Hochschulbibliothekarin (The Librarian) 

EN: Romance novels marked for exploitative tropes and locked in a painted cabinet. After the secured Staff Reading cabinet in the library of my high school.

DE: Liebesromane, deren ausbeuterische Tropen gekennzeichnet und in einem bemalten Schrank eingeschlossen sind. Nach dem gesicherten Personalleseschrank in der Bibliothek meiner High School.

The librarian at my all-girls’ high school in the British West Indies had locked into a glass cabinet all the books which she found unsuitable for students – romance novels with explicit sex scenes. Only teachers (also all female) were allowed access to this cabinet.

Eleven years after my graduation, I investigate the exact dangers to young female British West Indian minds that these books pose.   

Many post-colonial psycho-social problems- for example Frantz Fanon’s “Fact of Blackness” and Chinua Achebe’s “Difference”- stem from male experiences. Combining these phenomena with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “Madwoman in the Attic” (from Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea), a dialogue can be created between British West Indian women resident in the Caribbean and their often more liberated counterparts resident abroad. This possible dialogue was the catalyst of my reading.

Most of the romance novels in this cabinet are in german; the language (my third) allowed me a certain distance from personal encounters with sexuality and body-image, so that I was able to inhabit the figure of a womanist librarian figure in order to do the active reading that this work required.

Thus it became important to highlight and name the following themes:

Heteronormativity - the assumption that heterosexuality is the only sexual orientation
Rape - unwanted advances towards either sex
The ethnic other - the exoticisation or eroticisation of people of colour.
Love-making - consensual sexual activity  

In the realm of historical / 'regency' romance, all of these themes are necessarily warped; their intractability from the genre is symbolised in the novels' typical commissioned cover artwork. This cabinet's 'cover-painting' excludes the tropes of an embracing couple (the woman suppliant, the man brutally impassive) and castles or great houses (implying that true romance is reserved for those wielding fealty, wealth; colonial power), focusing, instead, on the blossoming and dispersion of delicate flowers (priceless virtue; virginity).