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That's an interesting point, that some genres are privileged by many people who seem to be deciding what kind of literature should be written or considered valuable. Then those genres get to be immune from the stigma of genre altogether. This takes me back to the introduction to Modern Genre Theory, which said that the term "genre" used to have a negative connotation--rules, conventions--but now is accepted and even celebrated as an "enabling device."

From the interview Al talks about, it's clear that the idea of genre is still taken negatively in the creative writing world, if "genre work" is so disdained. But why is it better that Laurell K. Hamilton "forged new genres" instead of fitting her work inside a pre-existing one?

I'm trying to think what Derrida would say about this. He might say that it's impossible to tell which works are "citations" and which are "non-citations"--it's impossible to define a genre because it is always changing (not stuck in history), so why refuse to accept (take seriously) a book that calls itself fantasy or horror, etc? Even though it's in a genre, that genre has the potential to morph into something different every time someone adds a work to it. Then, looking back on a genre in the future, you'll have a lot of different works that build on each other and are different. Genre, then, is more of an "enabling device" because it's an author's starting point rather than her fence.

I'm making an attempt to defend these fiction genres by asking what genre is anyway, and if it's fair to dismiss some piece of fiction because it's a "genre work" if genre doesn't exist the way we think it does, as Derrida says it doesn't.