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Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer (2013) constitutes an account of post-war Iraq narrated by an Iraqi youth and authored by an Iraqi émigré. It is thus a valuable alternative to American fiction on the conflict and its aftermath. From this premise, this article explores how the myth of the trauma hero, which has whitewashed the American invasion in redemptive terms, is here replaced by a more nuanced discourse. Mbembe's necropolitics-i.e. the "subjugation of life to the power of death" (2003: 39)-helps explain the story of Jawad, the corpse washer of the title, and of Iraq as one of dehumanization, wounding and spatialization inflicted by Western supremacy and alleged 'rationality.' The novel challenges Western necropolitics in two main ways: Iraqi stereotypes are questioned, especially their identification with terrorism and martyrdom. On the other hand, surrealism and gothic elements help the protagonist and his country to sublimate the trauma derived from American neocolonial politics.

This article addresses the ultimate pop icon Lady Gaga; in particular I will analyse how camp sensibility informs her gender and sex discourses as well as her acts of transgression and commodification. Using as a framework Pamela Robertson’s feminist camp in the 1990s and its revision by Helen Shugart and Catherine Waggoner in the 2000s, it is my main contention that Gaga problematizes camp and its subversive potential yet again. Thus, drawing on and contesting J. Jack Halberstam’s queer reading of the artist in Gaga Feminism, this article proves how her campy outfits and her videos ‘Born this Way’ and ‘Telephone’ open feminist camp to new concerns, especially through her affective engagement with her fans, which converts the artist into a hypermodern product. In featuring herself as ‘Mother Monster’ followed by her ‘little monsters’, she updates Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 2004) to revamp Otherness and belongness as culturally significant concepts.

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This paper addresses Naomi Alderman's The Power (2016), a (post‐)feminist dystopia where gender roles are reversed after what is called ‘the Cataclysm’. Being victims of male chauvinism, young girls develop the ability to emit an electrical charge through their hands, ‘the power’, which they use against their potential aggressors. One of these girls, Allie, uses it to start a violent female theocracy, not less violent and problematic than the patriarchy it fights against. The Power puts forward a stimulating debate on the justifiability and legitimacy of violence to combat violence. The novel, the paper contends, recasts the poetics and politics of 1990s cyberfeminism to meet new concerns, particularly the discourses of violence and otherness in the context of the twenty‐first‐century political crisis. To prove it, Rosie Braidotti's analysis of cyberfeminism is addressed first, to delve later into how The Power updates Slavoj Žižek's (Violence. London, UK: Profile Books, 2009), Walter Benjamin's (Selected writings. Vol. 1, 1913–1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 249–251) and Hannah Arendt's (On violence, New York, NY: Harcourt, 1970; The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Harcourt, 1976; On revolution. New York, NY: Penguin Books 1977) conceptions of violence and revolutionary rage.

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ABSTRACT. This article aims at analysing Mary Pix's The Innocent Mistress (1697) as a paradigmatic example of the boom in female playwriting at the end of the seventeenth century in England. It is my main aim to determine whether and to what extent

This essay aims at exploring how the controversy between postmodernist uncertainty and new movements claiming for a new certainty determine the discourse of Will Self's Dorian : An Imitation (2002) and Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004). After revising how this controversy has its roots deep in the history of art discourses, the article draws on postpostmodernist theories such as Raoul Edelman's performatism, Gilles Lipovetsky's hypermodernism and Alan Kirby's digimodernism. Although they help us understand texts at the turn of the millennium, they also prove eventually unsatisfactory in some cases. The analysis demonstrates that Self's and Tóibín's novels apparently aim at a new sense of certainty to represent homoerotic desire and its manifestations, as a roman à clef and a biofictional text respectively. However, certainty soon proves to be unfeasible as both novels turn to the precariousness and irony characteristic of postmodernism. Keywords