ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how in selected teen romance novels adolescent femininity is constructed through the code of romance. It shows that romance is a highly contradictory experience for heroines and interacts with their subordination in complex ways. The code of romance not only involves emotion and caring, it is also about the negotiation of patterns of power and control between young women and men. “Love makes the world go ’round,” the old song goes. Although romance may not be the center of the universe for some, it is one of the “organizing principles” of the home and school lives of teenage girls. Heterosexuality is established as the privileged form of pleasure and desire in the novels also through the character traits of heroines. The novels’ promotion of heterosexuality as the only legitimate form of sexual orientation is one aspect of the management of heroines’ sexuality.
