Introduction: Postfeminist Gothic

Still reading the romance: gothic sexuality and the remembrance of feminism throughTwilightandFifty Shades of Grey

“…In this scenario, the increasing prevalence and monstrousness of the gothic lover is an inevitable 'return of the repressed' , and its survival also demands an ever-more hysterical repudiation of the 'shrill' feminism imagined to threaten its existence. If Donna Heiland and other scholars are correct in arguing that female-centred gothic narratives have historically 'anatomized and explored the workings of a patriarchal society' (2004,5; see also Radway 1981;Ellis 1989;vargo 2004;Brabon and genz 2007), then the increasingly explicit and ubiquitous use of gothic narratives to explore female desires that are understood to have been 'forbidden' by feminism perhaps also confirms Segal's view that reading sexuality in terms of male dominance and female submission corroborates patriarchal mythologies. Certainly, the contemporary gothicization of desire is intimately connected to the pathologization of feminism, with both discourses slowly percolating the confused legacies of sexual liberation and the politicization of desire.…”