Roche, Emma
(2021)
‘A Corkscrew in the Neck’: Interrogating
Popular Representations of Femininity for the
Postmillennial Period.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This project examines representations of femininity in contemporary popular fiction. Specifically,
it interrogates a crucial paradox: the dissemination of popular literature produced by women
authors, for a largely female readership, which eroticises and fetishes gender-based violence.
The novels under study were marketed as disparate genres — domestic noir, crime fiction, psychological
thriller, erotica & YA romance — but I interpret them as contemporary reiterations of the
popular romance formula, reanimating recognisable tropes from chick lit, the modern gothic romance
and the Harlequin romance. These tropes, I argue, have been modified by and for a neoliberal
postfeminist culture climate. As such, my project utilises feminist genre theory and feminist cultural
theory to explicate the significance of the current revival and reformulation of ‘romance’ in
this new context of neoliberal postfeminist culture and ideology.
Influenced by Rosalind Gill and Angela McRobbie, my project addresses and critiques several
key attributes of ‘neoliberal postfeminism’. These include: a pervasive emphasis on individualism
and personal responsibility; a ubiquitous ‘makeover’ cultural paradigm; an insistent requirement
for self-monitoring, self-surveillance and body-work; the celebration of consumerism and its
associated pleasures; the prescription of mandatory optimism and suppressing one’s ‘negative’ emotions;
the endorsement of choice as a primary marker of women’s empowerment. While much critical
attention has been devoted to those attributes and their pernicious effects, I propose that one
significant repercussion has been largely overlooked in contemporary cultural criticism: how the
combination of these ideologies effectively sanctions gender-based violence. And so, by modifying
longstanding tropes from the romance genre for the postmillennial period, the novels under study
function as crucial spaces for interrogating and challenging contemporary gender ideologies — specifically
how those ideologies reify violently gendered power dynamics.
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