I'll be presenting a paper at Bath Spa University called: Féministes Fatales: The Transgressive Women of Contemporary Noir.

Authors including Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn and Annie Hauxwell are writing ugly, misanthropic, morally compromised and eminently realistic characters who expose femininity as performance. They are neither the garden variety femme fatale, nor the earnest, heroic feminist protagonist of the seventies and eighties. I will argue that noir, with its sense of alienation, entrapment, paranoia, and its facility for critiquing social, cultural and economic ideology, is the perfect genre through which to explore contemporary discourses on third wave and ‘post’ feminism and to accurately reflect the complexity of female experience.