Writing Contemporary Femininities: Experiments in Waywardness (Postgraduate)

This course examines discourses of female identity in contemporary culture, focusing on representations which challenge existing modes and ideals of femininity in a diverse range of texts, enabling students to study experimental and popular writing in the context of current critical approaches, particularly feminism and postfeminism. The current climate is replete with contradictory ideas, images and interpellations of women and femininity, with vaunted social freedoms existing amidst prominent reporting of sexism and misogyny across cultural contexts and communities. Making sense of this situation after 50 years of feminism is a fraught task, with competing analyses accounting for the persistence of traditional paradigms of gender identities and relations alongside innovative social, personal and sexual liberations which characterise contemporary life. This course addresses how the pressing confusions informing feminine social being are critically engaged and challenged by literary and filmic representations from the recent period. Therefore, it explores what can be characterised as a women's genre of disaffection in contemporary fictions. Credit Level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate

Not running in 2025/26