Pushing the boundaries: Erotic romance and the symbolic boundary nexus

How do contested emerging subgenres become legitimated and institutionalized? This case illustrates the meso-level negotiation of community sense (Wohl, 2015) as stakeholders of a genre (romance fiction) debate whether genre boundaries include a new subgenre (erotic romance). Erotic romance upended conventions by introducing explicit and sometimes unconventional sex into the traditionally heteronormative romance genre. However, opposition to subgenre inclusion involved more than sexual content. Drawing on interviews (n = 40) and text data from Romantic Times (n = 360) and Romance Writers Report (n = 180), I find that mainstream incorporation of erotic romance involved community negotiation of multiple symbolic boundary debates: (1) What is acceptable sexuality? (2) What is a real book? (3) Who is a professional author? Erotic romance was fully institutionalized after best-selling Fifty Shades of Grey forced the community to confront all three boundary debates at once. Each debate represents a different symbolic boundary around the mainstream romance genre, but the case can only be fully understood by examining how they intersect. I conceptualize that intersection as the symbolic boundary nexus and argue that analyzing genre classifications as a set of intersecting boundaries is a productive approach for understanding how cultural communities negotiate contested classification processes.