Adapting Romance’s Semantic and Syntactic Structures in 21st Century Young Adult Literature, Film, and Television

In this project, I interrogate specific romance genre structures in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), Laurie Nunn’s Sex Education (2019-current), Faraz Shariat’s Futur Drei (2020), Aiden Thomas’s The Cemetery Boys, Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki (2018), and Malinda Lo’s The Last Night at the Telegraph Club. I argue that my primary texts exemplify Rick Altman’s conclusions that adaptations to genre’s semantic and syntactic structures happen simultaneously. Altman argues that semantic structures are the “building blocks” (31) of genre and syntax elements are the “meaning bearing” structures (33). When authors adapt one of romance’s semantic structures, a change to the genre’s syntactic structures occurs at the same time. In Gerwig’s text, her use of white feminism to adapt the romantic kiss ending and its syntax that romance should be included in white female protagonist’s narrative ultimately reveals white feminist privilege and does not mitigate romance’s conservative semantic elements. In a related choice, Nunn interrogates white female sexuality by way of femme fatale semantic characteristics and the male gaze syntax, but Nunn’s attempted mutation only reveals the contradictions that exist in depictions of twenty-first century white teen girl sexuality. To truly broaden romance’s conservative genre structures, a focus on narratives that feature people of color and LGBQTIA+ experiences are necessary, as evidenced by Shariat’s and Thomas’s adaptation of the love triangle that include intimate romantic and nonromantic queer relationships. Similarly, Kahiu’s and Lo’s combined mutation of the romantic reunification and queer closet semantics allow them to broaden romantic endings to include happy lesbian romances. Shariat, Thomas, Kahiu, and Lo reveal how to adapt romance’s traditional genre semantic elements through methods that allow them to broaden the associated heteropatriarchal conservative syntactic structures. It is not equitable to ask our BIPOC and LGBQTIA+ communities to demonstrate how to combat the conservative backlash to representation that exists today; however, the methods that these four writers utilize establish the necessary broadening needed to contemporize romance’s conservative genre structures and render them more inclusive.