Academic literature on the topic 'Post-trauma romance'

Drawing on The Remote Kingdom of Women (1988), the novel written by Chinese author Bai Hua (1930-2019), this essay examines how post-Mao China articulated the notions of memory and identity, as well as of belonging and othering, as an attempt to overcome the state of fragility caused by the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the post-revolutionary growing influence of Western culture. It proposes to explore the way some of the literary works produced during this period were to promote an encounter between a fragmented yet hegemonic culture and the cultures of the internal ethnic Other, and how this encounter between majority and minority subjects was to highlight precisely the condition of fragility that underlies the very concept of identity. Keywords: China; Literature; Bai Hua; Identity; Majority; Minorities.

AbstractThe article examines Tomasz Różycki’s 2004 mock epic Twelve Stations. The poem recounts an oneiric tale about a community of expatriates from Poland’s Eastern Borderlands who send their grandson on a mission to assemble a scattered family and guide it to their lost homeland in today’s Ukraine. Revolving around the issues of memory, post-memory, and nostalgia, Twelve Stations draws heavily from the adventure tradition to present a fresh perspective on modern Poland’s founding myths: the loss of Borderlands and settling the post-German territories in the West. Reading the poem in the context of cultural memory studies and focusing on the author’s deployment of adventure tropes and patterns, the article argues that Różycki’s poetic tale de-politicizes the existing narratives affixed to forced resettlements by weaving them with various strands of popular romance. In doing so, the poem imagines a collective act of “working through” the trans-generational trauma resulting from physical and cultural uprooting. Różycki’s inventive use of the form demonstrates that adventure narratives can be effective vessels of cultural memory, capable of repurposing elements of official narratives and nostalgic imagination to initiate more constructive and future-oriented identity-building processes.

This study aims to describe adult mental healing, which is represented in the Korean drama series "It's Okay to Not Be Okay" through several characters. This romance drama, wrapped in internal conflict and mental illness, has high ratings both domestically and internationally. Aired through the Netflix network, this series broke the record number of viewers and caused much controversy. This study uses a qualitative approach using semiotic analysis theory and data analysis techniques Charles Sanders Pierce. Pierce categorized the triangle of a meaning theory, which consisted of three main elements: signs, objects, and interpretants. The researcher analyzes the selection of text and images related to mental healing. The results showed that the characters in "It's Okay to Not Be Okay" experienced psychological disorders in the form of depression, anti-social, autism, hallucinations, Manic Disorder, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This drama encourages Korean people who have tended to be more aware of mental problems and the importance of healing them in the personal (non-medical) realm through the interpersonal approach of the characters. Healing techniques such as Butterfly Hug, Problem Solving Therapy, Interpersonal Therapy, and coping with past trauma are several solutions for mental healing.

33 Background: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in cancer patients and those with life threatening illnesses has been officially recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition: DSM-4, since 1994. However, the updated 2013 DSM-V has redefined the idea of trauma and stress-related disorders resulting from life threatening illness as an amalgam of anxiety and adjustment disorders which must meet heightened criteria to be diagnosed as cancer-related PTSD (ca-PTSD) (1). Methods: In this pilot survey of Millennials and Generation X cancer survivors, ages 18-35 and 35-50 respectively, we queried based on DSM-V guidelines for basic demographics, illness-related stressors, as well as knowledge of ca-PTSD. We sent an electronic survey to 20 members of a social support group in May 2016. Results: Of the 13 survey respondents, 9 were female and 4 were male. Half of the respondents were from the Generation X and Millennial groups. None were military veterans. 6 were single, 4 were married, and 3 were in stable long term relations. 11 of 13 had a college degree or greater, and all but one had their cancer diagnosed after 2010. Respondents rated illness stressors as: 92% Possible illness progression; 77% Romance and/or reproductive; 77% Job-related; 77% Family dynamics and insecurities; 69% Social interaction insecurities; 69% Physician or Care-provider interactions and insecurities. All were aware of PTSD in general but only 4 reported discussion with a care provider. None recalled being screened for PTSD. Eight were unsure if more emphasis should be placed on ca-PTSD. Conclusions: This cohort further validates the new DSM-V inclusion of illness-adjustment and resultant anxiety to diagnose cancer related stress disorders, narrowing the scope of ca-PTSD diagnosis.With this survey we underline the importance of identifying illness-related stressors utilizing psychological distress monitoring, educating patients on symptoms and prevalence of cancer related stress disorders, and communication with the patient concerning cancer-related stress disorders and ca-PTSD diagnosis.

Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fiction. Where critiqued, trauma is sometimes understood as a domesticating concept by which the events of 9/11 are incorporated into sentimental, familial dramas and romances with no purchase on the international significance of the terrorist attacks and the US's response to them; or, the concept of trauma is understood critically as the means by which the boundaries of a nation or “homeland” self-perceived as violated and victimized may be shored up, rendered impermeable – if that were possible. A counterversion of trauma argues its potential as an affective means of bridging the divide between a wounded US and global suffering. Understood in this way, the concept of trauma becomes the means by which the significance of 9/11 could be deterritorialized. While these versions of trauma, found in academic theory and literary practice, invoke the spatial – the domestic sphere, the homeland, the global – they tend to focus on the time of trauma rather than on the imbrication of the temporal and the spatial. If, instead, 9/11 trauma could be more productively defined as the puncturing of national fantasies of an inviolable and innocent homeland, fantasies which themselves rest on the (failed) repression of foundational violence in the colonial and settler creation of that homeland, and on subsequent notions of American exceptionalism at home and, in the exercise of foreign policy, abroad, then the traumatic can be spatialized. In other words, understood in relation to fantasy, trauma illuminates the terroritalization and deterritorialization of American history. After working through various examples of post-9/11 fiction to demonstrate parochial renditions of trauma and trauma's unrealized global resonances, this article turns to Cormac McCarthy's 9/11 allegory The Road for the way in which its spaces, places and territories are marked by inextricable traumas of the past and present – and therefore for the way in which it models trauma's relation to national fantasy.

The last two decades have seen a rising interest in the Holocaust and the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II in Czech literature. Novels by Hana Androníková, Radka Denemarková, Magdalena Platzová, Kateřina Tučková, and Jáchym Topol share a quest for a new poetics of remembrance. Informed by contemporary discussions about Czech memory politics, these novels are characterised by spectral visions of Germans and Jews alike, a dichotomy of trauma and nostalgia, and an understanding of Czech history as postcatastrophically entangled and thus calling for multidirectional forms of remembrance. In this respect, literary memorial forms compensate for the absence of other memorial forms addressing these topics through a transnational lens. The interaction of different historical points of view is achieved by a time frame extending from the war to the present day and stressing the intercultural dynamics of Czechs, Jews, and Germans retroactively. In order to illustrate this entanglement, authors make use of popular genres, such as romance, and create texts shaped by genre fluidity, memory theory, documentary practices, and concepts of transnationality.

Building on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this article examines Oksana Zabuzhko’s latest novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets as postmemorial fiction, which articulates the trauma of Soviet political repressions in the post–World War II period and in the 1970s via the perception of the second and third generation. The affiliative postmemory about World War II in Ukraine from the viewpoint of Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans is emplotted via an original generic combination of contemporary Holocaust fiction and romances of the archive. Postmemory is used in the novel to shape a mythologised alternative historical narrative that reconceptualises the country’s difficult past as a story of heroic resistance.

Building on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this article examines Oksana Zabuzhko’s latest novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets as postmemorial fiction, which articulates the trauma of Soviet political repressions in the post–World War II period and in the 1970s via the perception of the second and third generation. The affiliative postmemory about World War II in Ukraine from the viewpoint of Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans is emplotted via an original generic combination of contemporary Holocaust fiction and romances of the archive. Postmemory is used in the novel to shape a mythologised alternative historical narrative that reconceptualises the country’s difficult past as a story of heroic resistance.

Resumo Este artigo estuda a representação dos anos finais da colonização portuguesa em Lourenço Marques (atualmente Maputo, capital de Moçambique) na obra literária Caderno de memórias coloniais (2009), da escritora Isabela Figueiredo. Trata-se de analisar a escrita colonial a partir da perspectiva de duas gerações distintas: o pai colonialista e a filha progressista. O romance acolhe os embaralhamentos promissores das escritas de si e dos paratextos, jogando luz nas interfaces entre a escrita individual e a memória coletiva portuguesa de um trauma nacional. Em sua tessitura romanesca, Figueiredo busca fugir dos perigos da história única (ADICHIE) e escreve, como ensina Walter Benjamin, uma história a contrapelo.

Romancing the Fantasy: #Booklove TikTok has been credited with encouraging young readers to #booklove through its BookTok community. However, the BookTok “trend for ‘spicy’ (i.e. sexy) books has led to fears children may be reading titles with adult content” (Knight). To ascertain the tenor of the adult content in these sexy books, we analyse a popular BookTok novel known for its spicy sex scenes: A Court of Mist and Fury (ACOMAF), a novel by Sarah J. Maas, the “reigning queen of romantasy” (Grady) and “mortal queen of faerie smut” (VanArendonk). Positively, Maas’s novel includes extended erotic scenes that both represent and invite female arousal and desire. By depicting the female protagonist's body responding enthusiastically to her lover's touch, these scenes counter concerns about problematic gender ideologies contained in mainstream pornography and challenge how female sexual desire and agency have been minimised historically. Problematically, however, the novel reinforces a heterosexual romance script that says once a woman finds her soul mate, she has no need to tell her lover how she wants to be touched because he knows exactly how to please her sexually. We argue that while the female protagonist expresses her desire and experiences sexual pleasure without shame, the articulation of this desire occurs as internal narration rather than external articulation to her lover in the storyworld, which weakens the potential for the novel to model a love literacy that highlights self-agency as part of self-love and sexual desire. Love literacy includes learning how to make distinctions between eros, romance, and pornography. Akin to sexologists who advocate for porn literacy for young people (Woodley et al.), our concept of love literacy is part of a much-needed expansion of our understandings of what has often been assumed or implicit: a view of love and sexual relationships as being natural, rather than socially constructed (we’ll know the right person / the right time / they’ll know what I want and need, and so on). Making such distinctions lies in understanding that our moral imaginations create and are created by the texts we read (Boyd). This understanding includes, rather than excludes, a recognition of the felt sense that is unique to every individual, a reading through the body that includes the awakening and recognition of desire. The distinction between art and porn can be fine (Bray, The Question). One distinction that has long been drawn is between visual art and pornography – currently contested in manifestations of #MeToo protests, with millennial feminist activists at the Louvre covering female nudes with #MeToo graffiti (France24). Another distinction lies in definitions of what is erotica and/or what is pornography, and their connection to writings about love. The origin of the word pornography stems from writing about prostitution, while the word erotica comes from eros/love. Romance refers historically to stories written in the romanz language originally connected to fairy tales, also called wonder tales and often told by women; it now denotes love and/or erotic stories. The word fantasy comes from the Greek phantasia – an image or perception that includes picturing oneself. Euphemisms like “sensual”, “steamy”, “hot”, and “spicy” have long been used in the romance genre. Today, lines are even more blurred by the emergence of a new genre, a hybrid of romance-focussed fantasy novels and a new word that appears to have emerged via TikTok hashtags: romantasy. Female Sexual Desire: Mixed Messages In her book Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski proposes that while young people think they know a lot about sex, what they know a lot about is what their culture believes about sex, rather than sex itself. Despite the deconstruction of sexual interactions that has taken place in the last decades, messages concerning sexual desire remain outdated and most adults and teenagers still absorb their content. Nagoski suggests three powerful messages, all exhibiting double standards for men and women: 1) the moral message; 2) the medical message; and 3) the media message. The moral message, still the most powerful for women, depicts the paradox between treasuring virginity (safe keeping your body for the man who will love you) yet being desirable, an impossible standard because “if you are sexually desirable, you are, by definition, unlovable” (Nagoski 159). Texts depicting this so-called “ideal” position of female desire have influenced Western thought since at least the Victorian period and may be summarised in William Acton's infamous words: “women, if ‘well brought up,’ are, and should be, absolutely ignorant of all matters concerning [sex] … ‘the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’” (Acton in Everaerd et al. 103). A more recent medical message – that women's desire, arousal, and orgasm are biologically analogous to men’s – derives from the work of researchers in sexuality in the last century, many of whom want to recognise and offer parity between the sexual man and woman. However, if a woman’s sexual response or quantifiable sexual desire does not follow men’s, then she is seen as dysfunctional, leading women into another double bind. Enter message number three to the rescue: the newer, media message, which presents sexuality for all genders as unlimited. If one is not engaged in multiple orgasms, uncountable sexual positions, volatile and explosive sexual responses, engrossed in pornography, or sexually interacting with gendered and non-gendered others, then one is atypical or is missing out! Representing Female Sexual Pleasure Mixed messages internalised by society vis-à-vis female sexual desire remain evident in the most current form of explicit portrayals of sex, namely porn. Complicating cultural messages of sex are the visual differences between men and women’s sexuality: “whereas male sexuality is very visible, external, inserting, female sexuality is largely hidden, internal, inserted into” (Zachary 91). In representations of sexual interactions, female protagonists perform their sexual responses as a part of their gender being objectified. Objectification, the viewing and consideration of an other for use in sexual interactions, may be particularly harmful for women as they self-objectify by internalising judgments and considering themselves as bodies first and foremost (Kellie et al.), bodies to be done things to. Representing authentic female sexual pleasure in porn is problematic. Women have been so surrounded by taboo, ambivalence, and ambiguity – and so socialised to be a certain way sexually – that finding their own voice may be near impossible. Spectatoring during sexual interactions, more common in females than males, is having a critical and anxious internal dialogue about what one should be doing, about the right way to be seen, and about how to respond (Mintz, Stop). How a woman should respond to sex or represent sexual pleasure are dominant themes in porn. In heterosexual sexual interactions, males do things to women’s bodies, and women respond in a highly choreographed way. Negotiating self-agency and the ability to consent genuinely can only occur when one is aware of one’s feelings in relation to self and other. This negotiation is dependent on a love of self, which includes self-care, and, like relationships, is dynamic. Access to self-love, the love of self beyond and inclusive of the body, has not been historically available to women, yet studies demonstrate that “feeling entitled to pleasure increases a woman’s agency in telling partners what they want sexually and their agency in protecting themselves sexually” (Mintz, The Orgasm). Love of Self versus Love of Other Porn scripts dominate the knowledge of sexual culture. In thinking about McKee et al.'s definition of pornography as “sexually explicit materials intended to arouse” and a “concept … to control the circulation of knowledge and culture” (34), one comes face to face with a double bind for women. Much of the porn available follows the heteronormative (and often violent) script where men do things to passive, silent women, in line with outdated messages such as, in women … especially in those who live a natural and healthy life, sexual excitement also tends to occur spontaneously but by no means so frequently as in men … . In a very large number of women the sexual impulses remain latent until aroused by a lover’s caresses. The youth spontaneously becomes a man: but the maiden – as it has been said – ‘must be kissed into a woman’. (Ellis in Everaerd et al. 102) The idea that he will know and give her what she needs, desires, and wants elevates him to a power position. It’s in sexual interactions that the heteronormative script exists because the passive position of receiver (the internal vaginal receiver) abdicates her from full responsibility of articulating her desires because passivity keeps women’s dialogue internal. Thus, the powerful penetrator (phallus as external and all-knowing) assumes that responsibility. And yet, women consume porn and are aroused by it, with women aged 18 to 25 engaging with porn more than older women. In their study into why people use porn, Smith at al. found that women used porn fiction sites at almost double the rate that men did and that “men use porn simply to express their arousal, but women are more likely to use pornography as a means to arousal” (284). Many women recognise the felt sense of their desire and arousal, but given the fraught messages embedded in female sexual desire and pleasure, explicitly sounding these desires out to a male other may still form part of the inherited and socially constructed idea. A Court of Mist and Fury Known for its steamy sex scenes, A Court of Mist and Fury serves as an exemplar for other romantasy novels, such as Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing. These novels challenge Nagoski's moral message and feature strong, complex female protagonists, whose sexual desire is represented as a healthy, normalised aspect of their identities. Sex, and diverse sexualities, are commonplace in both storyworlds, and, in line with a medical message, women and men are depicted as having equally high libido levels. Maas's and Yarros's novels positively challenge gendered sexual scripts that represent men as active initiators and women as passive recipients of sexual touch. Upon closer analysis of the erotic scenes between the female protagonist and her lover in both novels, however, a more problematic dynamic becomes apparent: in each sex scene, the aroused female does not verbalise how she wants to be touched. Vocalised in the first person, she makes her physical arousal known through her narration, but she never articulates explicit desires to her lover. Although we do not have the space to consider both novels in detail, the following example from Fourth Wing shows the representation of female sexual desire as internal narration rather than external expression, a dynamic we analyse in A Court of Mist and Fury in more detail. In this scene from Yarros’s Fourth Wing, Violet expresses her yearning for Xaden and also articulates how he seems to know exactly how she wants to be touched: “one second he’s out of reach and the next his mouth is on mine, hot and insistent. Gods, yes. This is exactly what I need. … Closer. I need him closer. As though he can hear my thoughts, he kisses me harder, claiming every line and curve of my mouth with a reckless edge that makes my body sing” (363). The emphasis on yes and closer implies the strength of her desire and need, even as Xaden occupies the active subject position in most of this moment. This juxtaposition between celebrating “the heroines’ sexual agency” while critiquing “the compulsory heterosexuality that privileges male power and experience” has been articulated by Elizabeth Little and Kristine Moruzi in their chapter on Maas’s fiction (82), and we build on their work in this next section. A Court of Mist and Fury develops the romantic and sexual relationship between human turned fae Feyre and High Lord of the Court of Night Rhysand/Rhys. The first novel in the A Court of Thorns and Roses – commonly shortened to ACOTAR – series sets up Feyre and Rhys as enemies, but this second novel utilises the enemies-to-lovers trope to create sexual tension between them. Their attraction for each other is depicted in three main episodes, with each one building upon the last. In the first instance, to distract from their friends' actions, Feyre pretends to be the “High Lord's whore” (409), which draws explicitly on the etymology of the word pornography. Despite it being a public performance, Feyre and Rhys's bodies respond to each other after months during which they had “danced around and teased and taunted each other” (415). Immediately afterwards, Feyre reflects on her feelings and narrates, “my focus half remained on the High Lord whose hands and mouth and body had suddenly made me feel awake – burning … alive. Made me feel as if I'd been asleep for a year, slumbering inside a glass coffin, and he had just shattered through it and shaken me to consciousness” (418). Drawing on a fairy tale metaphor, Feyre equates herself to Sleeping Beauty or Snow White kissed awake by a prince after a long sleep. Although the scene positively represents both Feyre and Rhys's arousal – her wetness and his hardness – the narration with which Feyre ends the chapter problematically echoes Ellis's message that the male kisses the maiden into being a woman. The second steamy scene is also framed as a distraction, rather than as an explicit articulation of Feyre's desire. Feyre and Rhys take shelter in a room in an inn that, predictably, contains only one small bed. While lying curled against each other, Rhys twice asks Feyre what she wants. Her first response occurs as an internal narration: “more, more, more, I almost begged him as his fingers traveled down the slope of my breasts … heading toward the low band of my pants and the building ache beneath it” (471). Feyre internalises her desire for more of his caresses, rather than telling him to touch her where her ache builds. Feyre's repetition of more, more, more yearns to break from her mouth rather than to remain screaming inside her head. Readers are positioned to hear Feyre's knowledge of her own desires and to feel her body aching for more touch, but unfortunately, she does not express them aloud to her lover. Feyre justifies her silence as power. When Rhys asks her again what she wants, Feyre narrates her actual desires, but lies to Rhys about them: arching fully against him, as if I could get that hand to slip exactly to where I wanted it. I knew what he wanted me to say. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of it. Not yet.So I said, “I want a distraction”. It was breathless. “I want – fun”.His body again tensed behind mine.And I wondered if he somehow didn't see it for the lie it was; if he thought … if he thought that was all I indeed wanted.But his hands resumed their roaming. “Then allow me the pleasure of distracting you”. (471) This exchange distinguishes between Feyre's body speaking its desire while her voice refuses to do so. Feyre claims her silence is to withhold providing Rhys what he wants to hear, what he wants her to say, but Feyre's knowledge of what Rhys wants and what she herself wants is left unspoken and unknowable. Despite this withholding, Feyre hopes that Rhys somehow sees her lie, somehow knows exactly what she wants, regardless of her refusal to speak it. Instead, pleasure shifts to him, even as he pleasures her. Feyre and Rhysand finally have explicit penetrative sex after it is revealed they are mates, a bond more than lovers or spouses. The fated mating bond in the ACOTAR storyworld roughly equates to finding a soul mate. Although some mating bonds are not reciprocated, the one between Feyre and Rhys's bond is “rare, cherished” (492). We highlight this connection because it fortifies a fairy-tale fantasy that one's “true love”, the prince who will awaken you with a kiss, need not be told one's desires because the two become one: I moved my hips in time with his. He kissed me over and over, and both of our faces turned damp. Every inch of me burned and tightened, and my control slipped entirely as he whispered, “I love you”.Release tore through my body, and he pounded into me, hard and fast, drawing out my pleasure until I felt and saw and smelled that bond between us, until our scents merged, and I was his and he was mine, and we were the beginning and middle and end. We were a song that had been sung from the very first ember of light in the world. (533) Over the three pages leading to this climax, Feyre slides her arms around Rhys, opens her mouth to him, groans into his mouth, wraps her legs around him, arches, plunges, snarls “a silent order” (530), bucks her hips, and has multiple orgasms without saying a word, all before Rhys has his pants unbuttoned. “Play later” and “you're mine” are the only words Feyre utters before the “I love you” in the above-quoted scene, in which she moves with him, and it is his penetrative phallus that draws out her pleasure, as they merge into a single timeless song that transcends their bodies – a fantasy indeed. Conclusion: Sharing Desire Romance, erotica, and pornography amplify desire, yet they do not fully articulate it, especially for women and diverse sexual orientations. However, they all offer recognition of not being alone with our desires, that others share them. Maas’s romantasy, for example, as shown here, connects the reader with an experience of desire: an imaginal space to wonder about sexual relationships without being watched. It is not so long ago – and if Bookban has its way, it soon will be again – for some desires to be deemed unspeakable. Learning to speak openly of desire is where a love literacy begins. This literacy includes making distinctions between pornography – with its heritage of silencing and enslavement – and romantasy, in which one might wonder about the self and the other, and finally love, which attachment theory tells us is empowered by close attention to self and other, to observing, speaking, and listening. Where giving power to silenced erotic voices will take us, we can – and must – wonder. References Boyd, Elizabeth Reid. “How Creativity Can Help Us Cultivate Moral Imagination.” The Conversation 30 Jan. 2019. <https://theconversation.com/how-creativity-can-help-us-cultivate-moral-imagination-101968>. Bray, Abigail. “Governing the Gaze: Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panics and the Post-Feminist Blindspot.” Feminist Media Studies 2.9 (2009): 173-191. ———. “The Question of Intolerance: 'Corporate Paedophilia' and Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panics.” Australian Feminist Studies 23.57 (2008): 323 – 342. Everaerd, Walter, et al. “Female Sexuality.” Psychological Perspectives on Human Sexuality. Eds. Lenore T. Szuchman and Frank Muscarella. New York: Wiley, 2000. 101–146. France24. “France's Famous 'Origin of the World' Painting Sprayed with Graffiti.” 7 May 2024. <https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240506-two-women-spray-renowned-france-s-origin-of-the-world-painting-with-graffiti>. Grady, Constance. "Why Half the People You Know Are Obsessed with This Book Series.” Vox 27 Feb. 2024. <https://www.vox.com/culture/24084037/sarah-j-maas-a-court-of-thorns-and-roses-acotar-romantasy>. Kellie, Dax J., et al. “What Drives Female Objectification? An Investigation of Appearance-Based Interpersonal Perceptions and the Objectification of Women.” PLOS ONE 14.8 (2019). <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221388>. Knight, Lucy. “Children Exposed to 'Spicy' Adult Fiction by BookTok Influencers.” The Guardian 18 Feb. 2024. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/17/tiktok-children-exposed-to-spicy-adult-fiction-booktok-influencers>. Little, Elizabeth, and Kristine Moruzi. “Postfeminism and Sexuality in the Fiction of Sarah J Maas.” Sexuality in Literature for Children and Young Adults. Eds. Paul Venzo and Kristine Moruzi. New York: Routledge, 2021. 81-95. Maas, Sarah J. A Court of Mist and Fury. Bloomsbury, 2016. McKee, Alan, et al. What Do We Know about the Effects of Pornography after Fifty Years of Academic Research? New York: Routledge, 2022. Mintz, Laurie. “Stop Spectatoring: Mindfulness to Enhance Sexual Pleasure.” Psychology Today 19 Mar. 2013. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/stress-and-sex/201303/stop-spectatoring-mindfulness-enhance-sexual-pleasure>. Mintz, Laurie. “The Orgasm Gap and Why Women Climax Less than Men.” The Conversation 15 Aug. 2023. <https://theconversation.com/the-orgasm-gap-and-why-women-climax-less-than-men-208614>. Nagoski, Emily. Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. Melbourne: Scribe, 2015. Smith, Clarissa, et al. "Why Do People Watch Porn? Results from PornResearch.Org.” New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law. Eds. Lynn Comella and Shira Tarrant. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015. 277-296. VanArendonk, Kathryn. “The Mortal Queen of Faerie Smut Sarah J. Maas Writes Massively Popular Books That Mix Fantasy Lore with Soft-Core Romance – and a Whole Lot of Trauma.” Vulture 30 Jan. 2024. <https://www.vulture.com/article/sarah-j-maas-acotar-crescent-city-new-book.html>. Woodley, Giselle, et al. “4 Things Our Schools Should Do Now to Help Prevent Gender-Based Violence.” The Conversation 3 May 2024. <https://theconversation.com/4-things-our-schools-should-do-now-to-help-prevent-gender-based-violence-228993>. Yarros, Rebecca. Fourth Wing. London: Little Brown, 2023. Zacchary, Anne. The Anatomy of the Clitoris: Reflections on the Theory of Female Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2018.

No romance O Deus das Pequenas Coisas (1997) de Arundhati Roy, as transgressões são atitudes que se configuram como abundantes na narrativa, sendo realizadas em sua maioria pelos personagens marginalizados. A fim de obter uma compreensão mais profunda das razões que impulsionam tanto a narrativa quanto os personagens a cometer estas infrações, elas foram divididas em três níveis neste trabalho: pós-colonial, sociopolítico e afetivo. São aqui analisadas as transgressões dos personagens Velutha, Ammu, Estha, Rahel e Sophie. Os níveis das transgressões, suas motivações e os conceitos de trauma individual e cultural são colocados em contraponto para aprofundar a análise da narrativa do romance. No nível pós- colonial, são empregados conceitos de Panikkar (1969), Festino (2007), Forter (2014) e Outka (2011), enquanto Sztompka (2000, 2004), Alexander (2000) e Joseph (2010) permeiam o nível sociopolítico, finalizando o nível afetivo com Caruth (1995), Bose (1998) e Almeida (2002). A hipótese deste trabalho é de que Roy foca nas transgressões para, em primeiro lugar, criticar determinados elementos da sociedade indiana, e para provocar reações em seus leitores. Esta é sustentada através da citação de seus ensaios e discursos na análise do romance.
In The God of Small Things (1997), from Arundhati Roy, the transgressions are substantial throughout the narrative, as the majority of them are performed by marginalized characters. In order to comprehend more deeply the reasons which propel the narrative and the characters to such violations, they were divided into three levels in this work: post-colonial, socio-political and affective. The transgressions analyzed here are the ones performed by the characters Velutha, Ammu, Estha, Rahel and Sophie. The levels of the transgressions, their motivations and the concepts of individual and cultural trauma are all correlated so that the intentions of the narrative are elucidated. In the post-colonial level, the concepts of Panikkar (1969), Festino (2007), Forter (2014) and Outka (2011) are applied, whereas Sztompka (2000, 2004), Alexander (2000) and Joseph (2010) are used for the socio-political level; the affective level is observed with notions from Caruth (1995), Bose (1998) and Almeida (2002). The hypothesis of this work is that Roy focuses on the transgressions of minor characters not only to criticize particular elements from the Indian society but also to trigger the reaction of the readers. This is supported by her essays and speeches quoted along the analysis of the novel.