ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey series (2011–12) exploits the conventions of the Harlequin romance to endorse the hegemonic ideal of neoliberal postfeminism as empowering and pleasurable for women. Romanticising that ideal as aspirational, the narrative underscores how heroine Anastasia Steele’s capitulation to Christian Grey’s ‘neoliberal contract’ guarantees her success, happiness and sexual fulfilment. At the same time, however, tonal discrepancies in the affective register undermine or even subvert the series’s valorisation of that ideal, alerting readers to its oppressiveness. Thus, by excavating those affective discrepancies, this chapter aims to expose the contradictory nature of neoliberal postfeminism, posing a crucial question: are these purportedly empowering ideologies actually sanctioning and facilitating gender-based violence?
