defining the feminist subjunctive

So, what the heck is the feminist subjunctive, anyway?

In writing my senior thesis, I am cobbling together a close reading methodology called the “feminist subjunctive,” inspired by a lovely friend of mine who introduced me to the term.

My research aims to explore the ways in which contemporarily written historical romance fiction featuring non-normative (BIPOC, queer, disabled, and gender non-conforming) characters can be read both as a response to the archives of romance literature and of history, as well as a mode of imagining a liberatory future through past and present transgressions and subversions. Although I will primarily engage in the literary analysis and close reading of a selected body of texts (Adriana Herrera’s An Island Princess Starts a Scandal, Beverly Jenkins’ Rebel, and Alexis Hall’s A Lady for a Duke) my analysis will be informed by feminist, decolonial, disabled/crip, and queer theory. I will employ a feminist subjunctive reading of my selected texts, a theoretical framework pulled from the fields of gender & sexuality and performance studies.

As queer studies and literary scholar Tison Pugh explains, grammatically, “the subjunctive mood indicates not the actual but the anticipated, not the determined but the desired” (22). Pugh argues that drama and other cultural performances reveal society’s “subjunctive mood” (22). In other words, a text can be read as elucidating the wishes and desires—a certain kind of futurity—of its cultural and societal context and audience. In conjunction with Michelle Wright’s concept of epiphenomenal time, or the “‘now,’ through which the past, present, and future are always interpreted” (4) and Nathan Snaza’s understanding of the “past’s subjunctive saturation of the present” (56), I propose that a feminist subjunctive reading inherently engages all temporalities and resists Western and colonial understandings of history and time.

This framework is also closely aligned with Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation. Hartman is one of the most preeminent scholars when it comes to understanding the intricacies of time, archives, and how to trouble them both. In her 2009 essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” she coined the term “critical fabulation,” which is a method of writing that re-presents historical events from “contested points of view,” in an attempt to reimagine what the historical record omits or distorts (11). Hartman specifically applied this method to recounting the narratives of enslaved women, and she explains that “[n]arrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity” (12). She makes it clear that critical fabulation’s intent is not to merely “give voice,” but rather to “imagine what cannot be verified” (12). Finally, in defining her method, she writes: “It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive” (12). Furthermore, in “The Time of Slavery,” Hartman delineates the ways in which time is experienced socially and contextually, and how “the ‘time’ of slavery negates the common-sense intuition of time as continuity or progression” since “then and now coexist” (759). She once again underscores the importance, not of fixing the past, but of sitting with the fact that there are some things in our past that cannot be undone or regained, which institute a long, continuous mourning process.

Reading through the lens of the feminist subjunctive, I argue that the three neo-historical romance fiction novels that I have selected engage with time in a non-normative way. Although it may be argued that these novels attempt to “fix” the past, in the way that Hartman advises against, I put forth the alternative idea that they utilize the method of critical fabulation by reimagining erased or obscured histories, practicing narrative restraint, and, most importantly, making the past an active part of our present.

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Works Cited

Hall, Alexis. A Lady for a Duke. Forever, 2022.

Hartman, Saidiya. “The Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 101, no. 4, 2002, pp. 757–77, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-101-4-757.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

Herrera, Adriana. An Island Princess Starts a Scandal. Canary Street Press, 2023.

Jenkins, Beverly. Rebel. Avon, 2019.

Pugh, Tison. “A Subjunctive Theory of Dramatic Queerness.” On the Queerness of Early English Drama, University of Toronto Press, 2021, pp. 21–48. Sex in the Subjunctive. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctv1g248rr.5.

Snaza, Nathan. Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man. Duke University Press, 2024.

Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

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