The Horrors of Home: Feminism and Femininity in the Suburban Gothic
In The Aftermath of Feminism (2009) Angela McRobbie draws on a constellation of imagery that has become peculiarly prevalent in recent feminist scholarship. In order to describe the variety of "postfeminist" phenomena she identifies, McRobbie takes repeated recourse to the notion of a phantasmatic feminism that haunts popular culture. While this "ghost of feminism" (22) presents itself as a "hideous spectre of what feminism once was" it bears little correspondence to any "real" feminism and instead adopts as the basis of its spectral visage the cartoonish features that are so frequently, if erroneously, ascribed to second wave feminists. In this way, explains McRobbie, feminism is fantastically and insistently (re)configured as a "monstrous ugliness" which sends "shudders of horror down the spines of young women today, as a kind of deterrent" (1) Evocative and striking, these macabre formulations of feminism's "ghostly" status have been an increasingly common point of reference in feminist discourses since the 1990s. From Avery Gordon's work on psychoanalysis to Terry Castle's critique of queer representation in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993) the spectral metaphor has been deployed as a means of symbolizing and interrogating women's historical (in)visibility and cultural inheritance. Given the centrality of these issues to contemporary debates about postfeminism, it is perhaps no surprise that the apparitional trope has been invoked with growing regularity in the twenty first century.