Heated Rivalry: Queer Joy and Intimate Masculinity on Television (No )
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Organization: Popular Culture Research Network
Event: No
Heated Rivalry: Queer Joy and Intimate Masculinity on Television
* being considered by a major publisher *
deadline for abstracts/EOI - open now
full name / name of organization:
Popular Culture Research Network
contact email:
jo.coghlan@une.edu.au
Call for Book Chapters
Heated Rivalry: Queer Joy and Intimate Masculinity on Television
This edited book collection invites scholarly contributions on Heated Rivalry (2015-). Adapted from Rachel Reid’s romance novel, the Canadian Crave original series system became an unexpected global success via HBO. Set in professional ice hockey, Heated Rivalry is propelled by queer characters and the sustained pleasures of their relationship. Its defining contribution is not exposure or transgression, but queer joy: intimacy, desire, humour, trust, and emotional safety enacted within demanding institutional and work settings.
At the centre of Heated Rivalry is a reframing of intimacy under pressure. The series treats queer hiding not as titillation or narrative delay, but as a survival strategy structured by professional, social, and cultural fear: fear of career damage, locker-room cultures, media scrutiny, national myths of masculinity, and the political risks attached to queer visibility in elite sport. Consent and care aren’t exceptional moments but organising principles, communicated through pacing, checking in, hesitation, and bodily responsiveness. Rather than building towards a single climactic revelation or resolution, the narrative returns across time to separation, reunion, and emotional recalibration, allowing intimacy to appear as something made and remade through endurance, negotiation, and care.
Formally and industrially, Heated Rivalry exemplifies platform-era prestige television. Its close framing, limited locations, and emphasis on interior spaces produce affective density rather than spectacle, while intimacy coordination operates as an embedded production practice shaping both ethics and aesthetics. Weekly release rhythms and bingeing, streaming circulation, and social media recap cultures turn each episode into a collective event, with fandom functioning as an infrastructure of meaning-making rather than a supplementary afterlife. The show’s global reach raises urgent questions about how nationally produced Canadian television travels, how queer romance becomes internationally legible, and how intimacy, consent and care operate as engines of popularity rather than niche moral concerns.
This edited volume seeks to position Heated Rivalry as a key text for understanding contemporary queer television, masculinity, labour, and intimacy. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that engage the series as a cultural text, industrial product, and social phenomenon.
Suggested themes and approaches
Submissions may address (but are not limited to) the following areas:
Consent, care, and ethical intimacy
Consent as televisual grammar: pacing, micro-gesture, hesitation, and mutual responsiveness
Intimacy coordination as creative and industrial labour
Ethical pleasure and viewer trust in contemporary television
Care, repair, apology, and relational maintenance as narrative structures
Hiding, fear, and institutional power
Hiding as risk management in professional sport
Reputation, sponsorship, and the economics of queer visibility
Surveillance regimes: teams, media, fans, and publics
Closet logics without tragedy: strategy, compromise, and emotional labour
National and geopolitical pressures shaping queer visibility
Masculinity, sport, and work
Ice hockey as labour/the workplace: discipline, injury, precarity, and productivity
Masculinity as affective regulation and emotional competence
Rivalry as sanctioned intimacy and cover for attachment
Injury, recovery, and care work within elite sport
Work–life boundaries, burnout, and relational endurance
Form, aesthetics, and spatial storytelling
Intimate thresholds and liminal spaces: locker rooms, corridors, hotels, kitchens
Low-budget production craft as affective strategy
Temporality, repetition, and non-linear serial narration
Bilingualism, language, and intimacy
Costume, comfort, and softness as narrative devices
Genre, adaptation, and comparison
Queer sports romance and television melodrama
Adaptation across romance publishing, BookTok, and streaming TV
Comparative queer sports texts and hockey media cultures
Reworking masculinity and intimacy in mainstream genres
Embodiment, neurodivergence, and reception
Embodiment, touch, food, routine, and comfort
Neurodivergent fan readings as interpretive practice
Refusal of pathology and diagnostic storytellinAudience recognition, trust, and emotional credibility
Submission details
Abstracts: 250–300 words outlining the argument, framework, and contribution
Author bio: 100 words
Abstract deadline: immediate
Notification of acceptance: once received
Full papers due: 1 October 2026
Word Length: 7500 words including references (Chicago Author-Date)
Submission and enquiries: jo.coghlan@une.edu.au
Jo Coghlan