An Intersectional Approach to The Literary ‘Madwoman’: Raven Leilani’s 'Luster' (2020)

Standing at the intersection between literary and gender studies, this paper contends that an intersectional approach is particularly fruitful in analyzing contemporary fictional representations of female ‘madness’ (or, more properly, mental illness). The so-called ‘woman on the verge’ – generally speaking, an apathetic character, unable to fit into society because of her mental disorders – is a recurring presence in contemporary US fiction (Bergman, 2020). If depictions of madwomen in female-authored texts have been usually strictly connected to an anti-patriarchal discourse that relied on a psychanalytic approach (Gilbert & Gubar, 1979) – meaning that the character of the madwoman was traditionally read as a reaction to and as resisting the patriarchal power –, this paper intends to adopt an intersectional perspective (Morrow, 2017) to reflect on how not merely gender, but the intersections between gender, race and class shape the constructions of mentally unstable female characters in Twenty-first-century American fiction. In particular, I aim to analyze as a case study the novel 'Luster' (2020) by African American author Raven Leilani in order to show how the text tightly intertwines anti-capitalism, social inequities, madness and female vulnerability.