Rape, Cake, and Gonzofeminism: on Intergenerational Trauma, Sexual Violence, and the Formation of White Female Subjectivities in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the contemporary gonzofeminism as proposed by Gillian Flynn in her debut novel Sharp Objects (2006). It argues that the problematic frame narrative - i.e., women themselves perpetrate violence - is so complicated by Flynn’s dense use of symbolism, narrative technique, and subversion and blending of genre elements, it reveals the inherent failure of gendered tropes and productively explores the relationship between the construction of womanhood and American cultural imaginaries to arrive at incisive sociocultural critique. This paper draws on theoretical texts from feminist literary and cultural scholars and from fields as diverse as sociolinguistics, trauma studies, genre theory, and psychoanalysis to evidence how her writing reflects current cultural anxieties surrounding the failure of what has been termed ‘white feminism’; it also assesses the ways in which her writing politicizes rape and her antiheroine destigmatizes survivors of sexual violence. The result of her writing, this thesis contends, is not the postfeminist pathologization of women, but the pathologization of a violent society.