«Hypervisible and Invisible: Black and Alone»: Uncovering the Hidden Intersections of Gender, Race and Class in Raven Leilani's Luster (2020)

Standing at the intersection between literary and gender studies, this paper contends that an intersectional approach can be particularly fruitful in analyzing contemporary fictional representations of female “madness” or, more properly, mental illness. Past feminist readings of fictional madwomen, rooted in psychoanalytical discourses, were usually oriented towards the criticism of patriarchalism (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979). However, past artistic and literary representations of madness can reveal to the contemporary onlooker or reader that mental illness was not simply characterized by a gender-marker; indeed, only white women belonging to the upper and middle classes of society were portrayed – whether in literature or through paintings – according to specific patterns or conventional poses, thus inscribing these depictions within a specific social context. Now more than ever, an intersectional approach becomes fundamental when analyzing contemporary madwomen, or what I refer to as “catastrofemales” – namely the antiheroines of the new Millennium. To further support my claim, in the last part of this paper, I analyze Raven Leilani’s debut novel, Luster (2020), to emphasize how the intersections of gender, race and class shape the lived experience and consequently determine the actions of the mad protagonist Edie, a case in point among contemporary catastrofemales.