality. In his discussion of Christian Grey from the
Fifty Shades trilogy and the prominence of alpha billionaires, McGurl contends that the
billionaire hero is on the one hand the ultimate consumer, yet simultaneously projects austerity.93
This dichotomy is expressed on Kayla’s first outing with Michael when the two travel to New
York and becomes a recurring motif throughout. While relaxing on Michael’s private plane,
Kayla notes his “pristine” white converse sneakers. Additionally, Michael sheepishly states that
he still eats like a college student and orders them chicken tenders for dinner on the plane. Both
91 Weatherspoon, SO RIGHT: A Sugar Baby Novella, chap. 8. 92 Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women. 93 McGurl, Everything and Less, 118.

47
of these things make Michael more approachable and attractive and work in conjunction with the
private plane to create a romantic fantasy that softens the capitalist. While many other heroes in
the subgenre, including Christian Grey, are notably distant and dominant, Weatherspoon’s
decision to make him a tech entrepreneur, rather than something like a CEO in finance, and
repeated discussion of his Midwestern identity both temper the character. The increasing
celebrity status of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs has created a palatable version of nerd
masculinity rooted in the industry’s connection to a laid-back, California ethos. This becomes
further enhanced with aligning him with the cultural identity of the Midwest, known in the
American cultural imaginary for “niceness.”
Moreover, because Kayla and Michael’s relationship is interracial, Weatherspoon locates
racism within white women characters and forges bonds between Michael and Black characters.
Michael, for example, gets his hair cut by a Black barber. During their trip to New York,
Michael sees his regular barber (notable considering he lives in Malibu) and takes Kayla into the
shop with him. She feels right at ease with all of the other older Black men in the shop, and
Michael’s ability to easily integrate himself into the Black, ethnic enclave of the barber shop
signals to the reader that he has the cultural competency to make a good partner for Kayla. To
return to Michael’s Midwestern identity, the character was born and raised in Detroit. This
choice performs double duty for readers. It softens the character’s capitalistic ruthlessness while
ensuring readers know that Michael has spent much of his life around Black people. This
assuages potential anxieties about the racial animus Kayla might experience in dating him (or
perhaps that Michael knows how to deal with it). Finally, Michael’s decision to purchase an
NBA team is rife with racist implications of white ownership of the Black male body. In addition
to illustrating how “down” Michael is, his comments about basketball saving him while growing

48
up poor in Detroit mirror the pervasive cultural narrative normally attributed to Black players in
the league. The final piece is revealed part way through So Right, the second book, that
Michael’s mother is half-Indian, which in Kayla’s words explain why he’s “not all the way
square.”94 While the “alpha-hole” billionaire romances Kamblé and McGurl examine make the
face of free-market enterprise a jerk—though one who is eventually softened through romantic
partnership—Weatherspoon casts neoliberal capitalism as approachable and relatable at the
outset. Taken together, these strategic decisions on the part of Weatherspoon put forth a
multicultural vision of neoliberal capitalism that domesticates the free market and allays real
concerns about the ways in which it exacerbates racist outcomes.
The Institution Cannot Love You Back
Where Weatherspoon pairs professional ambition and romance, Jackson takes the opposite
approach. In her work, Jackson’s protagonists demonstrate that successful romantic partnership
is actually stymied by adopting a neoliberal ethos. In the novel Office Hours, Jackson uses a
protagonist barely staying afloat in her early years on the tenure track to demonstrate how the
increasing neoliberalization of the university isolates and harms academic workers. Readers meet
Deja at the start of a new school year as she struggles to manage her teaching and advising
responsibilities, her disproportionate service load, and the imperative to produce enough
scholarship to earn job security. Because Deja has “won” the competition of the academic job
market, she feels immense pressures to juggle the competing responsibilities on her own. Deja’s
predicament is not without historical context. Since the 1970s the number of full-time academic
jobs has steadily decreased. While not all fields have experienced this downturn, across the
humanities and social sciences tenure-track faculty openings have consistently dropped, and in
94 Weatherspoon, SO RIGHT: A Sugar Baby Novella, chap. 5.

49
the wake of major economic events like The Great Recession, taken dramatic plunges.95 These
trends have happened alongside decreased state and federal funding for universities, rising costs
of tuition, and the mushrooming of student debt.96 Universities have increasingly come to rely on
part-time instructors paid per class or renewable positions off the tenure track which can vary
widely in terms of compensation and benefits. This type of academic gig labor has created a
larger precarious underclass within the profession. However, through Deja, we can also see the
ways in which the gig-ification of academic work affects even those with tenure-track
appointments. Jackson writes,
It was rare these days to get a tenure-track position on the first try, but Deja had, she
knew how lucky she was. She also knew that a terrifying amount of her job security
depended on making sure that her colleagues liked her. She loaded up on service
assignments and the large intro courses no one else liked to teach and ran herself ragged
trying to prove she was a “good colleague.”
Neoliberalism’s contraction of full-time employment in the academy also leads to the rising
demands of full-time faculty. Many of Deja’s anxieties center around the pressure to produce
enough work to be promoted and attain actual job security, but as this passage illustrates research
is not the only source of her stress. Her “luck” at securing a position pushes her to take on an
unsustainable number of responsibilities so she can keep it. In this case, neoliberal practices
create contingency for academic workers, while its ideology presents the solution as more work
to remain competitive. Deja muses to herself, “she’d only just now come to appreciate that the
95 Glenn Colby, “Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Higher Education,” AAUP, March 16, 2023,
https://www.aaup.org/article/data-snapshot-tenure-and-contingency-us-higher-education. 96 Elizabeth Baylor, “State Disinvestment in Higher Education Has Led to an Explosion of Student-Loan Debt,”
Center for American Progress (blog), December 3, 2014, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/statedisinvestment-in-higher-education-has-led-to-an-explosion-of-student-loan-debt/.

50
tenure track was a rain cloud hanging over her head for nearly a decade…no matter what she did,
what she hadn’t done and couldn’t do mattered so much more.” Deja engages in constant
negative self-talk, even as she makes progress, Deja hyper focuses on everything she is doing
wrong and has internalized that she can never being doing enough work to be on track.
Jackson depicts Deja as adopting a number of unhealthy coping mechanisms as she tries to
navigate the increasing demands of her job, but uses characters like Alejandro, the novel’s hero,
and Toni, friend and mentor to Deja, to illustrate the unsustainability of Deja’s methods. After
Deja and Alejandro have been seeing each other for a few weeks, Alejandro notices Deja’s
patterns. Regarding her while they wait in line for coffee,
He realized that she tended to fill every down moment with work. She woke up early
some mornings to grade, even if she hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before or never
went to sleep at all, she worked through weekends unless they had plans together, and she
responded to student emails while waiting in line for coffee, and all he wanted to tell her
was that she could just…not.
Alejandro, by contrast, explains his commitment to not working weekends and the strict
boundaries he policies around his job. This, of course, takes diligence and support because as the
series outlines, the university does not care if its employees work themselves to the bone. One of
the largest examples of Deja’s skewed perceptions about work is conveyed through the holiday
break. While all of Deja’s friends and colleagues visit loved ones, she stays alone in her
apartment because she has convinced herself that her only path forward is to work through the
holiday. During the break, Deja even pulls an all-nighter to submit a journal article. While
Alejandro is wary of telling Deja that she should reevaluate how much of her time she dedicates
to work and how much her self-worth hinges on how much she feels she is producing, her friend

51
and mentor Toni have no such compunctions. When Toni video calls Deja when she has arrived
back in town before the Spring semester starts, she admonishes Deja for being unable to
remember when she last left her apartment. When Deja tries to brush off her concern claiming
that her burnout can’t get any worse, Toni replies, “Yes it can…This is no joke, and your
department does not care if they burn you out. We’ve been over this.” In this interaction Toni
makes it clear that institutions do not consider the health—physical, mental, or emotional—of
their workers to be a priority. This is especially true for Black women. One reason Deja has so
many service responsibilities is because she is the only woman of color in her department, and
they need their new hire to be visible. However, throughout Office Hours, Jackson demonstrates
that it does not matter how many times Toni gives the same spiel or Alejandro gently suggests
Deja work less, Deja has to internalize this message for herself. Neoliberalism, as Julie Wilson
writes, “incites us to live as self-enclosed individuals;” in Deja’s case this results in an inability
to tap into her support network or to prioritize her well-being over her job.97 Jackson, however,
conveys that this form self-enclosed individualism is not sustainable and cannot bring Deja the
sense of security in her work and life that she is seeking.
Through the developing relationship between Deja and Alejandro, Jackson shows that
adherence to the demands of neoliberal work culture actually hinders the romantic relationship.
In the first two acts of the novel, Deja exhibits heightened paranoia about anyone on campus
finding out that her and Alejandro have moved beyond mere colleagues. She, for example, leans
away from any and all physical contact even when not overtly romantic or sexual. She also at
one point refuses to let Alejandro pay for her coffee as she furtively glances around the campus
coffeeshop. Part of Deja’s anxieties about her budding relationship with Alejandro being found
97 Wilson, Neoliberalism, 4.

52
out is tied to overblown fears about receiving official sanctions from the university (though she
has not actually broken any rules), but I argue that it also about fearing the consequences of not
being seen as an ideal worker. In Deja’s mind, her colleagues’ perceptions of her carry a lot of
weight for her future career. I am not saying she is wrong to think that, but Deja seeks to project
an air of productivity at all times. This is tied to two ways that neoliberalism has affected the
ways we now understand ourselves in relation to work. First, that the individual, viewing
themselves as human capital, must always seek to optimize themselves in ways that will increase
their output. For Deja, she fears her colleagues will interpret her having a romantic relationship
with a colleague as taking time away from publishing, teaching, and her administrative
responsibilities. In other words, she has internalized that whether or not she is on campus, her
time is meant to be spent always adding a line to her curriculum vitae or engaging in a visible
form of work recognized by her employer. Hiring a tenure-track faculty member is understood
by the institution to be an investment that will lead to a future return, Deja then, believes she
must prove her value to the institution. Secondly, Deja has conflated her self-worth with her
academic productivity. While this frame has permeated working life in all sectors, the conflation
of self and work can be especially pernicious in white collar, “knowledge” jobs. Therefore, if
Deja has not been productive enough, she has failed as an academic but also as a person because
her personhood is so intertwined with her job. Even the consideration of oneself as an academic
rather that someone who works as one illustrates this conflation.
By the end of the novel, however, Deja has made significant strides in renegotiating her
relationship to work, which aligns with her and Alejandro’s relationship progressing. In April,
one month before the end of the semester, Deja has a meeting with one of her advisees who will
be starting graduate school in the fall after graduation. Like Deja her student Amber is first-

53
generation. Rather than overload Amber with advice about how she should use her time to
prepare before her program starts, Deja advises her to rest. When Amber asks a more existential
question about whether or not she will be alright once she lives the comfortable space of her
undergraduate years, Deja not only reassures her about her capabilities but emphasizes the
importance of learning to ask for help while in graduate school. This interaction comes on the
heels of Deja and Alejandro notifying the university of their relationship and Deja relaxes
enough to hold hands on campus. Deja’s new outlook is not circumscribed to doling out sage
advice to her advisees. In a meeting for a committee Deja and Alejandro were roped into by the
Dean of their college, Deja shuts down a tenured, white professor who has previously derailed
committee meetings. At the meetings close, Mike and Toni tease Deja that this professor now
hates her and will tattle to the Dean. In response Deja replies, “Good.” Dismissing a higher
ranked, condescending white faculty member would have been unthinkable to Deja just two
months prior. In the final month of the semester, Jackson further emphasizes Deja’s growth
through a reversal of a previous interaction. Alejandro and Deja meet up in the student union
coffee shop and she purchases him a coffee as they walk to their last faculty senate meeting
together. Previously, Deja was hyper vigilant inside of the coffee shop for fear of being
“discovered.” By the end of the semester, she purchases Alejandro coffee and even allows their
now shared advisee to tease them about their relationship. In the novels’ final chapter, summer
break has just started and Deja receives a revise and resubmit decision from the Sociology
journal she submitted to over winter break. Although she does think about starting revisions right
away, she reminds herself that if the journal took five months to get back to her then there is no
reason she has to rush herself. Later that day, she tells Alejandro she loves him for the first time.

54
Pairing these two moments in the same chapter further crystallizes Jackson’s rejection of
academia’s neoliberal ethos.
In an interview on the Black Romance Podcast, host and professor Julie Moody-Freeman
asks Jackson about writing characters and a setting so close to home.98 Explaining the impetus
for Office Hours, Jackson notes that she understands writing the novel as paying all of the help
and advice she received from other Black women professors forward. During the interview
Jackson admits to not always having a healthy relationship with work; writing Office Hours
forced her to reckon with this. As Jackson notes, academia has often been an actively hostile
environment for Black women. In her blog post explaining to readers that she is pushing back the
release of the second novel in the series Sabbatical Jackson discusses how working through the
pandemic after her sabbatical has affected her own health and well-being. Though not the focus
of my analysis here, Sabbatical picks up on key themes of its predecessor and illustrates the
ways in which rest opens up the space for romantic love. Jackson writes,
Learning to rest is a theme of SABBATICAL in a way I did not plan, but not in the way I
lived it. Toni is not me, in the same way Deja was not me, but I know women like them.
Black women who worked through all their pain (emotional, physical, and mental)
because we’ve been told that tenure will be our reward. Women who got tenure and find
that it was the reward they hoped it would be. Women who got it and found that it was
not. Women who have no idea what they’re doing in their jobs, but don’t know how to
ask for help (or who will help them if they did). Women who know exactly what they’re
98 Julie Moody-Freeman, “Katrina Jackson,” Black Romance Podcast, accessed May 30, 2024,
https://blackromancepodcast.libsyn.com/katrina-jackson.

55
doing and have to fight for recognition. Women who know exactly what they’re doing so
their schools work them until they’re dust because of it.
Women who’ve died because of the work.
Toni’s story is my sincere hope for my colleagues and myself. If I am anyone in this
story, I’m Mike. I just want want to help those women I love learn how to rest. But
before I can do that, I have to learn how to do that myself. I cannot pour from an empty
cup and for most of 2020, 2021, and 2022, I was empty.99
Through prioritizing rest in Sabbatical, Jackson extends Office Hours’ rejection of neoliberal
culture. However, throughout her work Jackson also makes clear that individual decisions to opt
out of neoliberal institutions’ worst expectations is not enough on its own. Indeed, an ideology
built upon making people into marketed individuals cannot be countered with mere individual
solutions. In addition to developing communities of care for faculty of color, Jackson emphasizes
the need for structural change. In Sabbatical the core group of five (Deja, Alejandro, Toni, Mike,
and Marie) attend a meeting put on by a fictional union attempting to organize the faculty of their
university. As the novel progresses the union activity is in the background but ends with Marie,
who started as an adjunct and who has committed herself most strongly to organizing, alerting
Toni and Mike that the vote is imminent. Sabbatical’s release of course coincides with a sea of
union organizing across higher education.100 In making a potential faculty union part of the
narrative, Jackson further develops her response to the neoliberal university, advancing her
99 Jackson, “About Sabbatical. About Me.” 100 Jamie K. McCallum, “Higher Ed Labor Organizing Is Just Getting Started,” January 6, 2023,
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/university-california-strike-adjuncts/; Ryan Quinn, “Report: Higher Ed
Unions and Strikes Surged in 2022, 2023,” Inside Higher Ed, September 1, 2023,
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/09/01/higher-ed-unions-strikes-surged-2022-2023.

56
characters ethos of care into collective action. In a blog post promoting the release of Sabbatical
and chronicling her own relationship to organized labor, Jackson writes “So much of OFFICE
HOURS happens in hostile spaces (committee meetings, classrooms), but in SABBATICAL, we
see Toni and Mike safe in her home because one important part of union activism is to protect
the life you live when work ends.”101 Marie’s novel in the series, which Jackson has stated will
most centrally feature the union, has yet to be released; however, Jackson’s rejection of
neoliberal ideas is still salient across the first two novels in the Curriculum Vitae series. Through
her work, Jackson deviates from the hegemonic norm in the genre by rejecting the machinations
of neoliberal capitalism and demonstrating that healthy romantic partnership actually relies upon
community and collectivity.
Conclusion
Writing a chapter on work and neoliberalism in the final year of my PhD program,
especially through analyzing a text so centrally about the modern university, can often feel like
staring directly at the camera and breaking the fourth wall in a sitcom. Indeed, like Deja, I
survived the capricious academic job market and found gainful employment. My similarities to
the characters in Jackson’s series do not end there; I even organized my colleagues through
USC’s graduate student union. Despite the plot of the series feeling far too close to home, higher
education is a productive backdrop for an author like Jackson to untangle the relationship
between romance and work, and the ways in which work itself comes to be romanticized even as
a profession is being decimated. The texts at the center of this chapter illustrate two alternate
conceptions of trying to live and thrive under an economic system predicated on stratification
101 Katrina Jackson, “SABBATICAL: I Believe in Unions.,” Katrina Jackson (blog), November 20, 2022,
https://www.katrinajacksonauthor.com/mefromscratch/sabbatical-i-believe-in-unions.

57
and the consolidation of money and resources at the top. Both Weatherspoon and Jackson
acknowledge the ways that neoliberal capitalism can especially harm Black women, though they
identify very different routes to surviving within this system.
Since feminist scholars began taking the genre seriously in the 1980s, they have
worked through how romance’s relationship to a patriarchal, capitalist system. They have not,
however, always engaged how the genre or the systems it represents are also racialized. Through
turning the attention to works by and about Black women, I have extended analyses of how the
genre dramatizes widespread feelings about the economic system we live under. As
neoliberalism continues to struggle book production, texts in the genre, and increasingly reading
itself, I contend that despite its historical perception of making women accept their own
subordination romance is an effective vehicle from which to critique the systems we live under.

58
The Pleasure Principle: Desire and Eroticism in Black Cultural Production
“And when he gives into you, just sit on his face.”102 Candice delivers this sage advice to
her best friend Tracey in the pilot episode of Chewing Gum (E4, 2015-2017). Tracey, the 24-
year-old series protagonist, is trying to lose her virginity and finally act on her repressed sexual
desire. In this scene from the series’ first episode, Tracey has enlisted her best friend’s help for a
makeover in an attempt to ignite her boyfriend Ronald’s desire through an updated look,
complete with a blonde wig, pink lipstick, blue contact lenses, and a black push-up bra. The
audience, however, knows that Ronald is gay and has been using his faith to stave off his
girlfriend’s repeated advances; no makeover is going to make him attracted to her. By the end of
the episode, Tracey has found a new romantic and sexual prospect on her council estate, Connor,
and taken her best friend Candice’s advice. Tracey does not, however, remember that prior to
sitting on a man’s face, she is supposed to take her pants off.
This dissertation chapter engages the romance through the lens of sex and sexuality. I
examine the sitcom Chewing Gum and the podcast Thirst Aid Kit (Buzzfeed, 2017-2018; Slate,
2019-2020) and the discourses each produce about the relationship between race, gender, class,
sex, and romance. I begin by situating my work within two bodies of literature. First, I engage
popular romance and film studies analyses of the role of sex in the heterosexual romance over
time. I then synthesize some of the primary theories and debates in black feminist scholarship
about sex and sexuality. In my close reading of Chewing Gum and Thirst Aid Kit, I demonstrate
how both programs intervene in the histories of Black women’s sexuality in media and through
this also offer new ways of depicting women’s sexuality within romance. Considering the formal
102 “Sex and Violence,” Chewing Gum (E4, October 6, 2015),
https://play.hbomax.com/page/urn:hbo:page:GYA71VwuyyaOHHQEAAAAu:type:episode.

59
techniques of Chewing Gum, particularly direct address, I use the lens of excess to read Tracey’s
erotic longings. I move from excess to the analytic grotesquerie to illustrate how Michaela Coel
subtly dislocates the grotesque from Black women’s bodies and sexuality and positions sexual
grotesquerie as distinctly white. My examination of Thirst Aid Kit also illustrates the ways in
which the podcast renegotiates Black women’s sexuality and intimacy. I intervene in the nascent
field of podcasting studies to engage how the show uses the affordances of audio and distinct
cultural commonplaces to create an intimate public with Black women listeners. Further, I
illustrate how the podcast hosts’ original fanfiction creates the space for Black women to “lust
out loud” rather than shield their sexuality and desires from others.103
My analysis builds from interventions in Black feminist theory made by Jennifer Nash
and Joan Morgan, who assert that the field has become over-reliant on entrenched analytical
frames in examinations of Black female sexuality.104 Nash specifically pulls out spectacularity,
excess, grotesquerie, and display as reoccurring analytics.105 Rather than use these analytics to
highlight what Nash terms “evidence of injury,” through close reading/listening, I utilize them to
examine how these two media texts call for an investment in Black women’s pleasure.106 I argue
that both texts lean into conceptualizations of Black female sexual excess to illustrate the unique
pleasures in expressing overt sexuality. While some scholars have assessed Black media texts by
how well they “resist” the disciplining white gaze or the extent to which they “recuperate” Black
103 Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, “Hey, Did You Hear About Thirst Aid Kit, BuzzFeed’s New Podcast?,”
BuzzFeed News, November 2, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tnwhiskeywoman/did-you-hear-about-thirst-aid-kitpodcast.
104 Joan Morgan, “Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure,” The Black Scholar 45,
no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 36–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1080915; Jennifer C. Nash, “Theorizing
Pleasure: New Directions in Black Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 38, no. 2 (2012): 507–15,
https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2012.0008. 105 Jennifer C. Nash, “Black Anality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (October 1, 2014): 441,
https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2721366. 106 Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2014), 2.

60
women’s tarnished image in media, this chapter moves away from the resistance to hegemony
paradigm rooted in a politics of representation to explore the pleasures of transgression. In
Chewing Gum, Tracey actively seeks out sexual pleasure, even if her virginal naïveté and social
awkwardness thwart her attempts. Through narrative and performance, Michaela Coel highlights
Tracey’s investment in seeking pleasure without ignoring the colonial grammars that have placed
Tracey and her sexuality in a marginal position. Thirst Aid Kit uses the affordances of audio and
the fantasy space of fanfiction to construct erotic fantasies that embrace rather than shy away
from Black women’s sexuality. My emphasis on the aural intervenes in Black feminist studies of
sexuality where the visual and its effects, real or perceived, have dominated. Jennifer Lynn
Stoever argues “While vision remains a powerfully defining element of race, scholars have yet to
account for how other senses experience racialization or enact race feeling, both alone and in
concert with sight.”107 Prioritizing the visual in analyses of Black women’s representation is not
without historical context; however, I turn to podcasts to advance an understanding of sound’s
role in deconstructing discourses of Black sexual deviance and advancing a Black feminist
politics of pleasure. Additionally, I contend that the podcast’s use of fanfiction upends the
romance genre’s hegemonic whiteness and the primacy placed on the happy ending. I turn to sex
for this chapter because as other scholars have argued, sex, whether explicit or implied, is
heavily bound up within the romance genre.108 For Tracey, her attempts to mimic normative
scripts for romance and sex continually go awry. Thirst Aid Kit positions Black women as natural
givers and receivers of multiple forms of love rather than on the outskirts of the discourse
107 Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016), 4. 108 Jodi McAlister, “Breaking the Hard Limits: Romance, Pornography, and the Question of Genre in the Fifty
Shades Trilogy,” Analyses/Rerearings/Theories (A/R/T) Journal 3, no. 2 (2015): 23–33; Catherine Roach and
Hannah McCann, “Sex and Sexuality,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction, ed.
Eric Murphy Selinger, Jayashree Kamblé, and Hsu-Ming Teo (Routledge, 2020); Arielle Zibrak, Avidly Reads
Guilty Pleasures (NYU Press, 2021).

61
seeking crumbs of affection.
Sex and the Romance Genre
Within the field of popular romance studies, scholars have noted that working through the
sexual discourses of the period is a key feature of romance novels, even those without explicit
sex written onto the page. Critics of the genre’s representational politics have long argued that
genre romance fiction simply reproduces the patriarchal, hegemonic structures that position
women as submissive recipients of male sexual aggression.109 However, others have instead
articulated that romance novels are critical sites of fantasy.110 As Hannah McCann and Catherine
Roach argue, “the broad genre of romance can be understood to offer a particular type of fantasy
space, a space of imagination in which to negotiate the conundrum of living in a patriarchal rape
culture as a heterosexual woman.”111 Scholars Eva Illouz and Jayashree Kamblé also suggest that
romance novels do not merely encode the hegemonic ideas of a particular conjuncture.112 As
Illouz writes of the Fifty Shades of Gray novels, they also have the capacity to, “provide the tools
to make [living under patriarchy] better.”113
While many scholars analyzing sex and sexuality in the genre do not critically engage
with race, Hsu-Ming Teo and Jayashree Kamblé articulate how the matrix of race, gender, and
sex/sexuality have been bound together throughout the genre’s history.114 Both of their analyses
109 A. Dana Ménard and Christine Cabrera, “‘Whatever the Approach, Tab B Still Fits into Slot A’: Twenty Years of
Sex Scripts in Romance Novels,” Sexuality & Culture 15, no. 3 (September 1, 2011): 240–55,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-011-9092-3. 110 Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 2nd edition (University
of North Carolina Press, 2009).
111 Roach and McCann, “Sex and Sexuality,” 417. 112 Eva Illouz, Hard-Core Romance: “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Best-Sellers, and Society (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2014), https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo18232225.html; Kamblé, Making
Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction. 113 Illouz, Hard-Core Romance. 114 Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction; Teo, Desert Passions.

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build on Richard Dyer to engage how whiteness itself is discursively constructed in the genre
through its relationship to sexuality.115 Kamblé’s critical investigation of the romance hero and
his many “masks” reveals that the whiteness of the romance hero extends beyond being written
as Caucasian. Instead, the whiteness of the romance hero is bound up in his ability to control his
more “base” impulses and his internal Protestant, capitalist ethic that renders him in possession
of a distinctly white soul. In addition, Teo’s analysis of the Anglophone desert romance novel
illustrates how these works animate concerns about contact with the other amidst geopolitical
upheaval, and in turn, articulate white women’s sexuality. I bring these works together to
articulate how sex is in many ways a primary preoccupation of the romance genre.
Beyond literature, sex and sexuality are primary approaches in studying the romance genre’s
cycles on screen. Scholars of the romantic comedy in film have identified several genre
evolutions that are deeply intertwined with the sexual mores of their time. Tamar Jeffers
McDonald argues in her accounting of the genre in American cinema that “at the heart of every
romantic comedy is the implication of sex, and settled, secure, in-a-relationship sex at that.”116 In
a similar vein to McCann and Roach’s argument about genre romance fiction, Jeffers McDonald
contends that even if sex is not on screen, the genre is preoccupied with questions surrounding it.
This is echoed by other scholars of romantic comedy like Leger Grindon who illustrates that sex,
and how it structures relations between men and women, is the dominant throughline across
different waves of the genre. For example, comparing the neo-traditional rom-com When Harry
Met Sally (1989) to its predecessors, Grindon argues that the film illustrates the influence of the
70s “realist” romantic comedy Annie Hall (1977)—which famously examined changes in
115 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2013). 116 Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (Columbia University Press, 2007),
13.

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courtship and sexual relationships brought about by the 1960s—but concludes with a belief in the
optimism of romantic union, a return to the traditional logics of the genre developed in the
1930s.117 Recently, the genre and its relationship to sexual norms has continued to evolve as the
genre’s distribution and exhibition have been radically altered by the rise of streaming
platforms.118 My case studies divert from the norms in the genre I have outlined here, illustrating
new ways of articulating desire and eroticism in the genre.
Black Feminist Theories of Sexuality
Analyses of Black women’s sexuality have been dominated by illustrating evidence of
injury.119 This tendency is borne from Black feminist theory’s necessary investment in
disarticulating the hegemonic scripts that have demonized Black women’s sexuality as cover for
continued, colonial violence. However, as Joan Morgan argues, “the corrective has been a
creation of a black feminist master narrative in which black women’s damaged sexuality takes
center-stage as a site of reoccurring trauma—the place where intersecting oppressions can be
counted on to meet and violently coalesce.”120 Evelynn Hammonds, a Black feminist queer
theorist, was one of the early scholars in the field to push against the dominant trends in writing
about Black women’s sexuality. In her foundational essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of
Black Female Sexuality,” Hammonds articulates, “the restrictive, repressive, and dangerous
aspects of black female sexuality have been emphasized by black women writers while pleasure,
exploration, and agency have gone under-analyzed.”121 She also argues for a deeper engagement
117 Leger Grindon, The Hollywood Romantic Comedy: Conventions, History, Controversies (John Wiley & Sons,
2011), 130. 118 Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard, and Diane Negra, eds., Imagining “We” in the Age of “I”: Romance and Social
Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2021); Maria San Filippo, ed., After “Happily Ever After”: Romantic
Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age (Wayne State University Press, 2021). 119 Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy. 120 Morgan, “Why We Get Off,” 36. 121 Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)Holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” Differences 6, no. 2–3

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with Black lesbians; indeed, the work of Black, queer scholars like Hammonds, Audre Lorde,
and more recently Uri McMillan have been integral in theorizing pleasure. Before synthesizing
the work of scholars in Black feminist theory who have answered Hammond's charge by
critically engaging and foregrounding pleasure, I first turn to recurrent themes in the dominant
strain of Black feminist theories of sexuality.
The discourse of black women’s out of control sexuality serves distinct ideological
purposes during a time when white Europeans were negotiating their continued contact with the
other. Similarly, in North America, this discourse concretized to maintain black subordination
and exploitation after the abolition of slavery. As historians Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and
Darlene Clark Hine argue, Black women in the U.S. developed their own strategies to counter
this discourse. Higginbotham’s formulation of a “politics of respectability” was deployed by
Black women reformers to disconnect Black women from sexual deviance and align them with
Victorian womanhood.122 Similarly, Clark Hine notes a “culture of dissemblance” that allowed
Black women to protect their inner “psychic space” by separating themselves from their
sexuality.123 In other words, the Black women Clark Hine examines created a self-imposed
schism between their public and private selves. As Hammonds and other have illustrated,
however, these strategies have created a sustained silence around Black women’s sexuality that
is then reproduced within Black feminist scholarship.
Most resonant for my own analysis, are the scholars in Black feminist theory who have
identified popular culture as the primary, contemporary culprit of denigrating Black women’s

(July 1, 1994): 126–45, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-6-2-3-126. 122 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church,
1880–1920 (Harvard University Press, 1994). 123 Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (July 1989): 912–20, https://doi.org/10.1086/494552. 915

65
sexuality. bell hooks, for example, argues that “representations of black female bodies in
contemporary popular culture rarely subvert or critique images of black female sexuality which
were a part of the cultural apparatus of 19th century racism and which still shape perceptions
today.”124 In her analysis of Black women stars like Tina Turner, Diana Ross, and Iman, hooks
contends that many Black women entertainers have cultivated personas that traffic in racist and
sexist scripts which make the Black, female body “synonymous with accessibility,
availability…[and] sexual deviance.”125 In a similar vein, Patricia Hill Collins asserts that as
“controlling images” created and disseminated by the White, patriarchal elite, the “Jezebel” and
its contemporary “hoochie” counterpart pervade popular culture.126 Of special interest to her are
the ways in which the figure of the hoochie moves within Black cultural spheres, especially
music, and how the community’s “tacit acceptance validates this image.”127 In later work, Hill
Collins returned to music as a site of sexual script meaning making.128 Hill traces a turn in the
1990s with the rise of gangsta rap and argues that a celebration of Black women’s bodies has
turned into objectification and, thus, “turns [Black women’s bodies] into canvases that can be
interchanged for a variety of purposes.”129 I bring hooks and Hill Collins together here to explain
a dominant view in the study of sex and sexuality in Black feminist theory. Both scholars have
found contemporary popular culture, with few notable exceptions, to be rife with problematic
imagery that constructs Black women’s bodies and sexuality as deviant in line with racial scripts
produced through colonialism and slavery. While this foundational scholarship has produced
important criticism and given us language to explain how images of Black women circulate in
124 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Routledge, 1992), 62. 125 hooks, 66. 126 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd
ed. (Routledge, 2002). 127 Collins, 82. 128 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (Routledge, 2004). 129 Collins, 129.

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contemporary culture, this project moves away from the analytical frame of identifying injury to
examine the potential pleasures in contemporary media.
In this vein, the analysis in this chapter is largely influenced by recent scholarship that
assesses Black women in culture through the lens of pleasure. In her “origin tale” that charts the
inroads for a real reckoning with pleasure within Black feminist thought, Joan Morgan asks,
“...how can deepening our understanding of the multivalent ways black women, produce, read,
and participate in pleasure complicate our understanding of black female subjectivities in ways
that invigorate, inform, and sharpen a contemporary black feminist agenda?”130 Morgan
identifies other scholars in her cohort that are committed to this project. For example, Jennifer
Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography moves away from what
she terms the “protectionist reading of representation” to engage racialized pornography through
the lenses of pleasure and performance.131 As Nash articulates, “black pleasures can include
sexual and erotic pleasures in racialization, even when (and perhaps precisely because)
racialization is painful.”132 Nash and Morgan’s critical interventions are in dialogue with
scholarship that specifically theorizes “the black pussy.” Shoniqua Roach’s re-evaluation of the
Blaxploitation films of Pam Grier develops “black pussy power” as a conceptual framework that
can account for how “Grier’s performances of black eroticism…enable her to resist racialized
gendered sexual subjection and tap into modes of erotic agency.”133 While other Black feminist
scholars before Roach have used their examinations of “pussy power” as further evidence of
“objectified black female sexuality” and the ways “black women performers who leverage
130 Morgan, “Why We Get Off,” 36. 131 Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy, pg #. 132 Nash, 4. 133 Shoniqua Roach, “Black Pussy Power: Performing Acts of Black Eroticism in Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation Films,”
Feminist Theory 19, no. 1 (April 1, 2018): 7–22, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700117742866, 10.

67
‘pussy power’ are unwitting accomplices to black female alterity,” Roach challenges this
formulation by engaging in a closer reading that recognizes how “black pussy power” can be
mobilized “to secure nominal black freedoms.”134 Likewise, Carmel Ohman turns to an underexamined site of “black pussy theorizing”—surreal and comedic TV.135 Ohman’s analysis of Issa
Dee’s “Broken Pussy” rap in the pilot of Insecure (HBO, 2016-2021) names “broken Black
pussy” as an analytic that “refuses the disciplining mechanisms of respectability
politics,...denaturalized dominant sexual metrics derived from Black women’s systemic
exploitation, [and] thus adds to a growing Black feminist and queer vocabulary for registering
how naming injury and enacting pleasure can mutually animate.”136
In my analysis of how Chewing Gum and Thirst Aid Kit enact pleasure, these works are a
productive guide. In the case of Chewing Gum’s Tracey, Michaela Coel’s performance addresses
the historical “injury” that have simultaneously locked her, a dark-skinned, working-class British
girl, out of desirability and simultaneously placed her within a discourse of sexual deviance.
However, Coel leans further into the logics of excess and deviance to mine pleasure and humor
from her marginalized position. In a similar fashion, Thirst Aid Kit deploys thirst as a conceptual
frame from which both the Black women hosts and their listeners can highlight the capacities of
overt sexual desire. In both instances, the texts are aware of, and at times even address, the ways
in which Black female sexuality has been distorted; however, rather than try to develop a
representation solely focused on producing a counter-narrative or corrective, both media “[shift]
the terrain of Black visuality and performance by comedically redeploying narratives of Black
134 Roach, 14. 135 Carmel Ohman, “Undisciplining the Black Pussy: Pleasure, Black Feminism, and Sexuality in Issa Rae’s
Insecure,” The Black Scholar 50, no. 2 (April 2, 2020): 5–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2020.1727196, 5. 136 Ohman, 7.

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sexual excess.”137 Through an emphasis on Black, feminist politics of pleasure, I illustrate how
new works within romance use formal techniques to reject respectability and in turn transform
the sexual politics that have undergirded the romance genre, creates new avenues for ideological
and narrative possibility.
Excess
In the opening scene of Chewing Gum’s pilot, our protagonist Tracey kneels on the floor
praying with her boyfriend Ronald. She shifts her focus to the camera and brings the viewer into
her world through the mode of direct address. Tracey begins by complaining about how her
name makes her sound like she “…eats bacon sarnies or has sex on the back of the bus.”138 Our
Tracey, however, doesn’t eat pork and wants to have sex in a much more normalized and
sanctioned locale: her boyfriend’s bedroom. It is not enough, however, to just tell the
camera/audience that she wants to have sex; she has to show us. Tracey turns away from
addressing the audience to stare at her boyfriend’s crotch and bites her lip; she then begins to
pant and we are transported into her fantasy right along with her. As fantasy Tracey straddles her
boyfriend’s lap while he gropes her breasts, she licks his face and bites his hair. Her gusto may
be apparent, but so too is her utter lack of skill and sexual knowledge. From the very opening of
Chewing Gum, Tracey establishes herself as overwhelmed with her own desires. Indeed, it is
Tracey’s “over-the-topness,” that has garnered the series both fans and critical acclaim. This
section uses Black feminist theories of sexuality to inform my close reading of Chewing Gum’s
engagement with excess.
Some scholars have argued that Tracey’s naïveté and gawky physicality shield the character
137 Ohman, 11. 138 “Sex and Violence.”

69
from being read as a problematic stereotype rooted in formulations of Black women’s sexual
excess.139 I contend that Tracey’s characterization goes even further; it opens up new ways to
imagine bodily excess beyond respectability. Further, Coel’s engagement with the politics of
class in British working-class sitcoms is novel. Some scholars have traced how the figure of the
female “chav,” a pejorative for young, lower-class Brit known for their brash manner and
aesthetic, in recent working-class comedies works through anxieties about women’s sexualities
through a form of class disgust.140 In Chewing Gum Coel demonstrates her fluency in the visual
language of British class politics as well as depictions of Black female sexuality through her
subversion.
Following Nicole Fleetwood, I argue that Michaela Coel embraces excess, through both
performance and narrative, as a way to acknowledge racialized and sexualized scopic regimes of
visibility, while simultaneously resisting the respectability and dissemblance frameworks that
have been thought of as the only ways to counter them. Fleetwood writes,
to enact excess flesh is to signal historical attempts to regulate black female bodies, to
acknowledge black women’s resistance of the persistence of visibility, and to challenge
debates among black activists and critics about what constitutes positive or productive
representation of blackness, by refusing a binary of positive and negative.141
139 Francesca Sobande, “Awkward Black Girls and Post-Feminist Possibilities: Representing Millennial Black
Women on Television in Chewing Gum and Insecure,” Critical Studies in Television 14, no. 4 (December 1, 2019):
435–50, https://doi.org/10.1177/1749602019870298; Faye Woods, “Too Close for Comfort: Direct Address and the
Affective Pull of the Confessional Comic Woman in Chewing Gum and Fleabag,” Communication, Culture and
Critique 12, no. 2 (June 2, 2019): 194–212, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz014. 140 Sharon Lockyer, “Dynamics of Social Class Contempt in Contemporary British Television Comedy,” Social
Semiotics 20, no. 2 (April 1, 2010): 121–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330903565758; Imogen Tyler, “‘Chav
Mum Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain,” Feminist Media Studies 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 17–
34, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680770701824779.
141 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Troubling Vision (University of
Chicago Press, 2011), https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226253053, 112.

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Michaela Coel’s writing and performance do not fit perfectly inside of Fleetwood’s framework.
Tracey’s youthful exuberance and awkwardness illustrate a different relationship to abjection
and Black female alterity than Fleetwood identifies in her analysis of Janet Jackson and Lil’
Kim. However, Coel does indeed address the discourse of Black women’s excessiveness to
“construct new modes of operation;” therefore, Fleetwood’s formulation is generative for my
own reading of the sitcom.142 Specifically, I analyze the series’ use of direct address, fantasy
sequences, Tracey’s nosebleeds, and Michaela Coel’s performance. Finally, I engage Joan
Morgan’s conceptualization of Black female “alters” to articulate how the character of Tracey
acts as an avatar for Coel herself and potentially for the show’s Black women viewers.143
Direct address has become increasingly common in woman-centered comedies and
dramedies in Anglo-American media in recent years.144 I build on Faye Woods’s assertion that
Chewing Gum, along with her other case study Fleabag, “use [direct address] to enfold us in
their protagonist’s perspectives, in an at-times uncomfortably close embrace.”145 Episodes of
Chewing Gum open with Tracey addressing us as her confidantes. As she moves through her
council estate with her two braids, bright, girlish clothing, and backpack, her direct
confessionals, coupled with her costuming and styling, enhance both her arrested development
and erotic longings. Tracey’s desires have been building up to a critical mass. Her family’s
devout evangelical Christianity, and its attendant regime of shame, as well as her gay, closeted
boyfriend whose regard oscillates between indifference and open disdain have created the
conditions for years of pent up desire with no outlet. One of the primary ways Tracey works
142 Fleetwood, 105. 143 Joan Morgan, “It’s About Time We Got Off: Claiming a Politics of Pleasure in Black Feminist Theory” (New
York University, 2020), https://www.proquest.com/openview/491019db87b3a209f4653c871c8fc897/1?pqorigsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.
144 Examples include: Fleabag (BBC/Amazon Prime, 2016-2019), High Fidelity (Hulu, 2020) and Insecure (2016-
2021)
145 Woods, “Too Close for Comfort,” 195.

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through her frustration is through breathless chatter; her talking is one form of release valve.
Direct address, here, breaks with the ways Black women’s alterity has been made visible in the
history of Black women’s image circulation by giving us too much interiority. Tracey winds up
brining the viewer in so close, providing excessive detail about the inner workings of her mind,
that the viewer frequently wishes for escape. This excess if interiority is accomplished through
direct address and the character’s nosebleeds.
Though Tracey does indeed share her interest in having sex with those close to her on the
estate, it is the viewer that gets the most intimate details. Tracey initially tries to brush off
Ronald’s lack of interest and investment in her, however, it cannot last long. She goes to
Candice’s house for a makeover and proclaims that she is ready to take necessary steps to entice
Ronald. While Candice and her nan understand Tracey’s desires, they are outside observers
while we are immersed. Michaela Coel’s performance, particularly the way she manipulates her
face, only heightens this effect. When talking to the camera, she meets our gaze head on and
frequently adopts an impish grin that invites us to partake in Tracey’s shenanigans. The use of
direct address acts as a counter to both the “politics of respectability” and the “culture of
dissemblance.” Respectability was adopted by nineteenth century Black women reformers who
aligned themselves with Victorian femininity and distanced themselves from their sexuality in a
concerted effort to protect themselves from the violence the discourse of Black female deviance
was used to cover up.146 I do not contrast Michaela Coel’s portrayal of sexuality in her show as a
way to denounce these women’s strategies or the essential feminist scholarship that has sought to
explain it. Rather, my analysis contends that taking a different route opens up new possibilities
for Black erotic agency. It is through the expression of desire, and with that her insecurities and
146 Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.

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ignorance, that Tracey can find the pleasure she seeks even if we watch her stumble time and
time again.
Tracey’s nosebleeds are also a manifestation of the characters’ over-the-top sexuality and
excess of interiority. In the opening scene, Ronald feigns tiredness to get rid of Tracey.147 As she
leaves his house and returns home, she turns back to the audience. Tracey explains that while
Ronald always sleeps when she is around, she could never fall asleep in front of him on account
of her “wet dreams.”148 She does not, of course, mean wet dream in the commonly used sense.
Instead, she is describing her frequent nosebleeds that occur while she has sexually stimulating
dreams or thoughts. The invocation of wet dreams further signals Tracey’s arrested development
by attaching her to a phenomenon associated with adolescent boys. Additionally, it demonstrates
her lack of control over her body. The nose bleed, like menstruation or breastfeeding, becomes
the site where the boundary between the inside and the outside of the body is breached. Tracey’s
internal desires do not just overflow out of her mouth towards the viewer, they overflow out of
her body while both asleep and awake. When she explains this phenomenon the scene cuts to a
past instance while she was asleep and dreaming about Jay-Z. As I will detail in the next section,
in the nineteenth century the “proof” of Black women’s inherent sexual deviance was believed to
be found within their anatomy. In Chewing Gum, Coel Tracey’s sexual excess is bodily,
however, it is detached from the buttocks or reproductive organs. Later in the episode, we see her
uncontrolled nose bleeds when she interacts with Connor. Her first Connor induced nosebleed
happens as they make meaningful eye contact while riding together in an elevator. Since the
viewer, unlike Connor, knows the real reason for her nosebleeds it further solidifies her sexual
attraction to him despite the awkwardness of their first meeting. In the episode’s final scene,
147 “Sex and Violence.” 148 “Sex and Violence.”

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Tracey’s nose bleeds again as she kisses and straddles Connor. In the elevator, Tracey is stuck
between her budding attraction to Connor and her plans to seduce her boyfriend Ronald. The
sight of blood coming out of her nose breaks the moment between Tracey and Connor and the
ensuing awkwardness is exacerbated when she tries to pretend, unconvincingly, that she is
completely fine. Highlighting Tracey’s inability to appear nonchalant and lie convincingly, Coel
exaggerates Tracey’s scoff and head shake in response to Connor pointing out the blood oozing
from her nostrils. When they are alone in a bedroom at Candice’s house party in the episode’s
conclusion, however, she admits to the bodily response, but moves them back toward kissing and
dry humping. The nosebleed becoming detached from Ronald and later associated with Connor
illustrates Tracey’s evolving romantic and sexual interests through the progression of the
episode. Read through the lens of excess, Tracey’s nose bleeds work in conjunction with the
series’ use of direct address to critique the ways in which the politics of respectability have
circumscribed Black women’s erotic expression. Tracey’s desires have been overtly stymied by
her mother, sister, and boyfriend’s religious zeal as well as resultant lack of social skills, and
respectability is bound up within her current position. In other words, not having the outlet for
her sexual desires forces them to erupt from her body in multiple ways.
While Tracey’s ostensible lack of control over her body is embarrassing, for her and for the
audience, it also has the opportunity to be freeing. In an interview about the series Coel notes
that she wasn’t actually trying to make Tracey awkward as she is widely perceived to be. Instead,
she states, “I was trying to make someone who was unfiltered by the norms and expectations
popular culture puts on people, especially black women.”149 Tracey’s ability to be unfiltered on
149 Michael Coel as quoted in, Kathleen Newman-Bremang, “Chewing Gum’s Michaela Coel: ‘We Need Black
Women to Know That They Are Authors of Their Own Destiny,’” Elle Canada, September 21, 2017,
https://www.ellecanada.com/culture/movies-and-tv/chewing-gum-s-michaela-coel-we-need-black-women-to-knowthat-they-are-authors-of-their-own-destiny.

74
British television, which has historically had a dearth of Black, female characters, has resonated
with viewers. In her analysis of Chewing Gum and Insecure, Francesca Sobande interviews
Black, British women about their responses to Tracey as a character. One respondent noted that
despite the show not being aligned with her own sense of humor the fact that Tracey could be so
crude was in itself important.150
Building from Sobande’s work and profiles of Coel, I contend that Tracey can be read as an
alter ego for Coel, but more importantly for Black women viewers. In conversation with scholars
like Uri McMillan, Joan Morgan theorizes “Black female alters enable black women to indulge
the erotics of spectacle through performance, identity play, and altered embodiment, revealing
publicly aspects of black female sexuality and interiority that resists the…strategy of protection
and repression.”151 Since Chewing Gum is semi-autobiographical, both viewers and critics have
been curious about how closely related Tracey and Michaela Coel are.152 My interests in
positioning Tracey as an alter is not invested in “proving” that the character and the creator are
one. Instead, I read Tracey as a screen representation that can playfully engage erotic excess in
ways that many Black women watching feel they cannot. In her explanation of the Black
immigrant experience in Britain, Coel states, “we are the first generation born in this country so
we are really carrying a lot of stuff on our shoulders. This is our parents telling us we should
never have sex, we should never mention anything to do with sex…All of this is just oppression.
I think Chewing Gum is like a mockery of the entire thing.”153 Thus, Chewing Gum illustrates
how Coel attempts to create new representations that are not bogged down by pressures to be a
150 Sobande, “Awkward Black Girls and Post-Feminist Possibilities.” 151 Morgan, “It’s About Time We Got Off,” 139. 152 Simon Hattenstone, “Filthy, Funny and Christian: The Many Sides of Chewing Gum’s Michaela Coel,” The
Guardian, October 4, 2015, sec. Television & radio, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-andradio/2015/oct/04/michaela-coel-chewing-gum-e4-comedy-series-men-and-sex. 153 Coel as quoted in, Newman-Bremang, “Chewing Gum’s Michaela Coel.”

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“good immigrant.” In her “mockery” Coel illustrates new possibilities for Black sexuality. In the
next section, I move to how the show detaches the grotesque from the Black, female body. Along
with excess, the show’s engagement with grotesquerie illustrates how Coel uses the medium of
television to address the discourses used to subjugate Black women, while simultaneously
offering new strategies to critique hegemonic structures while prioritizing pleasure.
Sexual Grotesquerie
In her analysis of how Chewing Gum continuously teeters on the edge of comic abjection
Faye Woods suggests that the series “delights in white grotesquerie.”154 Using scholarship on the
discourse of racial and sexual difference in the 19th century, I illustrate how Chewing Gum
engages the grotesque. I extend Woods’s line of analysis by arguing that in Chewing Gum, Coel
makes the grotesque distinctly white by and through dislocating it from its historical attachment
to Black women’s bodies. White grotesquerie in Chewing Gum extends beyond the bodily or
physical; through her engagement with white sexuality, Coel illustrates how sexual grotesquerie
is a feature of the white psyche.
Sexual grotesquerie has been a primary analytic from which scholars have theorized
about discourses of Black female sexuality. In his landmark essay “Black Bodies, White Bodies:
Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and
Literature,” Sander Gilman argues that the development of a discourse of deviant Black female
sexuality relied upon the development of iconography across art, medicine, and literature.155
Critically, Gilman identifies how scientific classification, and its rising status in the 19th century,
154 Woods, “Too Close for Comfort,” 201. 155 Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late
Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1985): 204–42,
https://doi.org/10.1086/448327.

76
led to a discourse of sexuality that prescribed innate differences between that of Blacks and
whites and that the excessive sexuality of Black women was ostensibly evidenced on the
physical body. The conceptualization of Black women’s out of control sexuality served distinct
ideological purposes during a time when white Europeans and Americans were negotiating their
continued contact with the other as slavery was being abolished. Scholars have utilized Gilman’s
historical analysis and Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of the grotesque to examine how the
historical lineage of the “Hottentot Venus” still informs contemporary discourses of Black
female sexuality.156 Hobson articulates how white responses to Saartjie Baartman and other
women who were forced into the role of “Hottentot Venus” after her death “illustrate the
complexities of white responses to racial and sexual difference, which illicit both repulsion and
desire.”157 In their analysis of Venus and Serena Williams’ continued racist treatment by the
tennis and sports media establishment, McKay and Johnson illustrate how media coverage and
commentary of the Williams sisters moves from the “pornographic eroticism” that characterizes
coverage of women athletes into “sexual grotesquerie.”158 As they state, “The exceptional
athletic feats of the Williams sisters have occurred amidst a welter of denigrating discourses that
have moved from the narratives of ‘pornographic eroticism’ to powerful and denigrating
criticisms of their putatively ‘sexually grotesque’ behaviour, and their threatening corporealities
156 Aliyyah I Abdur-Rahman, “Black Grotesquerie,” American Literary History 29, no. 4 (December 1, 2017): 682–
703, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx028; Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University
Press, 1984); Janell Hobson, “The ‘Batty’ Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body,” Hypatia 18, no.
4 (ed 2003): 87–105, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2003.tb01414.x; James McKay and Helen Johnson,
“Pornographic Eroticism and Sexual Grotesquerie in Representations of African American Sportswomen,” Social
Identities 14, no. 4 (July 1, 2008): 491–504, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630802211985; Jaime Schultz, “Reading
the Catsuit: Serena Williams and the Production of Blackness at the 2002 U.S. Open,” Journal of Sport and Social
Issues 29, no. 3 (August 1, 2005): 338–57, https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723505276230. 157 Hobson, “The ‘Batty’ Politic,” 98. 158 McKay and Johnson, “Pornographic Eroticism and Sexual Grotesquerie in Representations of African American
Sportswomen.”

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have been recuperated by a racialised and sexualised semiotic regime.”159 As McKay and
Johnson illustrate in their analysis of the Williams sisters, the discourse of sexual grotesquerie
that has governed Black female sexuality has relied upon locating the scientific evidence for
Black sexual deviance on the body. Gilman and Hobson articulate how through Saartjie
Baartman’s exploitation, and the attendant rise in prominence of science and anthropology, the
“evidence” became the Black female buttocks and genitalia.
Fusing Tracey’s lack of knowledge about sex, awkward naïveté, and overenthusiastic
gusto, Coel subtly makes white bodies strange. In the episode “Binned” (S1,E2), Coel speaks to
the camera about her budding relationship with Connor. She states, “I always thought white
people were bad kissers. And it’s not their fault. It’s just that they’ve got really small lips and
they can’t embrace the challenge of lips like mine. And then they try to compensate for the lack
of lips with the tongue, and then the tongue ends up everywhere just flappin’ about yeah…”160
Tracey tells us that Connor, however, is a great kisser despite his inherited physical detriment. In
this case, the lips of Black women, conceived of in the dominant culture as too big, are
normalized and it is actually white people whose lips are too small. Coel extends this further in
her repeated awkward sexual encounters with Connor.
In the opening to the fourth episode “The Unicorn” the frame shows a hazy, white
buttocks.161 As the shot zooms in and moves to the right, Tracey becomes the focus, smiling at
the camera while she lays on her front with her feet kicked up on Connor’s bed. While Tracey is
in focus as she speaks to us, Connor’s butt moves to a marginal position on the edge. Tracey
159 McKay and Johnson, 500. 160 “Binned,” Chewing Gum (E4, October 13, 2015),
https://play.hbomax.com/page/urn:hbo:page:GYA8HTQUUx6_DwwEAAABD:type:episode.
161 “The Unicorn,” Chewing Gum (E4, October 27, 2015),
https://play.hbomax.com/page/urn:hbo:page:GYA8M1AR5A8LDwgEAAABE:type:episode.

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reveals to us that Connor’s dick is big, however, not so big as it could come up through her
throat and choke her as she tried to tell Candice two episodes prior. The camera then cuts to a
shot of Connor who stands naked at the edge of his bed holding a bag of crunchy snacks, which
he is throwing in the air and catching in his mouth. Tracey’s direct address is repeatedly used to
create a depiction of Connor as the epitome of both a romantic and sexual hero. The editing,
however, quickly disabuses the audience of Tracey’s romantic fictions. The camera, and the
audience with it, then moves to the side of the bed as Tracey looks over her shoulder to keep
conversing with us. Now that she is no longer facing her boyfriend, and further, directly looking
at his penis, she offers a more tempered assessment: “Connor’s dick is pink. And this
is…interesting. Sort of reminds me of raw chicken skin, but I try not to think about that. Instead,
I go with a long pink balloon.”162 Tracey’s discussion of white people’s lips detaches the white
phenotype from the norm. In her physical description of Connor’s penis, however, whiteness
moves from nonnormative to grotesque. Coel uses her expressive face and change in cadence
and tone to illustrate that Tracey is still trying to reframe her discomfort with the aesthetics of
Connor’s genitalia. Her connection between his penis and raw chicken skin is especially
evocative, if disturbing. Since raw meat is known to be a primary carrier of food-borne illnesses
and the audience has seen Tracey’s peers on the estate offer sexual advice rooted in Connor
penetrating her mouth, vagina, and anus, the connection to raw meat links white, male genitalia
to disease. This comparison harkens back to Gilman’s explanation of the development and
codification of the discourse of Black female sexual deviance in the late nineteenth century,
which connected Black women’s bodies to prostitution and the rise in rates of syphilis in Europe
during the time period.163 Raw chicken skin, thus, becomes a symbol that reverses this discourse.
162 “The Unicorn.” 163 Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies.”

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Since Connor stops them from having sex in the opening scene because Tracey is too
“pure,” she arranges for a threesome online with another woman. Sasha, the “unicorn” Tracey
found on a threesome hook-up app, exits her father’s car and both Tracey and our gaze is drawn
to the large cold sore on Sasha’s mouth suggesting she has herpes. Later, while the two playfully
rub against each other in an attempt to arouse Connor, Sasha tells Tracey to “dodge the face” on
account of her visible, contagious sores. Through the character of Sasha, the series connects the
grotesquerie of the body to the white psyche through the expression of kinks. Sasha’s
relationship to race is moved to unnerving ends throughout her interactions with Tracey and
Connor. When she first meets Tracey outside of the butcher’s shop where their interlude is slated
to take place, she confirms with Tracey twice that Connor is in fact white, suggesting a hesitation
with having sex with two Black people. Her preoccupation with race takes on a different form,
however, when the three try to coordinate how best to engage in a threesome. Sasha indicates her
desire to engage in race play by numerous references to the Steve McQueen film 12 Years a
Slave (2013), even going so far as to call Tracey Lupita. The audience views her interest in slave
play within the context of her character introduction. In contrast to the other white characters on
the show who are primarily working class and live on the estate with Connor and Tracey, Sasha
is dropped off by her father in an expensive car and both his accent and their conversation make
it clear that they are upper class. The white elite in Europe in the late nineteenth century
concretized discourses of sexual deviance to set themselves apart from whom Anne McClintock
calls dangerous classes: “the working class, the colonized, prostitutes, the Irish, Jews, gays and
lesbians, criminals, alcoholics, and the insane.”164 It is significant, then, that Coel would choose a
posh, white girl as the vehicle to connect two different forms of white grotesquerie. The
164 Anne McClintock, “Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race, and the Law,” Boundary 2 19, no. 2 (1992): 71,
https://doi.org/10.2307/303534.

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argument embedded in this episode, then, is that it is the white, upper class who constructed the
notion of sexual deviance as a way to subjugate other groups and in turn conceal that they
themselves engaged in so-called “deviant” behaviors and, more importantly, propagated a
violent, sexual regime through colonial conquest and racialized slavery.
There are multiple other instances throughout the two-season series where white
characters’ desires are presented as the place where comic abjection moves into the grotesque. In
“Binning” (S1, E2), both the audience and Tracey are introduced to Connor’s mother, Mandy, as
she attempts to steal baby food from the shop Tracey works in. Throughout the episode, Mandy
shows a clear lack of boundaries with both her son and Tracey as she interrupts and comments
on their attempts to forge a sexual relationship, even going so far as to intercept Tracey when she
tries to visit Connor and make Tracey take sexy photos of her for a hook-up site. During the
episode’s conclusion, these two plot streams converge as Mandy tries to get her date to engage in
a role-play fantasy and spoon feed her baby food while she wears a onesie. As the baby food
dribbles out of Mandy’s mouth and her date scrambles from the room, the audience too wishes
they can escape the scene. Returning to the threesome episode, “The Unicorn,” Tracey and her
sister Cynthia are on parallel sexual journeys. While Tracey attempts to organize a threesome,
Cynthia introduces herself to internet porn and migrates to live-streaming chat rooms.165 After
clicking on a headless photo of a man with a sculpted chest and defined abs, Cynthia is shocked
to find a banal looking, middle aged man quite different from the picture. As Cynthia tries to
leave, the man burst into tears and repeatedly says he is going to commit suicide. Alarmed and
uncomfortable, Cynthia stays and half-heartedly attempts to console him. The man then drags a
165 For livestreaming and domestic space see, Bonnie ‘Bo’ Ruberg and Daniel Lark, “Livestreaming from the
Bedroom: Performing Intimacy through Domestic Space on Twitch,” Convergence 27, no. 3 (June 1, 2021): 679–95,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520978324.

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chair towards the noose he has hanging from his ceiling, and as Cynthia’s, and the viewer’s,
sense of alarm heightens considerably, we find out that he is not actually going to commit any
form of self-harm; this is all part of his sexual fantasy. Cynthia tries to process this new
information as he climbs atop the chair, wraps the noose around his neck, and tells Cynthia that
she’s in charge of telling him when to stop before he actually hurts himself. Cynthia, shocked,
concerned, and appalled, watches as he aggressively tugs his erection inside of his boxers as his
face becomes red and he gasps for air. Once she frantically yells the signal for him to stop, he
gets down and walks back toward the camera, having achieved both emotional and sexual
release. Cynthia, however, hasn’t received any pleasure from the interaction; she slams her
sister’s laptop and later vigorously does a religious exercise DVD to purge the experience.
I bring these two examples from the series together because they share similar themes.
Both white characters use digitally mediated modes of connection to “meet” their sexual
partners. The hookup and live video chat websites facilitate the strategic sharing of information,
including falsehoods, in order to attract companions. Additionally, Mandy and the man from the
chatroom both express excitement about the racialized difference between themselves and the
person on the other side of the screen. Before Rashad comes to her home, Mandy shows Tracey
her phone with her match’s profile on the screen and gushes that he is a “proper Syrian.”166
Similarly, once the man in the video chat sees Cynthia pop up he leans uncomfortably close to
his webcam and comments on her beauty. Though not explicitly racialized in the same way, his
comment about Cynthia’s beauty can be read through the lens of fetishization. Crucially, both the
man and Mandy conceal the true nature of their sexual fantasies until the end; thus, trapping their
minoritized companions in their fantasies without their full knowledge or consent. In the case of
166 “Binned.”

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Rashad, he comes to Mandy’s house under the false illusion that he is going to be engaging in a
much more “normative” sexual encounter; Cynthia is stopped from leaving the online chat room
by the man appealing to her sense of pathos and igniting the fear that he will actually engage in
self-harm. The audience is also not clued in to the truth of the matter until the end, aligning our
position with that of Rashad and Cynthia.
Through these scenes of white sexual fantasy, Coel engages the grotesque nature of the
white psyche. First, both white characters are aroused by culturally “deviant” scenarios. Though
these scenes can be read as mere kink shaming, the fact that both white fantasies rely upon the
Arab and Black subjects being conscripted into the white, sexual imagination without their full
knowledge of what they are participating in suggests a different thesis. The second, argues that
the white sexual psyche actually hinges on holding power over others. I do not want to suggest a
neat line in the sand wherein the white characters are all firmly on the side of deviance, while the
Black characters express normative sexual desires; clearly, Tracey herself dispels this simplistic
notion. Rather, I am contending that Michael Coel’s use of the grotesque fractures the dominant,
discourse of sexual grotesquerie as a distinct feature of Black womanhood, while simultaneously
creating the space to explore Black female sexuality through multiple registers.
Coel’s most pronounced examination of the colonial ways of thought that organize the
white sexual imagination comes in “Replacements” (S2, E2) where Tracey aims to replace her
best friend Candice who she is on the outs with and Connor who has a new girlfriend.167 While
passing out religious flyers for her devout mother, Tracey meets Ash. Ash is clearly out of place
on the estate; his tailored navy suit signals his class even before Tracey interrogates him about
his job and educational background. Their initial meeting calls to mind the “meet-cute”
167 “Replacements,” Chewing Gum (E4, January 19, 2017),
https://play.hbomax.com/page/urn:hbo:page:GYA8OyQdF0XOghgEAAABS:type:episode.

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conventions of the romantic comedy. However, throughout the episode it becomes abundantly
clear to both Tracey and the viewer that Ash is interested in Tracey because he fetishizes her
Blackness. Their meet-cute retrospectively takes on a different tenor; this wealthy, white man
who works in finance came to the estate as a form of racialized, sexual tourism. As Jennifer Nash
argues, “black sexualities are imagined to be pathologically related to spatial formations,”
specifically the ghetto.168 Ash’s sexual fetishization of Tracey is not only tied to her race, but
also to her class position and its perceived roots in the particular spatial formation of the council
estate. In his first text message to Tracey, Ash writes “Your skin is so smooth I want to devour it.
;) xx.”169 These types of comments incrementally escalate during their first date at a jazz club.
Throughout the series, Tracey has demonstrated her understanding of how skin color, phenotype,
and class structure dominant hierarchies of desirability and dating. On her date with Ash, she
points out that the two do not have equal status within this hierarchy. To which he responds:
“This face. These features. It’s like you’ve been kissed by God.”170 Later, as the two kiss in his
bedroom and Tracey takes off her top, Ash remarks with awe that her breasts are “so black.”
When they move to his bed, Ash’s sexualized commentary becomes more intensely racialized:
“You want this white dick, you naughty black bitch. You want this white cock on your black
tongue.”171 Adding white and Black as both descriptors reaffirms their “innate” difference and
showcases how Ash’s sexual fetish relies upon an essentializing discourse that positions distinct
body parts as exemplifying both racial and sexual difference. Tracey’s increasing discomfort is
evident on her face, and when Ash attempts to say that “[she’s] been a bad little n——“ she stops
168 Jennifer C. Nash, “Black Anality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (October 1, 2014): 448,
https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2721366. 169 “Replacements.” 170 “Replacements.” 171 “Replacements.”

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him, puts her clothes back on, and tries to leave.172 Ash pretends to have no knowledge of what
he just said and rationalizes his behavior by explaining that he has never been with a Black girl
before. However, the audience can see identifiably African art in the background of the frame,
casting doubt on his claims. Though Tracey intends to leave Ash behind permanently, her current
housing insecurity pushes her toward further participating in his fetish. The zenith of their
problematic dynamic comes when Tracey dresses up in “African,” tribal garb and does a chant
and dance while Ash masturbates. Their encounter is awkwardly interrupted by the arrival of his
Black, former wife and biracial children.
Ash’s fetish is predicated on colonial logics. To start, Ash requires Tracey to change out
of her regular clothing which dislocates her in space and time. As Anne McClintock argues, in
the nineteenth century, “colonized peoples were figured as sexual deviants, the living
embodiments of a primordial erotic promiscuity and excess.”173 Through costume and the
solicitation of her racialized performance, Ash seeks to position Tracey as an exotic other who
came from a faraway land and who is in possession of a “natural,” atavistic sexuality in an
attempt to inscribe the figure of the “Hottentot Venus” onto Tracey’s body. The set design
furthers this aim: his apartment is full of the color white and he has wrap-around floor to ceiling
windows. Their encasement in glass further speaks to Ash’s investment in colonial logics of
display and ethnographic exhibition. The conclusion of this scene, however, ruptures Ash’s
fantasy.
Tracey redirects her initial shame for participating in this colonial form of race play and
berates Ash. Here, their back and forth is worth quoting at length:
172 “Replacements.” 173 McClintock, “Screwing the System,” 71.

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Tracey: The black thing…the black thing is not cool.
Ash: Actually, it’s positive discrimination.
Tracey: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Five minutes ago you told me you were going to
destroy me. You wanna destroy me? Go and be in a remake of Roots, man! […]
Ash: I am a campaigner for ethnic minority power. I went to Kenya and The Gambia for
my gap year. And I love jazz!
Tracey: You…You’re the weirdest white boy I’ve ever met!174
As Ash attempts to placate Tracey’s ire through representing himself as a benevolent
“campaigner for ethnic minority power,” Tracey comes up with the perfect revenge. She goes
into Ash’s cabinets and grabs a bottle of wine and Marmite—dark red and brown respectively—
which she splashes and squirts all over his pristine white couch, provoking him by stating “Yes,
black and white, just like you want.”175 Earlier, Ash reclined on his white furniture and
masturbated intending to climax—and thus produce the white bodily fluid of semen—through a
colonial form of spectatorship. To subvert this, Tracey and his ex-wife Judith use dark
substances, which also bring to mind period blood and feces, to ruin the couch, which stands in
as a symbol of his social power.176 It is significant that they do not use their own bodily fluids to
achieve this destruction. This decision unlinks Tracey from late nineteenth century formulations
connecting Black women’s sexuality to sickness and disease and, if momentarily, from the white
174 “Replacements.” 175 “Replacements.” 176 L. J. Minor, “Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum: Redefining ‘Unruliness’ in London’s East End,” ed. Mary Irwin
and Jill Marshall (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/65126/.

86
comic women of the 2010s who have also mined humor from bodily secretions.177 Jennifer
Nash’s intervention into Black female sexuality studies uses the analytic of “black anality” to
argue that through their connection to the anus, Black female sexualities are constructed as
distinctly wasteful. She writes, “black anal pornographies construct black sexuality as
scatological, as distinctively and peculiarly drawn to bodily filth.”178 Instead of rejecting any
connection between black female sexualities and the non-reproductive, wasteful space of the
anus, Coel heightens it through her use of Marmite. Further, she revels in her destruction. This
righteous destruction differs from what Susan Fraiman terms “bathroom realism,” where womancentered cable television in the 2010s—specifically Broad City, Girls, and Insecure—use the
bathroom to represent the conventionally ugly, be that ugly bodily functions, and ugly body, or
ugly feelings.179 By using Marmite as proxy, Tracey recognizes then exposes the ideological
underpinnings of Ash’s sexual desires while separating herself from white, colonial formations
of the grotesque. The grotesque body has been a key feature of woman-centered comedies as
well as British working-class humor. Coel aligns herself with this comedic history but takes her
use of its beats to new heights. Alongside her use of excess, Coel makes a distinct intervention in
representations of Black women’s sexuality, representing the potentials of pleasure.
Chewing Gum, Romance, and The Expanded Middle
I have primarily focused on the ways in which Chewing Gum represents and interrogates
sexuality, and I want to wrap up my reading of the series by examining how the space Chewing
Gum opens up for exploring Black women’s desire is bound up within the series’ relationship to
177 Susan Fraiman, “Bathroom Realism and the Women of Cable TV,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 47, no. 3 (March 2022): 589–611, https://doi.org/10.1086/717698; Woods, “Too Close for Comfort.” 178 Nash, “Black Anality,” 453. 179 Fraiman, “Bathroom Realism and the Women of Cable TV,” 457.

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the romance genre. Critically, the series upends one of the biggest generic conventions of the
romance: the happy ending. In the final episode of the series, the motley crew of the estate
gathers together for the celebration of one of its members new babies. Tracey and Connor, now
broken up, look across the green at one another and exchange a smile. Connor has come with his
new girlfriend, who Tracey is finally no longer jealous of, and Tracey holds Candice’s hand as a
sign of friendship and solidarity. Tracey’s stance and closing monologue illustrate that love
remains at the heart of Chewing Gum; however, rather than the love of the central couple
anchoring the series, Chewing Gum highlights friendship, family, and community. As a viewer, it
is still a satisfying end to the series, mostly because watching Tracey’s journey over the course
of two seasons supplants the desire for a more traditional happy ending that centers the couple.
I contend that Chewing Gum’s de-emphasization of the traditional happy ending of the
romance, illustrates the possibilities of the television rom-com in the “post-romantic” age.
Following Elizabeth Alsop, I argue that television’s expanded middle creates the space for
Chewing Gum’s ideological possibility. Chewing Gum is of course not isolated in its depreciation
of the end. Scholars of the soap opera have illustrated the ways in which television melodramas
differ from their filmic counterparts through an expanded middle and the resistance of narrative
closure.180 Others, namely Jason Mittell and Michael Newman and Elana Levine, have also
argued that the paratextual framing of the planned end has come to mark the era of serialized
“complex” or “quality” television as a way to separate these series from the rest of the television
landscape. Though not a serialized, hour-long drama, Chewing Gum, like other sitcoms, follows
this resistance to narrative closure. While I will come back to the reasons behind the series actual
end in this chapter’s conclusion, here, I want to highlight Chewing Gum’s uses of the middle. For
180 Feuer, “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today”; Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced
Fantasies for Women.

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Tracey, who consistently fails at mimicking normative romantic and sexual scripts, the repetition
of the sitcom and its balance of episodic and serialized narrative impulses allows for her to
attempt to enact her desires again and again even after what may seem like an awkward failure to
the audience. As I will argue in my analysis of Thirst Aid Kit, the episodic nature of the
fanfiction drabbles create an indefinite and expansive middle from which new articulations of
Black female sexuality can be created. Both Chewing Gum and Thirst Aid Kit demonstrate ways
to conceive of Black women’s sexuality outside of both the colonial logics of deviance or the
frameworks of “respectability” and “cultural dissemblance” that many Black women reformers
in the first half of the 20th century utilized. What makes the new articulation of Black women’s
sexuality and pleasure possible in both Chewing Gum and Thirst Aid Kit is the expanded
narrative middle. The middle, thus, remains a site of critical, feminist possibility.
Thirst Aid Kit
Thirst: (def) Desire, greed, obsession, or lust for an object or person characterized by over
eagerness or obsessiveness that is obvious to everyone around you.181
The people we thirst for are living mirrors, reflecting more than just what we like, or even who
we are—they reflect what we need.182
In 2017, the definition of thirst transformed. As Soraya Roberts at Longreads traces,
181 “Urban Dictionary: Thirst,” Urban Dictionary, December 28, 2012,
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Thirst. 182 Laura Bogart, “The Therapeutic Rise of Celebrity Thirst Culture,” The Week, November 1, 2019,
https://theweek.com/articles/864794/therapeutic-rise-celebrity-thirst-culture.

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thirst had previously been associated with a form of desperation—for sex, for approval.
However, between 2017 and 2019, she argues, “women got a hold of it. These women objects for
so long within an atmosphere of men’s ambient lust, emerged to twist thirst from a flying wish
into full-bodied desire.” The podcast Thirst Aid Kit, which premiered in 2017 and was hosted
and co-produced by Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, took up and advanced the emerging
definition of thirst through lusting out loud. Beyond articulating the hosts’ own lustful desires,
Thirst Aid Kit demonstrates— through cultural criticism, interviews with celebrities, and
fanfiction—how the social, the cultural, and the political are intertwined with thirst. The podcast
uses popular culture as a lens to engage how we arrive at our own desires, untangling how and
why someone is attractive to them personally and read as desirable within broader culture.
Adewunmi and Perkins state in interviews that their show understands thirst as a “holistic
experience,” that goes beyond physical attraction.183
Part of their holistic approach includes an analysis of the thirst object of the week’s “star
text.”184 In their discussion of Keanu Reeves’ performance in My Own Private Idaho (1991), for
example, Perkins notes
the beauty in that dark floppy fantastic hair was just so compelling to me…It’s an
extension of his acting really…He can make it tremble with rage. He can make it just
kind of flop like “I’m really into you.…Look at me pull my fingers through it”…Like
ugh he’s just amazing.
The connection here between a common marker of attractiveness, hair, and his craft is indicative
of the show’s approach to celebrity and desirability politics. I examine Adewunmi and Perkins’
183 Mattie Kahn, “Someone Pour Me a Cold Drink, the Thirstiest Podcast on the Internet Is Here,” ELLE, November
14, 2017, https://www.elle.com/culture/a13528305/thirst-aid-kit-podcast-bim-adewunmi-nichole-perkins-interview/. 184 Richard Dyer, Stars (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).

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analysis of their thirst objects’ star texts as well as the fanfiction drabbles the hosts write that
bookend each episode of the podcast to ascertain how the show engages the relationship between
race and sound, mediated representations of sexuality, and the romance genre. In this vein, my
analysis of Thirst Aid Kit is rooted in Black feminist theories of sexuality, podcasting and sound
studies, and popular romance studies.
As some scholars and critics have noted, podcasting is structured by whiteness
technologically, industrially, and stylistically.185 I contend, however, that Adewunmi and
Perkins’ accents, diction, and uses of Black cultural touchstones disrupt podcasting’s hegemonic
“white aurality”, which in turn constructs an “intimate public” with Black women listeners.186
With this argument, I offer an addendum to recent analyses of podcasts’ intimacy by examining
how race inflects the relationship between host, listener, and device.187 Second, I look at how the
podcast deploys thirst as an analytic. In conversation with Black feminist theories of sexuality, I
argue that through the affordances of an aural medium, Thirst Aid Kit mobilizes thirst and its
attendant affective performances to create the space for Black women to revel in pleasure rather
than shield their sexuality and desire from others. Finally, I build from scholars in popular
romance studies to illustrate that the eroticism of Thirst Aid Kit’s fanfiction is always in dialogue
with the conventions of the romance; however, the podcast upends the genre’s hegemonic
185 Briana Barner, “Moving From The Margins: Blackness, Podcasts and Racialized Audio Space,” Flow (blog), July
30, 2018, https://www.flowjournal.org/2018/07/moving-from-the-margins/; Anjuli Joshi Brekke, “The Sound of
Yellow Rain: Resisting Podcasting’s Sonic Whiteness,” in Radio’s Second Century: Past, Present, and Future
Perspectives, ed. Michael Brown and John Allen Hendricks (Rutgers University Press, 2020), 173–90,
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvwcjfxv.15; Reggie Ugwu, “Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings of ‘For Colored Nerds’ Play
for Keeps,” The New York Times, November 17, 2021, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/arts/brittanyluse-eric-eddings-for-colored-nerds-podcast.html. 186 Marie Thompson, “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies,” Parallax 23, no. 3 (July 3, 2017):
266–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339967; Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished
Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 187 Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry, eds., Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (Springer,
2018); Martin Spinelli and Lance Dann, Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution (Bloomsbury Publishing USA,
2019).

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whiteness and its focus on narrative conclusion.188 Ultimately, in line with my analysis of
Chewing Gum I use Thirst Aid Kit as a case study to illustrate how Black women’s cultural
production in recent years foregrounds the ideological possibilities of pleasure.
Podcasting’s Intimacies and Racialized Aurality
Radio and podcasting scholars note the first use of the term podcast in a 2004 article in The
Guardian.
189 Since then, scholars, podcasters, and critics alike have tried to define the medium in
terms of its unique production, distribution, and reception, and, critically, its relationship to
radio. While scholars have argued for the distinctiveness of podcasting as a form, others, namely
Andrew Bottomley, have been skeptical of podcasts framing as “new” media or as a “disruption”
of old forms.190 Instead, Bottomley argues that podcasting is continuation of radio’s longstanding flexibility. The aim of this chapter is not to wade into debates about medium specificity;
however, I begin here because across these works scholars of podcasting return to a feature they
think sets audio apart: intimacy.
Intimacy is a productive interpretive frame for my analysis because of its discursive
embeddedness in both studies of podcasting and studies of romance. When I first began listening
to Thirst Aid Kit in 2017, I was immediately struck by how close I felt to the hosts and the
feeling that the podcast had been made for me. But where did these feelings of closeness come
from? Podcasting has been constructed as uniquely intimate by platforms, cultural critics,
188 Elizabeth Alsop, “The Radical Middle: Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and the Subversive Potential of the
TV Post-Romcom,” in After Happily Every After: Romantic Comedy in a Post-Romantic Age, ed. Maria San Filippo
(Wayne State University Press, 2021), 219–40; Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction. 189 Hammersley, “Audible Revolution.” 190 Richard Berry, “Part of the Establishment: Reflecting on 10 Years of Podcasting as an Audio Medium,”
Convergence 22, no. 6 (December 1, 2016): 661–71, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516632105; Andrew J.
Bottomley, Sound Streams: A Cultural History of Radio-Internet Convergence (University of Michigan Press,
2020); Spinelli and Dann, Podcasting.

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scholars, and podcasters themselves.191 She states, “podcasting’s self-descriptions as
intimate…draw on historical constructs of intimacy to negotiate podcasting’s mediality in terms
of physical and temporal closeness.”192 Thirst Aid Kit, through its narrative mode of casual, even
confessional, conversation between friends evokes this. I build on and extend Euritt’s
intervention in podcast studies—namely, that intimacy is a discourse and not an innate feature of
the form—by thinking through how intimacy is formed by and through race, gender, place, and
medium.
I contend that the intimacy Thirst Aid Kit curates with and for its listeners is multivalent. The
podcast hosts disrupt the “white aurality” of podcasting; their accents, diction, and performance
of affect are spatially specific, highlighting the Black communities in Nashville and East
London. This produces a form of sonic resonance that hails Black women listeners, particularly
cisgender and heterosexual, of the Anglophone diaspora. My understanding of how audio
productions, and more broadly both hearing and listening, are racialized is influenced by sound
scholars Jennifer Lynn Stoever and Marie Thompson. Interrogating the “ontological turn” in
sound studies, Thompson argues
white aurality can be understood as not just relying upon but actively producing a series
of bifurcations in its ‘hearing-with’: it amplifies the materiality of ‘sound itself’ while
muffling its sociality; it amplifies neurological sound art and, in the process, muffles
other sonic practices…all the while invisibilizing its own constitutive presence in hearing
the ontological conditions of sound-itself193
191 Alyn Euritt, Podcasting as an Intimate Medium (London: Routledge, 2022),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003340980; Hannah McGregor, “Podcast Studies,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Literature, June 20, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1338. 192 Euritt, 3. 193 Thompson, “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies,” 274.

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This phenomenon is evidenced in podcast studies where the ways whiteness structures form,
production, and even our understanding of what a podcast is remains largely unmarked.
Race is largely elided in the subfield; however, work within the burgeoning field of Black
podcast studies is disrupting this norm. My argument is in conversation with scholarship from
Sarah Florini and Briana Barner who theorize how Black sonic signifiers attract and engage
particular listening publics.194 Florini writes, “the use of Black cultural commonplaces along
with the intimate qualities of radio-style audio allow the podcasts to reproduce a sense of being
in Black social spaces” which she identifies as the church or the barbershop/beauty salon.195
While Spinelli and Dann have argued that the distribution and reception mechanisms of podcasts,
namely earbuds, headphones, and mobile devices are an integral component of podcasting’s
intimacy, Florini takes this a step further. She asserts mobile devices as the primary technology
of podcast consumption and listeners’ use of headphones have the ability to “cocoon” Black
listeners as they navigate hegemonic, white spaces.196 Similarly, Barner’s analysis of The Read
(Loud Speakers Network, 2013-) identifies the podcast as a “racialized, sexualized and gendered
space…where Kid Fury and Crissles [the hosts] theorize about their locations as Black, queer
people existing within a political landscape that calls for the dismissal and refusal to accept their
humanity.”197 Most resonant for my own analysis is Barner’s illustration of how The Read’s
racialized sound is also distinctly spatial. Unlike the podcasts Florini and Barner analyze,
however, Thirst Aid Kit was produced and distributed by the audio divisions at Buzzfeed and
Slate, instead of Black, independent networks. Despite being aligned with media companies that
194 Barner, “Moving From The Margins”; Sarah Florini, “The Podcast ‘Chitlin’ Circuit’: Black Podcasters,
Alternative Media, and Audio Enclaves,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 22, no. 2 (July 3, 2015): 209–19,
https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2015.1083373. 195 Florini, “The Podcast ‘Chitlin’ Circuit,’” 210. 196 Florini. 197 Barner, “Moving From The Margins,”

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are ostensibly non-raced, Thirst Aid Kit uses different components of Black women’s aural
cultures to construct intimacy in ways that disrupt the white podcasting landscape.
Thirst Aid Kit’s Intimate Public
Thirst Aid Kit curates a feeling of intimacy amongst listeners through their use of Black
vernaculars and cultural touchpoints. According to Lauren Berlant, an intimate public “flourishes
as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience
of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion
about how to live as an x.”198 The podcast’s construction of the intimate public Berlant describes
is evident in an April 2020 episode about Simu Liu and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. The hosts
discuss Simu Liu’s character (Jung) on the Canadian sitcom Kim’s Convenience (CBC, 2016-
2021), and they play a humorous clip where Jung winds up shirtless in front of his roommate’s
date who identifies the smell of one of his grooming products. Both hosts note their appreciation
for his character’s use of shea body butter, which only enhanced their thirst for Jung on the
show. They then encourage any male listeners to “lotion up.”199 Their discussion connects the
hosts to Black women listeners through the importance of shea butter to Black women’s
grooming routines across the diaspora, producing the “affective scene of identification amongst
strangers” Berlant identifies.200 Though Buzzfeed’s and later Slate’s audio production units
cannot by design construct an “enclave” for Black listeners away from the discipling, white ear,
the show itself uses particular cultural codes to signal which listeners they prioritize.
198 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), viii. 199 Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, “No Chill With Yahya and Simu,” Thirst Aid Kit, April 16, 2020,
https://www.stitcher.com/show/thirst-aid-kit/episode/no-chill-with-yahya-and-simu-68866360. 200 Berlant, The Female Complaint.

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Thirst Aid Kit’s uses of cultural touchstones, Black regional vernaculars, and shared histories
is most evident in this episode’s discussion of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Early on, Perkins goes
through Abdul-Mateen’s biography and states “I knew without even knowing that he was from
New Orleans…He had this sheen about him.”201 She goes on to articulate how his “peacock
attitude” identifies him as a New Orleanian. Perkins tries to explain how she came to her
conclusion, but it is evident in listening that it is hard to put into words. Her commentary is
targeted towards a subset of the audience that understands the enigmatic, confident aura of Black
men from The Big Easy. Similarly, Adewunmi highlights that these same qualities, to her, make
him Nigerian. Adewunmi knows that the actor is not actually from Nigeria; however, his true
birthplace matters little. This is about his essence, his energy:
When I look at Yahya, without a shadow of a doubt, I’m like that man is several
percentage points Nigerian. Like he reminds me of no fewer than six uncles of mine who
are just kind of like: listen “If God didn’t want me to be pretty, I wouldn’t be pretty.”202
Both hosts take the same elements of the actor’s persona and align him with particular
expressions of Black masculinity that are specific to their own experiences as a Black Southern
and a Nigerian-British woman.
Additionally, the episode calls attention to how racist histories shape the actor, his
experiences, and how he resonates with Black audiences. In their discussion of Abdul-Mateen’s
work ethic, they highlight his experience teaching himself to swim which he discussed during the
Aquaman (2018) press tour. Perkins states that she admires him because it took her “years to get
up the nerve” to learn. What Perkins is noting without explicitly stating it is that many Black
201 Adewunmi and Perkins, “No Chill With Yahya and Simu.” 202 Adewunmi and Perkins.

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Americans do not learn to swim in childhood.203 While this is a brief moment in the overall
episode, it is another example of how the show uses cultural resonance to create intimacy.
Perkins knows that many Black listeners will identify with learning to swim later in life or with
the anxiety swimming can induce. Language, in addition, to cultural references is also an
important component of creating their intimate public.
Idioms, vernacular traditions, and call outs also bridge Thirst Aid Kit and Black women
listeners through distinctly racializing the intimacy of audio. Another example from this episode
is Perkins’s analysis of Abdul-Mateen’s relationship to Black women audiences. Responding to
Adewunmi’s delight in Black women’s particular performance of thirst for the actor, Perkins
states “…and Yahya knows what side his bread is buttered on. Because he knows that its
black women that are gonna boost him to a point where he’s probably not gonna need us
anymore and then will forget about us, but…” Adewunmi interrupts with “Oooof. Come on
Waiting to Exhale!”204 When Perkins deploys the Southern saying her accent thickens and her
cadence slows down. It speeds up in the second half of her declaration when she acknowledges
the pattern of ascending stars leaving behind the Black women they relied upon before garnering
mainstream success. Adewunmi’s spontaneous interjection “oooof” demonstrates surprise,
agreement, and acknowledgment all at once. The Waiting to Exhale (1995) reference activates
multiple registers of the intimate public and positions the show as a part of the lineage of Black
women’s media. Intimacy, here, encapsulates the closeness cultivated through regional sayings
and cultural references, but also a shared history of being cast aside or taken advantage of.
Through rhetorical moves and references like this, the podcast’s construction of intimacy also
203 Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (University of North Carolina
Press, 2009).
204 Adewunmi and Perkins, “No Chill With Yahya and Simu.”

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creates the space for the hosts to prioritize Black women’s pleasure and depict their desire
through the use of fanfiction drabbles.
Audible Thirst
“Mark-Paul gently touches my [beep]. I gasp from [beep]. He looks up and down [beep].
I’m going to [beep] he says. Don’t move.”205
As is typical with opening drabbles on Thirst Aid Kit, one host reads her story to the other,
who, like the audience, is hearing it for the first time. The non-reading host, however, hears the
uncensored version, while the listeners are always tasked with filling in the blanks. Since the
beeps literally block out the whole story, the listener is invited into the writing and constructing
of the fantasy. Building from my analysis of how the podcast’s racialized aurality builds an
intimate public with Black women listeners, here, I contend that through the affective
performance of thirst, the podcast makes Black women’s desires—generally hidden or
distorted—audible. More specifically, I examine the podcast’s opening drabbles and closing
fanfiction stories alongside organic, aural expressions of thirst—mostly groans and sighs— to
illustrate how Adewunmi, Perkins, and the rest of the podcast’s production team move Black
women’s discussions of sex, desire, and intimacy from a “politics of silence” to a “politics of
articulation.”206 Similar to Chewing Gum’s deployment of direct address, the podcast’s
expression of Black women’s desire counters hegemonic frameworks of Black sexuality without
adopting the strategic silence embedded in strategies like “dissemblance.”207
205 Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, “Mark-Paul Gosselaar Can Catch It,” Thirst Aid Kit, October 17, 2019,
https://www.stitcher.com/show/thirst-aid-kit/episode/mark-paul-gosselaar-can-catch-it-64659841. 206 Hammonds, “Black (W)Holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” 207 Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.”

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The opening drabbles of Thirst Aid Kit are marked by their brevity. In the drabble about
Mark-Paul Gosselaar that I opened this section with, Perkins communicates her fantasy in just
over twenty words. The most striking element of these drabbles is the redacted parts. While the
recognizable bleep is likely deployed in part to protect existing and potential relationships with
advertisers, this can also be read as a narrative device that amplifies the aural intimacy the
podcast curates with listeners and, as I suggest, part of the sound of thirst. Bleeping out
(presumably) sexually charged terms allows the listener to actively participate in the fantasy.
Though the hosts cannot hear listeners and incorporate their thoughts, feelings, and feedback into
the episode in real time, the ability for the audience to insert their own terms and scenarios into
the drabble allows for a greater feeling of intimacy through facilitating the aura of liveness.208 As
Euritt and Florini both argue in their explorations of podcasting’s intimacy, the conversational
style of some podcasts allows listeners to feel as if they are participating in a conversation as it
occurs. Aside from interview questions for guests, the fanfiction drabbles are one of the only
elements of the podcast that are obviously scripted in advance; therefore, intimacy vis-a-vis the
feeling of temporal closeness needs to be curated for the opening and closing segments of the
show. Allowing listeners to participate in this way produces intimacy through manufactured
liveness and providing a stake in the story. The use of bleeps may be read by some as a
concession to respectability: censoring sexualized terms and scenarios to maintain some
semblance of a “positive” image. However, I read this practice as just the opposite. The metanarrative the hosts and producers developed about Thirst Aid Kit continually stated that the
show’s mission was to give listeners permission to “lust out loud.”209 Indeed, the bleep gives the
208 Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in Regarding Television: Critical
Approaches—An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1983), 12–21. 209 Adewunmi and Perkins, “Hey, Did You Hear About Thirst Aid Kit, BuzzFeed’s New Podcast?”; Kahn,
“Someone Pour Me a Cold Drink, the Thirstiest Podcast on the Internet Is Here.”

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listener permission to consider and supply far more disrespectable terms than likely were
initially written.
In fact, in the final episode of the podcast the hosts uncensored some of their previous
drabbles and revealed that they occasionally subverted the expectations of listeners by bleeping
out innocuous terms or scenarios. In “The Emotional Intelligence of Brian Tyree Henry” Perkins
reads “‘Turn over. Lie on your belly,’ I tell Brian. I press a thumb [bleep]. He inhales sharply.
‘Do you want me to keep going?’ I ask. ‘Yeah.’ he moans into the pillow.” The producers
strategically bleep out Perkins’s words in the middle to suggest that the narrator has pressed her
thumb into the actor’s rectum. Instead, Perkins is actually painting a scene where she pops the
pimples on his back. Through creating the conditions for the listener to participate in
constructing the fantasy written in the drabble, Thirst Aid Kit further takes up the charge Evelynn
Hammonds laid out decades earlier. If Black feminist theory has produced and exacerbated
silences around Black women’s sexuality, Thirst Aid Kit illustrates an avenue for its articulation.
The podcast’s construction of audible thirst also relies on the hosts’ extemporaneous use of
recognizable sounds that are not discreet words, namely laughing, groaning, and sighing. These
sounds cement a connection to listeners because they feel as if they erupt from the hosts
unplanned, furthering podcasting’s narrativization of itself as intimate through curating feelings
of physical or temporal proximity. Returning to an early episode about Keanu Reeves, both hosts
have moments of affective excess. Where their memories of seeing Keanu on screen at key
points in their life and in the actor’s trajectory produces an emotional response, it exits their body
as sound. When Adewunmi discusses Keanu Reeves’s long hair in the Nancy Meyers classic
Something’s Gotta Give (2003), Perkins lets out an “Mmmmmm. Hmmmmm.”210 This auditory
210 Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, “Keanu.,” Thirst Aid Kit, November 23, 2017,
https://www.stitcher.com/show/thirst-aid-kit/episode/keanu-52326663.

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expression of thirst reappears in this episode—Adewunmi repeats it in their discussion of Neo
and Trinity’s intimate scene in The Matrix Reloaded (2003). In their discussion of Point Break
(1991), Perkins begins by with his physicality explaining that “Keanu was so cut,” elongating
and emphasizing the word cut which prompts Adewunmi to audibly groan.211 Adewunmi
continually reacts as Perkins explains what made Reeves in that role so entrancing. Her voice
gets high pitched and she repeats “Ahhhhhh!”.212 The effects of these moments of audible thirst
is heightened by podcasts’ relationship to mobile technologies. Spinelli and Dann argue that
earbuds, because they are placed inside of the ear, collapse the distance between the podcast
speaker and the listener.213 Since podcast listeners are likely to utilize earbuds or headphones, the
actual technology has a symbiotic relationship to the content in Thirst Aid Kit. In other words,
every groan, giggle, and sigh from the hosts is put directly into the ear of the listener, which
enhances the affective intimacy of the podcast.
Both the podcast’s audible thirst and the drabbles let readers into the minds of the hosts
through the expression of their desires, which pushes against the strategies of respectability and
dissemblance other Black women have utilized. The podcast’s audible thirst is in line with Joan
Morgan’s formulation of Black female interiority. She states:
While interiority is widely understood as the quiet composite of mental, spiritual, and
psychological expression, black female interiority is that—and then some…the broad
range of feeling, desires, yearning (erotic and otherwise) that were once deemed
necessarily private by the ‘politics of silence.’ Now frequently expressed in black
women’s cultural expressions specifically for the purposes of observance and
211 Adewunmi and Perkins. 212 Adewunmi and Perkins. 213 Spinelli and Dann, Podcasting.

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consumption, it demands a black feminist reckoning. Black female interiority is the
codicil to cultural dissemblance.214 (Emphasis original)
My reading of the podcast is in line with Morgan’s framing of Black female interiority as a
“codicil” to the framework of cultural dissemblance. The culture of dissemblance relied upon
Black women creating their own positive self-images by adopting secrecy and a “self-imposed
invisibility” in order to “shield from scrutiny these private, empowering definitions of self.”215
Instead, Thirst Aid Kit makes the interiority of Black women known to wider publics through the
medium of podcasting. As I have explained in the previous section, the podcast uses several
cultural commonplaces to mark Black women as their intended audience, but they were by no
means the only audience. The podcast’s scripting of thirst makes known the inner workings of
Black women’s desires and by embracing overt displays of sexuality and eroticism, and, in turn,
Thirst Aid Kit rejects the colonial frameworks of Black sexual deviance while resisting the
strategic silence many Black feminists have held up as the only possible counter.
Romance and the Expansive Middle
While the opening drabbles use auditory censoring to empower listeners to construct their
own erotic fantasies, the closing ones give listeners the unedited story Here, I turn to how
Adewunmi and Perkins’s fanfiction about their thirst objects interrogates long-standing
assumptions about the relationship between sex, romance, and whiteness. The discourse of
sexual deviance has distorted Black women’s sexuality within public consciousness, and we can
extend our analysis to how this relates to romantic love and its cultural (re)presentations. The
214 Morgan, “Why We Get Off.” 215 Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” 916.

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fanfiction the hosts write to close out each episode ruptures the whiteness embedded in the
romance genre and reduces the genre’s emphasis on a happy ending in favor of returning to an
expansive middle.
Jayashree Kamblé argues that the romance genre is not necessarily white because the
protagonists often are, but because the genre is invested in a “white poetics” that aligns the hero
and heroine with thematic through lines that have been used to articulate and distinguish
whiteness through its relationship to a “soul” and the Protestant capitalist ethic.216 Kamblé
writes, “the exercise of white female sexuality is limited by white male self-control, a response
linked to the adoption of a Protestant value of physical austerity and an increasingly diverse
environment that provokes anxiety about the blurring of ethnic distinctions.”217 Put another way,
the whiteness of the male protagonist in a romance novel hinges on the tension between
controlling his “baser” desires—perennially associated with racialized groups—and the
reproductive imperative to further the white race. Relatedly, white women throughout the genre’s
history are expected to engage in “compulsory demisexuality,” wherein their freedom to engage
in sex enthusiastically is tied to being in love with a heterosexual, white man.218 Colonial
discourses of Black women’s sexuality as excessive or wasteful are co-constitutive with the
discourse of white sexuality Kamblé identifies that is (re)constructed in the romance novel.
In Thirst Aid Kit these racialized discourses of sexuality are ruptured through the hosts’
scripting of Black female agency, interiority, and eroticism. Since the hosts themselves are
always the heroines of their romantic fictions, week after week, the drabbles show an emotional
range that has historically been denied to Black women within the cultural sphere. In a drabble
216 Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction. 217 Kamblé, 139. 218 McAlister, “Breaking the Hard Limits.”

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Perkins writes about Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, the story begins at a point of tension.219 The
listener does not know what Rhys has done that is so frustrating, but Perkins makes her feelings
recognizable to listeners. Rhys’s apology in this scene is distantly erotic. While standing behind
Perkins who is angrily trying to wash dishes. Rhys apologizes and begins to kiss her neck and lift
up the skirt of her dress. Perkins reads,
My annoyance shrank as his finger walked apologies up the back of my thighs. I arched
into him and he curved his mouth against my ear. “Do you think the neighbors can see
us,” he whispered. I gripped the counter and inched my feet apart. He smiled into my
neck before he bit it. “Face me,” he said.220
Though Perkins cuts the story off before the two “characters” actually have sex, the story leads
the reader directly to a precipice. This story, and the rest of the drabbles on the podcast, disrupts
the white poetics of the romance genre by returning to the Black desiring subject in each episode
and illustrating that “[black people] too are lovers, [black people] too are erotic.”221 The
fanfiction stories expand representational possibilities for Black women in the genre without
forcing them into “compulsory demisexuality” or a sexless role. Put another way, Thirst Aid
Kit’s use of fanfiction rejects both the confines the genre has placed on white women’s sexual
expression and the call to conceal Black women’s sexuality.
In addition to disrupting the white poetics of the genre, the podcast’s drabbles de-emphasize
the happy ending in favor the expansive middle. The happy ending has been a genre defining
feature of the romance, so much so that in the rare case a film or romance novel does not end
with a couple happily together it is positioned as an outlier, a subversion, or not part of the genre
219 Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins, “A Bottle of Matthew Rhys-Ling,” Thirst Aid Kit, September 10, 2020,
https://www.stitcher.com/show/thirst-aid-kit/episode/a-bottle-of-matthew-rhys-ling-77611469. 220 Adewunmi and Perkins. 221 Belinda Edmondson, “The Black Romance,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1/2 (2007): 207.

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all together.222 Thirst Aid Kit has a much looser relationship to narrative closure. Though the
drabbles on Thirst Aid Kit all technically have an ending, the stories tend to start and end in the
middle of a broader story, only giving the listener a glimpse into the relationship between the
host and the thirst object of the week. Further, like the fanfic Perkins wrote about Matthew Rhys,
the stories frequently focus on quotidian moments like making up after a small argument or
getting dressed for a nice date. I contend that the host’s emphasis on domestic banality and the
everyda” across their drabbles highlights the eroticism and intimacy of everyday life over the
perennial courtship phase that marks many other works in the genre.223 Their stories embrace
tenderness and the pleasure of touch and attention over material signs of affection. Their stories
embrace tenderness and the pleasure of touch and attention over material signs of affection,
another way that intimacy is evoked in the podcast. This is significant because the genre has
historically connected whiteness, sex, romance, and capitalism through the happy unification of a
white couple resulting in the heroine’s economic security and upward class mobility. Further, the
traditional manifestation of the happy ending within the genre has been engagements, weddings,
and pregnancies. The fanfiction drabbles on Thirst Aid Kit, however, emphasize the happiness
and eroticism of everyday occurrences and intimate connections over the traditional life
milestones that codify white, heteropatriarchy.
Adewunmi’s drabble about Matthew Rhys renegotiates romance’s relationship to a
conventional happy ending. In the drabble, she becomes increasingly fatigued as she signs copies
of her book after an event. One of the last readers in attendance is Matthew Rhys, a former
romantic partner. It is evident that despite their prior romantic relationship not working out, the
222 James MacDowell, Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliche, Convention and the Final Couple (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Radway, Reading the Romance; Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the
Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 223 Kamblé, Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction.

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attraction and chemistry hasn’t diminished. Adewunmi adds details like how Rhys’s “Welsh
inflection was softer after having been in the States for so many years” or the way his beard felt
against her cheek when they embraced.224 While they banter and share a charged hug, Adewunmi
discloses to the listener at the end that she won’t ever actually take him up on his invite to dinner
the next time she’s in New York. After she finishes reading and Perkins reacts, Adewunmi states
clearly that she wrote the story without a happy ending just for Nichole. The drabble does not
start at the beginning of the couple’s story, but after their relationship concluded. When they part
ways the closing lines of the drabble suggest that Adewunmi will likely not see Rhys again,
eschewing the happy ending, but there is also just enough ambiguity left for the podcast listener
to imagine where the story might pick up again.
Many of the other drabbles contain a brief moment of connection like this. Others like the one
Perkins wrote about Rhys begin and end in the middle point of a couple’s story. Elizabeth Alsop
argues that serialized TV dramas widen the “ideological possibility” of the romantic comedy
through an emphasis on an expansive middle which creates the space for “digression, reversal,
and continual movement both toward and away from the traditional telos of romantic
comedy.”225 While each drabble on Thirst Aid Kit can be read as a closed text, the return to the
middle at the start of each expands the ideological possibility in similar ways to what Alsop
identifies in television. Thirst Aid Kit’s rescripting of Adewunmi and Perkins’s romantic, erotic
lives is in dialogue with the narrative conventions of the romance genre; however, it ruptures
many of the foundational frames, while foregrounding Black women as desired and desiring
subjects.
224 Adewunmi and Perkins, “A Bottle of Matthew Rhys-Ling.” 225 Elizabeth Alsop, “The Radical Middle: Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and the Subversive Potential of the
TV Post-Romcom,” in After Happily Every After: Romantic Comedy in a Post-Romantic Age, ed. Maria San Filippo
(Wayne State University Press, 2021), 220.

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Conclusion
Despite the possibilities of an expanded middle, media texts, including these, do
eventually come to an end. In September of 2018, BuzzFeed decided to shutter its entire audio
division and shift those resources to video production.226 An understanding of Thirst Aid Kit’s
intervention in the podcasting landscape necessitates an understanding of the show’s precarity.
New media ventures like BuzzFeed purport to expand creativity through new technologies and
modes of operation; however, they can also easily exacerbate many of the existing inequities
within journalism and media spaces. The podcast teams, of course, were not the final groups to
receive the axe from BuzzFeed as lay-offs have continued to plague the company five years
later.227 In a similar vein, Michaela Coel’s experience on Chewing Gum was plagued with
myriad challenges as Channel 4 and Fremantle Media touted their decision to hire an “outsider”
with no television experience, even as they withheld both support and recognition.228 Moving
towards my next chapter that thinks through the instability of the happily ever after at the current
conjuncture, this chapter’s conclusion engages the end of the media texts I have analyzed.
As I have discussed in the first chapter, Black creators have frequently sought out “new”
media ventures and platforms. Reggie Ugwu, writing about podcasters Brittany Luse and Eric
Eddings in The New York Times, states, “Between 2013 and 2016 and entire field of Black
podcasts bloomed…The pattern was a familiar development in the history of American
media…Black creators, under- or misrepresented in existing media, flocked to the new
226 Benjamin Mullin, “BuzzFeed News Cuts Podcasting Team to Focus on Video,” Wall Street Journal, September
19, 2018, sec. Business, https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzzfeed-news-cuts-podcasting-team-to-focus-on-video1537369455.
227 Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson, “BuzzFeed News, Which Dragged Media Into the Digital Age, Shuts
Down,” The New York Times, April 20, 2023, sec. Business,
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/business/buzzfeed-news-shut-down.html. 228 E. Alex Jung, “Michaela the Destroyer,” Vulture, July 6, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/article/michaela-coel-imay-destroy-you.html.

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landscapes in search of greener pastures.”229 However, as we have seen in the last few years, the
podcasting boom of the 2010s still marginalized Black creators and relied upon many of the
same logics of legacy media industries. After BuzzFeed shuttered its podcasting division,
Adewunmi and Perkins were able to move the show to Slate, not all of their colleagues, however,
were able to find new platforms or podcast networks. In the fall of 2020, the final episode of
Thirst Aid Kit dropped. While Slate did not give the show the axe, the hosts decided to conclude
the podcast because they no longer had the capacity or energy to keep it going. This form of gigified creative labor was and is exhausting. After leaving BuzzFeed the hosts had to reorient
themselves: Nichole Perkins continually discussed the trials of being a freelancer, Bim
Adewnumi was always trying to make time for her own writing amongst a new job producing
This American Life, and of course, the pandemic.
Similarly, it was Michaela Coel’s choice to leave Chewing Gum behind. However, her
experience working on the first two seasons was marked by myriad challenges. She consistently
had to advocate for the other Black actors on set, she was pushed to take out many of the darker
themes from her original one woman show because they wouldn’t play well with advertisers, and
the production company behind the show refused to make her an executive producer.230 Her
struggles working on Chewing Gum were exacerbated after Coel was drugged and sexually
assaulted one night while trying to crank out an episode of the show’s second season. As she
explains, “I saw [the Chewing Gum cast and crew] morph into an anxious team of employers and
employees alike; teetering back and forth between the line of knowing what normal human
empathy is and not knowing what empathy is at all.”231 Coel’s experience in the aftermath of her
229 Ugwu, “Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings of ‘For Colored Nerds’ Play for Keeps.” 230 Jung, “Michaela the Destroyer.” 231 Kaitlin Reilly, “Chewing Gum Star Michaela Coel Shares Story Of Sexual Assault On Heels Of Consent-Themed
TV Series,” Refinery29, August 22, 2018, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/08/208069/michaela-coel-sexual-

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assault became the basis for her next show I May Destroy You (BBC/HBO, 2020). I bring in
Coel’s experience being assaulted because for both Chewing Gum and Thirst Aid Kit, the show’s
endings were ostensibly the choice of the creators, but they existed within a larger matrix of
marginalization, patriarchy, and precarity. In my final chapter, I continue this thread to analyze
how precarity affects recent romantic comedies’ engagement with temporality. I conclude my
final chapter building on threads I have outlined here about how the romance genre’s happy
ending is increasingly unstable in the current media landscape.
assault-reveal-chewing-gum.

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Timing is Everything: Romantic Comedy’s Shifting Temporalities
Serendipitous meet cutes. Missed connections. Happily ever afters. In examining the many
narrative tropes that have emerged throughout the romantic comedy’s history, a throughline
emerges. Romantic comedies are preoccupied with timing. As examples of this continued
concentration on timing, we might think of the many scenes of a character racing through a
station as a train departs, as Simran does in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), or through an
airport trying to catch their love interest before their flight departs, which can be seen in films
from Love Actually (2003) to Little Italy (2018). The relationship between romance narratives
and timing predates its cinematic manifestation, and the genre’s engagement with timing directly
relates to both its narrative form and the changing socio-cultural dynamics works in the genre
emerge in.232 For example, television’s unique balance of serial and episodic narrative forms can
draw out the traditional chronology of coupling. This chapter takes up romance’s temporality
through recent television rom-coms starring Black women, specifically Hulu’s 2020 adaptation
of High Fidelity and the British sitcom Lovesick (Channel 4 2014, Netflix 2016-2018).
Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, originally published in 1995, chronicles London record
shop owner Rob as he deals with his breakup from his girlfriend Laura by going back through his
romantic relationships to figure out what keeps going wrong. The film adaptation, released five
years later starring John Cusack, faithfully follows its source material, but moves Rob and
Championship Vinyl to North Chicago. On Valentine’s Day in 2020, Hulu released their
adaptation of High Fidelity with an updated look. In the television adaptation, Rob is now a
queer, Black woman played by Zoë Kravitz, in a nod to her mother’s role in the original film.
232 Marjean D. Purinton, “Watches and Watching Time in British Romantic Comedy,” The Wordsworth Circle 39,
no. 1–2 (January 2008): 46–49, https://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045187.

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The series, like its predecessors, follows Rob as she recovers from her most recent and heartwrenching breakup; however, the move from novel to film to television allows more narrative
space for digressions away from Rob and Mac and the series builds out its supporting cast. In my
analysis, I examine how the television adaptation’s engagement with temporality and chronology
in the genre represents a recent turn towards cynical, realist depictions of romantic love that
address the fissures and anxieties of contemporary coupledom. I apply this same analytical lens
to the Channel 4 turned Netflix series Lovesick.
Like High Fidelity, Lovesick is preoccupied with the past and how it shapes who we are, and
who we love, in the present. While Rob in High Fidelity goes back through her top five
heartbreaks, Dylan contacts his past partners to disclose that he has tested positive for chlamydia.
Lovesick follows Dylan and his two best friends, Evie and Luke, as they attempt to sort out their
romantic lives. While Dylan has been in love with many women throughout his adult life, his
biggest love is his best friend Evie. Dylan and Evie are both in love with each other but can
never get their timing right. While Lovesick is less tonally cynical about romantic love than High
Fidelity, both use formal and narrative techniques like flashbacks to draw out the messiness of
contemporary coupling. Further, both series are not just concerned with the pasts of their
protagonists, they also examine the many pasts of the romance genre itself.
This chapter analyzes the romance genre’s relationship to temporality and chronology across
multiple registers. Through both close reading and critical media industry studies methods, I
examine the series and their paratexts through the socio-temporal frame of the “post,” through
how both series use flashbacks as a form of temporal disruption, and, finally, how both series
destabilize the happy ending as a genre defining feature of the romance. While other scholars
have discussed each of these areas in turn, I am especially invested in how both series’ casting of

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Black women affects their arguments about romantic love and timing. I begin by tracing how
High Fidelity and Lovesick illustrate some of the central tenets of the “post-romantic” age. In my
analysis, I demonstrate the ways that the series’ engagement, or lack thereof, with race puts forth
a post-racial politics in line with Kristen Warner’s framework of “plastic representation.”233
More specifically, the series use Black-cast as markers of visual diversity and of the network or
platform’s vaguely progressive ethos without actually delving into how race and racism structure
love and relationships. My second usage of temporality examines how both High Fidelity and
Lovesick use forms of temporal disruption and non-linear narrative structures, mostly through
flashbacks. I build from scholarship from Paul Booth and Laura Kogen about how television’s
increasing reliance on temporal disruption addresses contemporary temporal instability both in
the lives of viewers and in the media industries.234 Both series address a changing relationship to
temporality within broader culture and disrupt the traditional telos of the romantic comedy. In
their moves across periods in the protagonists’ lives, both use temporal rupture to demonstrate a
contemporary desire for temporal control amidst technology’s increased fracturing of normative
time. However, both series’ colorblind approach to temporal rupture has the effect of locking
some Black women characters into temporal conditions of stasis. The final part of my analysis
examines temporality in contemporary romantic comedy through the romance genre’s traditional
chronology, which results in a happy ending. I contend that, in recent years, the happy ending on
screen has become increasingly unstable. My reading of how High Fidelity and Lovesick
approach narrative conclusion challenges dominant theses of the happy ending as a genre-
233 Kristen J. Warner, “Plastic Representation,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (December 4, 2017),
https://filmquarterly.org/2017/12/04/in-the-time-of-plastic-representation/. 234 Paul Booth, “Memories, Temporalities, Fictions: Temporal Displacement in Contemporary Television,”
Television & New Media 12, no. 4 (July 1, 2011): 370–88, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476410392806; Lauren
Kogen, “Once or Twice upon a Time: Temporal Simultaneity and the Lost Phenomenon,” Film International
(Intellect, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1386/fiin.4.2.44.

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defining feature of the romance. In each of these areas of analysis, I demonstrate how these new
narrative trends related to temporality illustrate larger themes within contemporary, Western
understandings of romantic love and coupling.
Plastic Representation in the Post-Romantic Age
For both High Fidelity and Lovesick, the stories start at points of crisis. In High Fidelity, Rob
sits in an armchair in the living room of her Brooklyn apartment with tears streaming down her
face. Speaking directly to the camera, she lists her “Top Five All Time Desert Island Greatest
Heartbreaks” in chronological order. She lists the names—Kevin Bannister, Justin Kitt, Kate
Monroe, Simon Miller—however, before she can say the final name on her list, Mac
McCormick, the camera cuts to the other side of the room where Mac, her biggest and most
recent heartbreak, is packing his things and walking out of her life. Lovesick’s crisis has a much
more humorous tone. The series commences on a shot of our protagonist, Dylan, whose face is
shocked and slightly disturbed as he receives news from the doctor that he has a sexually
transmitted disease. He is informed that he must contact his past sexual partners, which he
decides to do personally rather than mail cards from the NHS, starting alphabetically. Both series
use similar conceits and illustrate how a character’s present-day romantic woes are bound up in
their past relationships. As many scholars have noted, romantic comedies respond to the cultural
and material conditions they emerge in.235 In this vein, recent romantic comedies have eschewed
the fantasy of the neotraditional age in the 1990s and 2000s in favor of more cynical and realist
depictions of romantic love.
In this section, my analysis of the genre’s shifting temporality regards High Fidelity and
235 Grindon, The Hollywood Romantic Comedy; McDonald, Romantic Comedy; San Filippo, After “Happily Ever
After.”

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Lovesick through the temporal frame of “post.” Both series contain narrative and aesthetic
elements that align them with the “post-romantic age.”236 In her analysis of recent industrial and
textual shifts in romantic comedy, Maria San Filippo identifies two forces that have shaped the
genre in recent years, “the ‘digital’ era of screen media production, distribution, and exhibition;
and the reconfiguration of social relations and practices linked to romance as a result of
neoliberalism, globalization, civil rights legislation (e.g. marriage equality), social media, and
other cultural factors.”237 Both television rom-coms at the center of my analysis are illustrative of
these trends. I extend San Filippo’s work by engaging how race, and specifically how post-racial
ideology, is embedded within these texts post-romanticism. High Fidelity addresses the postromantic age through its focus on an individual’s path to self-actualization, foregrounding
precarity rather than upward mobility, and it contends with interracial intimacy. Lovesick
similarly illustrates how social and romantic relations have been deconstructed and recomposed
due to broader socio-cultural forces. I argue that both series investments in colorblindness stymie
the potential to fully examine how Blackness might re-imagine the contours of the post-romantic
age. For High Fidelity, the series reimagining of Rob as a queer, Black women is meant to
account for the embedded whiteness and misogyny of the original novel and its film adaptation.
However, the series’ surface level engagement with racial and gender politics and its deployment
of plastic representation is indicative of streaming television’s approach to diverse casting. In
Lovesick, the series’ use of colorblind casting is borne out of public broadcasting’s move from a
soft form of anti-racist politics towards what Sarita Mailk calls “creative diversity” where race
becomes further depoliticized in favor of neoliberal understandings of commodifiable
236 See, Pamela Haag, Marriage Confidential: Love in the Post-Romantic Age, (Harper Perennial, 2012). 237 San Filippo, After “Happily Ever After,” 6.

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difference.238 While Evie is played by Black, British actress Antonia Thomas, her race has no
relation to her character or story. Scholars of contemporary romantic comedy have illustrated
how the genre’s narrative revisions from old forms have opened up ideological and
representational possibilities within the genre; however, I foreground race in my analysis of the
contemporary romance genre to illustrate how colorblindness can foreclose some of this
potential.
High Fidelity
Throughout the series, High Fidelity uses narrative and aesthetic means to highlight Rob’s
path as an individual. In her analysis of recent romantic comedies, Beatriz Oria argues that the
individualistic rom-com “usually involves some kind of romantic endeavor, but one that is
secondary the real issue at stake: the construction of the character’s self-identity.”239 The series
uses the mode of direct address alongside voiceover narration to guide the audience through
Rob’s romantic life and to depict Rob as a work in progress. Direct address in the series performs
what Faye Woods identifies as “an intricate dance of closeness and detachment.”240 Rob reveals
things to the audience that she won’t to other characters, but she does so at her own discretion.
Other series about millennial women figuring their lives out, such as Insecure or Fleabag, deploy
the narrative device to similar ends. Direct address is part of the series’ preoccupation with selfawareness. The device is used to comment on Rob’s own lack of self-awareness in that the
238 Sarita Malik, “‘Creative Diversity’: UK Public Service Broadcasting After Multiculturalism,” Popular
Communication 11, no. 3 (July 1, 2013): 227–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2013.810081. 239 Beatriz Oria, “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place:Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age,” in After
“Happily Ever After”: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age, ed. Maria San Filippo (Wayne State University
Press, 2021), 40.
240 Faye Woods, “Too Close for Comfort: Direct Address and the Affective Pull of the Confessional Comic Woman
in Chewing Gum and Fleabag,” Communication, Culture and Critique 12, no. 2 (June 2, 2019): 197,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz014.

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character’s self-absorption frequently hurts those around her. It is through direct address that the
audience can watch the character grapple with her internal realizations that she has hurt several
people in her life. Moreover, the series demonstrates a meta self-reflexivity about its own status
as an adaptation. Buoyed by the expanded narrative time of the television format, High Fidelity
grapples with the criticisms of its predecessors. Self-discovery is still a core component of the
film adaptation which also uses direct address in its transition from the page; however, Rob’s
journey as an individual is more clearly prioritized in the television series and it is more willing
to admit Rob’s faults.
For example, in the episode “Me Time” Rob attends her brother’s last hurrah, a night of
drunken debauchery that ends in a bar fight, as her brother tries to avoid dealing with his
imminent fatherhood. Rob invites Clyde, who she has rudely blows off in the first episode (a
scene I will return in the next section) and mostly calls when she needs a favor to help mitigate
the awkwardness of having to hang out with her ex-fiancée and his new partner. However, Rob
does not inform Clyde of the social dynamic he is walking into. The episodes title “Me Time” is
fitting for a narrative arc where Rob’s mounting selfish actions are finally met with real
resistance. Fueled by alcohol and cocaine, Rob’s brother shouts at her that her relationships all
fail because she is the problem. Despite Cam’s anger and harsh words being partially the result
of his own insecurities and various substances, even Rob has to admit that he is not entirely
wrong. If the book and film version of Rob is able to skate to the final scene with his selfabsorption roughly intact, television Rob is not so lucky. In the final episodes of the season, Rob
is forced to reckon with how she treats the people in her life from her family to Simon and
Cherise. The series’ character study which turns into self-introspection is aligned with the postromantic; Rob’s relationship to Mac ad Clyde are important, but never more than her relationship

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to herself.
In addition to a greater emphasis on the individual’s path to self-discovery, post-romantic
romcoms foreground precarity rather than upward mobility. Romantic comedy films of the neotraditional era frequently had protagonists with stable jobs within the culture industries. In recent
years, this has changed so that the genre’s protagonists’ work lives represent the increasing lack
of stability within cultural spheres. High Fidelity, like other recent New York rom-coms such as
HBO Max’s Love Life (2020-2021) or the film Obvious Child (2014), illustrates this reality
through highlighting the record store’s financial difficulties and lack of customers. Further, the
emphasis on precarity is illustrated through the series’ discussions of gentrification. As Rob
walks through her neighborhood of Crown Heights, her direct address and the mise-en-scène
highlight the dichotomy between an “authentic,” bohemian Brooklyn that Rob, her employees,
the record store, and her bodega represent and the gentrifying forces that threaten it, which in the
series are represented by a new coffee shop with a line out the door selling overpriced lattes and
clientele in Championship Vinyl that are interested in vinyl records for the aesthetic rather than
genuine appreciation. In her analysis comparing the Brooklyn-based film Obvious Child and
You’ve Got Mail (1998), which both feature the threat of a closing independent bookstore,
Martha Shearer argues, “the romcoms depiction of independent bookshops points to
gentrification as a simultaneously cultural and material process, both romanticizing a particular
model of urban culture and identifying pressures of both competition from big business and the
working of the real estate market.”241 In High Fidelity, the cultural dimensions of gentrification
are foregrounded, but the material dimensions, especially with regard to who exactly is being
displaced by the yuppies buying overpriced coffees, remains implicit. High Fidelity romanticizes
241 Martha Shearer, “Obvious Child, Bookshops, and Postcrisis Romcom Urbanism,” in After “Happily Ever After”:
Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age, ed. Maria San Filippo (Wayne State University Press, 2021), 166.

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a particular vision of Brooklyn that is visibly multicultural, bohemian, and eclectic, but is far less
interested in the racialized and classed realities of displacement and the rising cost of living in
Brooklyn.
Lastly, like other recent romantic comedies, particularly released on streaming platforms,
High Fidelity prioritizes interracial couplings. In her book The Postracial Mystique, Catherine
Squires argues, “in car commercials, movies, and sitcoms, interracial couples and children have
become vehicles for expressing to the audience that we have arrived, that the text or product in
question is hip—still, perhaps, a bit edgy or exotic, but not threatening.”242 High Fidelity the
series is illustrative of Squires’ argument. In Rob’s past relationships that she outlines as her
biggest heartbreaks, only Mac is Black (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir who is of mixed-race
heritage). Further, her brother is also in an interracial relationship, and so are (or were) Rob and
Cam’s parents. Both actors who play Rob and Cam are the children of famous performers.
Kravitz of course is the daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet and Rainbow Sun Francks is
the child of Don Francks, the actor and musician, and Lili Red Eagle. The privileging of
interracial couples, including Rob and Clyde, and the predominance of light-skinned Black
actors is meant to act as a visual shorthand for New York and the millennial generation’s eclectic
and progressive ethos. In her analysis of interracial pairing in recent Netflix original films
including The Incredible Jessica James (2017), To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018), and
Someone Great (2019), Jacqueline Ballantine argues that the branding of these films as originals
“illustrates the streaming service’s savvy cognition that, as a commodifiable metric of modernity,
‘diversity’ has the potential for a considerable return on investment.”243 Building from Squires
242 Catherine R. Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: NYU
Press, 2014), 102.
243 Jacqueline Ballantine, “Mixed Feelings: (Inter)Raced Romance and the Post-Millennial Romantic Comedy,” in
Imagining “We” in the Age of “I”: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture, ed. Mary Harrod,

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and Ballantine’s arguments, I contend that Hulu utilizes interracial pairings on High Fidelity to
illustrate that the updated text is hip without the risk of alienating key subscriber demographics.
Across each of the areas I have discussed, High Fidelity deploys “plastic representation.”
Developed by Kristen Warner, plastic representation is “a combination of synthetic elements put
together and shaped to look like meaningful imagery, but which can only approximate depth and
substance.”244 In other words, it relies on the visual sign of some form of difference to hail a
marginalized segment of the audience without genuinely engaging with the lived reality or
history of that group. In the case of High Fidelity, Blackness is reduced to an aesthetic signifier.
This is most evident in the series’ set design and the soundtrack, which was curated by Questlove
of The Roots. Despite Wu-Tang Clan posters and Janet Jackson needle drops, High Fidelity is
not interested in untangling the ways in which Rob’s Blackness has affected her experience of
romantic love or even her relationship to music. Because of the series’ disinterest in addressing
racial politics, the show ends up reifiying hierarchies that privilege the experiences of petite,
light-skinned Black women specifically, and light-skinned, presumably mixed-race, Black
characters generally. I will return to this idea in subsequent sections.
This adaptation of High Fidelity demonstrates many of the industrial logics of the streaming
era. The series is based off of established intellectual property, which is meant to mitigate risk as
fans of the original novel or film might watch the series. Additionally, the race and gender bent
casting is meant to appeal to a younger and wider audience who might feel alienated by the
gender politics of the book and film and the narrative marginalization, or even absence, of Black
characters. However, to mitigate the risk perennially associated with Blackness on screen, this
adaptation chooses a star whose lineage ties her to the original and who already has proven

Suzanne Leonard, and Diane Negra (Routledge, 2021), 154.
244 Warner, “Plastic Representation.”

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cross-cultural and cross-racial appeal. Further, the series employs plastic representation to attract
Black audiences without ever having to truly decenter whiteness.
Lovesick
In a similar vein to High Fidelity, Lovesick embeds the characters’ journeys of self-discovery
into the larger tapestry of romantic relationships in the show. Beatriz Oria outlines three trends in
contemporary romantic comedy in the post-romantic age: “unexpected genre mixing, an
increased emphasis on friendship as an alternative to heteronormative coupling, and a focus on
the individual instead of the couple,” the latter two of which are clear in Lovesick. Like Rob,
Dylan is the central character who the flashbacks are anchored around. However, Lovesick is
more invested in how each of our primary characters is shaped by their past relationships and
how it affects the dynamic between Dylan, Luke, Evie, and to a lesser extent Angus, in the
present. In addition to Dylan working through his past relationships and the ways they highlight
his own faults, his friends also grapple with their individual hang-ups that have caused them
problems with their relationships, romantic and platonic. Luke deals with his issues surrounding
rejection and intimacy in therapy, Evie becomes far less cynical about love and opens her heart
to Dylan, and Angus deals with the fallout of his marriage brought about by his inability to
standup for himself and be honest with his former wife. The introspection is more overt in High
Fidelity, due in large part due to the mechanism of direct address; however, Lovesick still
produces significant levels of introspection for all of the protagonists. Further, to Oria’s point,
because most of Dylan’s past girlfriends only appear for a single episode, the series prioritizes
the friendships and their evolving dynamics even as it tells a broader story about Dylan and
Evie’s love for one another. In this way, the affordances of television as a medium enhances the

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series’ engagement with temporality and the traditional chronology of the love story. While
structuring the episodes around a former girlfriend of Dylan’s plays into television’s episodic
structure, this is made to work in service of a longer, serialized narrative threads.
Lovesick’s articulation of some of the hallmarks of works in the post-romantic age is tied to
the precarious material conditions of the millennial generation. Recent research has demonstrated
that the millennial generation in the U.K. is still wading through the wake of The Great
Recession.245 One such way the series demonstrates how the enhanced economic precarity of the
characters’ generation affects the series’ engagement with romantic love is through the primary
characters’ living situation. For the majority of the series, Dylan, Luke, and Evie are roommates
in addition to best friends. Later, Angus is forced to move in with them after his divorce. Their
financial necessity of sharing an apartment in the years after they graduate college influences the
narrative’s emphasis on the friendship between the characters. Further, like High Fidelity,
Lovesick departs from neotraditional works in the genre through how it portrays the characters’
work lives.
Despite rarely actually venturing into the workspace of any of the characters, Lovesick
demonstrates a shift from how neotraditional romantic comedies thought about work, particularly
in the culture industries. In one of the series’ oldest flashbacks, Evie pleads with a man she has
been sleeping with to give her notes on her photography portfolio. Across multiple seasons, we
see Evie’s photography business develop, but never so much that she can live without
roommates or her fiancée Mal. Luke works in app development, and the precarity of that
245 Aine Fox, “UK Millennials ‘Still Wearing Economic Scars of 2008 Financial Crisis,’” The Independent,
November 13, 2023, sec. News, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-millenials-britons-2008-
financial-crisis-b2446171.html; Heather Stewart, “British Millennials Still Bearing Scars of 2008 Financial Crisis,
Says Research,” The Guardian, November 13, 2023, sec. Society,
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/13/british-millennials-still-bearing-scars-of-2008-financial-crisissays-research.

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tumultuous industry is highlighted in an episode where Luke panics about the company
downsizing and the team members he might lose to cuts. In that same episode “Isabel,” which I
will return to in the next section, Dylan grapples with being a barista unsure of where his life is
going. In the final season’s present, Angus is divorced and unemployed with a child on the way.
When romantic comedies had a surge in the 1990s and early 2000s the relative economic
stability (for some groups) was reflected within the genre. Similarly, Lovesick’s narrative is
immersed in the broader ethos of the millennial protagonist who is still trying to “figure it out.”
Similar to High Fidelity, Lovesick also engages the “post” through postracial ideology. The
series’ casting of diverse actors, most notably Antonia Thomas and Yasmine Akram (Jonesy), is
in line with public broadcasting’s shifting relationship to demographic difference. In her analysis
of casting in the British film and television industry in the 2010s, Christine Geraghty argues that
the policy of colorblind casting is discursively constructed as having two aims: “to encourage
casting practices which remove race and ethnicity as criteria for acting in a role and to put on
stage or screen casts which will reflect what is deemed to be the ethnic diversity of contemporary
Britain.”246 For Channel 4, the original broadcaster of the series, creating content starring and
“for” diverse groups is a part of their remit. However, as Sarita Malik traces, Channel 4’s
approach to diversity has progressively moved from highlighting Black stories in the U.K. and a
soft form of antiracism to an “incremental depoliticization of race in public service broadcasting”
aided by technological developments, decreased regulation, and competition for viewer
attention.247 In the case of Lovesick, the series casting and the narrative’s non-existent
246 Christine Geraghty, “Casting for the Public Good: BAME Casting in British Film and Television in the 2010s,”
Adaptation 14, no. 2 (August 1, 2021): 168–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apaa004. 247 Sarita Malik, “‘Keeping It Real’: The Politics of Channel 4’s Multiculturalism, Mainstreaming and Mandates,”
Screen 49, no. 3 (October 1, 2008): 343–53, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjn041; Malik, “‘Creative Diversity,’
228.”

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engagement with racial politics align with Channel 4’s brand identity as innovative and in touch
with younger Britons without having to work through how race affects relationships of all forms.
Temporal Displacement in Romantic Comedy
Temporal disruption has become increasingly common in contemporary romantic comedy.
In the Hulu film Palm Springs (2020), Nyles (Andy Samberg) wakes up in his hotel room each
day as his girlfriend moisturizes her legs. Trapped in a time loop, Nyles, who is later joined by
Sarah (Cristin Milioti) and Roy (J.K. Simmons) lives each day to the fullest because he knows
tomorrow it will just repeat all over again. In the Netflix film When We First Met (2018), Noah
(Adam Devine) uses a time machine photo booth to go back to the night he met his best friend
Avery (Alexandra Daddario) to change the course of history and make her fall in love with him
instead of her present-day fiancée. Similarly, in Meet Cute (Peacock, 2022), Sheila uses a time
machine tanning bed to repeat her first date with Gary (Pete Davidson) and change the course of
their relationship and make Gary the perfect partner. These three streaming films do not exist in
isolation. In fact, the romantic comedy genre is increasingly relying on forms of temporal
disruption to structure the narrative. But why?
The increasing use of temporal rupture in media over the past twenty years is a response to
off-screen forms of temporal rupture media audiences are increasingly living through and with.
Paul Booth asserts, “shows that rely on temporal disruption illustrate the industry’s reaction to
and the audience’s resolution of postmodern schizophrenia.”248 In his analysis of series like Lost
(ABC, 2004-2010) and How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 2005-2014), Paul Booth connects this onscreen trend to recent phenomenon including screen media becoming increasingly detached from
scheduled time and a larger cultural sensibility of a fractured sense of time.
248 Booth, “Memories, Temporalities, Fictions,”370.

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I contend that examining this trend through the romance genre points to additional reasons
for the prominence of temporal disruption. Many of the films and series that deploy these
techniques center millennial protagonists who are a “mess:” people who have not figured out
their lives and have repeatedly been in relationships that do not work out. Temporal rupture in
recent romantic comedy then also addresses the millennial generation’s delay of conventional
markers of adulthood: marriage, buying a home, and having children. These markers of
adulthood have been traditionally linked to the conclusion of the romance narrative in both its
print and screen iterations. However, younger generations delaying of these normative life
milestones is a response to their material conditions, as well as changing mores around romantic
relationships. Additionally, the digitalization of dating, with websites like match.com, and
increasingly apps like Hinge or Tinder, has affected how we perceive the relationship between
time and romantic coupling. Now, individuals are confronted with a consistent stream of options,
which creates increased anxiety over missed opportunities and connections. Further, it increases
the possibilities for overlapping relationship timelines with multiple partners. These broader
social and cultural trends, then, become embedded in the narrative structure of contemporary
romantic comedies, which is especially true for those available through streaming platforms.
Both High Fidelity and Lovesick use forms of temporal disruption, namely the flashback, to
work through their protagonists’ love lives and convey the ways in which their love lives are key
components on their larger path to self-actualization. In my analysis of High Fidelity, I examine
how the series intensifies its use of the flashback which distinguishes it from its book and film
predecessors. In conjunction with direct address, High Fidelity uses the flashback to give the
viewer context for Rob’s behavior and decision making, but the series by no means always does
this linearly. In Lovesick, the flashback is a much more defining feature of the narrative. In the

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series, each episode is bookended by the present, but the bulk of each episode is set during
Dylan’s relationship with each woman on his list. The furthest going back six and a half years
and the most recent to the night before. While the flashback is structured around his relationship
with many other women, the narrative device is always meant to give the audience greater
insight into the dynamic between our core set of main protagonists. In my analysis of temporal
disruption across both of these series, I examine how the use of temporal rupture has, perhaps
unintentional, racialized dimensions. In both series, the narrative locks Black women characters,
Cherise in High Fidelity and Evie in Lovesick, into the temporal condition of stasis, wherein both
women are expected to wait while other characters and their lives move on around them.
Ultimately, my analysis demonstrates the ways in which new understandings of temporality
make their way into romance narratives, a space that has always been preoccupied with timing.
High Fidelity
In the second act of the 2000 film adaptation, John Cusack’s Rob takes us through his past
romantic relationships at a brisk pace. Soon after telling each of their stories, we see him
confront his past girlfriends. For example, coming off a breakup with Charlie, Rob meets Sarah.
Both Rob and Sarah are connected through their recent heartbreaks and uninterested in
discussing much beyond how their past partners have bruised them emotionally. The series uses
flashbacks in a similar way to the movie; however, it takes its use of the device further and
repeatedly envelops the viewer in a state of temporal disruption. More specifically, the
flashbacks related to her relationship with Mac and the ways in which they affect her burgeoning
relationship with Clyde dole out pieces of their story in the wrong order. As I stated in the
previous section, Rob’s path to self-actualization is equally if not more important than Rob’s

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romantic life. In this vein, Rob’s explanation of the past to the viewer combines the mode of
direct address with temporal disruption to take the reader on a journey to how Rob grows as a
person. Further, temporal disruption and direct address cohere to address both the contemporary
feeling of “postmodern schizophrenia” as Booth outlines and the changing dynamics of romantic
relationships in the post-romantic age.
In the first episode of the High Fidelity reboot, Rob decides to finally go on a date. She has
been staying in and listening to sad records in her apartment alone after her relationship with
Mac ended, and her brother Cam expresses his concern through needling her to get out of the
house. When Rob hangs up with Cam, she turns back to the camera and says to the audience, “I
could have a date…if I wanted to. And I want to. Cuz I’m fine.” The scene then transitions to her
on a date with Clyde in a Brooklyn dive bare where she addresses us as her confidantes, and she
proclaims “This is not fine. I’m not ready. This is fucked!” before tuning back in to Clyde’s story
about his road trip. Even without the use of direct address, it is clear to the audience that Rob is
not invested in Clyde or this date. After repeatedly giving him mumbled, half-hearted answers,
Clyde asks her what happened to her hand, which is sporting a bandage. She abruptly claims to
have to go to the bathroom and attempts to sneak out of the bar when his back is turned.
However, Rob is forced to return to Clyde at the bar because she has left her phone behind. From
there, the date eventually turns around; however, Rob unfairly freezes Clyde out when he returns
to apologize and explain for having left abruptly in the morning. It is only then that Rob reveals
the full story.
Coupled with direct address and voiceover, the use of a flashback in the first episode gives
the audience a full rationale for Rob’s behavior with Clyde. When walking to their date, Rob
runs into her ex-fiancée Mac who has just moved back to New York. During their conversation,

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a bike messenger runs into her and wounds her hand causing her to stop into her local bodega to
get it bandaged. During her date with Clyde earlier in the episode, the bandage serves as a visual
cue to the audience that they have missed something. Rob’s run-in with Mac shakes her
emotionally, which in turn causes her to be standoffish towards Clyde and unfairly reject him
after he apologized for leaving her apartment when the city tried to tow his car. High Fidelity’s
decision to tell the events of the first episode out of order illustrates the series’ attempt to make
sense of an increasingly fractured temporality both industrially and within the lives of the
audience. Rob is able to rewind for the viewer to give them more context to her actions, but
makes it clear that the unfolding of her story is always at her discretion and at her pace. This is
enhanced aesthetically through the deployment of visual cues of the rewind. The scene goes back
to the night of Rob’s date with Clyde, signaled to the audience through her outfit, and as we
watch her walk toward the bar, her present-day voiceover states: “Maybe there’s something I
forgot to mention.” High Fidelity’s aesthetic and narrative choices acknowledge an audience that
might also wish to exert more control off screen, through being able to pause, rewind, or fast
forward.
The High Fidelity reboot was first reported to be in the works at Disney Plus in 2018 before
executives announced a year later that Hulu was a better fit for the show’s themes. Disney Plus
was attempting to mine other popular IP to launch their OTT service alongside juggernauts like
Marvel and Lucasfilm. This focus on updating older IP for the streaming era in the hopes of
capturing both a nostalgic and a fresh audience further speaks to how the television industry
contributes to a viewer experience of temporal fracturing. Additionally, every episode of the
series’ first season was released on the streaming platform at once, allowing viewers to control
the pace at which they watched Rob’s story unfold. In part, High Fidelity’s narrative is

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responding to a televisual landscape that purports to put more authority in the hands of viewers
by (seemingly) giving them control over how and when they watch media.
High Fidelity’s depiction of Rob’s relationship with Mac is the focal point of the series’
utilization of temporal rupture. As previously stated, the pilot begins with Mac leaving Rob. As
he re-enters her life, she periodically goes through memories of their time together. Rob explains
a turning point in their relationship where Mac proposed to her. In a flashback where Mac makes
dinner for the two of them, Rob goes through a drawer and finds a ring. She frantically makes an
excuse about having to go to the bodega, but ultimately leaves for hours before she returns with a
bag of cat food. Mac is upset that she has just walked out with no explanation, but after she
explains that she found the ring, the two make up and she accepts his proposal. Though we can
see her panic before she eventually says yes, we do not receive the complete story until the end
of the penultimate episode of the season. Rob reveals once again that she has left out a part of the
story. In the present day, Mac comes to Rob’s apartment on her thirtieth birthday and they share
pizza and beer. From the audience’s perspective the two are growing closer and potentially
rekindling their romance while Mac’s new fiancée is out of town. However, when Mac reveals
that his guilt over the dissolution of their relationship has given him doubts about his impending
marriage, Rob has to come clean to him and to us. In the gap between Rob finding the ring and
returning to the apartment with cat food from the bodega, Rob cheated on Mac. It was actually
her guilt about her mistake that pushed Mac away and caused the demise of their relationship.
Hiding this information from Mac for two years and from the audience for most of a season
provides further evidence that Rob is still working on herself. The use of temporal disruption in
this arc addresses many of the key features of temporal instability in contemporary media and
further aligns High Fidelity with the post-romantic age’s investment in disillusionment.

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The connections between a wider use of temporal instability in contemporary media and the
romance’s unique investments in timing are illustrated in High Fidelity’s use of flashbacks.
While the intensification of temporal rupture in the television adaptation speaks to a broader
cultural perception that time is no longer linear, the timeline of Rob’s romantic journey is full of
fits and starts, as well as reversals and digressions. Rob had the opportunity to move forward
with Mac, and even “achieves” the traditional happy ending of the romance narrative through an
engagement. However, the series rejects this form of happy ending, which distinguishes it from
its predecessors, through dissolving this romantic union and keeping Rob and Mac apart at the
end. In the book and film, the reader/viewer does find out that Rob cheated on Laura, but she
forgives him, and they end the story happily coupled once more. High Fidelity the series
capitalizes on a broader sense of romantic disillusionment, and in turn rejects the traditional telos
and chronology of romantic comedy.
To return to my earlier point about the use of temporal instability in recent works in the genre
being a manifestation of the millennial generation delaying traditional markers of adulthood, the
penultimate episode where Rob reveals her own fault in her breakup with Mac provides evidence
for this thesis. The episode is structured around Rob turning thirty and the anomie this life
milestone engenders. If thirty is supposed to be the age by which young women have figured
their lives out and settled down (as postfeminism suggested to us), for Rob, this milestone
birthday conveys just the opposite. Rob’s thirtieth birthday is full of overlapping timelines, as
she sees friends from her past she has not spoken to in ages. If thirty is meant to symbolize a turn
toward a new era in Rob’s life, spending it with friends from her past that she barely speaks to
anymore illustrates Rob’s core problem of being locked in the past, which continually affects her
ability to move forward. The episode heightens its meta engagement with time through Rob

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being pulled between Clyde and Mac. Though she recently fought with Clyde, he calls her on her
birthday in an attempt to make amends. The romantic optimism embedded in this step forward is
pierced by Rob also spending time with Mac, the manifestation of her past, on the same night.
Rather than a linear progression through Rob’s romantic life, her relationship timelines are
always crashing into one another. As I posit, the digitalization of dating and romance has
adjusted our perception of the normative timeline of romantic partnership. Rob presumably met
Clyde on a dating app; however, as she develops a bond with him, she also dates a singer she
sees perform (who she later breaks up with when she finds out he is too young) and reconnects
with past partners Justin, Kat, and, of course, Mac continually, emphasizing the overlapping
timelines. High Fidelity’s use of temporal rupture engages with these new formations in
contemporary romantic love across multiple registers.
Timing is a central feature of the romantic comedy, and High Fidelity makes this explicit.
Throughout the series Rob is preoccupied with the past, which by the end she can finally admit
to herself, to the viewers who have been her confidantes, and even to Clyde. In the final episode,
Rob apologizes to Clyde for stringing him along and acting like a jerk. In her apology she
explicitly states that she has been working on herself and trying to learn “how to stop living in
the past.” This interaction, and the writers’ decision to place it as one of the last scenes in the
season, further illustrates the ways in which the series’ plays with temporality simultaneously
engages the genre’s long-standing relationship to time, the contemporary forces that fracture the
audience’s sense of time, and, finally, the tenets of the post-romantic age. I have demonstrated
how High Fidelity uses the flashback, in concert with direct address, to examine the
contemporary state of romantic love and the ways in which its engagement with time sets it apart
from the book and screen versions that came before. While High Fidelity deploys flashbacks

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throughout the series, Lovesick makes the flashback its organizing mode.
Lovesick
In a March 2016 press release, Netflix announced that Lovesick, formerly known as Scrotal
Recall, was coming to the platform. The deal they reached with BBC Worldwide North America
and series’ producer Clerkenwell Films not only meant that the first season which had aired on
Channel 4 was being made available, but that Netflix had an exclusive deal for the second
season, and later the third, which they also commissioned. In the 2010s, Netflix worked to secure
their status as an international television platform through acquiring many series from around the
world, particularly Europe in the early years of this strategy.249 The acquisition of Scrotal Recall,
which the platform decided to rename, sits alongside other “continuation deals” such as The A
List (2018-2021) and series whose production they took over entirely like Black Mirror (2011-
).250 I begin my analysis of Lovesick here because I am interested in interpreting how the series’
use of temporal rupture presents a meta-analysis of the genre’s historical preoccupation with
timing through using the flashback as the defining structural feature of the series and how the
device simultaneously addresses television programming’s shifting temporality as a result of
streaming platforms’ further disruption of the television landscape.
In Lovesick’s first episode, the series shows the audience that love is about timing. The pilot
is bookended by the present day, but spends most of its time in the past. After finding out that he
has contracted chlamydia, Dylan goes back through his past partners starting alphabetically with
Abigail (Hannah Britland). The narrative transports us to three years prior when Dylan attends
249 Adelaida Afilipoaie, Catalina Iordache, and Tim Raats, “The ‘Netflix Original’ and What It Means for the
Production of European Television Content,” Critical Studies in Television 16, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 304–25,
https://doi.org/10.1177/17496020211023318. 250 Afilipoaie, Iordache, and Raats, 311.

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his friend Angus’s (Joshua McGuire) wedding with his then girlfriend Jane (Jessica Ellerby). It is
clear from the start that Dylan’s relationship with Jane is doomed; she barely even tolerates him.
Jane breaks up with him during the wedding ceremony, and he spends the reception moping until
he takes advice from the priest and flirts with Abigail who works at the wedding venue’s
reception desk. Dylan’s relationship with Jane, however, isn’t the only one that is obviously
doomed to fail. Angus’s marriage to Helen (Aimee Parks) is clearly a mistake. While Helen
exhibits overblown jealously that friend and wedding photographer Evie used to date Angus, he
responds to his nuptials by drinking past the excesses of a felicitous groom. While Evie
diligently photographs the wedding, the audience realizes that she is in love with Dylan and is
forced to watch him repeatedly date women that are all wrong for him. When the narrative
transitions us back to the present, the roles have reversed. Luke and a subdued Dylan attend
Evie’s engagement party to her fiancée Mal (Richard Thomson). Through its preoccupation with
timing, Lovesick contends that there is no real, beginning, middle, or end to romantic coupling.
Rather, love is full of false starts, impediments, and detours. Evie’s engagement should signal an
“end” to a potential relationship for Dylan and Evie, but instead it is the entry point for the
viewers even as we are in the middle of the characters’ story. On the day of Evie and Mal’s
party, Abigail gets back to Dylan, taking the news of potentially being exposed to an STI well.
The two reconnect and begin a relationship as Dylan tries to move on from Evie. The series
embrace of temporal discontinuity and its relationship to contemporary romantic coupling is
utilized in multiple ways across the episode. By using a doomed wedding as the first flashback,
the series conveys to the audience that it will reject the chronology and some of the optimism of
traditional and neotraditional romantic comedy from the start. Unlike neo-traditional film Four
Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which uses a wedding to facilitate the meeting of its

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protagonists Charles (Hugh Grant) and Carrie (Andie Macdowell), this wedding positions Dylan
and Evie as best friends, where Evie’s love for Dylan is unrequited. In the present day, a few
years later, the roles seem to have reversed. Before the end of the series, Angus and Helen’s
marriage will end in divorce and Mal and Evie will dissolve their engagement. The series is set
almost entirely in flashback; however, it does not take the viewer through the past in
chronological order.
In the fourth episode of the second season, the series jumps back to three and half years ago
when Dylan, Evie, and Luke accompany Angus and Helen as they tour their eventual wedding
venue. At the time Dylan is dating Liv, a woman whom he has trouble communicating with due
to his inability to understand her uses of emojis or use them properly himself. In an interesting
turn from previous episodes, we never meet Liv, our entire understanding of their relationship
comes through text messages. In addition to speaking to some of the anxieties and new
communication problems brought about by emojis, this is a strategic move from the writers, as
this choice emphasizes the real romantic entanglements the viewer should prioritize. The series
illustrates yet again, that Helen and Angus are wrong for each other, and at this stage of the
narrative Luke is still only interested in sleeping with as many women as possible. However, the
true romantic turning point is for Dylan and Evie. Throughout the prior nine episodes we know
that Evie was in love with Dylan long before she met Mal. It isn’t until halfway through the
second season that the audience sees the origin point. Evie, trying to sleep on the floor of Helen
and Angus’s hotel room, wakes abruptly after having a dream about Dylan and ambles
downstairs where she meets Abigail and confesses her changing feelings towards him, though
she never tells Abigail his name. Abigail tries to convince Evie to tell Dylan the truth, and in
turn, Evie helps Abigail break up with a boyfriend she should have left much earlier. In this

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storyline, the audience, who has watched Dylan and Evie across the years and Dylan’s presentday relationship with Abigail, has more information than our past characters. Evie never tells
Abigail the name of the best friend she has fallen for, and by chance Dylan does not meet
Abigail that night but months later at the actual wedding. Evie tries to leave her email for Abigail
so that they can be friends, but the other hotel concierge tosses it in the trash. Through timing
and circumstance, Evie has not been able to meet Abigail as Dylan’s girlfriend in the present, but
the viewer knows that their reconnection is inevitable (indeed, they meet in the present at
Angus’s divorce party). Angus and Helen’s wedding serves as a temporal motif anchoring many
of the core developments of the central romantic relationships. Adding in Evie and Abigail’s first
meeting halfway through the series run further heightens the series’ play with temporality.
The finale of the series’ first season further engages with Lovesick’s investment in
unspooling chronology in its engagement with endings through the death of a character. One of
the women on Dylan’s list, Phoebe, has not responded to any of his messages, so he shows up at
her parent’s house with Luke in tow. When they arrive, they find out that Phoebe has passed
away. In the flashback, which takes place one night when the gang does bar trivia, Evie points
out to Dylan that he is dating the girl version of Luke. It is then clear to the audience, and then
eventually to Phoebe and Luke, that they are a much better fit. Luke decides not to say anything
to Dylan about his feelings for Phoebe but hopes that he can reconnect with her when Dylan
discloses his STI. However, neither of the two men can receive the closure they hope to from
Phoebe. As I will discuss in the next section, television has many ends. The writers introduce
death’s finality to the first season’s ending as a way to illustrate how Dylan and his friends
messy bumbling through their twenties might collide with end points that they cannot predict or
prevent. Trying to grapple with the fact that he waited too long to have a chance with Phoebe,

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Luke intervenes in the present on Dylan’s behalf with Evie. When Dylan and Evie have dinner,
so that she can ask him to be her “man of honor,” Luke bursts into the restaurant and tells Evie
that Dylan is in love with her and that he needs to do something before it’s too late. The season
closes on Evie and Dylan awkwardly sitting across from one another trying to deal with Luke’s
explosive intervention. Their decision to close the season on uncertainty, is a part of television’s
long-standing use of the cliffhanger yes, but it is also a part of the series’ larger argument about
the instability of a happy ending.
In addition to Lovesick’s engagement with the romantic comedy genre’s history, the series’
use of temporal disruption addresses a contemporary media landscape that has fractured
audiences’ perceptions of time. In its first season, Lovesick episodes premiered each week in the
fall of 2014. However, once the series migrated to Netflix, the first season became available for
viewers to watch all at once and later the episodes for the subsequent seasons were released all at
once. In her analysis of the fractured temporality of Lost, Laura Kogen argues that the series onscreen ruptures in temporality addressed viewers increasing relationship to the Internet and the
show’s own availability online.251 Additionally, the series’ main narrative may have occurred
during scheduled programming blocks, but many of the paratextual materials fans used to make
sense of the narrative were only available on the show’s website. Further, as Booth articulates,
Lost was a part of the increasing popularity of television DVD sales. Viewers no longer had to
use their VCRs to record and rewatch their favorite episodes; they could now buy DVD box sets
and watch the series as quickly or as slowly as they wanted. This process of viewer control has
only increased through streaming platforms.
Like Lost, Lovesick addresses a wider cultural sense of fractured time through its narrative,
251 Kogen, “Once or Twice upon a Time: Temporal Simultaneity and the Lost Phenomenon," 51.

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formal properties, and paratextual discourse. In a press release announcing the series’ move to
Netflix published in March of 2016, the platform describes itself as follows:
Netflix is the world’s leading Internet television network with over 75 million members
in over 190 countries enjoying more than 125 million hours of TV shows and movies per
day, including original series, documentaries and feature films. Members can watch as
much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on nearly any Internet-connected screen.
Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or
commitments.
Netflix distinguishes itself from broadcast and cable, as well as other streaming competitors with
less access to content, through its ability to give consumers ultimate choice and control. Their
decision to highlight subscribers’ ability to circumvent the spatio-temporal boundaries of
traditional media viewing and “play, pause, and resume,” however, are more than just branding.
In this press release about a series that rejects normative time, Netflix taps into subscribers’
experience of spatio-temporal fracture in the present. By releasing seasons of Lovesick all at once
and then keeping the full series on the platform, Netflix increases viewers’ ability to watch
Dylan’s love life jump through time at their own pace. In a similar vein to High Fidelity, the
series, and the platform it streams on, highlight modes of temporal control that many viewers
wish they could implement in their romantic lives off-screen. However, unlike the viewers, not
all of the characters are able to control their temporal conditions.
Black Women and Stasis
In the episode “Jane,” (S1,E4), Lovesick’s audience is taken back three years into the past,

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where Dylan dated Jane before she dumped him in the middle of Angus and Helen’s wedding.
Evie and Dylan have dinner for her birthday and she attempts to tell him how she feels, however,
before she can, her confession is interrupted by all of their friends who have joined for a surprise
party. Luke has even gone so far as to bring a date for her, Jonno. At the end of an episode full of
miscommunications with ill-suited partners, Evie watches Dylan walk away with Jane and says
to herself (and us) “That’s ok. It can wait.” Waiting becomes Evie’s dominant mode throughout
the series. Similarly, in High Fidelity, Cherise is pushed to the sidelines of the narrative, also
forced to wait for a turn in the spotlight that never materializes. While my analysis of temporality
in the genre thus far has focused on both series’ use of temporal rupture, I now turn to the
temporal conditions of stasis. I argue that both Lovesick and High Fidelity lock Black women
characters into temporal conditions of stasis, rendering them stuck while their white or in High
Fidelity’s case lighter-skinned counterparts are able to go on robust journeys of self-discovery.
Lovesick’s flashbacks include numerous instances where Evie waits for Dylan to notice that
she is standing right in front of him. In the fifth episode of the second season “Isabel,” Dylan,
Evie, and Luke in the present attend a whiskey tasting for Evie’s wedding to Mal. The series
transitions to a flashback from two and a half years prior where the three best friends attend an
awards ceremony where Luke’s company are nominees. In this episode, the series grapples with
temporality and being out of step with normative time through multiple valences. First, both
Luke, Dylan, and Evie contend with not feeling like they are in the right place professionally.
Luke is panicking about not winning the award because his bosses are aiming to downsize, and
Dylan confesses to the bartender Isabel that he is anxious about not figuring his life out, working
a string of temporary low wage jobs after college. The group also contends with a return to the
past in the form of Jonno. Jonno, who Luke tried to set Evie up with for her birthday, months ago

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for the protagonists and last season for the viewers, has now left Luke’s company and is his rival
for one of the awards. When we first meet Jonno, Evie changes her mind about telling Dylan
how she feels and decides to wait for the right moment. When they run into each other again, it
has been months and Dylan and Jane have since broken up; however, she still has not said
anything. While Dylan decides to work behind the bar for the night so that he can spend time
with Isabel, Evie gets progressively drunker across the ballroom watching, yet again, as Dylan
falls for another woman who is not her. Antonia Thomas’s compelling performance highlights
Evie’s stasis. Across several episodes in the series, the camera frequently stays on Evie’s face in
a medium close-up as she gazes across a room at Dylan with someone else. In this episode, her
eyes begin to well with tears as she realizes she is once again not the right girl at the right time.
Spurred by her inebriation, Evie does try to push herself out of stasis by drunkenly kissing
Dylan, which he takes as a drunken lark and refuses to see for what it is. Once he makes sure she
is ok, he leaves the awards ceremony with Isabel, leaving Evie behind to watch him go as she
resolves yet again to wait for another opportunity. Back in the present, Evie finds the whiskey
she had been looking for. However, when her sense memory kicks in, it is not in fact the whiskey
her and Mal had on a romantic trip together, but the whiskey she guzzled years prior at the
awards ceremony before kissing Dylan. Even as Evie’s relationship with Mal has progressed to
an engagement, she shows herself and the viewers time and time again that she still loves Dylan
and her heart has not in fact moved on.
While each of the main characters in Lovesick are locked in particular patterns that their
characters have to grow out of, it is Evie, the only Black protagonist, who is forced by the
narrative to constantly wait for Dylan. After having his proposal to his long-time girlfriend
rejected years earlier, Luke spends much of the flashbacks trying to sleep with as many women

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as possible and not develop any real attachment to them. However, after learning about the death
of Phoebe, Luke goes to therapy and eventually moves forward from the trauma and
embarrassment of Jo’s rejection. Angus and Helen eventually divorce, and Angus builds a new
life with his friends’ help. Dylan eventually realizes that he has to stop getting in his own way in
relationships. Evie does eventually start dating Mal after over a year of waiting for Dylan, but
she cannot actually move past him. While Lovesick makes it clear that Dylan and Evie are meant
to be, the narrative forces Evie into a position of constant waiting, and the series’ rejection of
linearity compounds this.
Evie’s position of waiting in Lovesick is echoed in High Fidelity. High Fidelity spends much
of its narrative following Rob on her journey to self-actualization and healthy romantic practices;
however, it deviates in its eighth episode. “Ballad of a Lonesome Loser” puts Simon in the driver
seat as he confides in the audience and takes us through his biggest heartbreaks. Cherise,
however, never receives the opportunity to do the same. By the end of the season, each of our
primary characters, save Cherise, moves past their primary roadblocks. Rob is eventually honest
with herself, the viewers, and Mac, and is able to try to move forward with Clyde. Simon
eventually gains the confidence to move forward with his crush on the barista at the coffee shop.
Mac realizes that his breakup with Rob was not his fault and ends the season happy with his new
fiancée Lily. Lastly, Rob’s brother Cam gets over his fear of change and embraces his imminent
fatherhood. Cherise’s strides are much more minute. At the start of the season, Cherise discusses
her plans to start a band and Rob and Simon chuckle at her expense. Cherise has repeatedly
discussed this, but her friends have not seen even the slightest movement towards this goal; they
do not even know what her music sounds like. In the middle of the season, Cherise eventually
puts up a flyer in the store to attract new members and later receives her dream guitar as a gift

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from Rob, but by the end her band still does not exist. Additionally, Cherise’s lack of romantic
prospects is glaring in a show that uses its cast to highlight different types of and stages of
relationships. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Mac,
stated that the second season of High Fidelity was meant to focus on Cherise’s character much
more heavily.252 While everyone else in the series has a romantic relationship, Cherise was
meant to wait until the second season.
Though High Fidelity does center a Black woman as she works through her relationships, the
decision to privilege the love life of a biracial, light-skinned Black woman, while sidelining a
larger, darker-skinned Black woman, is illustrative of the adaptation’s broader engagement with
race. Other scholars and critics have engaged with the dichotomy between how Rob and Cherise
are written in the show. In the podcast Still Processing (New York Times, 2016-) hosted by
Wesley Morris and J Wortham, Morris states,
This is like — this is 250 years of American history happening in this little record store,
where Cherise is Ethel Waters and Pearl Bailey, and Rob is Lena Horne. (LAUGHS) And
there’s a constant preference for people who look like Rob, and a fixed job for people
who look like Cherise. And this is sort of the pain that Da’Vine Joy Randolph brings with
her to the performance in some ways. And the bigness of her performance has these
layers of these reserves of hurt and ache. But what it’s missing right now is writing that
makes the character make more sense.253
In their conversation both Morris and Wortham note than Randolph’s performance provides
252 Ashley Lee, “Season 2 of ‘High Fidelity’ Would Have Focused on Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Cherise,” Los
Angeles Times, August 27, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-08-27/high-fidelityhulu-season-2-davine-joy-randolph-cherise. 253 Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, “Delicious Vinyl,” April 2, 2020, Still Processing, accessed April 1, 2024,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/podcasts/high-fidelity-zoe-kravitz.html.

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shades to Cherise’s character that are not on the page. Similarly, in her analysis of the series,
Alexandra Vesey positions Randolph’s performance as a “cover” of the original White, male
character of Barry in the book and film.254 However, rather than designating a cover as an
unoriginal or poor imitation, Vesey contends that covers are tactics “that allow [Black female
performers] to use someone else’s language to criticize institutional racism and sexism.”255 In
line with the claims Morris and Wortham make, Vesey goes on to argue that “despite
considerable representational obstacles, Randolph finds plenitude in Cherise’s secondariness.”256
I want to pick up on Morris’s designation of the character as “fixed” and Vesey identification of
her “secondariness” in my analysis of stasis. While Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s performance
provided texture to Cherise and received much acclaim, the characterization demonstrates a lack
of imagination about and for the inner lives of Black women. As I argued earlier, the casting of
the television adaptation is in line with the media industries’ recent cursory investment in the
visual difference and diversity. However, the writing failed to provide this character with a real
trajectory, thus making one of two Black female characters stagnant. The choice to privilege a
light-skinned, petite character, played by an actress who has demonstrated appeal to white
audiences, further suggests that only certain types of Black women are deserving of love. Rob is,
of course, our primary character whose point-of-view audiences are immersed in, but the
decision to give Simon a standalone episode and not Cherise points to a diminished status for
Cherise beyond merely a supporting character. In the case of Lovesick, Antonia Thomas, who
plays Evie, is also a light-skinned biracial actress. However, as Evie is the only Black series
254 Alyxandra Vesey, “‘Have You Got Any Soul?’: Reinterpreting High Fidelity’s Relationship to Black Cultural
Production,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 21, no. 4 (2023): 1–24,
https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2220635. 255 Vesey, 4. 256 Vesey, 11.

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regular, the relative privilege her lighter skin color and small stature affords her does not shield
Evie from narrative stasis. Though High Fidelity has multiple Black female characters, it creates,
even if unintentionally, a division between Rob and Cherise rooted in colorism and sizeism.
Returning to my arguments about the series’ investments in plastic representation, my
designation of Evie and Cherise as static provides further evidence for these series’ plasticity.
While both series may laud themselves for diverse casting, their lack of forward movement
within the story arcs of the Black women characters belies the series superficial engagements
with the politics of race. The increased use of temporal rupture in recent romantic comedies
addresses contemporary feelings of instability and a broader desire in audiences to be able to
have more control over time and timing in their lives. Even as both series speak to the wider
desire within the current conjuncture, they demonstrate that not everyone experiences these
fractures in temporality the same way.
Romance and The Happy Ending
The happy ending has long been understood as a defining feature of the romance genre in
both its literary and screen forms.257 According to the Romance Writers of America two basic
elements define the literary genre “a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and
optimistic ending.”258 Similarly, filmmakers, critics, and scholars from Fritz Lang to David
Bordwell have identified the happy ending as a defining feature of not just the romantic comedy,
but of Hollywood commercial cinema at large.259 As Catherine Roach puts it, many romance
257 MacDowell, Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema; Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel; Catherine
M. Roach, Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 2016). 258 “About the Romance Genre,” accessed December 22, 2023,
https://www.rwa.org/Online/Education/About_Romance_Fiction/Online/Romance_Genre/About_Romance_Genre.a
spx?hkey=dc7b967d-d1eb-4101-bb3f-a6cc936b5219. 259 MacDowell, Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema.

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novelists see the happy ending as part of a “contract” they have with readers in the genre.260 The
happy ending of the romance has also been the site of contention for feminist scholars. Despite
scholars like Janice Radway and Tania Modleski taking romance seriously as a critical object (to
varying degrees), their feminist examinations of the genre’s textual qualities and its readers still
regarded the romance novel’s endings, especially the emphasis on heterosexual union, with
skepticism.261
As I have sketched out in the introduction, Radway’s foundational examination of the
romance readers in the fictional town of Smithton argues for understanding women’s investment
in the genre as a way to cope with living under patriarchy; in this view, spending time reading
romance novels is “compensatory.” Despite the nuanced engagement Radway has with both the
form and the women who read novel after novel, the traditional ending of the romance is a
feminist sticking point for her. She states, “even as the narrative conveys its overt message that
all women are different and their destinies fundamentally open, the romance also reveals that
such differences are illusory and short-lived because they are submerged or sacrificed inevitably
to the demands of that necessary and always identical romantic ending.”262 She concludes by
arguing that the romance novel’s ending reifies society’s reduction of women to their
reproductive capabilities. In a similar vein, which I touched on in the first chapter, Tania
Modleski’s analysis of the Harlequin romance formula argues that because the ending is known,
“romance novels [push] women readers to [re-interpret] “male brutality” as an act of love, and in
turn “romances…’inoculate’ against the major evils of a sexist society.”263 For both Modleski
260 Roach, Happily Ever After. 261 Tania Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, 1st edition (New York &
London: Routledge, 1982); Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature,
2nd edition (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 262 Radway, Reading the Romance, 208. 263 Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, 35.

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and Radway, the ending is both a defining feature of the genre and the locus of their feminist
complaint. But, others have asked, does the ending really have this much power?
In their analyses of the happy ending, other scholars have rejected the primacy of the ending
in the romance. In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis takes up Radway and
Rachel Blau Duplessis’s criticisms of the ideological functions of the romance narrative’s
conclusion. Regis explains, “critics claim that in equating marriage with the success of the
heroine, the romance novel reconciles readers, who are overwhelmingly women, to marriage
which keeps women subservient.”264 Regis, conversely, contends that any literary form simply
does not have the power to compel readers. But more centrally, Regis pushes back against the
understanding that it is the ending that is the governing element of the romance novel. For Regis,
this is a misunderstanding of the genre and gives the ending an outsized effect when romance
actually prioritizes the middle. In the realm of film, James MacDowell similarly pushes against
the ways in which “the happy ending” has been overdetermined in analyses of commercial film
over the course of Hollywood history.265 MacDowell deconstructs the notion that the ending of a
film should be understood as narrative closure. Using the example of Sleepless in Seattle (1993),
it is actually the end of the film that is the beginning of a relationship, and it is one that opens
more questions than it closes. Further, MacDowell too challenges conceptions of the inherent
ideological conservatism of the happy ending in cinema. My analysis of High Fidelity and
Lovesick takes up both Regis and MacDowell’s disagreement about the primacy of the end.
The romantic comedy’s place on television further complicates feminist criticism of the
genre’s “compulsory” happy ending. Television, of course, has many ends. There are the ends of
episodes and the ends of seasons, but television’s ends also include cancellations, even mid-
264 Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 12. 265 MacDowell, Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema.

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season, pilots not getting picked up, or networks being sold. Indeed, when most television series
begin, it is not known when, or importantly how, they will end.266 This reality, and television’s
historical relationship to novelistic and radio serials, help explain why television as a medium
prioritizes the middle. As Elizabeth Alsop argues, “two structural features of serialized
television—its amplification and elevation of the middle, and relative depreciation of the end—
are central affordances of the TV romcom, which may indefinitely defer the normative climax of
romantic coupling.”267 In my final section of analysis, I examine the ends, both narratively and
industrially, of Lovesick and High Fidelity. I argue that their endings destabilize the happy
ending as the defining feature of the romance enhanced by television’s differing relationship to
narrative conclusion.
Lovesick
The final episode of Lovesick goes back to the beginning. Dylan, Luke, Evie, Angus, and
Jonesy return to their alma mater for their ten-year college reunion. Dylan and Evie did not know
each other at the start of university, so the audience becomes aligned with Dylan’s perspective as
old acquaintances fill in the blanks about Evie from before they met. Specifically, Dylan learns
of Evie’s tumultuous freshman year relationship with Adal, who attends the reunion with his
wife and new baby. Lovesick’s final season uses the flashback structure but truncates the
timeline. With the exception of one episode, the flashbacks in the finals season go back a matter
of weeks rather than years. The final episode, however, abandons the flashback as a narrative
266 See, Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015);
Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status
(Routledge, 2012).
267 Elizabeth Alsop, “The Radical Middle: Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and the Subversive Potential of the
TV Post-Romcom,” in After Happily Every After: Romantic Comedy in a Post-Romantic Age, ed. Maria San Filippo
(Wayne State University Press, 2021), 223.

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device and instead transports us back further than any of the flashbacks through the setting of the
reunion. In a similar vein to High Fidelity, this episode showcases how the relationships of the
characters can crash into one another. Luke, for example, is punched in the face as an old
classmate realizes that Luke slept with his girlfriend. In another callback to previous years, Luke
decides to be brave and tell Jonesy that he loves her. After her (initial) rejection he sleeps with an
old classmate again. In the season two episode “Agata,” the flashback centers around a house
party over six years in the past. The party develops Evie and Dylan’s relationship, but it is also a
key turning point for Luke. He proposes to his long-time girlfriend Jo who rejects him. After
attempting to pull himself together, Luke finds another woman at the Halloween party, Zoe
dressed as a sexy witch, to sleep with. Several years in the future, he forgets who this woman is
initially at the reunion and then sleeps with her again after his conversation with Jonesy. After
Jonesy decides that she does in fact want to be with Luke, she walks into his room where he is
still with Zoe. I summarize these events here to demonstrate how Lovesick’s thesis about
romance’s reliance on timing is layered into the show as Luke repeats a past coping mechanism
with the same woman. Meanwhile, Dylan and Evie are both working through her run-in with
Adal. Evie gets up in the middle of the night and sits on the couch crying. When Dylan asks her
what is wrong, she replies that she is sad about Adal and sad for her former self and how much
she loved him.
A different version of this series might have brought Evie and Dylan together in the final
episode. Instead, Lovesick spends much of its third season working through the growing pains of
a new relationship. Dylan and Evie have their first fight, Luke must figure out where he fits in
now that his two best friends are an item, and the four roommates work through living in close
quarters. In this way, the series does not treat the unification of the central couple as an end, but

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rather a beginning. This is further enforced through the choice to frame multiple episodes in the
final season around looking back at the past. In addition to their college reunion, Luke, Evie,
Angus, and Jonesy help Dylan surprise his parents with an anniversary party. During the party,
Dylan finds out that his parents’ “perfect” marriage has had to grapple with past infidelity. These
returns to the past demonstrate that the series’ investment in non-linear time extends to its
relationship to endings. The series more realist depiction of romantic love, that you can love
multiple people even at the same time, that relationships can move past infidelity, and that past
loves can still make you feel in the present, all deconstruct traditional and neo-traditional
formulations of the happy ending in the genre. Lovesick’s relationship to the ending is further
enhanced by industrial factors.
When Lovesick, initially Scrotal Recall, premiered on Channel 4 the series was released
weekly and the final episode of season one, where Dylan learns his former girlfriend Phoebe
died, ended on a cliffhanger. The series was eventually cancelled and many related its lack of
success on the television network to the disconnect between its name and tone.268 As previously
discussed, the series moved to Netflix where it had two more eight episode seasons. The series
initial cancellation also illustrates how the organizing logics of television alter contemporary
disillusionment around the romance’s happy ending. Of course, had the initial cancellation stood,
Dylan and Evie never would have gotten together. Further, season three has a neat conclusion,
while still leaving plenty of space available for the characters’ stories to continue. In fact, Netflix
never properly announced that Lovesick would end with season three. Fans of the series were
able to discern that the series ended due to the lack of announcement about a renewal and the
268 Graeme Virtue, “A Whole New Ball Game: The Unlikely Return of STI Sitcom Scrotal Recall,” The Guardian,
November 16, 2016, sec. Television & radio, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/nov/16/c4-comedyscotal-recall-returns-as-netflix-series-lovesick.

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cast members schedules being packed with other demanding roles. However, with no official
announcement and the door left open in interviews by creator Tom Edge, many fans have
speculated about how the series could go on; the ending worked for viewers, but it was by no
means understood as an entirely closed chapter.269
High Fidelity
In the final episode of High Fidelity’s first season, Rob attempts to make amends with Clyde
as she has come to realize over the course of the season how her selfish actions have affected
those closest to her. In their final conversation, Rob shows up at Clyde’s apartment unannounced
and believes that her charm will win him over. However, as Rob babbles about how she is
working on herself—especially how she is learning to stop living in the past—Clyde’s
expression remains stoic. It slowly dawns on Rob that she will not easily make up with him.
After he rejects her, she needles him about what percentage of a chance they have, to which he
replies perhaps nine percent. In the finale’s last scene, parallel editing moves between Rob
walking home after Clyde’s rejection, Cherise singing alone and playing the guitar at the record
store, and the birth of Cam’s child. While walking Rob turns to the camera and states, “Nine
percent. Fucking nine percent. Alright, I’ll take it.” In this moment, Rob declares to both herself
and the viewers she has confided in all season that she will continue to try and win Clyde over.
This infusion of hope is bolstered by the scene cutting between Rob and the birth of her
niece/nephew. The series finale eschews the traditional happy ending of the genre and of High
Fidelity’s previous iterations. Not only does this speak to a more realist depiction of romantic
269 Morgan Jeffrey, “Lovesick Star Updates Fans on Series’ Future,” Digital Spy, November 6, 2018,
https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a870062/lovesick-season-4-netflix-cancelled/; Esther Zuckerman, “Lovesick’s Tom
Edge on Rom-Coms, Season 3, and What’s Next for Dylan and Evie,” Vulture, January 8, 2018,
https://www.vulture.com/2018/01/lovesick-season-3-tom-edge-interview.html.

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love and relationships, but the series’ decision to conclude the first season this way is also
illustrative of television’s narrative conventions and the precarity of the happy ending in the
streaming era.
Returning to Alsop, it is clear from an examination of the final scene of High Fidelity’s first
season that the writers sought to defer Clyde and Rob’s relationship. While there was no
guarantee that the two would end up together, the writers were never able to further expand their
relationship dynamic due to the series being cancelled. Cancellations, or abrupt endings, have
long been a part of the television industry. However, the rise of streaming platforms has
disrupted many of the tried and true models of the industry and has made an already precarious
endeavor more so. High Fidelity was originally set to be released on Disney Plus, but after years
of development delays, Disney decided it was a better tonal fit for Hulu (which they have
majority stake of). The series had a ten-episode season, one month after its premiere COVID-19
shut down much of the industry, and months later the series was cancelled for good in August of
2020. Of course, the pandemic is not the fault of streaming. However, my argument is that with
the greater capacity to widen the romance genre narratively and ideologically, television also
manages heightened risk, and further, that this risk is not understood or borne out proportionally.
While digital streaming platforms might brand themselves as places for endless possibility on
television, they too manage heightened risk. In the case of High Fidelity, Hulu mitigated the risk
of investing in a new series, by adapting an old property and using a star with cross-cultural and
importantly cross-racial cache. This, however, was apparently not enough.
When cast members expressed their sadness that the show had been canceled they remarked
on the lack of diversity in Hulu’s content. In the comments under her Instagram post about the
cancellation Kravitz sarcastically remarked “It’s cool. At least Hulu has a ton of other shows

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starring women of color we can watch. Oh wait.”270 This cancellation illustrates how streaming
platforms mitigate risk in a crowded television landscape. They rebooted an old property but
gave it a different cover to attract a more diverse audience. However, they ultimately decided
that a series led by a woman of color was not worth the long-term investment. TV shows might
be more plentiful as a result of subscription video on demand services; however, these same
upstarts have in many ways heightened the precarity of the industry. The fate of television shows
is more perilous as the workers that create television juggle shorter season runs, longer time
between seasons, “mini” writers’ rooms, and the looming threat of AI optimization. To return to
High Fidelity’s narrative ending, television narrative also responds to the conditions of its
production, as well as the broader cultural sense of temporal instability. The heightened chance
of cancellation or long delays between seasons intensified by digital streaming platforms also
affects how we understand the romance’s happy ending in the current media landscape.
Conclusion
After the box-office success of 2024 film Anyone But You, critics tentatively suggested
that the mid-budget theatrically released romantic comedy might officially be back.271 This
comes on the heels of almost a decade of think pieces declaring the genre dead after its form
morphed during the 2010s.272 Despite films like Anyone But You, or even The Fall Guy (2024),
the romantic comedy, at least for the time being, still seems to be the purview of streaming
platforms. As I have outlined here, the organizing logics of streaming—from their approach to
270 Jessica Herndon, “Zoë Kravitz Has Stopped Reading the Comments,” ELLE, February 14, 2022,
https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a39035654/zoe-kravitz-interview-march-2022/. 271 Sarah Bregel, “Is Sydney Sweeney’s Anyone But You the Grand Return of the Mediocre Rom-Com?,” BBC,
March 5, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240305-sydney-sweeney-new-rom-com-era-golden-age. 272 Matt Singer, “From the Wire: R.I.P. The Romantic Comedy (1932-2013),” IndieWire (blog), March 4, 2013,
https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/from-the-wire-r-i-p-the-romantic-comedy-1932-2013-128315/.

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diversity to their sense of time—has directly influenced the genre’s current narrative strategies.
Indeed, this tendency to construct a millennial protagonist out of step with normative time is not
exclusive to Netflix and Hulu either. Last fall, Antonia Thomas, Evie in Lovesick, starred in the
Apple TV + series Still Up (2023), which followed two insomniac best friends who flourish and
connect with one another when the rest of London is asleep. While the series does not hinge on
the flashback like my two case studies, it grapples with two millennial, oddball characters both
out of step with normative time. Months after the first season concluded, Deadline reported the
series’ cancellation. As Max Goldbart contextualizes, Apple TV has only had a single overseas
comedy production that ran past a single season.273 I bring Still Up into my conclusion because it
is an increasingly common reality for television series in the streaming era. To be sure, television
series have always been at risk of cancellation and British comedies have shorter season runs
than American ones; however, streaming, particularly its detachment from more traditional
programming schedules, can make viewers feel like programs they have invested time into
simply disappear even as the architecture of streaming tries to signal endless availability.
As I have outlined here, the romantic comedy is preoccupied with timing. In recent years,
romantic comedies have taken this thematic throughline and further integrated temporal rupture
into the formal and narratives properties of the genre. Films like When We First Met or About
Time and series like High Fidelity demonstrate a desire to control temporal conditions, which
addresses an audience adapting to fractured temporality in their lives off screen. However, as I
have also demonstrated, the ability to control one’s temporal conditions is not always available
to all characters. Streaming series that operate within the logics of colorblindness have forced
some Black women characters into stasis, waiting while the lives and relationships of their
273 Max Goldbart, “‘Still Up’ Axed By Apple TV+ After One Season,” Deadline (blog), May 24, 2024,
https://deadline.com/2024/05/still-up-apple-tv-plus-canceled-1235929917/.

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friends’ progress. Further, the stops, starts, and re-dos of contemporary romantic comedy address
a generation whose experiences of romantic love have been changed by increasing precarity, the
digitalization of dating, and the influence of technologies of immediacy on our daily lives. It is
within these material and narrative conditions that we must rethink the romance’s happy ending.

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Conclusion
Labors of Love
When discussing my dissertation over the last couple of years, many people would ask
me some version of: why romance? The short answer is that I love love. Romantic comedies
have always been some of my favorite films. I still count films I saw years ago such as 10 Things
I Hate About You (1999) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) as favorites. Additionally, I
grew up in front of the television and on the internet, and I spent much of my time online
immersing myself back into the story worlds of my favorite books and shows through fanfiction.
Becoming an avid fanfiction reader in middle school, fueled my interest in continuing a series
long after the writers, or more aptly the network, decided it had ended. It also fueled my interest
in love as a cultural practice and as a narrative. In graduate school, I developed such a utilitarian
relationship to reading that romance novels helped me relearn how to immerse myself in a story
and not just how to comb through a text to impress my peers in a graduate seminar. When it
came time to pursue a PhD, however, it took me awhile to arrive back at romance. For a time, I
thought I might write about what infuriated me—like the months I thought I would research the
remediation of plantations on digital platforms like Pinterest and Trip Advisor. However, I
quickly realized that for me to spend this much time working on a dissertation—and later on a
book—I needed to love what I was working on. As many will tell you, writing a dissertation is a
labor of love.
“Labors of Love” is also, of course, the title of this project. I chose labors of love as my
title because the catchy wordplay spoke to my interest in bringing together media industry
studies with genre studies. However, as I moved forward in the writing process, the concept of
“labors of love” aptly spoke to many more facets of the project. Katrina Jackson and Rebekah

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Weatherspoon, whose work is the subject of my first chapter, both started writing romance
fiction while working in other jobs. Indeed, Katrina Jackson is still a college professor. It would
take time for them to be paid for their fiction. Further, in interviews, both have discussed how
some of their books and the characters they design are demonstrations of their love for Black
women and their desire to place Black women within cultural narratives of romance they had
been excluded from.274 As I have discussed, Sarah Brouillette argues that romance fiction is a
space where the “love discount” is especially in effect; that women writing romance are meant to
take their passion for the genre as partially compensatory.275 In this way, labors of love partially
speaks to the demands of working as a self-published author. Further, both romance series’
articulation of contemporary capitalism builds out two differing relationships between love and
labor. For Weatherspoon’s characters in her So Sweet series of novellas, the key to their
happiness under neoliberalism is the perfect alignment of their work and romantic lives.
However, for Jackson’s characters in the professoriate, it is a rejection of neoliberal hustle
culture and individualism that allows the romance to thrive. Both series are stories about love
just as much as they are stories about contemporary labor.
In my second chapter, labors of love also takes on multiple resonances. Michaela Coel
wrote Chewing Gum Dreams as a one-woman-show when she was in college. The theatre
production, and the series that followed, are partially a love letter to the community she grew up
in on a council estate in London. However, in the turn to television Coel was asked to remove
some of the play’s darker themes. Further, her experience working on Chewing Gum, as I discuss
in chapter two, was rife with racist and sexist practices that attempted to circumscribe her agency
and authorial voice. Chewing Gum is about multiple forms of love, but the complexity of
274 Moody-Freeman, “Black Romance Podcast.” 275 Brouillette, “Romance Work.”

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Chewing Gum’s love story must be understood through the laboring conditions it emerged in.
Similarly, BuzzFeed, like Channel 4 in public broadcast television, proclaimed to be the young,
plucky upstart in the digital media era. BuzzFeed helped give rise to many Black journalists,
writers, and creators within the media landscape including Quinta Brunson the creator and star of
the Emmy winning series Abbott Elementary. BuzzFeed was also an important platform that
helped shape the ecosystem of podcasting. However, their business practices have left some of
these same individuals out to dry. For example, the company shuttered their podcasting division
abruptly and most shows were cancelled. Thirst Aid Kit was actually an outlier in finding a new
home for the podcast. Out of all of the case studies in this dissertation, both Chewing Gum and
Thirst Aid Kit offer some of the most exciting innovations to the romance genre. They work to
curate an intimate public with Black women audiences in ways that advance the representational
possibilities of Black women within the genre and renegotiates the history of Black women’s
representation in Western popular culture. However, they accomplished these feats with
capricious institutional support.
Finally, my last chapter thinks about how broader, socio-cultural understandings of
romantic love are changing for a generation whose relationship to time and traditional life
milestones are fractured. The series I examine for my final chapter grapple with millennials
whose love lives are in disarray. Many of their roundabout paths to happy coupledom are
mirrored in other aspects of their lives, including work. In Lovesick, for example, Dylan works a
low-wage job as a barista before he can figure out a career he loves enough to pursue with real
intent. Labors of love might also speak to Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s approach to playing Cherise
on High Fidelity. In chapter three, I discussed how Cherise is not written with the same depth as
the other characters; while others move forward in love and in life, she stands still. One might

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read the depth of Randolph’s performance, however, as a labor of love, expanding the character
from the sketch that existed in the scripts. As I continue to develop this project into a booklength manuscript, I will undoubtedly find more such ways that Black women’s work within the
genre in recent years articulates a distinct relationship between labor and love. The media
landscape is more expansive than ever before, however the relationship between platforms,
precarity, and media production should always frame how we understand the works that have
emerged from this moment.
A Provocation and a Concern
In December of 2022, HBO Max (now just Max), cancelled its first original scripted
series, the romantic-comedy anthology Love Life (2020-2021). This news came just months after
the Warner Discovery merger. However, this was not just a cancellation. In the wake of the
merger and the subsequent (now infamous) cost-saving measures David Zaslav began
implementing, Love Life, alongside other relatively new programming on the platform, would be
deleted from the catalog entirely.276 On Twitter, series’ producers and writers disclosed that they
themselves did not even have copies of their work. Love Life could have easily been a part of this
dissertation. In a similar vein to the series I discuss in my third chapter, Love Life’s second
season, starring William Jackson Harper and Jessica Williams, engages the romantic comedy’s
shifting temporality. Viewers spend the season immersed in the highs and lows of Marcus’s love
life as he moves from divorce to a stronger partnership with many, many fits and starts along the
way. Indeed, Marcus’s journey is quite similar to the post-romantic ethos of High Fidelity. When
writing my dissertation, I thought extensively about the cultural work each of the media objects I
276 Nellie Andreeva, “‘Love Life’ Canceled After 2 Seasons, Pulled From HBO Max Amid Review,” Deadline,
December 12, 2022, https://deadline.com/2022/12/love-life-pulled-hbo-max-review-1235197198/.

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analyze do. However, I must confess, that I spent little time thinking of what would happen if the
media objects simply disappeared.
As I have discussed throughout this dissertation, new media technologies and platforms
are steeped in discourses of utopian promise. Platforms like Netflix and Amazon have been
successful at branding themselves as edgier risk takers amidst a staid broadcast and cable
landscape. Indeed, HBO Max initially capitalized on the cable channel’s success at
differentiating itself from regular television. However, as the tech industry becomes further
enmeshed within the media industries, consumers and scholars alike can see the ways in which
new media companies have adopted some of the practices of legacy media industries and have
even mobilized the Silicon Valley’s ethos of optimization in ways that exacerbate the industry’s
precarity. Further, when large media conglomerates merge, many of their “risky” series starring
people of color seem to bear the brunt. Love Life, full of formal innovation and a rare look into
the interiority of Black men, was a streaming casualty in an era where many audiences assume
that series will exist in perpetuity. While all of the material I have used in this dissertation is
currently available, though accessing it all would require multiple different subscriptions, I have
to wonder how long that will be the case. As I turn toward the future of this project, I continue to
ruminate on the future of the new media platforms that made these works possible. Is there a
future without Amazon? Will the books I have purchased for my Kindle still be there in twenty
years? While DVDs of streaming tentpoles like Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016-) are readily
available, a series like Lovesick is unlikely to ever have an official physical release. Will most
podcasts remain free and easily accessible? I do not have the answers to these questions. Future
iterations of this project will expand my analyses of Black women’s place within discourses of
romantic love through deeper engagements with these texts alongside new analysis of other

157
formats like audiobooks and reality television. While I can build my own archive with all of the
media texts I have examined for this project, I do hope that when a book version of this
dissertation is eventually published, those that choose to read it will be able to read, watch, and
listen to the media texts at its center.

158
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Creator Johnson, Jacqueline (author)

Core Title Labors of love: Black women, cultural production, and the romance genre

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema and Media Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2024-08

Publication Date 09/04/2024

Defense Date 06/11/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cultural production,cultural studies,feminist media studies,Race,romance genre

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Language English

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Advisor McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Govil, Nitin (committee member), Imre, Aniko (committee member), Sobande, Francesca (committee member)

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Format theses (aat)

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