Laura Vivanco
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lauravivanco.bsky.social
Laura Vivanco
@lauravivanco.bsky.social
2.6K followers 220 following 2.7K posts
Independent scholar of popular romance fiction https://www.vivanco.me.uk/ On the Editorial Board of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies https://www.jprstudies.org/

My database of scholarship about romances: https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk

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lauravivanco.bsky.social
Just got an email from Habitat, which made me think of romance heroines and a recent article about sex in f/m romance and how it could maybe do with deviating a bit more from the standard heterosexual script doi.org/10.1080/2326...
The Habitat logo (a heart inside a house) beside their name in lower case. Below this is a photo showing a pair of legs wearing pink trousers with fur at the ankles (the legs are visible until just above the groin). The groin is positioned right beside the caption "Your Grotto your rules". Below the caption are paper decorations of a snowman (white) and a Christmas tree (green).
November 18, 2025 at 2:34 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
From Georgia Nicholl's "Between the sheets: physiological sex acts in the contemporary romance novel"

Note: as far as I can tell, this article only looks at novels with heterosexual, cis protagonists.
I am aware – as a romance writer myself – how difficult it can be to write sex scenes, let alone sex scenes that divert from readerly expectations of sexual scripts and strive for egalitarianism. But there is a degree of responsibility that romance novelists should take on when it comes to the sex they write and, in turn, promote.
November 15, 2025 at 5:33 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
I just realised that the modern equivalent of the breathy ... pauses that ... Cartland heroines ... indulged in... is blurbs written in extremely short sentences and paragraphs. Here's one which looks ridiculously like a poem because of how short the sentences and paragraphs are.
An example of a blurb in full: I captured the enemy. Now I can’t let her go. She’s the prophecy I don’t believe in. I rule the wilds with blood and blade. No mercy. No weakness. Until she crashes into my world—wild, spell-soaked, and defiant. I should've killed her. Instead, I bound her. A siren with eyes like war and lips that taste like sin. Now she’s mine to guard. To break. To crave. But my own soldiers want her power. And if they touch her… I’ll burn this realm to ash.
November 8, 2025 at 2:35 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
I do find this bit a little odd, as though the author hasn't heard of @republiccampaign.bsky.social , who've had a fair bit of coverage in recent years. The image at the top of the article even recalls Republic's yellow and black branding.
Republicanism is an almost buried tradition in Britain. The successors of Oliver Cromwell talk in the soporific language of accountants and lawyers and NGO managers. They grouse about costings and rationality. They talk dimly about the need for “grown up conversations” about the Crown, about “accountability” and “rationality” in ways that thrill sixth-form debating societies and bore everybody else. They lack self-confidence. If republicanism returns, it must talk in the frank, sturdy, moral language of the 17th and 18th centuries. It must condemn corruption and demand redress. It must fight the irrationality of the hereditary principle with its own forms of irrationality. “What is called splendour of the throne is no other than the corruption of the state,” wrote Tom Paine in 1791. “It is made up of a band of parasites, living in luxurious indolence, out of public taxes.” Those two lines are worth more than anything put to paper by a republican in Britain for 70 years. They also, given our experience with Prince Andrew, remain true.
October 29, 2025 at 3:50 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
It's making me think of morris dancers en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_...
Morris dancers, York, by Tim Green from Bradford. The dancers are wearing black breeches and a green stocking on the left leg and a red stocking on the right leg. The stockings have bells on a kind of garter/strap just below the knee. They're also wearing white shirts covered in rosettes (with red and green ribbons) and straw hats (with more ribbons and some feathers on). Their shoes are black.
October 28, 2025 at 8:21 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
I was born here, with a UK-passport-holding parent and I still got the message below. They have a somewhat bleak sense of humour, but it's hard not to have one at the moment.
Status approved (for now) Your reference number ILR453681
October 26, 2025 at 11:45 AM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
Camara writes journals.macewan.ca/muse/article... (open access) that
McIntosh’s The Couch (2014) reimagines a vintage Colonial-Revival couch as an expression of queer desire and fantasy in the form of a functional object. The juxtaposition between the traditional couch style and homoerotic texts alongside heterosexual texts normalizes sexual experiences and fantasies across the spectrum; all of them can exist and have existed at the same time. McIntosh describes the couch as having “no hierarchy or dominant sexuality—it charts the known and unknown territories of [his] personal desire, which has been informed by a variety of gendered and sexual experiences” (n.d). The Couch (2014) challenges heteronormativity by celebrating and normalizing a patchwork of experiences that are equally valid and visible, countering narratives that queer sex is unnatural or deviant.
October 23, 2025 at 1:03 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
From Chloe Camara's "Threading the Narrative: A Critical Discourse Analysis of LGBTQ+ Resistance to Heteronormativity Through Textile Arts":

Aaron McIntosh's "The Couch" 2010 "is a colonial-revival couch upholstered with quilted digital textile prints of romance novels and gay erotica."
Image of "The Couch", 2010. It's a couch and there's a description beneath the photo which says it's upholstered in "Romance novels and gay erotica printed on cotton" and that it was a "found couch". Photo by Terry Brown. The couch is mostly cream coloured, presumably because that's the colour the paper came out, but on it is text and photos, though the definition in this photo isn't good enough to identify any of them. This is a screenshot of part of a closeup photo in Camara's essay. It's a bit blurry but I think there's a Silhouette romance cover identifiable at the back of the couch and below it another romance cover titled "The Bite of Love". I think there's a third cover to the right, on the right-hand side of the couch, but I can't read the title. Other parts of the fabric in this section are mostly text. I think this is the part of the couch that has the most romance novel covers.
October 23, 2025 at 1:03 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
So I was going to be all 😡 but then the review ended with this comment from her, which ends up being a lot more insightful into what romance is capable of
Romance is the least threatening genre; it’s easy, it’s comfortable, and it’s supposed to make you feel good. I wonder if there’s something about using romance as a genre that enables an author to write an uncomfortable novel in a ‘sneaky’ way. So the reader is supposed to feel warm while reading this novel but actually Bradley drops in a lot of difficult questions that make us uncomfortable. Maybe that’s what good romance fiction does?
October 19, 2025 at 12:09 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
Fine! They'd be anachronistic if he's a neo-classical statue so maybe they're just lines where parts of the statue were welded together, and actually he's naked under his apron, in the style of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(... (but less provocative from the front, obvs, thanks to the apron).
The rear view of Donatello's bronze statue of David (creative commons photo by Yair Haklai ) showing him wearing only a helmet and boots.
October 14, 2025 at 5:06 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
I'm really bad at this, but I've tried to circle the lines I can see which could be interpreted as the lower seam of some shorts/cut-offs. My lines are the squiggly red ones.
The back view of Vulcan is very grey. You can see the straps of his apron across his back, and waist. Below his bottom, though, I'm seeing some lines. And then from the knee down he's got sandal straps that cross over each other down his calf.
October 14, 2025 at 4:45 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
Labour really are in denial about the environment. Faced with warnings about the need to address future flooding, www.theguardian.com/environment/... their answer seems to be to rip up nature protection and focus on the extremely short-term economics.
“For too long, deprived towns and cities struggled to secure the vital money needed for flood defences due to a complicated and outdated process,” she said. “Our reforms will rip this up and help communities get back on their feet after floods by unlocking economic growth, building new homes, and creating new jobs.”
October 14, 2025 at 3:29 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
And
I think that, as she identifies with a hero, a woman can become what she takes joy in, can realize the maleness in herself, can experience the sensation of living inside a body suffused with masculine power and grace (adjectives very commonly applied to heroes, including my own), can explore anger and ruthlessness and passion and pride and honor and gentleness and vulnerability: yes, ma'am, all those old romantic cliches. In short, she can *be* a man.
October 9, 2025 at 2:01 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
OK, have had to go off and find the essay. Still not sure about all this, but you can read the whole essay here: books.google.co.uk/books?id=TRA... and here's a screenshot of what I think is a key part of the argument:
Feminists need not tremble for the reader - she does not identify with, admire, or internalize the characteristics of either a stupidly submissive or an irksomely independent heroine. The reader thinks about what she would have done in the heroine's place. The reader measures the heroine by a tough yardstick, asking the character to live up to the reader's standards, not vice versa. Placeholding and reader identification should not be confused. Placeholding is an objective involvement; the reader rides along with the character, having the same experiences but accepting or rejecting the character's actions, words, and emotions on the basis of her personal yardstick. Reader identification is subjective: the reader *becomes* the character, feeling what she or he feels, experiencing the sensation of being *under control* of the character's awareness. Even the most well-conceived and fascinating of romance heroines embodies an element of placeholding. However, it is myopic to believe that just because the reader is female she is confined to the heroine's character as the target of authentic reader identification. In romance it is the hero who carries the book. Within the dynamics of reading a romance, the female reader *is* the hero, and also is the heroine-as-object-of-the-hero's interest (the placeholder heroine). The reader very seldom *is* the heroine in the sense meant by the term "reader identification." There is always an element of analytical distance.
October 9, 2025 at 2:00 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
Agreeing with you, with a quote from page 22 of Hsu-Ming Teo's ""Bertrice teaches you about history, and you don't even mind!": History and Revisionist Historiography in Bertrice Small's The Kadin" books.google.co.uk/books?id=OSA...
This chapter explores the uses of history and the challenge to historiography latent in a particular bodice ripper: Bertrice Small's The Kadin. Among the nine Orientalist historical romances published in 1978, Bertrice Small's The Kadin stands out for its meticulous historical research into the reigns of the Ottoman sultans Bajazet II (1481-1512), Selim I (1512-20), and Suleiman I (the Magnificent, 1520-1566). The Kadin blends historical fact with invention to achieve a romance. The narrative serves as an example of a feminist revisionist historiography of the Ottoman empire (albeit one that is still essentially Orientalist) which places women's domestic, familial, romantic, and sexual experiences, actions, and relationships at the centre of historical narratives of power, statehood, and empire. As the final section of this chapter will demonstrate, such revisionist historiography was - and remains - of considerable interest to general readers, and not simply to historians.
October 4, 2025 at 4:48 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
Fantasy romance was less gendered than romance in general
A different pattern emerges in fantasy romance. Roles such as warrior, royalty, healer, and witch/wizard introduce fantasy-world institutions that allow for more mixed gender associations. Some skews persist (e.g., warriors are predominantly men, healers more often women), but the overall distribution is less rigid. In this sense, romance codifies occupational identity into conventional gendered tropes, while fantasy romance destabilizes them, opening more space for variation beyond conventional gender sorting.
September 23, 2025 at 3:29 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
I know she'd hate it if I used AI to make a composite version of this (and I wouldn't know how to anyway), but I'm thinking of her as a curly-haired version of this Edward Gorey person (since she likes his illustrations so much), with a mastiff waiting for her at the treeline.
This is part of the cover which Edward Gorey illustrated for the Doubleday Anchor edition of The Wanderer by Alain-Fournier. It shows a short-haired human wearing a cloak and standing on a path which is about to lead into a dark forest. There are some bright circular lights hovering above the path, though, as though to light the way to the brooding castle that sits at the top of the path, above the forest.
September 22, 2025 at 4:56 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
Hmm, no. I think it would be OK, because there's a specific exemption for fictional/artistic depictions. But that's for violence. I see that the rules are stricter re artwork that sexualises children. Also, interpreted broadly, could parents just mentioning they have young children be banned under
Do not share personal information about minors: Identifying information, real-time location data, or personal details that could pose safety risks.
September 20, 2025 at 1:30 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
This new series from the University of Wales Press is looking for proposals! I'm on the Board, as are some other romance scholars, so there's definitely an openness to proposals including/focussed on popular romance fiction.
University of Wales Press Romance, Power and Desire New Series from the University of Wales Press Romance, Power and Desire provides a focus for scholarly debates in the humanities around sexual/romantic power and agency, fantasy and social reality, relationships and sexual practices. The series is global in scope and interdisciplinary in nature; it comprises of cutting-edge research in monographs and edited collections across a broad historical period, from the ancient world to the present day. Series Editors: Dr Jo Parsons Falmouth University and Dr Meredith Miller Cardiff University Would you like to write for this series? We’d love to hear from you. Please contact Chris Richards, Journals and Assistant Commissioning Editor, with your proposal, including a brief synopsis of the proposed work: chris.richards@press.wales.ac.uk To read more on the information we require at proposal stage, see our Publish With Us page https://www.uwp.co.uk/publish-with-us/
September 17, 2025 at 3:13 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
I'm not sure what style the Alexis Daria covers are/were, but I liked those! They looked modern enough that I wasn't expecting the setting to be mid-twentieth-century, which is what I'd think if I saw the more retro-looking comic-style covers.
Bold colours (red, yellow, green) and stylised drawing of a dark-haired woman in a red dress putting her hands against the chest of a sharp-featured dark-haired man in a blue suit.
September 16, 2025 at 2:39 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
Got this in an email from Academia. I'm not encouraging their use of AI by clicking on this. In any case, I think I can be fairly certain that no-one is sitting on a pile of 💵, desperately hoping I'll apply for funding to research monster romance.
From an email to me: "Our AI found a $1,000 funding opportunity that aligns perfectly with your research 'Feeling Judged: Reflections...'" Below this is a blue button saying "View your personalized grant matches"
September 15, 2025 at 8:57 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
I just finished a 3D #embroidery rat. I adapted the pattern from a couple of paper-craft models from the Canon website. I'm also not very good at taking photos but this is the best I could do.
A dark grey 3D embroidered rat is standing upright and peering somewhat suspiciously at the camera. The whiskers on both sides of its face are fairly visible, though the light's only reflecting on two on each side, for some reason, and there are 6 in total. This photo shows the shiny nature of the thread I used for the body and tail. The paws and feet are pink embroidered felt, so they're not shiny. They eyes are black beads, so they always catch the light. The rat's mouth is open as though it's about to ask grumpily what you're staring at.
September 8, 2025 at 1:15 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
The headline's a bit provocative. The full paragraph the quote comes from says:
It’s time for John Swinney or Kate Forbes (below) to take a leaf from Nigel Farage’s own playbook and generate headlines in support of a humane immigration policy and in support of Scotland’s longstanding policy of welcome instead of waiting on the back foot for the news cycle to move on.
August 28, 2025 at 11:09 AM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
Here's another photo of it, on Calton Hill
Black and white photo of the same "Democracy for Scotland" banner being held up on the monument at the top of Calton Hill by a group of people, one of whom seems to be addressing a crowd (who're not in the photo).
August 25, 2025 at 7:10 PM
lauravivanco.bsky.social
I think this one is in the People's Story Museum collection, but they definitely had one, and it used to have a SCRAN entry. However, I think that database isn't working now so I can't check. It had an ID of 000-000-033-509-C.
People are joining hands around the foot of Calton Hill as part of the Democracy for Scotland vigil. The photo is from The Scotsman in 2010. There's a big banner in the centre that's in blue and red saying "Democracy for Scotland"
August 25, 2025 at 5:47 PM