If you look at the bragbook on my website you'll see how many of the reviewers initially assumed I was a man -- and that reflects how many of the people on the romance mailing lists thought that. This startled me when I first ran into it, because of course coming from slash my default assumption is that anyone writing that style of gay erotica is female until proven otherwise.
I think there were a couple of things feeding into this. One is that apparently in the US most people think "Jules" is a purely masculine name, and it wouldn't occur to them that it could be a woman, unlike in the UK where it's a common short form for the entire Julius/Julia-derived group of names, whether male or female. The other is that I first came to attention in pro erotic romance as part of "Jules Jones & Alex Woolgrave", and I'm pretty sure that there were a lot of women unfamiliar with slash fanfic who were fantasising about this gay male couple writing love stories together. (Scott & Scott are a real example of such.)
Yes, were I in the UK I'd be very tempted by that study day -- does it produce proceedings? And of course the reason I thought one or two people might be amused by me being litcritted is that the fanfic zine series I edited was cited in an academic study of fanfic, and someone else was contemplating citing me in an academic paper on sf this year, so the romance blog completes the genre trifecta...
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Date: 2007-02-10 04:48 pm (UTC)I think there were a couple of things feeding into this. One is that apparently in the US most people think "Jules" is a purely masculine name, and it wouldn't occur to them that it could be a woman, unlike in the UK where it's a common short form for the entire Julius/Julia-derived group of names, whether male or female. The other is that I first came to attention in pro erotic romance as part of "Jules Jones & Alex Woolgrave", and I'm pretty sure that there were a lot of women unfamiliar with slash fanfic who were fantasising about this gay male couple writing love stories together. (Scott & Scott are a real example of such.)
Yes, were I in the UK I'd be very tempted by that study day -- does it produce proceedings? And of course the reason I thought one or two people might be amused by me being litcritted is that the fanfic zine series I edited was cited in an academic study of fanfic, and someone else was contemplating citing me in an academic paper on sf this year, so the romance blog completes the genre trifecta...