Happily Ever After for Whom? Blackness and Disability in Romance Narratives

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Abstract: This article considers the limits and possibilities of including multiply marginalized subjects, specifically black disabled protagonists, in romance narratives, which have traditionally excluded black and disabled people as romantic subjects. The article focuses on two examples, Gwynne Forster’s Forbidden Temptation and N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Kingdoms, the former a more traditional romance novel and the latter a more genre-blended romance narrative. I argue that the incorporation of multiply marginalized subjects into romance narratives requires a careful negotiation of genre conventions which rely upon particular race, gender and (dis)ability norms, and identity stereotypes—stereotypes which are often in conflict with one another. In making this argument, I also question how the incorporation of more multiply marginalized subjects into romance narratives might change our expectations and understandings of the genre. Keywords: romance narratives, race, blackness, disability, genre

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