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The Romantic Author And The Romance Writer: Resisting Gendered Concepts Of Creativity, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Dominant narratives of creativity regularly expect female-associated forms of creativity to be provisioned naturally without need for the economic incentives provided by exclusive rights, just like housework and childcare. Even as the concept of Romantic authorship has come under sustained analytic assault, its challengers often look elsewhere–to the kinds of creativity in which men are more likely to participate–to find models of situated, always-influenced authorship. In this chapter, I examine one variant of the problem, in which certain arguments about copyright discount the value of forms that are predominantly produced and enjoyed by women. But creative works in these oft-denigrated …