Catastrofemales of the New Millennium: A Posthuman Feminist Perspective on Twenty-First Century Antiheroines in Selected Works of Contemporary American Fiction

Located at the intersection of literary and gender studies, my PhD project focuses on the representation of female ‘madness’ (or, more properly, mental disorder) in contemporary female-authored American fiction. If past feminist readings of fictional female madness, usually rooted in psychoanalytical discourses, would be oriented towards the criticism of patriarchalism (Gilbert & Gubar 1979), this project, whilst drawing from Foucault’s correlation between madness and power (Foucault 1961), explores the concept of madness – hence, abnormality – as functioning in the contemporary Western world, where the emancipatory potential of technology and of the academic recognition of non-binary cultural practices promises change (Braidotti 2012, 2022). Based on the premise that posthumanism, redefining subjectivity/agency, renders some of the past dualisms – viz. mind-body, sanity-insanity – invalid, I revisit the question of how do novels entering into a dialog with post-human discourse portray mental disorders, and more importantly, to what end? It is my intention to argue that posthuman feminist approaches (aware of the proliferation of new Manifestos) can help us explore the present-day relationship between fictional madness and contemporary relations of power, by focusing, in particular, on the interconnection between mental illness, the female body (embodied experience of madness), and the phenomenon of shame (Szatanik 2011). Lastly, in this context, an intersectional approach can help us account for structural inequalities that affect women, both as fictional characters and as living beings. On this premise, I adapt Morrow’s (2017) intersectional perspective to my analysis of the selected corpus of texts, emphasizing the intersectional dynamics of madness, gender, race, and class. Such a strategy allows me to address the essential research questions of my project: how does the selected corpus of novels represent female madness (i.e., mental disorders) nowadays? How do the writers convey the experience of women in contemporary society? Are there differences within the corpus that account for existing structural inequalities? Why do twenty-first-century female authors, both white and non-white, still use clichéd characters as their literary archetype? And finally: can the ‘catastrofemale’ be considered the antihero of the new Millennium? Are these literary attempts representative of the birth of a new aesthetic position?