Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories

Abstract

In December 2017, The New Yorker published a short story about modern dating, consent, and double standards which rapidly escalated into a viral phenomenon in the wake of the MeToo movement. Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” an unsettling story about a student’s brief relationship with a somewhat older man, provoked an avalanche of reactions worldwide on Twitter, eventually making it one of the most talked-about short stories in history. The timing of Emma Young’s exploration of the contemporary and ongoing conversations between short fiction and feminism, published only a couple of months later, simply could not have been better. The success of “Cat Person” illustrates Young’s claim that “the short story is being used as an intentionally feminist literary vehicle” (1) and resonates with her comment on the digital space as both “a key site of feminist activism in the twenty-first century” and a location that “encourages interest in the [short story] genre” (150). The timeliness of Young’s study is fittingly echoed in her decision to articulate her argument through the concept of the “moment”; she argues that it “bridges the formal features of the short story, the momentary experience of reading short fiction, and the ‘of the moment’ nature of feminist politics” (1). Accordingly, after a thorough introduction investigating “the moment” in relationship to the short story and feminist politics, the book is structured thematically around prominent moments and issues that punctuate women’s lives: femininity, motherhood, marriage and domesticity, masculinity, and sexuality. Each chapter discusses a selection of short stories by British women writers from the 1980s onwards, interprets them as both critical and literary texts, and situates them in the broad field of feminism. The book thus provides a valuable introduction to contemporary feminist debates and theory, while acquainting the reader with an impressively wide range of contemporary short stories by British women. Importantly, Young successfully resists a critical tendency to study the short story for either content or form, and manages to engage with each story on both levels, never overlooking the impact of form on content and vice versa.