Love is love: Reverse isomorphism and the rise of LGBTQ+ romance publishing

Abstract

In the late 2010s, US romance publishing underwent an astonishing change. Previously, same-sex couples were all but nonexistent in romances released by major publishers. By 2022, every large publisher in the United States issued romances featuring same-sex couples: A few also published bisexual, trans, or polyamorous romances. This article turns to neo-institutionalism to analyze how processes of isomorphism contributed to this change. Through interviews with 10 authors and 7 editors, we show how specific mechanisms associated with isomorphism—coercion, mimesis, and normative pressures—explain this major shift. Contrary to prevailing literature, we find that structural innovations moved from publishing’s periphery to its core in a process we call reverse isomorphism. We contribute to discussions of representation in media by showing how social, organizational, and institutional processes facilitate or suppress underrepresented voices. At the same time, we caution that new structures may create new types of marginalization.

Keywords

book publishing cultural production isomorphism LGBTQ media industries neo-institutionalism platformization romance

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abidin

(2019) Yes homo: gay influencers, homonormativity, and queerbaiting on YouTube. Continuum 33(5): 614–629.

Anderson

(2013) Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Barot

(2016) Queer romance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America: snapshots of a revolution. In: Gleason

Selinger

(eds) Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? London: Ashgate, pp. 389–404.

Brockmann

(2018) Nora Roberts lifetime achievement award acceptance speech. TinyLetter, 21 August 21. Available at: http://tinyletter.com/SuzanneBrockmann/letters/that-rwa-lta-speech-news-from-suz

Brouillette

(2002) Corporate publishing and canonization: neuromancer and science-fiction publishing in the 1970s and early 1980s. Book History 5(1): 187–208.

Burt

(2004) Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology 110(2): 349–399.

Cader

(2017, October 11). “Reidy Looks Forward to An Open European Market After Brexit.” Publisher’s Lunch. https://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2017/10/reidy-looks-forward-open-european-market-brexit/

Caplan

boyd

(2018) Isomorphism through algorithms: institutional dependencies in the case of Facebook. Big Data & Society 5(1): 205395171875725.

Childress

(2015) Regionalism and the publishing class: conflicted isomorphism and negotiated identity in a nested field of American publishing. Cultural Sociology 9(3): 364–381.

10.

Childress

(2019) Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

11.

Christensen

(2016) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

12.

Christian

(2018) Open TV: Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television. Available at: https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781479814909

13.

Christin

(2020) Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

14.

Coffee

(2022). LGBT representation in ads has grown, but many consumers find it inauthentic. Wall Street Journal, 1 November. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/lgbt-representation-in-ads-has-grown-but-many-consumers-find-it-inauthentic-11667331187

15.

Colyvas

Jonsson

(2011) Ubiquity and legitimacy: disentangling diffusion and institutionalization. Sociological Theory 29(1): 27–53.

16.

Coser

Kadushin

Powell

(1982) Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. New York: Basic Books.

17.

Curr

(2015, January 15). How authors decide between traditional and self publishing. New York: Digital Book World.

18.

Deahl

(2017) Is book publishing too liberal? Publishersweekly.com, 7 April. Available at: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/73292-is-book-publishing-too-liberal.html

19.

DiMaggio

Powell

(1983) The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review: 147–160.

20.

Duffy

Poell

Nieborg

(2019) Platform practices in the cultural industries: creativity, labor, and citizenship. Social Media + Society 5(4): 2056305119879672.

21.

Duggan

(2002) The new homonormativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics 10: 175–194.

22.

Elberse

(2013) Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. 1st ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

23.

Ferrante

(2017) Super troopers: the homonormative regime of visibility in RuPaul’s Drag Race. In: Gudelunas

Brennan

(eds) Rupaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture: The Boundaries of Reality TV (1st ed., 2017 ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

24.

Franssen

Kuipers

(2013) Coping with uncertainty, abundance and strife: decision-making processes of Dutch acquisition editors in the global market for translations. Poetics 41(1): 48–74.

25.

Freeman

(1982) Organizational Life Cycles and Natural Selection Processes. In: Staw

Cummings

(eds) Research in Organizational Behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 1–32.

26.

Gallop (2022) LGBT Rights. Gallup.Com. Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/Gay-Lesbian-Rights.aspx

27.

Geertz

(1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

28.

GLAAD (2022) GLAAD’S 2021-2022 where we are on TV report: LGBTQ representation reaches new record highs. GLAAD, 16 February. Available at: https://glaad.org/glaads-2021-2022-where-we-are-tv-report-lgbtq-representation-reaches-new-record-highs/

29.

Glaser

Strauss

(1999) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

30.

Hannan

Freeman

(1977) The population ecology of organizations. American Journal of Sociology 82(5): 929–964.

31.

Harris

(2022). ‘I just want something that’s gay and happy’: L.G.B.T.Q. romance is booming. The New York Times, 30 March. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/books/lgbtq-romance-novels.html

32.

Hesmondhalgh

(2018) The Cultural Industries. 4th ed. London: Sage.

33.

Hesmondhalgh

(2021) Is music streaming bad for musicians? Problems of evidence and argument. New Media & Society 23: 3593–3615.

34.

Hesmondhalgh

Meyer

(2014) Popular music, independence and the concept of the alternative in contemporary capitalism. In: Bennett

Strange

(eds) Media Independence. London: Routledge, pp. 94–116.

35.

Hurston

(1950) What white publishers won’t print. Negro Digest, April.

36.

Jerolmack

Murphy

(2019) The ethical dilemmas and social scientific trade-offs of masking in ethnography. Sociological Methods & Research 48(4): 801–827.

37.

Kuipers

(2011) Cultural globalization as the emergence of a transnational cultural field: transnational television and national media landscapes in four European countries. American Behavioral Scientist 55(5): 541–557.

38.

Kuipers

de Kloet

(2009) Banal cosmopolitanism and the lord of the rings: the limited role of national differences in global media consumption. Poetics 37(2): 99–118.

39.

Laaksonen

S-M

Koivula

Villi

(2022). Mediated by the giants: Tracing practices, discourses, and mediators of platform isomorphism in a media organization. New Media & Society. DOI: 10.1177/14614448221122220

40.

Larson

(2020) Open networks, open books: gender, precarity and solidarity in digital publishing. Information, Communication & Society 23: 1892–1908.

41.

Larson

(2022) Streaming books: confluencers, kindle unlimited and the platform imaginary. Communication, Culture and Critique 15(4): 520–530.

42.

Latzer

(2009) Information and communication technology innovations: radical and disruptive? New Media & Society 11(4): 599–619.

43.

Maltese

(2016). RWA issues apology for infamous “one man, one woman” romance definition poll. Avian30, 4 April. Available at: https://avian30.com/2016/04/04/rwa-issues-apology-for-infamous-one-man-one-woman-romance-definition-poll/

44.

McLean

(2023). Soaring sales of LGBTQ fiction showcase diversity in storytelling. Circana, 6 June. Available at: https://www.circana.com/press-releases/2023/soaring-sales-of-lgbtq-fiction-defy-book-bans-and-showcase-diversity-in-storytelling/

45.

Meyer

(2009, April 10). “About That Book Advance ...” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/books/review/Meyer-t.html?_r=0

46.

Meyer

Rowan

(1977) Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology 83(2): 340–363.

47.

Napoli

(2014) On automation in media industries: integrating algorithmic media production into media industries scholarship. Media Industries Journal 1(1): 33–38. DOI: 10.3998/mij.15031809.0001.107.

48.

Nava

(2021). Creating a literary culture: a short, selective, and incomplete history of LGBT publishing, part I. Los Angeles Review of Books, 5 June. Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/creating-a-literary-culture-a-short-selective-and-incomplete-history-of-lgbt-publishing-part-i/

49.

Neary

(2015) A year later, #WeNeedDiverseBooks has left its mark on Bookcon. NPR, 29 May. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2015/05/29/410272351/a-year-later-weneeddiversebooks-has-left-its-mark-on-bookcon

50.

Nieborg

Poell

(2018). The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. New Media & Society, 20(11), 4275–4292. DOI: 10.1177/146144481876969

51.

Petre

(2021) All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

52.

Poell

Nieborg

Duffy

(2021) Platforms and Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press.

53.

Powell

DiMaggio

(eds) (1991) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

54.

Publishers’ Weekly (1982) Romance writers hold second annual meeting. Publisher’s Weekly, 25 June.

55.

Romano

(2006). The lonely lives of conservative editors in the liberal world of book publishing. Baltimore Sun, 3 January. Available at: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2006-06-04-0606030186-story.html

56.

Sánchez-Soriano

J-J

García-Jiménez

(2020) The media construction of LGBT+ characters in Hollywood blockbuster movies. The use of pinkwashing and queerbaiting. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social 77: 95–115.

57.

Srnicek

De Sutter

(2017) Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

58.

Strang

Soule

(1998) Diffusion in organizations and social movements. Annual Review of Sociology 24(1): 265–290.

59.

Thompson

J. B.

(2021). Book wars: The digital revolution in publishing. Cambridge: Polity Press.

60.

Thompson

(2012) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. 2nd ed. New York: Plume.

61.

Tomasena

(2019) Negotiating collaborations: BookTubers, the publishing industry, and YouTube’s ecosystem. Social Media + Society 5(4): 205630511989400.

62.

Vos

Russell

(2019) Theorizing journalism’s institutional relationships: an elaboration of gatekeeping theory. Journalism Studies 20(16): 2331–2348.

63.

Waldfogel

(2018) Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

64.

Weber

Gerth

Mills

(1958) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.01 MB