Dark romance: an introduction

This article examines the rise of dark romance from the fringes of self-publishing to a bestselling genre. After surveying definitions of dark romance, the article provides a detailed chronology of the genre’s formation, situating its development as a product of both digital self-publishing’s technological affordances and the socio-political context of twenty-first-century popular feminisms. Intervening in long-standing discussions around fantasies of non-consensual sex, the article argues for dark romance’s depictions of ‘problematic’ romantic courtships as a readerly engagement with a kink imaginary, an activity which implicates both textual and metatextual levels of consent. The article provides a participant-grounded, alternative lens to sexual script theory through which to read dark romance: as a textual-narrative alternative to lived practices of BDSM more commonly addressed by scholarship.