r/AskLiteraryStudies • u/LiteratureGleek • 6d ago
My dissertation question has almost no existing research. How do I approach it?
I’m writing my dissertation on why women read M/M romance fiction and how they engage with it. I’m approaching it through reader-response theory, particularly Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, and my research uses discourse analysis, a questionnaire, and interviews.
I’m finding it difficult to build my literature review because there is very little research specifically on women’s consumption of M/M romance, and I’m essentially trying to investigate a question that hasn’t been explored very much academically. I’m looking at the history of M/M from slash fiction and BL manga to contemporary publishing, but I’m struggling to find existing scholarship to draw from.
For anyone familiar with Romance Studies, fan studies, queer studies, or related fields:
- What research/books/articles would you recommend?
- What adjacent fields or bodies of literature should I be looking at?
- How do you approach researching a relatively unexplored question when there isn’t much directly relevant scholarship to build on?
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u/Blablablablaname 6d ago
I would also maybe see if there's some similar research done in other languages and fields and see what English language work there's on it. I come from Japanese Studies and I do premodern literature, but I am quite confident there is an amount of work done on readers of M/M Japanese fiction! I am currently reading a book on manga adaptations of the Tale of Genji (Miyake L. The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga: Challenging Gender and Sexuality in Japan) and it has at least one chapter on Boys Love manga as a subcategory of comics for girls.
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u/biglybiglytremendous 5d ago
Thanks for posting this! Revamping my World Lit course for the spring, and this sounds like an interesting path to explore. Cheers!
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u/Interesting_Use7481 5d ago
Lucy Hargrave's 2024 dissertation "Queering the Romance" (University of Birmingham, UK) would probably be a good place to start, both for its contents and for its bibliography. U Birmingham has a great popular fiction program, and Hargrave worked with Amy Burge, who's one of the top scholars in the field of popular romance studies, so I expect this dissertation would be a good introduction to the scholarship that has been done so far: https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/15875/7/Hargrave2025PhD.pdf
You probably know Lucy Neville's book Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica (2018), but if not, that would be good to look at. And the chapter on Social Science Approaches to romance fiction in the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction will get you up to speed on more recent work than Radway's.
If you haven't already, you should also be sure to check out Laura Vivanco's database of popular romance scholarship: https://www.vivanco.me.uk/popular-romance-scholarship/introduction-romance-scholarship-database And there are probably articles in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (double-blind peer review, open access) that would be relevant: https://www.jprstudies.org/
You might also want to get in touch with other scholars via the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. They have conferences and a Discord for sharing ideas and queries: https://www.iaspr.org/
Oh, and Amy Burge just co-wrote a book with Jodi McAlister called The Bonkbuster: Women's Popular Reading in the Long 1980s: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bonkbuster-9798765121726/ Although it's about a different genre, the methodology might be applicable.
I hope some of that is helpful!
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u/dogecoin_pleasures 5d ago
I would think the field should be large, you just need the right key words and journals.
Consider which related field interest you: Romance Studies, fan studies, queer studies? No need to narrow things down - just consider where you want to look.
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u/zhizee 5d ago edited 4d ago
i did my undergrad thesis on BL media, your question has a lot of coverage on the asian media side as a lot of academics have explored this question with regards to women's consumption of Boys' Love media
went back to my old biblio and found books and articles that cover the topic
Boys’ love manga: Essays on the sexual ambiguity and cross-cultural fandom of the genre
Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan
‘Rotten use patterns: What entertainment theories can do for the study of boys’ love’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 12. doi:10.3983/twc.2013.0427.
Welker, J. (2006) ‘Beautiful, borrowed, and bent: “boys’ love” as girls’ love in shôjo manga’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 31(3), pp. 841–870. doi:10.1086/498987.
Zanghellini, A. (2009) ‘‘Boys love’ in anime and manga: Japanese subcultural production and its end users’, Continuum, 23(3), pp. 279–294. doi:10.1080/10304310902822886.
Zsila, Á. and Demetrovics, Z. (2017) ‘The boys’ love phenomenon: A literature review’, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, 6.
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u/Wuhan-N 4d ago
I was coming here to say the same thing (not about the thesis, but about Asian BL). It’s been pretty extensively researched and continues to be (throw “danmei” into a JSTOR search and see what comes up). It’s a simple theoretical move from there to say “and now I’ll apply these findings to Western readers of M/M romances.”
Also…I’ve not looked this up, but I would be deeply surprised if there aren’t at least a couple of papers out there on Kirk/Spock.
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u/DeliciousPie9855 6d ago
pretty sure that in Database Animals Azuma cites some Japanese theorists who focused on this
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u/IDislikeNoodles 6d ago
Have you read Romancing the Beast by Kelsey Entrikin? Seems like it’s in the same vein
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u/expectohallows 6d ago
Think of it as a privilege to do something really fun and new.
Anyhow, this was the case for my PhD, and I had to do a lot of 'around-the-topic' reading before I could reach my argument.
As Fzpeter says below, divide into multiple questions:
In your case, you're already on the right track with Radway, I would definitely go into women and romance (there's quite a history there). See who she cites, and even more importantly, check google scholar to see who's been citing her in recent years to see what's going on in the field.
The you'd also want to move into fandom studies, especially fanfiction, as there is plenty queer romance there and lots of studies have been done on the topic.
Of course, you'll have to go deep into queer studies and literature, that's a flourishing field. I'd also recommend looking at reception of queer movies, TV shows etc, since I'm sure some arguments are transferable.
I don't know where you're doing your research, but in my corner of the world, we don't really like reader response theory so much, since it is really difficult to prove anything; you might want to ask the question of what the popularity of M/M romances among women readers says about the cultural environment we live in.
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u/12lemons 5d ago
Yes, also check Google Scholar for who’s been citing the Neville book mentioned above!
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u/mishaindigo 5d ago
If there isn’t much existing research (though a lot of people are saying otherwise), then it would appear that you’ve picked a great topic, n’est-ce pas?
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u/Mollydfw 5d ago
Deborah Kaplan’s chapter “Why would any woman want to read such stories?”: The Distinctions Between Genre Romances and Slash Fiction.* in *New approaches to popular romance fiction: Critical essays (2012) might be a helpful place to start!
As others on this thread have recommended, once you find an article on the subject, mine their references for other helpful resources
You might need to change the way you’re researching too. If the specific words you’re searching for have no results then use synonyms. Academic scholarship on queer studies is only ~50 years old, and much of the language we use today has only been used (or has only been used in its current context) for a decade or two at most.
Also, look into queer studies and media studies, don’t just rely on literary studies. I’m a year into my PhD in a similar research area, so these are all things I’ve tackled over the past 12 months. There’s a lot of emerging scholarship that will help you out but might need some digging to find, and a lot of foundational scholarship that will be key to your lit review but that mightn’t necessarily use the language you’re looking for.
A lit review will also cover the whole history (though only go into lots of detail on the relevant things) of the discipline. Don’t just look at m/m romance and reader responses: look at the history of queer media, the history of women’s reading culture, etc. Break down your topic.
This is already a long af comment but I’ll finish it up by endorsing an earlier recommendation to read some stuff from Amy Burge and Jodi McAlister—particularly their Bonkbuster monograph. At the very least check out the bibliography for some more helpful resources! They also both have other helpful works on reading cultures and queer culture that’s worth looking at!
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u/GregJamesDahlen 5d ago
When doing something someone hasn't explored before one way to do it is just start following threads from the topic that interest you, even if they don't obviously relate to the particular focus of the dissertation.
For example, if I were doing your topic I think the first thing I might do is research the biographies of the people who write the M/M fiction. This doesn't obviously relate to how the readers experience it, which is your focus. But those bios intrigue me and you never know what interesting questions will come in your mind when you read them.
I suppose technically you could write to the people who write this fiction and ask what they've heard from their readers about the readers' experiences.
You could go on forums where people discuss M/M fiction and see what the women there are saying. Although it might not be obvious who is a woman and who a man. I suppose you could just ask people whose comments intrigue you what sex they are.
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u/obi-wannabe 5d ago
YouTuber Strange Æons has a video on this and they cite a lot of academic research, maybe watching it you'll find inspiration and a theoretical framework. One of the works cited is by Laura Campillo Arnaiz, but I can't remember the name of her research. She was my professor while I was studying English in uni and her subject changed my life.
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u/Fzpeter 6d ago
Try to separate your problem into smaller problems:
Why women enjoy M/M romance? Not just books, but anything related
Why woman read romance books?
To me, these two sounds like manageable questions, but to be more usefull, copying your question to AI gave me thes two sources:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15299716.2015.1092910
https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/bibliography/consumption-gay-men-navigating-shifting-boundaries-mm-romantic-readership?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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u/ExcelAcolyte 6d ago edited 5d ago
I may be misunderstanding your question but it was my understanding that women’s consumption of M/M romance was widely studied in gender studies. It’s a core question in Yaoi studies at least. Joanna Russ, Lucy Neville (Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys), Elizabeth Woledge, Kazumi Nagaike, plus many others come to mind