“Romancing the Right”

This presentation explores the construction of the male, white, Christian, nation through two genres of “women’s literature”: marriage manuals and romance novels.  These vehiculate core ideologies of Christian Nationalism, participating in gendered forms of mainstreaming which recast male supremacy as romance. Really taking off in the late 1960s and 70s in response to the twin threats of deindustrialization and feminism (Du Mez 2020) evangelical marriage manuals prescribe a form of biblical patriarchy as the answer to women seeking financial and personal security. This talk will first explore how marriage manuals offer a complementarian semiotics (Tebaldi 2024) which reframes male domination and female submission as personal traits through the prescription of minute rules for dress, speech and conduct which will be pleasing to men. These manuals are not merely about Christian marriage, but scale up these marriage instructions into a metapolitics – reframing the home as man’s kingdom, the male headed household a “divine institution” (Bjork James 2021) upon which a Christian Nation shall be founded.

It will then use an analysis of romance novels to show how Christian marriage and romance media reframes white Christian male power as love – spreading and normalizing this politics well beyond the Christian Right. Looking at series from the MAGA hat romances, it shows how the tropes of love are often about rescuing women from feminism. It then explores how they are used to express religious and political conversion as well.

Finally, the talk will conclude with comments on the uptake of this in the mainstream. The same complementarian semiotics and naturalization of white male power in books such as John Gray’s bestseller Men are From Mars Women are From Venus (1994) , discussion of “love languages” and widely circulating scripts in romance novels and films. Anything but fluffy entertainment, but these genres are key in circulating, mainstreaming, and promoting affective investment in the hierarchies and ideologies which undergird Christian nationalism.

• Bjork-James, Sophie. The divine institution: white evangelicalism’s politics of the family. Rutgers University Press, 2021.
• Du Mez, Kristin. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020.
• Tebaldi, Catherine. Metapolitical Seduction: Women’s language and white nationalism. Journal of Linguistic anthropology, 2024.

Catherine Tebaldi is a postdoctoral research at the University of Luxembourg, culture and computation lab.  Her research interests center on gender, language and nationalism, and she is currently researching roles aesthetics in reactionary discourse.

Please reach out to Hazel Velasco Palacios hgv5008@psu.edu if you have any questions about the event or need accommodations.