“Femininity in Crisis”: The Troubled Trajectory of Feminism in Laura Hird’s Born Free and Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon

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This essay traces a trajectory between the diminution of the radical objectives of secondwave feminism and the rise of postfeminism in two contemporary novels by Scottish writers. Laura Hird’s Born Free (1999) and Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012) illustrate the shrinking of radical feminist ideals to a sexual revolution appropriated by the individualism, consumerism, and competitive market-focused ideology that characterizes neoliberal postfeminism and sustains misogynist social structures. Informed by critiques of postfeminism by commentators such as Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill, the essay finds Hird’s end-of-century pessimistic vision of female defeat
allayed to some extent in Fagan’s gothic-tinged narrative of a marginalized outsider evading neopatriarchal containment. The texts demonstrate a damaging disorientation in contemporary femininity produced by what McRobbie terms the postfeminist gender settlement.