Postfeminist Gothic

Postfeminist Gothic emerged as a critical category in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries, reflecting altered gender relations and changes in the feminist landscape. The concept of postfeminism is highly contested, with proposed definitions ranging from popular evocations of “girl power” to cultural analyses of backlash, academic discussions of postmodern/poststructuralist feminism, and political examinations of neoliberal individualism (Genz and Brabon 2009: 1–50). It is this definitional malleability that makes the conceptual alliance of postfeminism and Gothic particularly productive, with both terms exhibiting a penchant for haunting – a gap in the signification process that allows for multiple (and contradictory) meanings. Both concepts are bound up with ghosts of the past that constantly shadow the present and threaten to rematerialize. Just as Gothic is uneasy about its relationship with history, postfeminism is troubled by its problematic ties to its past – feminism. As David Punter notes, “the code of Gothic is […] not a simple one in which past is encoded in present or vice versa, but dialectical, past and present intertwined, and distorting […] each other with the sheer effort of coming to grips” (1996: 198). Along these lines, postfeminism undoubtedly harbors a Gothic impulse, split as it is between backlash tendencies and progressive visions, representations of victimhood and agency.