Thank you for bringing this piece to my attention. I feel like it has a lot to say about our collective dismissal of #romance novels and also our inability to think about f/f relationships as worthy of romance storytelling. vqronline.org/essays-article
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"Generations of forgetting to zoom into female experience aren’t easily shrugged off, however noble our intentions, and the upshot is that we still don’t expect female texts to have universal things to say."
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Women (even queer women) are taught from birth that the stories of boys are universal stories, that the stories of girls are only for girls. We are all (people of all genders) in the process of unlearning this natal training.
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Combine this with the near universal assumption in Western literature that a woman's life story is organized around a marriage (and babies) plot, and the exclusion of women whose lives are organized around other women from the romance plot comes into focus.
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Rebecca Traister talks about the marriage plot shaping life narratives for women in her book All the Single Ladies: amazon.com/All-Single-Lad (and I would argue her unmarried women include women in relationships with women b/c society saw them that way)
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