The Education of Desire: Unsettling Sexuality, Gender, and Racial Politics in Contemporary Medical Romance

Abstract

Medical romance features health care heroes and heroines in a central love story.This article analyzes two contemporary literary examples of the popular but neglectedgenre of German medical romance, Julya Rabinowich's Herznovelle (2011) and IrenaBrežná's Schuppenhaut: Ein Liebesroman (2010). This article argues that medicalromance performs agile cultural work that ambivalently locates discourses of desire,race, and gender within popular, literary, and medical cultures. Through a range ofliterary and autofictional strategies, both works reveal how medical romance can reflect and produce bourgeois sexuality and whiteness in contemporary culture. Foregrounding their narrators' appropriation of colonial imagery, I show that Herznovelle and Schuppenhaut open up critical questions about approaches to decolonization inGerman studies and medical culture.