Ng, Stephanie Tsz Yan; (2024) On Compromise: Neoliberalism, Postfeminism, and the Disappointed Promise of Personhood. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

My thesis develops the notion of compromise as an affective atmosphere of the contemporary present, a product of liberal democracy, and an obstacle to flourishing as well as a potential means thereof. Situated at the intersection of neoliberalism and postfeminism, this project reads twenty-first century, Anglo-American fiction to understand why women who by all legal accounts constitute full-fledged citizens continually find themselves exercising their agency in ways that approximate bargaining. Building on existing theoretical insights into the culture of responsibilization and heteropessimism, my first chapter examines Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy which delineates a protracted attempt to live beyond the reassuring cadences of bourgeois domesticity by a protagonist who compulsively shoulders the self-effacing care work expected of women. Another close reading of the compromised cultural moment and compromises citizens make – conscious and unconscious – to sustain it, Chapter 2, studies the privatization and depoliticization of female pain in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel whose antiheroine manages to stomach the world after a self-administered, drug-fuelled hibernation. Reading Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Beautiful World, How Are You? Chapter 3 situates the tendency to suture oneself to existing lifeworlds within the framework of liberal democracy which produces compromisers for citizens who, in an effort to preserve the promise of conflict resolution, tell themselves they consent to subpar conditions and buffer their experience of those conditions with heteroidealism. A more generative possibility of compromise as a means rather than an end emerges from Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby whose characters, co-parents-to-be, adapt to the good life genre, an endeavour that threatens its members’ sovereign identities as much as it promises greater intimacy. Using compromise as a conceptual heuristic, my thesis foregrounds the messy desires, ambivalent politics, and gendered costs of living on in periods of stuckness.

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