ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8) as a striking manifestation of neoliberal and postfeminist culture. Specifically, it highlights how the series fetishises and romanticises neoliberal and postfeminist ideals of subjectivity as empowering and pleasurable for readers by reanimating long-standing tropes and archetypes from the romance genre. At the same time, however, the narrative gestures towards the limitations of these ideologies – particularly the rhetoric of choice as empowerment. As such, this chapter aims to excavate disruptive moments in the text, which rupture the narrative’s endorsement of neoliberal postfeminism, exposing the pernicious effects of those ideologies on women.
