Unleashing Anger: The Emergence of Female Rage as a Contemporary Literary Force

In 2017, the #MeToo movement forwarded an initiative that called for women who had survived any form of sexual violence to speak about it in what quickly became a forum-like online space for survivor-on-survivor support. In light of this powerful assembly that made the ubiquitousness of sexual and patriarchal abuses quite impossible to ignore, many of the movement’s participants began expressing their anger against the system that had sustained these aggressions in an unashamed and unapologetic way. The anger of #MeToo continued to expand outside the scope of feminist traditional demonstration and permeated into popular forms of culture and entertainment like film, television, and literature. In the latter, female anger has proved to be quite a productive force, having motivated what Jilly Boyce Kay named “a remarkable boom in publishing on female fury” (2019, 591). Based on Sara Ahmed’s model for the sociality of emotions that she articulated in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), this paper intends to offer a mapping of the circulation of female anger into mainstream literature and an exploration of how this affect is operating in some of the literary works of this “boom” of publications. First, an exploration of prior conceptions and writings of female anger will be developed, to then contend how the #MeToo served as a catalyst for its circulation and resignification. Afterwards, the approaches that authors have been taking to write about female anger at the turn of the decade will be examined and examples will be drawn from two primary texts: Lisa Taddeo’s Animal (2021), and Dizz Tate’s Brutes (2023). Finally, the main points of contention about this angry wave of literature will be properly addressed and tackled, all in hopes of reaching a comprehensive work that grounds the basis for a literary tendency that, in light of recent events in the US Presidential Election, might be on the verge of a second wave.