Love, Death and Caste in Gay Romances ‘Heated Rivalry’ and ‘Cactus Pears’
Canadian series Heated Rivalry and Marathi movie Cactus Pears both center on queer love, but they explore its complexities in different migration and caste locations.
Jayashree Kamblé
Jayashree Kamblé is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. She is the author of Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology (Palgrave, 2014) and Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation (Indiana UP, 2023), and together with Eric Murphy Selinger and Hsu-Ming Teo, co-edited The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020). Her recent research on the history of BIPOC American and British romance authors and editors appears in the Journal of American Culture, Esferas Literarias, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Comedy Studies, and Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. She has served as the President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and discussed the genre on PBS, the New York Times, and public scholarship sites like The Conversation.