Earlier in this blog, I provided a definition of the feminist subjunctive, the method I am employing in my senior honors thesis that critically analyzes three historical romance novels. But as I have worked on this project, my own understanding of the feminist subjunctive has evolved and solidified. So here, I present my updated definition of the feminist subjunctive, with endless permutations to come. May this term continue to mutate, grow, and expand.
My senior thesis, “Love in the Time of the Feminist Subjunctive” (which this blog is named after), focuses in on three historical romances novels: Beverly Jenkins’ Rebel, Adriana Herrera’s An Island Princess Starts a Scandal, and Alexis Hall’s A Lady for a Duke. All three of these novels feature non-normative characters for historical romance: Rebel follows two Black characters in Reconstruction-era New Orleans, An Island Princess features two Latina lesbians in Paris, set against the backdrop of the 1889 World’s Fair, and A Lady for a Duke tells the story of a white transgender woman and white disabled man who fall in love. My thesis came about after I read An Island Princess, and was really struck by Herrera’s engagement with history while narrating this vibrant Latine, queer romance. Because of that, I wanted to ask the question: How are various historical romance authors using historical romance fiction to narrate alternative histories that feature marginalized characters? So, with this question animating my research, I decided to employ what I call a feminist subjunctive reading of my three selected texts.
The concept of the feminist subjunctive is derived, in part, from Black studies scholar Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation. She describes critical fabulation as a method of writing that re-presents historical events from contested or unknown perspectives in an attempt to reimagine what the historical record omits or distorts (Hartman 11). Hartman specifically applied this method to recounting the narratives of enslaved women, making it clear that critical fabulation’s intent is not to merely “give voice,” but instead 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). I consider Hartman’s theorization of critical fabulation to be vital in understanding the power of Hall, Herrera, and Jenkins’ act of writing into the past, but it is also specific to histories of slavery and Blackness. Thus, I did not want to remove critical fabulation from its context, nor generalize its application too much, particularly because not every novel I examine centers Black characters. For that reason, I turned to the feminist subjunctive as an alternative, yet related, term.
The feminist subjunctive was initially introduced to me by one of my friends (the absolutely lovely Delilah), who was taught it by Professor Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, a womanist sociologist professor at Grinnell College. As it was described to me, it’s a method of writing retroactively into the past in order to tell feminist histories that have gone untold, been intentionally erased, or are otherwise obscured. It was passed on to me via word of mouth, so the precise coinage and definition of the term is uncertain. Because of this, I have worked with other scholars who similarly think with and through the subjunctive, in order to give it a fuller, richer definition. According to Carolyn Fornoff, who theorizes the concept of subjunctive aesthetics, “the subjunctive mood is the realm of the potential and the uncertain” (2). This definition, applied to the past, elucidates how a subjunctive mode inherently operates within multiple terrains of temporality, uncovering the potentials and uncertainties of past histories, while also indicating a future-facing desire. As Fornoff writes, subjunctive aesthetics are invested “in the desires and fears that the real provokes, as well as the as-of-yet unrealized possibilities that percolate around the given” (3).
Similarly, 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. Therefore, the method of feminist subjunctive writing disrupts normative logics that imagine time and history as inherently linear and progressive, since it is a method that constantly engages multiple temporalities at once.
The subjunctive provides an alternative epistemological mode, one that embraces uncertainty and creativity. Carolyn Fornoff puts it perfectly: “Thinking in the subjunctive tilts away from narrative certainty and moves toward knowledge-making practices motored by doubt, emotion, and imagination” (4). Fornoff’s words direct us to view historical romance novels as engaging in knowledge production, but also gives us the language to understand how a feminist subjunctive reading attends seriously to imaginative uses of history, like historical romance, as sites of rich analysis.
I make the intervention that a feminist subjunctive reading method attunes the reader to this subjunctive authorship. I was deeply inspired by Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, in which she analyzes identificatory photography of Black people, like passport photos and mug shots. She argues that we must go beyond the obvious of merely looking at these photos, that to limit our perception to sight is to miss to sonic frequencies of these photos. Although romance novels and identification photography are by no means perfectly comparable, especially with the latter often being state-sanctioned and produced without input from its subjects, Campt’s theorization prompts larger questions about media analysis: Which genres or formats require a different kind of attentiveness? How can we attune our senses differently? From those questions, I began to wonder how a careful attention to the feminist subjunctive mode might open up conversation, make ruptures, and create new possibilities for reading romance. In my thesis, my attentiveness to the feminist subjunctive allowed me to trace the threads of time and history and how they are being twisted, played with, and subverted.
According to Miriam-Webster, the subjunctive mood expresses “wishes, proposals, suggestions, or imagined situations.” The subjunctive, therefore, allows for time to be played around with. For example, take the subjunctive phrase: “I wish I were eighteen again.” The “I wish” indicates a joint sort of future and present orientation, whereas the “were” and “again” indicate something that has already passed. The subjunctive is also a profoundly creative and imaginative grammatical mood, expressing desire and futurity. Thinking about all of these elements together, it becomes clear that historical romance is a prime example of subjunctive writing. Contemporary authors write into the past, in a genre that is always bending towards a desired future, that happily-ever-after.
Therefore, the feminist subjunctive as a reading practice encourages us, as readers, to turn away from strict ideas of historical “accuracy” and instead embrace the imaginative. This reading practice also attunes us to how the genre of historical romance is being mobilized in order to narrate these histories, as well as how time and temporality are being played with. Finally, a feminist subjunctive reading pays close attention to wishes and desires and what they indicate, particularly in a genre so centered around desire.
The feminist subjunctive reading method has attuned my sense not towards questions of accuracy or truthfulness, necessarily, but rather towards imagination and temporal play. I hope that the method of feminist subjunctive reading can be a useful analytic for reorienting ourselves and attuning our senses to the temporal frequencies of and modalities of desire in historical romance.
Works Cited
Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2018.
Fornoff, Carolyn. Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change. Vanderbilt University Press, 2025.
Hall, Alexis. A Lady for a Duke. Forever, 2022.
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.jhfh
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. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctv1g248rr.5.
“What Is the Subjunctive Mood? An Explainer.” Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/getting-in-the-subjunctive-mood.
Love in the Time of the Feminist Subjunctive 
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