Marni received her PhD from the University of East Anglia in 2023. Below is a selection of her academic work, which focuses on contemporary feminism, the politics of feeling, and women's short story writing.
PhD thesis, accepted 2023. Under embargo until 2026.
This PhD in Creative and Critical writing investigates certain ‘sticking points’ or impasses that emerge in contemporary conversations about feminism, and considers the ways in which these sticking points are navigated in contemporary women’s short stories about girls and young women. I argue that the contemporary feminist landscape – marked by a renewed enthusiasm for feminism (sometimes thought of as a ‘fourth wave’) and complicated by the persistence of a postfeminist sensibility – contributes to the emergence of particular flat and frustrating feelings, which index situations of obstructed agency and affective deadlock.
In the critical thesis I analyse five short stories by women writers (all of which have been published since 2015) to theorise three particular feelings: heterosexual fatigue, stuckness and un/belonging. In the stories I analyse, the postfeminist insistence on upbeat feeling performances (such as resilience, positivity and empowerment) sits uncomfortably alongside the characters’ creeping awareness of the persistence and pervasiveness of gender inequality. In the fourth critical chapter, I address the question of form, asking what makes the short story especially suited to the channelling of these flat and frustrating feelings.
Published in Comparative American Studies, 2023
In neoliberal societies, our personal lives are increasingly subject to market logics. Feminism has become less a social force for critiquing sexism and violence against women and girls; rather, a consumer force in which feminist vocabulary is commodified, and the ability to extract profit from one’s own bodily femininity is situated as a signifier of empowerment. In this context, women’s feelings are also being commodified. Women are exhorted to perform upbeat feelings, such as confidence and resilience to help them survive in an increasingly precarious and unequal society. The transformation of negative feelings into positive ones has become a crucial way in which women can accrue social and affective value. In this article, I explore the economics of confidence in the short story ‘Los Angeles’ by Emma Cline, by interrogating the relationship between the protagonist’s feeling performances and her fluctuating value. I trace transactions of confidence throughout the story, paying attention to how confidence changes hands, how it confers value and what happens when performances of confidence are not converted into the rewards promised by neoliberal postfeminist value systems. Confidence becomes a sticking point for other feelings, such as disappointment and shame, which highlights the fact that certain neoliberal and postfeminist promises of the ‘good life’ are being slowly drained of their affective potential in contemporary American culture.
Published in Contemporary Women's Writing, 2024
While postfeminism is typically associated with upbeat feelings, such as confidence and resilience, scholars have begun to examine the emergence of less positive feelings alongside the compulsory outward presentation of enthusiasm. This essay examines feelings of "stuckness" in two short stories—" Would Like to Meet " (2014) by May-Lan Tan and " Los Angeles " (2020) by Emma Cline—and how these feelings illuminate the affective regulation of postfeminism. It also makes the case that the short story is an adept form through which to explore the contradictions of neoliberal femininity and that women short story writers are utilizing the tendencies of the form—particularly in regard to the short story's ending—to re-create the lingering, non-cathartic feelings produced by the deteriorating promise of postfeminist culture.
Co-authored with Tinca Lukan. Published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024.
This article examines the self-representations of three female lifestyle influencers from three different empirical settings – the United Kingdom, Sweden and Slovenia – who are each in their own context referred to as a ‘girl boss’. Drawing on multimodal discourse analysis, we examine what ideas and practices constitute a girl boss. Our analysis shows that, despite different geographies and socio-economic backgrounds, influencers’ self-representations are made up of the same themes that together constitute the girl boss as an ideal feminine subject of the current moment. Drawing on the work of Angela McRobbie, we extend sociological and feminist accounts of postfeminism by arguing that, with neoliberalism entering its maturity stage, the girl boss is a new sexual contract offered to women through four modalities of prescriptive feminine agency: girl boss masquerade, boss babe, power couples and woke girl. We also demonstrate the homogenizing tendencies of Internet culture and how the girl boss ideal is easily transposed from the West to the rest.
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