APPEARANCE AND BEAUTY are key concerns of new-feminist texts. Writers of such texts are concerned with the objectification and sexualization of young female bodies. This question is linked to the availability of pornography via the Internet and to the continued growth of the sex industry. The issue of appearance has implications for women's professional and public status: slights on women's looks function as a “Shut-the-Fuck-Up-Tool,” as Jessica Valenti puts it. Female corporeality involves shame: “to be made of female flesh is to be well-schooled in the abjections and humiliations of embodiment.” Eating disorders constitute an extreme, if common, manifestation of such humiliation, as Laurie Penny contends. The questions of diet and weight raise the matter of agency: Ahmed notes that in the contemporary context, fatness is viewed as the result of a failure of will. This assumption accords with the neoliberal imperative to “succeed” at conformity with mainstream ideals. As Alison Phipps argues, in the context of neoliberalism, “success is measured by individuals’ capacity for self-care via the market, and those who do not achieve their potential are viewed as failures.”

While contemporary feminists have on the one hand challenged dominant standards of beauty, which—as Naomi Wolf has argued—serve as an imprisoning construct, there has at the same time been a defense of self-adornment and enjoyment of one's appearance—this as a reaction to the perceived ugliness and joylessness of “1970s feminists.” According to Thea Dorn, the women she interviews in her book wear lipstick without fearing that they are thereby succumbing to the patriarchy. And the authors of Wir Alpha-Mädchen assert, “Wir können Freude an Lippenstift und enthaarten Beinen haben, ohne uns deswegen als hilflose Opfer männ licher Fantasien oder einer riesigen Industrie fühlen zu müssen” (We can take pleasure in lipstick and hairless legs without having to feel that we're helpless victims of male fantasies or of a massive industry). Yet they also point to the issues of sexism and objectification, and to profitmotivated representations of bodies. They use the term “Schönheitslüge” (beauty lie) to describe dominant ideals of attractiveness. This is a matter that once again raises the questions of individualism versus collectivism, interpellation versus resistance—that is to say, the issue of will.

THE TERM “SISTERHOOD” functions strategically here as a reference to a mythical “1970s feminism.” It connotes a sense of shared political struggle among women, a notion that is not unproblematic but which is nonetheless crucial as a legitimizing and enabling condition of feminism. I have already mentioned claims that certain new-feminist texts ignore differences among women and so unwittingly reproduce hierarchies founded on race, class, and sexuality. This gesture might be strategically essentialist, but it also risks simplifying and reducing female subjects. However, such texts do also gesture toward internationalism and intersectionality. And in any case, the issue of dividedness among women is arguably the more pressing one, as analyses of femininity in neoliberalism, and the literary texts under discussion, suggest. Ahmed's “army of the wayward” appears far from the point of assembly.

Beauvoir wrote in 1949 of the alienation of individual women from each other. How are relationships between women conceived and lived out in the context of neoliberal postfeminism? The nonfiction texts featured in chapter one of this volume note the importance of role models and of stereotypes. Natasha Walter, for example, underlines the significance of stereotypes such as male leader and female caregiver in shaping self-perception and ambition. Representation is key here. Yet in the literary texts I have explored so far, excepting Moran's and Grether's, in which the protagonists find strength in female musical artistes, there is a distinct absence of role models in evidence. The mother-daughter relations featured in these texts are, on the whole, dysfunctional or distant. Appearance causes tensions among women, as becomes even clearer in this chapter. Complex hierarchies and patterns of desire emerge. Such tensions and difficulties are symptomatic and representative of the neoliberal, postfeminist context, as Alison Winch suggests in Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood.

Winch refers to “the complex emotions and systems of control that permeate female sociality in a postfeminist context” (9). In particular, she discusses the feelings of “competition and comparison” that neoliberal popular culture fosters and legitimizes (196). She argues: “technologies of oppression structure the gestures, conversations and interpersonal reflexivity enacted by and between women” (197).

AGENCY AND VOLITION are crucial concerns for feminist theory, and they underlie all of the chapters that follow. Ahmed's notion of willfulness offers a powerful way of conceiving female agency today. In this chapter, I begin by returning to the question of “becoming” raised in the introduction. I link the idea of becoming to Ahmed's willfulness, as well as to the matters of negativity, failure, and anger—this following J. Halberstam and Elizabeth A. Wilson. I then turn to an exploration of a number of literary texts that depict and manifest a range of “willful” female responses to the postfeminist, neoliberal condition. Literary texts allow for ambiguity and contradictoriness and so complement and extend feminist nonfiction and theory. Literary texts also counter the individualism and rationalism that one finds in much nonfiction, involving as they do affectivity. The encounter between reader and text itself involves a becoming that challenges instrumentalizing and individualizing discourses. The willfulness of the texts is potentially contagious.

Becoming, Willing, Failing, Refusing

I have already described “becoming” as involving a challenge to “identity.” In Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Rosi Braidotti also opposes notions of subjectivity as fixed and unified, and argues, following Deleuze, that the subject is “an affective, positive and dynamic structure.” She defines the “becomings” the subject undergoes as involving “empathic proximity and intensive interconnectedness,” thereby also critiquing individualism, and by implication neoliberalism (M, 8; cf. M, 3). I have elsewhere highlighted the importance of Braidotti's “nomadic” conception of subjectivity for an understanding of ethics and suggested that it is particularly pertinent to the contemporary era. Braidotti refers, notably, to “the fictional unity of a grammatical ‘I’” (M, 22).

In Becoming Undone, Grosz similarly investigates the questions of individuation and individuality. She suggests: “The individual is a solution or response to the problem posed by intense yet incompatible forces struggling with each other.” This questioning of (individual) “identities” constitutes a challenge to certain feminist theories. Grosz stresses instead becoming, which she links to the question of “difference.” Difference, for Grosz, is not only a matter of distinctions between entities; rather, it is the driving force of things themselves. This thinking ties in with Jasbir K. Puar's ideas of affirmative becomings and of assemblages, and it means rethinking the idea of intersectionality.

THERE IS AMONG feminist commentators widespread concern about the pornographization of culture and the sexualization of young girls, as we saw in chapter 1. On the one hand, the assertion of female sexuality is important and necessary, as is the avoidance of unhelpful moral panics. On the other, the vulnerability of girls and young women to sexual assault, and the reduction of women to their bodies, require acknowledgment and action. Sex and desire thus raise the matters of agency and volition. They are also obviously linked to the questions of body and beauty: as chapter 3 demonstrates, the prevalence of eating disorders and low self-esteem among young women in the Western world is bound up with normative ideals regarding sexual attractiveness. Sex and desire may also challenge or affirm sisterhood and identification, entailing emulation, rivalry, hostility, or attraction between female subjects. This book's chapters thus form an interlinked investigation into contemporary feminine willfulness. If not necessarily or only oppositional, this willfulness is at the least troublesome and, occasionally, optimistic.

Framing Female Desire

The tension between affirmations of female desire and the requirement to protect and appropriately advise young women raises the matters of will and willfulness. If the thousands of contributors to the Everyday Sexism project are to be believed, young women experience sexualization and harassment routinely. The social will renders them docile. But what happens when the girl or young woman herself desires? Is her desire willful in Ahmed's sense? In Daddy's Girl, Valerie Walkerdine suggests so: “the little girl who is not nurturant, but displays a sexuality too different, active, animal, is one who constantly threatens the possibility of the rational order.” Elsewhere, she points out that the girl as an erotic object challenges the notion of the innocence of the child. Yet Walkerdine also acknowledges the systematic sexualization and scrutiny of girls: “There is an erotically-coded and ubiquitous gaze at the little girl.” Affirming female desire, and especially the sexuality of girls and young women, can serve to legitimize views of girls as appropriate targets, or fair game, so to speak. Natasha Walter points out the vulnerability of girls and the dubious status of the idea of “choice” in this context.

“NIEMAND REDET HEUTE MEHR von Sexismus” (No one talks about sexism these days), Bascha Mika claims. In both Anglo-American and German contexts, there is a widespread perception that feminism has “gone too far,” and that it is no longer necessary. We are living in a time of “emergent retrosexism,” as Alison Phipps puts it. Sociobiological explanations are increasingly proffered in an attempt to naturalize a state of affairs in which issues of power, violence, and money are still very much at play. These observations accord with Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff's description of a contemporary postfeminist sensibility, which involves an emphasis on self-surveillance and self-transformation, a resurgence of ideas concerning natural sexual difference, and a consumerist, commodifying mentality. In line with work by Angela McRobbie, Scharff explains that in a postfeminist climate, feminism is “both taken into account and, simultaneously, repudiated.”

Yet “in spite of it all,” there has been in both German and Anglo- American contexts a boom in nonfiction “feminist” writing, where this descriptor is up for discussion. As we will see, the logic underpinning these texts often relies on neoliberalist individualism and leaves out the messiness of embodied, relational experience that fiction can better evoke. But such writing nonetheless helps clarify the status and concerns of feminism today, as well as the mainstream or normative logic that it attempts to counter. It thereby provides further insights into the “willful” workings of the literary texts under discussion in the four chapters that follow. It also flags up the ongoing feminist activity that both emerges from and counters neoliberalism, in the face of its own impossibility. In Sara Ahmed's 2017 formulation, “Feminism needs to be everywhere because feminism is not everywhere.”

Contexts

On the matter of contextualizing feminist debates, Scharff notes: “The story of feminism is told differently in Germany than in the UK and, in fact, also encompasses the existence of two German states [East and West Germany] until 1989.” As an example of such differing narratives and histories: a significant trigger for the emergence of the “new” feminism in Germany was the public debate on demographic changes, and especially the low birth rate, which in some cases involved blaming feminism and individual women. In the United States and the United Kingdom, such demographic debates have not been so prominent, and the triggers are more multiple and scattered.

THIS BOOK EXPLORES the depiction of girls and young women in contemporary Anglo-American and German literary texts. It focuses on how the novels in question portray the process of “becoming woman,” and on the role of will and willfulness in this becoming. “Becoming woman” is an allusion to Simone de Beauvoir's famous 1949 pronouncement “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This assertion, perhaps the defining statement of second-wave and subsequent feminisms, highlights the constructed status of gender. Gender is not a given; rather, it is a cultural construct. I am interested in what kind of becomings are possible in the context of neoliberalism and postfeminism. How do people become what they are? How do they fail to become what they might? What is at stake, politically and ethically, in such becomings or failures to become? I identify four sets of concerns that are integral to the notion of becoming: agency and volition; body and beauty; sisterhood and identification; and sex and desire. These clusters of concerns are all crucial to feminist thought, and urgent for anyone interested in understanding subject formation—especially, but not only, gendered subject formation—in the contemporary context.

The literary texts I examine, all published during the last twenty years in German or English, tease out the complex processes by which female subjects become women in the context of a globalized, neoliberal world. The introduction delineates the theoretical and cultural context for this study and justifies the comparatist approach it adopts. It examines the notion of becoming in gender and feminist theory, putting forward a conception of this process as affective, bodily, and relational. It also argues for negativity, failure, and anger as crucial to conceptualizations of femininity. It then turns to Sara Ahmed's productive notion of willfulness, as developed in Willful Subjects. Willful Girls tests out Ahmed's concept and expands its implications for understandings of literature and of the contemporary context more broadly. The book demonstrates that femininity is a site of identification and disidentification, of interpellation and resistance, of desire and disgust. It thereby crystallizes and develops ongoing feminist debates concerning agency, embodiment, relationality, and sexuality.

Art and affect are crucial to this project. Art—which, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests, connects us to our animal lineage—involves bodiliness and eroticism.

THE TEXTS I HAVE EXAMINED in this study reveal a spectrum of feminine becomings. Failure, refusal, disgust, and bile feature strikingly in these willful literary responses to postfeminism and neoliberalism. In the course of writing this book, I came across Kate Zambreno's 2011 novel Green Girl. This text holds an emblematic status as far as my project is concerned, and demands a special emphasis. Green Girl engages with the concerns of this book in important and instructive ways, offering an important case study in terms of contemporary literary constructions of and engagements with femininity. The novel's aesthetic illustrates strikingly the ways in which literature itself can provoke becoming, as my introduction suggests. This conclusion therefore discusses Zambreno's novel under the headings agency and voluntarism, body and beauty, sisterhood and identification, and sex and desire, also reiterating and crystallizing the concerns of previous chapters. It argues that the green girl, and the related figure of the trainwreck, are provocative and useful figurations. Finally, it turns to the questions of feminist art, criticism, and activism today, in light of Ahmed's theorization of willfulness as “a style of politics.”

Green Girl: Agency and Voluntarism

Green Girl concerns Ruth, a young American in London who is adrift and as-yet unfixed. The novel self-consciously thematizes the creation of its protagonist. The narrator is a mother-author: “I am trying to push her [Ruth] out in the world” (GG, 3). This self-reflexiveness involves a postmodern emphasis on the constructedness of text. It also highlights the struggle for self-definition in which the protagonist—an archetypal neoliberal girl—is engaged. Ruth's job in a department store, where she sells a celebrity-endorsed perfume wittily called Desire, points up the commercialism and consumerism of the age, and the power of celebrity and branding (see GG, 184–86). Affect, here, is to be packaged and sold: “Would you like to sample Desire?” (GG, 7). The text archly quotes and subverts sales patter. It also exposes and mocks the neoliberalist makeover paradigm (GG, 45–48, 89). Ruth, who is in “her last gasp of girlhood” (GG, 3), is undergoing “becoming” in this context. The process is anxious and faltering. The novel explicitly foregrounds becoming, then, and like texts such as Baum's and Hegemann's, it suggests how arduous and precarious a process that is (GG, 81, 229). Ruth's status and identity are uncertain.

Given the demographic development of today's Western societies, both individuals and societies are facing ethical questions of how to deal with aging people in public as well as in private spheres. The urgency of the subject manifests itself not only in the growth of relevant academic research and self-help literature, but also in an increasing number of literary explorations of what has been a literary subject since antiquity. This chapter explores ethical problems of age and aging in Annette Pehnt's novel Haus der Schildkröten (2006), a text that forms an important contribution to these ongoing investigations. pehnt's novel deals with conflicts that arise in the lives of two middle-aged characters whose parents live in a nursing home, and in the lives of the elderly inhabitants and their professional caregivers. A focus on the relationships between these characters inevitably involves a discussion of ethics. “Ethics” here designates a system of specific mutual demands concerning the behavior of people toward themselves and others.

In our essay we shall ask, first, what conflicts arise in the novel and what the characters think is morally right. In the cases at hand, deciding what is morally right is no easy matter; for instance, there are tensions between self-fulfillment and responsibilities toward relatives. There is also the basic problem of figuring out what is right for the other person's sake, given that, owing to dementia or other age-related illnesses, this person is no longer capable of expressing her wishes. Second, we shall examine other narrative strategies that shape the ethical discourse of the novel.

“Memory contests” are a defining feature of contemporary German cultural and political life. As Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove explain, the term denotes “highly dynamic public engagements with the past,” which in the German context constitutes “hotly contested territory.” While the now well-established notion was developed in response to framings of the national socialist past, it can also be applied to ongoing attempts to articulate and account for the east German experience. This chapter engages in such an application, with the complementary aim of bringing to light the ethical implications of these memory contests. “ethics,” here, connotes a relationship of obligation to “the other.” The chapter asks: what is at stake, ethically, in writings of the GDR past? How do such writings fit into, or indeed challenge, the “continuing struggle to imagine Germany as a unified, democratic, and capitalist country”? And what do they tell us more broadly about the relationship between ethics and memory?

This project involves an examination of four recent German novels in which the memory of life in the GDR plays an important role: Julia Schoch's Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers (2009), Stefan Moster's Die Unmöglichkeit des vierhändigen Spiels (2009), Antje Rávic Strubel's Sturz der Tage in die Nacht (2011), and Judith Schalanksy's Der Hals der Giraffe (2011). In all of these works, the memory of the GDR is mediated and explored through the depiction of difficult, even taboo, familial or quasi-familial relationships. In all the texts, shame—“an intense and painful sensation that is bound up with how the self feels about itself”— features significantly.