Last week’s video included a review of Rebekah Weatherspoon’s cowboy romance, A Thorn in the Saddle, and a discussion of why I think reading romance novels (or other media that helps us imagine beyond the stories that are most often presented to us) is important.
A Thorn in the Saddle is the third book in the Cowboys of California series, and it’s a lot of fun, and I think it’s doing something really interesting when it comes to how communities and families can respond to inappropriate behaviour in loving and restorative ways. It’s really good!
In adrienne maree brown’s essay on love as political resistance, in her book Pleasure Activism, she writes about how we need to learn how to love, and how this is something we learn in relationship. I think romance novels are one place where we can learn better ways to love, and where we can learn to imagine love outside of dominant discourses. Any community that you most often see represented as struggling, suffering, excluded, traumatized… if you can’t remember the last time you saw a story about someone from that community thriving, loving, and being loved, I think it’s worth seeking out romance novels by and about them.
I think now, even more than before, we need to be able to witness and imagine trans joy, immigrant joy, Black joy, Indigenous joy, queer joy. Things are really hard, and going to get harder, and I’m not at all suggesting that we pretend this isn’t the case or that we turn away from the material effects of hardship and injustice. I just think that it can be sustaining and generative to also seek out the stories that help us remember that another world is also possible, and that people are never just the hardest moments in their lives.
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