Animating creative selves: Pen names as property in the careers of Canadian and American romance writers

Abstract

Most romance writers in Canada and the United States in the first decade of the 21st century wrote under at least one, and as many as three or four, pen names. In doing so, they typified the ideal of a middle‐class worker who is both a business and a brand. Yet writers went beyond the singular branded self to develop multiple brand names. Prompted by publishers, writers developed pen names as forms of property that, like brands, could be used to mediate between producer and consumer. These newly developed properties were created according to specifications that reflected the gendered and racialized structure of mass‐market publishing. This process of property creation and animation was imagined to create value for writers and publishers in an uncertain, recession‐era economy. [authors, branding, gender, labor, romance, United States, Canada]

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…Cooper () foregrounded the language of “unruly affects” in her examination of homeless individuals in San Francisco who elude US criminal court control, despite legal efforts to contain and render them fixed. As O'Neill and Dua (, 8) argue, “people want out, and they want it now.” Sometimes the unruly or bumptious (Haraway ) is a matter of improvisation and bricolage in relation to divine agency (Bjork‐James ; Elisha ; Friedner ; O'Neill ; Scherz ) or in the face of global capitalism or neoliberalism (Degani ; Gershon ; Hoag ; Ofstehage ; Taylor ; Zhu ), while other times the unruly is a matter of life and death, terror and madness (Burraway ; Luna ). Some of this work used the language of the unruly to point to the contagious spilling over of affect in an attempt to take seriously a range of ways of being in the world.…”

“…Other work focused on people's seemingly unruly, often “flexible,” behavior in relation to corporate logics and economics (Degani ; Gershon ; Hoag ; Nuhrat ; Ofstehage ; Taylor ; Zhu ). Nuhrat () emphasized how competition for and efforts to control Turkish soccer fans’ “maddening” love of the game highlights fans’ agency in an increasingly repressive political environment.…”

“…Anthropologists examined these unruly behaviors in relation to labor in the United States as well. In a study that anticipated the Marie Kondo decluttering trend of early 2019, Newell (, 1) analyzed hoarding behavior among Americans, showing how people have difficulty getting rid of items because of the unruly “open‐ended and often unrecognized chains of semiotic associations” sparked by the “affectively charged material objects.” Taylor () illuminated the pen‐name strategies romance writers in the United States and Canada use to work within and exceed neoliberal branding logics. Gershon () similarly showed that Americans see the paradoxical nature of neoliberal imperatives where, for example, being a “flexible” worker is incompatible with being the right kind of job candidate, and thus their negotiations of social practices and contingencies exceed reductive neoliberal models.…”

Keywords and key words in AE

“…Here it becomes clear that United States as an isolated phrase (indicating the article's geographic focus, as the AAA publication director advises for keyword listings) does not tell us much about the United States as a research setting or analytical trope for specific topics. In 2018, United States indexed articles discussing a broad range of topics, including documents in state‐noncitizen relations (Abarca and Coutin ), romance writers (Taylor ), neoliberal corporate hiring (Gershon ), bureaucratic regimes concerned with endangered species (Errington and Gewertz ), Hopi tribal consultation (Richland ), transnational flexible farmers (Ofstehage ), Christian praise dancers (Elisha ), empathic military training (Stone ), quantitative science in population health (Mason ), and citizen campaigns in court (Greenhouse ).…”