Author: Georgia Nicholls
Nicholls, Georgia, 2025 Things I'm thinking about sex (in romance): a novel and exegesis, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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This Creative Writing thesis, Things I’m Thinking About Sex (in Romance), is comprised of a rom-com novel titled To Paris, with Love, and a supporting exegesis which examines representations of sexual intimacy in the popular romance novel. As a young woman who has come of age in a world where porn is ubiquitous (Srinivisan) and sexual subjectification is framed as empowering (Gill), I constantly grapple with how to write about sex. The popular romance genre is a space that can address the anxieties and tensions of being a woman under patriarchy (Roach 14), allowing authors to explore “thoughts and fantasies that run contrary to patriarchal scripts of feminine docility, submissiveness, and sexual passivity” (McCann & Roach 421).
When novelists like me put pen to paper, do we actually provide a representation of sex that is egalitarian and challenges patriarchal sexual scripts? How can we, in the romance genre, use our novels to facilitate sexual education and imagination? I will employ the works of scholars such as Emily Nagoski, Rosalind Gill, bell hooks and Katherine Angel to interrogate my own work alongside case studies from contemporary rom-com novelists such as Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry, Elle Kennedy and Christina Lauren. Critical of sex-positive feminism and considerate of the inegalitarian messages characteristic of porn, I explore questions such as how might romance novelists challenge, expand and enrich the sexual imagination while being conscious of the inequalities evident in representations of sexual intimacy? Romance has the expansive potential to create, encourage and inspire the egalitarian possibilities of sex, and To Paris, with Love is my exploration of how a novel can serve as a “twenty-first [century] basis for romance” (Pearce 521) and purposefully make room for modes of female sexuality.
Keywords: romance, popular romance, popular romance studies, pornography, raunch culture, sex, erotica, porn, anti-porn feminism, feminism, romance genre, sex positive feminism
Subject: Creative Arts thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2025
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Associate Professor Amy Matthews