JPRS publishes special issues on a range of topics relating to the study of romantic love and its representations. These issues contain at least 3 articles on their shared topic, as well as an introduction by the editor(s). If you are interested in creating or editing a special issue, contact the Special Issues Editor (special.issues@jprstudies.org) to begin the conversation. You can read more about special issues on our Editorial Policies page.
Please see our Topics of Interest page for a non-exhaustive list of subjects covered by our journal, and our regular Submissions page for additional information on submitting your work. If you are submitting to a special issue or our general submissions, please review our new AI policy and other policies before submission.
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Special Issue: Romancing the Posthuman
The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is calling for papers for its Special Issue “Romancing the Posthuman” focusing on romance, critical love studies and posthumanism.
The posthuman is many things: the cyborg, the monster, the zombie, shapeshifters, and vampires (Herbrechter 2018: 94; McLennon 2017). Primarily, though, it is a challenge to Cartesian and humanist understandings of the human both as an independently agentic, biologically uniform being and as a privileged category: male, white, able. As a state of being, the posthuman changes how we define humanity and its relationship to the planet and its other species (Braidotti 2013: 1-2). Critical posthumanism thus interrogates default binaries (such as organic/inorganic, human/animal etc.) and established hierarchies, and deconstructs the categories that make racial, gender, ethnic, sexual, and species othering possible: the ‘human’, ‘sub-human,’ ‘inhuman,’ and ‘non-human.’ Posthumanism thus offers a critical lens through which we can conceptualize human embeddedness in technoscientific naturecultures, past, current and future embodiments, and alternative conceptions of what it means to be human.
Inevitably, posthumanism has fully embraced science fiction literature and, to a lesser extent, fantasy, horror and Gothic literature, seeing affinities between the posthuman and futuristic imaginings of the human, the zombie and the vampire. But as Falkenhayner (2020: 10) explains, the posthuman is no longer the other that troubles but the similar: “[a]s fictions, posthuman similars appear as desire and as a danger […] Analyses of posthuman fictions reflect their respective contemporary imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion into conceptions of self and other, of similarity and difference, equality and hybridity.” Popular romance is therefore a perfect candidate for the exploration of posthuman imaginaries: for example, little attention has yet been paid to the figure of the posthuman in love and in romance, to critical posthumanism as an approach to popular romance and critical love studies, or what Pettman (2017: 8) terms creaturely love: “to rejoice in the miraculous singularity of the being that one is with.” Love, romance, desire and eroticism offer a uniquely productive vantage point from which to approach the posthuman. Popular romance, as Kamblé (2023: 2) argues, maintains a consistent investment in “seeking the truth of [the] unknown, suppressed, fragmented, or embattled self” of the heroine. How is that self re-configured within the posthuman condition? If, as Roach (2016: 175) posits, “the romance story is a reparation fantasy of the end of patriarchy” that affirms its belief in the power of erotic faith within the sacred guarantee of a HEA, what do such fantasies look like away from “the blood, earth, and origin of the classical social contract” (Braidotti 2011: 104). What alternative human and non-human embodiments does romance offer or foreclose?
There are many more questions to explore at the intersection of critical love/ popular romance studies and posthumanism, and to that effect, the special issue of JPRS “Romancing the Posthuman” is interested in creating, for the first time, a dedicated academic space for that work. With this special issue, we invite popular romance scholars and scholars of posthumanism to engage with the posthuman in their reading of romance and to bring posthuman theory to bear on popular romance texts.
Topics of interest may include but are not limited to:
- Representations/cultural expressions of love in a posthuman world
- Technologically mediated love in global popular culture
- Creaturely love, humanimality and interspecies intimacies
- The posthuman in and/or a posthumanist reading of paranormal, science fiction, fantasy, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, steampunk and speculative popular romance
- Posthuman love, sexuality and desire
- Alternative imaginings of human subjectivities, embodiments and love
- Transhumanist and/or tranimacy fantasies in romantic media
- Critical posthumanist and new materialist understandings of love, romance and kinship
- The mediation of these cultural/theoretical considerations in a variety of media, including but not limited to: genre fiction, literary texts, autobiography/memoir, screen media, music, performing arts, or in the teaching of these media/texts.
We are inviting submissions for the Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies: “Romancing the Posthuman.” The Special Issue is jointly edited by Hanna Hoorenman and Evvie Valliou. Please submit abstracts in MS Word of no more than 300 words and bios of no more than 100 words to j.e.m.hoorenman@uu.nl and e.k.valiou@sheffield.ac.uk by 31 October 2025.
Suggested bibliography:
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
—-. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013.
Christmas, A.J. “Augmented Intimacies: Posthuman Love Stories in Contemporary Science Fiction.” PhD Dissertation Leeds University, 2013.
Falkenhayner, N. “The Ship Who Sang: Feminism, the Posthuman, and Similarity.” Open Library of Humanities, 6(2): 21 (2020), pp. 1–24.
Herbrechter, Stephan. “Critical Posthumanism.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Kamblé, Jayashree, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Routledge, 2021.
Kamblé, Jayashree. Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation. Indiana University Press, 2023.
MacCormack, Patricia. “Posthuman Sexuality.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
McLennon, Leigh. “Contemporary Vampire Genre Fiction: Ethical Feeding and the Posthuman Vampire in Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance.” PhD Dissertation. University of Melbourne, 2017.
Ostalska, Katarzyna. “Dystopias in the Realm of Popular Culture: Introducing Elements of Posthuman and Postfeminist Discourse to the Mass Audience Female Readership in Cecelia Ahern’s Roar (2018).” Text Matters, no. 11 (2021): 204–21.
Pettman, Dominic. Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less than Human. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Roach, Catherine M. Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture. Indiana University Press, 2016.