PAMLA 2025: Anger and Frustration in Contemporary American Women's Fiction (Pacific Modern Language Association Annual Conference)
San Francisco, CA
Organization: Pacific Modern Language Association
Event: Pacific Modern Language Association Annual Conference
Many mainstream media outlets have observed an uptick in the mainstream popularity of American women's fiction that center on rage-filled female characters or that express anger at contemporary society. The complicated aftermath of second-wave feminism has in some ways enabled women to speak more frankly about their bodies, desires, and experiences, but these forms of sexual and social liberation of the past several decades have led to a strong backlash against reproductive freedom and a resurgent public-sphere misogyny; many feminist critics have also noticed that media discussions of progress for women—how many female CEO’s run Fortune 500 companies, for instance—have silenced structural critique of a patriarchal society.
It is no surprise, then, that so many women writers are producing angry fiction, and it’s also no surprise that these writers are finding audiences (the hashtag #UnhingedWomen has 35 million views on TikTok, and the tags often wind up on works of fiction). Rather than expressing surprise at this anger, this panel calls for papers exploring the contours of writerly depictions of anger and rage by American women. We are interested in analyses of anger in texts by American women writers in the post-1990 era that consider their relation to gender norms, to genre conventions, to fictional predecessors, and to the political and social context in which the works appear.
Upload abstracts here: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19516
Send questions to the panel organizer, Jeffrey Gonzalez, at gonzalezje@montclair.edu
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19516
Jeffrey Gonzalez
