Vulnerability and Chronic Illness in Three Contemporary Romance Novels

Romance novels have been justly criticized for either ignoring disability or for portraying disability in problematic ways, for example, as something that can be "overcome" by romantic love. This paper analyzes the representation of chronic illness in three contemporary romance novels which feature interabled relationships between heroines with disabilities and nondisabled heroes. It finds that they subvert dominant pernicious attitudes towards disability, in particular that people with chronic illnesses are not desired or desiring and that the "happily ever after" promised by the romance genre is impossible if one partner has a disability. The novels do this through an exploration of vulnerability. In each novel, the heroines move from a negative understanding of vulnerability as mere susceptibility to harm, to a positive view of vulnerability as a condition for the possibility of healthy and fulfilling romantic love. In doing so, they can be viewed as a positive literary response to the call by feminist disability scholars to conceptualize vulnerability as a potent force for ethical relations, the acknowledgement of which can destabilize the harmful binary of abled versus disabled.