Romancing Native Americans

Romancing Native Americans is my degree capstone. This project was a semester-long endeavor in which I conducted academic, archival, and visual research alongside formally analyzing* my chosen image, Georgina Gentry’s Warrior’s Honor, before synthesizing my research-backed analysis into a 20-page paper and 30-minute presentation.

Warrior’s Honor is just one of many contemporary romance novels that engage the tradition of obvious stereotypical minority representation. In this novel, the two main characters Lusa and Talako engage in a love affair that leaves them bound to each other’s hearts forever. This research paper focused on how the the front cover and main visual descriptions of these two characters selectively engage and disengage stereotypes of the American Indian, revealing how American women simultaneously fetishize and whitewash interracial men and women, In order to profit off of exotic romance tropes and appeal to the white middle-aged women, of which is the predominant reading demographic of these novels.