This week was a busy one. Yesterday, I presented at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference. The conference was held at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. My presentation, “Like a Bird on a Wire: A Study of the Rediscovery, Preservation, and Circulation of Ephemeral Texts,” was well received, and I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations of the other panelists, who examined celebrity and fandom in connection to Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga, respectively. Our presentations generated a lively dialogue with the audience and prompted some thought provoking questions.

In addition to presenting at the NEPCA Conference yesterday, on Thursday I ran a 400-level Sociology of Literature seminar. The topic of the seminar was love and postfeminism in the Twilight saga. Two articles were assigned for the class: Hila Shachar’s “A Post-Feminist Romance: Love, Gender and Intertextuality in Stephenie Meyer’s Saga” and “’The Urge Towards Love is an Urge Towards (un)Death’: Romance, Masochistic Desire and Postfeminism in the Twilight novels” by Anthea Taylor. This is the second time that I have run this particular seminar. The last time I held this seminar there were two students presenting on the articles, whereas this time I was in charge of introducing and contextualizing the articles and drafting discussion questions. Thus, it was probably beneficial that I have also read the entire Twilight series.

In approaching the Twilight series, both authors (Taylor and Shachar) focus on the Twilight books and/or the network of relationships among romance texts, such as Twilight. In other words, both authors only consider the postfeminist rhetoric of Twilight without examining whether or not actual readers are passively accepting or rethinking/contesting the books’ portrayals of patriarchal gender relations. This lack of attention to the act of reading reminded me of Janice Radway’s assertion in “Interpretative Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading” that it is vital to “distinguish between the book read by an individual and the act of reading itself carried on within a specific social context” (66). She continues: “by separating them analytically, one can then isolate the social and material situation surrounding the actual event of reading” (67). In this respect, I appreciate Anne Helen Petersen’s article “That Teenage Feeling: Twilight, Fantasy, and Feminist Readers,” which was not assigned as a seminar reading, but one I discovered and read in preparation for the class. In the article, Petersen sets out to discover the various pleasures feminist women derive from Twilight. Situating her analysis within a tradition of feminist ethnography, which includes Radway’s Reading the Romance, Petersen aims to “produce an ethnography that employs engaged criticism, yet resists reinterpreting or debunking readers’ own opinions, all the while attempting to situate participant responses within [the] current postfeminist cultural climate” (55). Interestingly, this study stems from Petersen’s own discomfort in obtaining pleasure from reading Twilight. In conclusion, she argues that Twilight, and similar texts, can and should be used to create dialogue and to provide opportunities to work through the contesting ideas of feminism contained both within the text and in the broader society. Here, the reader becomes confronted with the reality of both “the problems and the possibilities of the current cultural moment” (64-65). I think that Petersen’s article is important as it does not deride feminists for reading and experiencing pleasure from Twilight, but instead seeks to understand why and how we can experience this pleasure while simultaneously identifying and critiquing the problematic aspects of the series. Such an approach is beneficial for students who are fans of Twilight (as were many of the students in this seminar), as it allows them to be critical without having to reject their enjoyment of the series.