1. ‘Sad Girl Novel’: female disenchantment and the failures of neoliberalism

When Frances of Sally Rooney’s Conversation with Friends (2017) asserts that ‘[f]or […] days I stared at my phone for hours on end and accomplished nothing’ (288), she describes a physical paralysis induced by both a withdrawal from interpersonal interaction as well as by a mindless immersion in virtual spaces, which leads to a sense of unproductive stagnation. Frances recounts the emotional detachment that accompanies her bodily inertia: ‘I lay on my bed feeling like a light had been switched off’ (291). This instance is merely one of the novel’s many descriptions of affective and corporeal stupor. In combination with the narrative’s emotionless tone and its focus on failed social relationships, the novel serves as an example of a rising literary phenomenon: the figure of the affectless passive woman, commonly referred to as the literary sad girl in popular discourse, especially on BookTok (Butler-Gallie 2024), where the term originated (Finkemeyer 2023). Digital book culture, like reading communities on BookTok or Goodreads, demonstrates the ubiquity of the ‘sad girl novel’¹ as users frequently praise narratives of passive women for their perceived relatability and their alleged capacity to speak truth to power. Users often refer to Sally Rooney as one of the most iconic sad girl authors of the contemporary moment. Aptly, the protagonist of her debut novel exhibits the literary sad girl’s common characteristics: female gender; young adulthood; a lack of feelings; a general sense of disenchantment with people, politics, or the self; physical fragility and deliberate neglect of the body; mental instability that often correlates with substance abuse and/or eating disorders; (in)voluntary loneliness; failed relationships (including friendships) in mostly heteropatriarchal settings; a middle-class upbringing; academic achievements; (performed or actual) economic precarity; and significantly, fundamental boredom.

In recent years, literary criticism has sought to illuminate the figure of the unhappy, lonely woman that is particularly present in Irish Millennial fiction since the late 2010s (Cahill 2020; Darling 2021; Kenny 2021; Barros-Del Río 2022; Darling 2023; Bollas 2025; Yilmaz 2025). Assessing its critical function, this literary development has been described as a ‘narrative of generational disaffection’ (Darling 2021: 542) or ‘narrative of no community’ (Yilmaz 2025: 80). In contrast, Irish media have flattened its discursive potential, using labels such as ‘Rooney’s Politics of Millennial Resignation’ (Delistraty 2019), ‘The Sally Rooney effect’ (Sweeney 2021), ‘Sad Girl Trinity books’ (O’Beirne 2022), ‘Sad College Girl’ (Lueders 2025), or ‘Sad Irish Girl Wanders Around Dublin novels’ (McRedmond 2025). These reductions are not only dismissive towards complex works that ‘critique the drive towards commodification and unthinking consumption and the structures of late capitalism that create atomized subjects’ (Cahill 2020: 609), they are also triply misleading. First, the literary sad girl is not necessarily sad, but void of feeling. Second, she is hardly ever a girl, but an adult woman. Third, she is not quintessentially Irish or even necessarily white. While research has engaged only recently with this phenomenon, the figure of the affectless woman has been of interest in journalistic discourse for many years, e.g., in The New York Times (Jamison 2019), Los Angeles Times (Steger Strong 2020), The Guardian (Touma 2022; Manavis 2023), or Harper’s Bazaar Australia (Finkemeyer 2023). These contributions have tried to trace the rise and resonance of the sad girl across contemporary media, including her manifestations in film (such as Sofia Coppola’s oeuvre, see Yoshida 2023), television series (such as Fleabag,² see Darling 2020), music (Muchitsch 2024), fashion (Stubblebine 2019; Wong 2025), and self-fashioning (Demopoulos 2022). While these various iterations of detached womanhood point to a broader cultural moment, the sad girl appears most prominently in contemporary prose fiction. Accounts of the sad girl as ‘book cover trend’ (Touma 2022) have insinuated the deliberate exploitation of disaffected female misery by a number of large-scale publishers (Stuckes 2024), pointing to its lucrative potential. Such profitable bestsellers of the last 25 years include, among many others, Melissa Banks’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999), Rachel Klein’s The Moth Diaries (2005), Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014), Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020), Natasha Brown’s Assembly (2021), and Coco Mellors’s Blue Sisters (2024). This brief selection spans short prose fiction, novels, and memoir, as well as different Anglophone cultures of origin, such as the UK, US, or Canada, indicating a recurring emphasis on female detachment across English-speaking literary cultures. It also encompasses both white and non-white authors and represents a range of religious backgrounds, challenging the common criticism that the sad girl is marked by whiteness and mainstream ethnicity (Liu 2022). The sad girl seems to transgress national borders and genre boundaries, appearing anywhere on the spectrum of biography to (auto)fiction, and inhabiting predominantly but not exclusively what the marketplace labels literary fiction. While public media has addressed the ubiquitous literary presence of the sad girl as a ‘cult’ (Jamison 2019), ‘trope’ (Finkemeyer 2023), or more broadly as ‘sad-girl lit’ (Manavis 2023), scholarly conceptualisations of this development remain lacking. To frame the phenomenon as a genre would risk to imprecisely extend the reductive market strategies that underpin it. Instead, the literary sad girl is to be conceived of as a literary figure; not so much as a character type ‘forming part of the storyworld’ (Jannidis 2013) or trope (as that would limit her discursive function to a ploy for plot) but as a recurring fictional entity that entails a specific kind of narrative, i.e., a narrative of female disaffect. As such, the sad girl carries specific cultural meanings tied to her contemporary emergence. If a range of mass-produced and widely consumed media iterate similar forms of disaffected womanhood, what does its enduring appeal signify? What affective realities do these narratives respond to?

Rather than focusing on building complex fictional worlds or intricate plots, these texts use the figure of the literary sad girl to critique normative feminism and affective labour under capitalism by exploring the affective actuality of their protagonists, notably disaffect. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s concept of ‘stuplimity’ (2005: 248–297) and Lauren Berlant’s notion of Cruel Optimism (2011), I read Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017) as a case study exemplifying a once cruelly optimistic subject embodied in the disaffected, passive woman who relinquishes her unattainable fantasies and instead retreats into an idle state of inaction. I suggest that the rise of the literary sad girl mirrors the shift in feminist discourse since the beginning of the new millennium. She reflects the growing sense of female disillusion as the promises of neoliberalism fail to materialise: from the shallow empowerment rhetoric of early 2000s postfeminism to increasing socioeconomic precarity in the 2010s and the rise of reactionary politics and fascist heteropatriarchy in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Her rejection of self-optimisation, professional careerism, and political idealism, and subsequent turn towards instant gratification through bodily pursuits, male validation, and the passive absorption of digital content does not merely represent a submission to capitalist determinism and the male gaze. Instead, she – ambivalently – signifies a resistance to feeling norms imposed on women, and articulates a passive but resolute form of dissent.

2. Bored of the fantasy of the good life: disaffect and stuplimity

As emotionally dull and socially inactive female protagonists like Frances prevail in twenty-first-century fiction, negative affects appear characteristic of the current literary moment – a development that highlights how affects, generally, ‘mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective’ (Ahmed 2004: 119). A wide resonance of narratives of disaffected womanhood thus represents both intimate, individual existing affects that become collective, public affects. These shared public affects, actual or fictional, are collectively negotiated in literary culture; as affects ‘work to bind subjects together’ (Ahmed 2004: 119), this shared affective experience becomes a distinct affective cultural practice that manifests, for instance, in fiction, among other cultural forms. This cultural practice (like the sad girl phenomenon) is markedly gendered as affects are a necessarily gendered experience in gendered societies (Yilmaz 2025: 82). Trends in literary culture (like both the production and consumption of narratives of female affective disengagement) as well as emerging and spreading literary forms (like the literary figure of the sad girl) point to a collective affective experience among, respectively, (female) readers and female characters. Fiction can therefore mediate affects within the gendered collective. While female disenchantment has long been part of British (Anderson 2001; Crangle 2008; Pease 2012) and American (Berlant 2008; Yao 2021) literary history, the literary sad girl represents a new form of female impassivity that is specific to twenty-first-century fiction and literary (online) culture.

Sad girl novels commonly trace the development from emotional negativity such as disaffection to disaffect. While affect has been subject to intense scholarship, disaffect as noun is not a popular concept. Disaffect, I argue, is not identical with the common notion of disaffection. I argue that the existence of affect, dialectically, holds the capacity for the absence of affect. I understand disaffect as the opposite of affect, or, the affective void created by the absence of prior existing affects. Lauren Berlant posits that ‘the present is perceived, first, affectively’ (Berlant 2011: 4), insofar that an initial bodily affective experience results in some sort of rational recognition. Disaffect then necessitates the absence of this link. Failing to affectively respond to the current moment results in the incomprehensibility of the present. While negative affect like anxiety indicates an understanding of specific situations that one reacts to, disaffect requires the abandonment of even negative feelings.

I understand disaffect to largely align with Xine Yao’s conceptualisation of disaffection as ‘unfeeling’ (2021: 3). Yao frames unfeeling as marked by a constitutive negativity: to be disaffected is to ‘stay with the negativity of unfeeling’ (3). But while negative affectability forms a crucial component in the emergence of disaffection, Yao specifies that disaffection is ‘not simply […] negative feeling[]’ (5) but something ‘which cannot be recognized as feeling’ (5). Disaffect, as I use the term, remains emotionally neutral, much like affect in its basic form, and is, in this regard, akin to Yao’s unfeeling: an affective state that is not merely ‘the absence of feelings’ (5) but ‘the negation of feeling itself’ (5–6). By extending this concept to include the temporal dimension, I employ disaffect to describe an extreme diminution of affect over time: a condition in which former affects, such as disaffection, gradually erode and eventually cease. As a state tied to progressing affective decline, disaffect centres temporality: a slow depletion of affective forces. Disaffect emphasises the temporal unfolding of unfeeling and thus stresses the build-up of the disruptive potential that Yao associates with unfeeling. For Yao, unfeeling is ‘vilified’ because it represents an ‘underacknowledged spectrum of dissonance and dissent’ (5) predominantly embodied by female, racialised, queer and otherwise othered subjects in modernity, and carries significant ‘insurgent potential’ (5) to rupture dominant affective structures so as to ‘enable[] new structures of feeling to arise’ (5). Precisely this connection of unfeeling to minorities or the marginalised renders hegemonic culture derogatory towards these alleged ‘antisocial’ (5) affects, which is a dynamic reiterated in the derogatory labelling of sad girl literature and the public failure to recognise its critical depth.

If the loss of affectability is processual, then how does this process unfold, and how does disaffect emerge from preceding affective diminution? Disaffect ensues from what Sianne Ngai conceptualised as ‘stuplimity’ (2005: 248–297) and is predicated on what Berlant calls the ‘impasse’ (2011: 4). In Ugly Feelings, Ngai describes stuplimity as ‘a strange amalgamation of shock and boredom’ (2) that occurs in ‘situations of passivity’ (3) caused by a present that is affectively illegible. As one of other persistent dysphoric affects fostered by capitalism that last over long periods of time (7), it leads to a perpetual state of affective stasis. Ngai principally builds her concept on Kantian sublimity but crucially departs from its clear causal sequence and reliance on terror. After the sublime entity has induced terror, the encounter causes apatheia (Kant 2007 [1790]: 102) which is a noble moment of affectless metaphysical insight. For Ngai, there is no single grand terror but diffuse shocks, and no orderly progression to a subsequent absence of affect. Instead, stuplimity entails ‘the paradoxical convergence of excessive excitation (shock) and the lack of excitation (boredom)’ (Ngai 2005: 36). Stuplified subjects like sad girl protagonists similarly experience a lack of affect when continuously exposed to the horrors of navigating life amid ongoing multiple crises, overstimulation, and hyper-connectedness under late capitalism. This apathy appears in the form of boredom and is ‘seemingly unjustifiable’ (10) as it is not caused by a single, meaningful impact but ‘related to tedium’ (277). This perceived tedium, however, is in actuality a complicated and complex amassment of endless ‘encounters with vast but bounded artificial systems, resulting in repetitive and often mechanical acts of enumeration, permutation and combination, and taxonomic classification’ that cause shock continuously (36). As shock is usually restricted to a singular occurrence, stuplimity arises from these repeated shocking encounters whose numerous causes are difficult to clearly identify. This causes a ‘comic exhaustion rather than terror’ (36) – an affective circumstance used to infantilise narratives of female detachment, taking comical tedium at face value to degrade complex narratives of female disenchantment to trivial sad girl sob stories.

How is a subject continuously shocked to boredom in the first place? Taking another step back, the genesis of stuplimity can be grasped through Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011). Principally, ‘[a] relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (1). While optimism itself is not cruel, it becomes cruel ‘when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially’ (1). The fantasy of ‘the good life’ (2) lies at its core:

Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies – say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work – when evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abound? Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories […] about how they and the world “add up to something.” What happens when those fantasies start to fray – depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash? (2)

The promises of neoliberalism construe the nurturing ground for this ‘[m]isrecognition’ (122). Neoliberalism,³ to use David Harvey’s definition, is ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey 2005: 2). Neoliberalism ‘sees market exchange as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action’ and trusts ‘that the social good will be maximized by maximizing […] market transactions’, thereby prioritising ‘privatization, deregulation and a […] withdrawal from the state from many areas of social provision’ (Gill & Scharff 2011: 5). Thus, neoliberalism places the responsibility for both social flourishing and individual well-being onto the individual, based on the belief that free markets inherently possess the capacity to secure everyone’s personal thriving if only properly pursued. Consequently, neoliberalism demands that society must merely be ‘supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state’ (Vallier 2022). The belief in ultimate success secured by individualistic striving lies at the core of cruelly optimistic attachments: even if the object of desire is not obtained, it is always depicted within the realm of the possible by your own hard work. This hyper-individualistic nature of neoliberalism unavoidably produces relations of cruel optimism, as it attaches people ‘to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic’ (Berlant 2011: 24, emphasis original). If, as Berlant suggests, neoliberalism coerces people ‘to repeat optimism’ only to ‘survive, once again, disappointment and depression’ (121), resulting in the ‘neoliberal feedback loop’ (192), then it produces a present that is affectively perceived as an ‘impasse’ (4) that, originally temporary (5), persists as ‘a time of dithering from which someone […] cannot move forward’ (4). This account of the present as stuck or suspended resonates with Ngai’s description of stuplimity as a lengthening of time in form of affectless boredom, induced by incessant terror.

Disaffect ensues when the stuplified subject becomes aware of the irrationality of their cruel attachments and, as a consequence, resists coercion into the futile pursuit of personal fulfilment. The subversive potential of the disaffected sad girl lies in this resistance. Disaffect happens when subjects recognise the implausibility of the good life fantasy, accept the limitations of their agency under current systems of power, and embrace detachment and passivity as expressions of dissent. As relations of cruel optimism constitute the underlying affective conditions of the neoliberal present, which sad girl literature responds to, disaffect emerges as a primary affective mode in the present cultural landscape, hence materialising in contemporary bestsellers.

3. “a strange, depersonalising shock”: fictionalised female disaffect

The disaffected, passive woman represents a formerly cruelly optimistic individual that has abandoned her unattainable fantasies in favour of inaction. Conversations with Friends is often cited within digital book culture as one key text in the development of twenty-first-century sad girl literature and thus depicts a likely choice for case study to substantiate the narrative of female disaffect. An apt example of the literary sad girl figure, the protagonist of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017), Frances, affirms that she ‘never fantasised about a radiant future’ (23). As a formerly lonely, diligent student turned respected queer poetry talent at school, Frances grew up believing that by optimising her personality and body, and maintaining a romantic relationship, she will build an intellectually and socially fulfilling future (7–8). Yet, as a first-person narrator with a notable tone of indifference, she recounts her disillusionment with the good life fantasy as an unsociable, academically robotic, and financially precarious college student obsessed with her emotionally abusive lover Nick. Throughout the novel, Frances’s drive to attain intellectual and material rewards progressively declines.

The neoliberal education system represents the entry point into the aforementioned neoliberal feedback loop as it promises future social and material security through accumulated individual educational milestones. Frances, born sometime after 1992, grew up as ‘a gifted child’ (107). Yet, reaping rewards in the hyper-individualised school system makes her a social misfit instead of securing status: ‘when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was. When I couldn’t make friends as a child, I fantasised that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other student who had been in the school before, a genius hidden among normal people’ (34). The pursuit of intellectual gratification actively impedes Frances’s need for validation, yet academic credentials are a cornerstone of the good life fantasy. At college, Frances gradually accepts her alienation; now accustomed to permanent disaffect towards peers, she continues to rely on academic achievements for external validation (34). However, rather than sensing actual worth, she relies on assignments to keep her mind occupied so as to keep up the pretence of agency: ‘Over the summer I missed the periods of intense academic concentration which helped to relax me during term time. I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve’ (34). This depersonalisation signifies Berlant’s ‘dissipated’ subject (2011: 9), that is the inevitable process under neoliberal capitalism that drives individuals to pursue relations of cruel optimism – like academic credentialism – but which ultimately gradually wears down the subject’s sense of self and plunging them into the impersonal chase for the same unified, monotonous good-life fantasy. While academic accomplishments are a quick affective fix, they do not equate to actually achieving lasting social goods that neoliberal education promises. While incessantly completing assignments for most of her life has given her the impression of working linearly towards a positive outcome, repetitive intellectual work has turned into an affectively stultifying tedium that renders her stuplified: brief exhilaration induced by good grades represents that first ‘sharp, sudden excitation’ that is followed by ‘prolonged desensitization’ (Ngai 2005: 271) that eventually leads to disaffect.

The novel mirrors the development of disaffect from initial disaffection through Frances’s growing disengagement with her art. While her talent as a poet granted her social upward mobility in secondary school, her artistic capabilities, like her intellectual capacities, do not propel her socially or financially forward as an adult. Realising this misrecognition, she stops pursuing poetry as a means of self-actualisation. She deflects it as mere ‘performance […] which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy’ (Rooney 2017: 41). She further reduces her writing to a tool to draw her lover’s inconsistent attention, which depict one of her few sources of affective stimuli: ‘I thought about Nick entering the room while everybody applauded […], as if I also was an important person […], as if there was nothing inferior about me’ (41). Frances also projects meaning onto the approval of strangers in the audience, indicating the still internalised good life fantasy that dictates popularity and approval will grant lasting social status. This misrecognition as well as her misplaced focus on her emotionally distant love interest as the solution of her increasing emotional numbness represents a typical relation of cruel optimism. This unfulfilling overreliance on others’ approval instead of engaging with her own intellectual and creative capabilities is further expressed through the notable absence of Frances’s own achievements such as her writings in the novel.

Compulsively seeking attention from emotionally unavailable persons represents a key feature of the cruelly optimistic sad girl. Frances represents this futile chase for affective responses not only through her damaged relationships with her distant father (207) and estranged mother (310) but through romantic and sexual encounters with both Bobbi and Nick. While we never read her poems, mundane text messages between Frances and her lovers feature often and always in ‘lower case’ (61). Since Frances sees ‘capitalisation’ as ‘dramatic’ (61), she opts for lower cases so as not to falsely give the impression of excitability. The lower cases thus temper potential impressions of affectability and mirror her affectless tone and decreasing emotional repertoire – insufficient to even reproduce the artifice of intact grammar. Since neither relationship results in a solid interpersonal bond, Frances disengages with the idea of eternal love and stable intimacy within as well as outside monogamy, concluding that ‘nothing consists of two people, or even three’ (299). While this insight does not propel her to seek alternatives such as consenting polyamorous constellations – an impossibility under hegemonial heteropatriarchy and thus a cruelly optimistic prospect – her growing romantic detachment indicates her resignation to heteropessimism. Frances’s turn to indifference seems to confirm Ellie Anderson’s observation that ‘a core problem with heteropessimism is that it involves complaining instead of changing things’ (Anderson 2023). Yet, her passivity also marks an important step away from the good life fantasy. It indicates a recognition of the ‘unreliable agency’ (2011: 9) that, according to Berlant, permeates all social constellations under neoliberal capitalism, in the sense that Frances accepts that she cannot shape her own interpersonal relations and must instead endure – and become complicit in – others’ unreliability, inconsistency, and wrongful behaviour.

Frances’s recognition of and resignation to the conditions of intimacy under neoliberal, heteropatriarchal capitalism feeds into the sad girl’s abandonment of feminist aspirations. Despite efforts to nurture her intellect and embrace her emotionally flat existence by resorting to thoughts only, external forces remind Frances that she nevertheless exists as a sexed body – objectified and to be improved and consumed. As a friendless teenager, Frances is sexually harassed online (Rooney 2017: 35) for which she blames herself. Her parents are already estranged at this point (17), so she ‘had no one to tell’ (35). At school, Frances internalises that feminist activities are trivialised (7). Driven by her doubts over her physical qualities, she continuously compares her body to Bobbi’s, and pictures herself living Bobbi’s life ‘when I was doing something dull’ (14). Frances’s fantasy of being a desirable woman, however, increases her emotional flatness by inducing a ‘depersonalising shock’ (14). In her twenties, she trivialises her extremely painful periods (22) that repeatedly make her faint (295), and are later diagnosed as endometriosis, which she also trivialises (272) to avoid acknowledging the severity of an incurable condition. When Nick repeatedly exploits her emotionally, she blames herself for his cruel behaviour (178). After their affair becomes known to his wife, Frances’s profound lack of remorse towards Melissa represents the culmination of her internalised antifeminism (297).

Negative feelings towards partnerships and formal achievements, but also employment, increasingly morph into the negation of feeling. Realising that educational excellence does not result in meaningful occupations or financial security, Frances disengages with the idea of ‘perform[ing] an economic role. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy’ (23). As Darling asserts, Frances ‘depict[s] the paralysis of capitalism, in which […] choices are pre-determined by crippling capitalist norms’ (2021: 542). In a realistic assessment of her situation, Frances embraces this paralysis, missing work because she prefers sleeping (Rooney 2017: 91). Frances renounces capitalist norms, stating that she ‘had no plans as to my future financial sustainability: I never wanted to earn money for doing anything’ (23), ultimately resisting the coercion into the good life fantasy and refusing labour dependency.

Education, liberal feminism, personal relationships, and employment have perpetually affectively stunted Frances as the childhood promises of feminist self-actualisation have failed to materialise. Formerly perpetually oscillating between ‘sharp, sudden excitation and prolonged desensitization, exhaustion, or fatigue’ (Ngai 2005: 271), stuplified Frances eventually inhabits the middle of affectless existence. This position of disaffect emerges as the only place that offers stability, albeit no cleansing release: stuplimity ‘involves a deficiency of affect that is […] dysphoric – stultifying, tedious, irritating (269). Stuplimity manifests as an insipid ‘affective gap’ (1): ‘Hours passed […]. I lay on the bed in my clothes and wondered if I was going to start feeling some particular emotion, like sadness or regret. Instead, I just felt a lot of things I didn’t know how to identify’ (Rooney 2017: 59). While previously capable to feel sad about her growing apathy towards herself, thinking ‘this was the worst misery’ (Rooney 2017: 85), Frances abandons greater emotions. This relates to what Ngai remarks about ‘grander passions,’ which have long been regarded as a noble aesthetic (2005: 6); ugly feelings, however, are ‘morally degraded’ (10). Since Frances’s stuplimity is not caused by magnificent incidents but by infinite (social, economic) tedium, her self-proclaimed ‘very shallow misery’ (Rooney 2017: 85) occupies a ‘seemingly unjustifiable status’ (Ngai 2005: 10).

Eventually fundamentally disaffected, Frances describes her emptiness as ‘the inside of a glass jar’ where the only emotional remnant is her ‘fear of total disappearance’ (Rooney 2017: 207). Frances describes the experience of disaffect as ‘l[ying] on my bed feeling like a light had been switched off’ (291). This description shows that stuplified disaffect is essentially the impasse, in which Frances merely resides in a state of ‘absorptive awareness’ (Berlant 2011: 4), realising ‘this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen’ (Rooney 2017: 289). The impasse is reflected in Frances’s physical paralysis (288). Without agency to move forward, the sad girl resorts to sarcasm: Frances remarks that her passivity ‘could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl’ (308). She becomes socially unresponsive, claiming to not experience either emotions or thoughts (193), and losing her sense of self: ‘Am I myself […]? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me’ (294). To make her isolation bearable, she pretends to have chosen it, euphemistically calling it ‘privacy’ that is ‘protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived’ (288). Yet, she resorts to minor acts of desperation within the small realm of individual agency, such as switching all apartment lights on before going to bed in an attempt of feeling seen (16). The impasse is also ‘a stretch of time in which one moves around […] intensely present’ (Berlant 2011: 4). Accordingly, Frances often ‘fe[els] dizzy and restless’ (Rooney 2011: 61) in her affectless stagnation. This animatedness, which is one of Ngai’s ugly feelings (2005: 89–125), correlates with Frances’s bodily fragility that oscillates between physical activity – mostly sexual intercourse – and recurring fainting due to her painful menstruation.

Since it is neoliberalism’s structural hostility that causes this ‘general sense of obstructed agency’ (Ngai 2005: 3), the sad girl’s options to reclaim agency are limited. Frances resorts to exerting power over her own body to disobey the capitalist logic of productivity and to defy the neoliberal coercion back into the good life fantasy. She stops going to work and abandons poetry, remaining in bed all day, consuming digital content like cartoons, or watching on-demand crime dramas (Rooney 2017: 60–61, 300). She compares her passive absorption to ‘peace’ (300), like other external, accessible stimuli like nicotine, caffeine, and sugar (60–61, 295, 299). Additionally, she refuses to fuel her body with nutrients, either not eating at all or eating large amounts of convenience food (60–61, 295). This neglect escalates into self-harm and suicidality. Frances seeks cold temperatures (60), sometimes to the point of ‘giving myself hypothermia’ (288). She cuts her arms and legs (288–299). However, self-harm does not provide her the bodily autonomy and affective responses she was seeking: ‘I sat on the floor of my room bleeding […]. I was like an empty cup, […] and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value […]. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself’ (287). The blood allegorises former relations of cruel optimism, now expelled from within. This allegory is continued by her extreme periods: ‘I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole […] person maybe. I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and there was nothing special about it’ (275). Her suffering ultimately becomes too much to comprehend and ceases to matter entirely. Desensitised, Frances habitually ‘tak[es] the maximum dose’ of painkillers ‘every day just in case’, seemingly developing an addiction (309). Her last attempt at reclaiming autonomy is her pursuit of sexual encounters with Nick. Desperate to feel at least bodily sensation, she asks to be physically abused during sex (215). When Frances learns that sex might become too painful to bear due to her endometriosis, she describes this disclosure as ‘apocalyptically cruel’ (270). She resorts to sarcasm to distance herself from the final disappointment, namely that even her last source of stimulation will become inaccessible.

4. Passive Dissent as Resistance to Neoliberal Coercion

Frances as merely one exemplary iteration of the sad girl figure that pervades much of contemporary Anglophone narrative fiction. After we learn about her former optimistic aspirations in the first-person narrator’s initial flashbacks, we witness her perpetual disappointments by people, politics, and lacking socioeconomic prospects of self-actualisation throughout the novel. The narrative delineates the protagonist’s growing disenchantment with neoliberal promises that fail to materialise, showing a decidedly young and female gradual loss of affect that is preceded by a repetitious cycle of previous hopes and ensuing disappointments – the neoliberal feedback loop that capitalism rests on. As Frances recognises the futility of this loop, her affective fluctuation levels until she settles in a stable yet unsettling state of disaffect that looks like carelessness. However, I argue that Frances represents the opposite: the apparent resignation to her own powerlessness is merely her disaffect’s outward appearance. Underneath, her disaffect signifies her heightened awareness of her object-position in current systems of power, realising that capitalist heteropatriarchal structures, not her own free will, determine her reality. Towards the end of the novel, in her profound stuplimity, she experiences a similar affectless state of metaphysical insight that terrifies her beyond comprehension, similar to Kantian sublimity: ‘I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I […] collapsed’ (Rooney 2017: 295). Frances dysfunctional, sexed body disrupts her moment of metaphysical insight: her uterus cramps so painfully that she loses consciousness. This literal loss of control exemplifies that stuplimity, unlike sublimity, is ‘decidedly […] noncathartic’ (Ngai 2005: 6, emphasis original) and provides no purification. The disaffected sad girl may eventually understand her position in the neoliberal feedback loop and see through the coercive forces of cruel optimism, but can never fully grasp the conditions that cause this positionality. The neoliberal capitalist present remains an ‘affective […] illegibility’ (1). For instance, when Frances is contemplating structural inequality, she is unable to comprehend the historical and material complexities fully, eventually deciding that ‘[i]nstead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of’ (Rooney 2017: 294). Darling has pointed to the ‘vocal criticism but practical passivity’ (2021: 542) of current female characters such as Frances. Yet, it is precisely her passivity that should be understood as an act of defiance, not inaction: in resignation to the structural nature of the dystopian conditions of her reality, she accepts that action is futile, and passivity offers a valve for resistance within the capitalist logic of productivity.

Female disaffect in current narratives must therefore be grasped as a form of seemingly passive but substantive dissent. Thrift argues that affective responses signify a certain knowledge about the present (Thrift 2008: 175). Ongoing oscillating affects do not produce actual understanding of the world, but lead to a subdued affectless state. Precisely this lack offers eventual understanding of the position of the female body as object in heteropatriarchal late capitalism. Disaffect does not entail a lack of knowledge about the present, but denotes a state after affect, in which the current literary detached woman may gain profound insights about her predetermined existence. Depersonalisation can thus be reconceptualised not as a regrettable loss of identity (a category generally overemphasised in neoliberalism), but as a rejection of hyperindividualism. Abandoning grand emotions offers protection against the coercion into relations of cruel optimism. Self-neglect provides protection against capitalist exploitation by making the body maximally useless. Berlant remarks about cruel optimism’s ‘double bind’ that ‘even with an image of a better good life available to sustain your optimism, it is […] threatening to detach from what is already not working’ (2011: 263). The literary sad girl, then, can be considered courageous for facing this threat, regardless of whether this confrontation is deliberate or inadvertent. These subversive potentials of disaffect align most with Yao’s conceptualisation of unfeeling as negation of feeling: it can become a mode of rejecting the upholding of ‘structures of domination’ (2021: 2) when those situated higher in affective hierarchies demand constant displays of sympathy and care; unfeeling is ‘vilified’ precisely because ‘antisocial affects […] have insurgent potential’ (6). Unfeeling emerges from disaffect(ion) as a subversive, disruptive force – ‘a tactic from below’ (3).

Critics of these narratives have lamented on the absence of plot, yet these novels deliberately refuse to propel themselves forward. The formal lack of agency and action mirrors the characters’ refusal of progress as a neoliberal ideal. In reducing female agency to the deintellectualised pursuit of instinctive bodily wants through sex and substances, these narratives defy conventional expectations of resolution and humanist ideals. Steger Strong argues that they ‘oppose[] […] the Great Male Novels that centered agency and action’ and represent ‘an expansion of the form’ which is why, despite accusations of an antifeminist rhetoric, ‘the last decade’ has acknowledged their ‘revolutionary potential’ (2020).

5. Female disaffect as a critique of postfeminist feeling norms

The figure of the disaffected, passive woman has frequently been accused of being essentially antifeminist due to her capitulation to patriarchal oppression, for instance in form of lacking careerism, preoccupation with (older and richer) men, and submissiveness into (at times violent) sexual penetration. These characteristics implicate the disownership and inherent objectness of female bodies. Yet, this is not necessarily only regressive, since these characters do not objectify themselves; rather, they recognise the social determination of their body’s objecthood and stop performing the illusion of agency. It is this feminist ambiguity that holds discursive potential. As Jasmine Gege Yang (2018) asserts, these figures highlight the repercussions of postfeminist culture in illustrating the lingering dominance of the male gaze. By enraging proclaimed feminist readers specifically, their internalised patriarchal lens is disclosed: blaming fictional women for creating their own misery is in itself antifeminist as it disregards the complex criticism they voice and stigmatises prioritising female bodily gratification. Passivity has historically been a legitimate form of political resistance, yet dismissing more radical, young, and female passivity reproduces a patronising condescension, which the derogatory label sad girl – as in, silly and sulking, not to be taken seriously – encapsulates. The notion of girlhood is not entirely inappropriate as it signals a refusal of adulthood which no longer holds the prospect of autonomy and fulfilment. Girlhood signifies a stuplified lingering in-between child- and adulthood to avoid what adulting actually entails: grappling with rising reactionary forces, resurging gender roles, socioeconomic precarity, ecological crises, and more.

Admittedly, many of the bestselling sad girl novels merely offer a performance of feminism in their fictional worlds. They idealise thin, white bodies and hyperfeminine fragility. However, these characters must be evaluated in sum to understand their feminist scope. Considered as one phenomenon in twenty-first-century narratives, they reflect a growing general sense of disillusionment among predominantly millennial and Gen Z writers and readers. The literary sad girl mirrors the ‘affective atmosphere’ of the twenty-first century insofar as they recognise the ‘existential truth about contingencies of living, namely, that there are no guarantees that the life one intends can or will be built’ (Berlant 2011: 192). This literary figure represents a rejection of feeling norms perpetuated by liberal feminism. These norms reproduce the stigma of emotionality as inferior and dictate that women must display constant mental resilience, physical solidity, and intellectual superiority – expectations which, like the postfeminist rhetoric in the early 2000s, place the responsibility for emancipatory justice onto the individual. By challenging normative expectations of twenty-first century womanhood and exposing the limitations of actual feminist progress, these narratives’ exaggerated performance of antifeminism can be read as satirical commentary on the failures of neoliberal feminism throughout the past 25 years.

As such, the literary sad girl is an exemplary culmination of the issues increasingly addressed in female-authored fiction since the turn of the millennium, especially as more female writers gain access to the global literary marketplace. While representations of the literary sad girl have surged in prose fiction since the 2010s, this development is rooted in the early twenty-first century, after which it gained traction in the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2007–2008 and accelerated during the 2020s. The pandemic provided ideal conditions for narratives of emotional detachment and female passivity to flourish, with its forced prolonged social isolation, confinement to the home, stasis of live culture and increased turn towards online book culture, and a parallel surge in readership, especially in relatively young, female readers, who represent the dominant demographic among readers in the global north (Eurostat 2024; Iyengar 2025).

By engaging in these texts, and moreover in reading cultures such as BookTok or Goodreads, the wide consumption of these texts might yield not only a mutual understanding and sense of knowing about the world through fictionalised, albeit shared, affects; engaging with these narratives might provoke a reader’s own moment of disaffected recognition about their own coercion into the good life fantasy. The literary sad girl thus epitomises what Berlant calls the ‘unravelled life’ (2011: 21) one forcibly lives under neoliberal capitalism, offering solemn social critique of the specifically young and female conditions of this life. The ‘sad girl’s’ literary and (pop) cultural pervasiveness points to a specific aesthetic that appeals to readers, but also reflects widespread patterns of adapting to the present. To borrow from Berlant, this cultural development shows ‘what’s collective about specific modes of sensual activity towards and beyond survival’ (9). These books as products are the base for a shared cultural practice among readers but at the same time lucrative commodities on the largest literary marketplace. For understanding the reasons for her longevity and her anti/feminist implications, future studies might, for example, evaluate the sad girl’s inherently ambivalent existence as commodity on the marketplace.

Also, in recognising the feminist potential of the disaffected, passive woman, her global representativity must be questioned. She appears to be mostly situated in the Global North, and predominantly within so-called Western literary culture.⁴ Critics such as Liu (2022) claim that these narratives ‘can only ever represent white women, whose whiteness allows them to be a kind of feminine that women of color could never attain. White women […] are therefore entitled to relate to these complex literary women’, yet this assertion overlooks various examples of UK- or US-based ethnically and/or religiously ‘othered’ disaffected womanhood in current Anglophone fiction.⁵ Furthermore, Japanese and Korean works of fiction display the same development.⁶ Situating the emergence of the literary sad girl in the broader context of postindustrial societies may be a more accurate way to account for this diversity, especially considering that disengagement with employment, politics, or personal relationships presupposes a certain socioeconomic rank that enables these women to refute normative obligations. This literary figure does not reflect the affective realities of women for whom emotional or physical withdrawal is not an option, for instance those in compulsory wage labour relations and/or with care responsibilities. Disaffected female passivity should not be reduced to the overrepresented whiteness that dominates popular criticism, but rather grasped as determined by social class; nor should it be generalised as representative across age demographics and geographical specificities.

Lastly, while the figure of the disaffected woman is emblematic of late 2010s and early 2020s fiction, its literary lineage in (semi)fictional works must be accounted for. Similar themes emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as works by Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted, 1993), Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation, 1994) or Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life, 2008) show. This literary lineage includes translated works of fiction; examples are, among others, Taiwanese (Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile (1994)), Italian (Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment, 2005[2002]), Polish (Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, 2018[2009]), or Catalan (Eva Baltasar, Permafrost, 2021). This lineage could in a future study be traced further back, to twentieth-century writers such as Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf, and further to the female ennui of the nineteenth century. Yet, the disaffected woman of twenty-first-century fiction represents a new form of her literary predecessors which is distinctly marked by neoliberal, late capitalism.

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.