Undutiful daughters: Growing up in feminism and psychoanalysis

Abstract

2014 saw a surge in discussions in the media and in feminist circles around who is a feminist and what it takes to be one: critics proclaimed that pop singer Beyonce is not a feminist; Katy Perry and Lady Gaga reject the label; and Roxane Gay published a collection of essays, Bad Feminist (2014), on the topic. This paper works from and against the claim that third-wave feminism is rife with “undutiful daughters” and reads many of today’s feminists as “bad psychoanalysts” whose investment in reading desire often leads to a misreading. In positioning American pop sensation Lana Del Rey vis-a-vis Sophocles’ Antigone, I argue that these undutiful daughters ask us to interrogate what it means to make one’s desire ambiguously legible, and how that might work with, from, or against third-wave feminism. This paper contends that Del Rey and Antigone’s childlike attitudes, and their decision to remain undutiful daughters, offer a new model of willfulness that is integral to feminism today.