“Margaret Thatcher Has Basically Made Me Pro-Blow Job”

This chapter examines Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (2014) as a postfeminist reworking of the female Bildungsroman, set against the sociopolitical backdrop of post-Thatcherite Britain. It argues that Moran’s novel stages the protagonist Johanna Morrigan’s journey of sexual and professional reinvention as both liberation and constraint: while she embraces sexual experimentation and invents a new persona as a teenage music journalist, her trajectory remains shaped by neoliberal ideals of self-reliance, confidence, and commodified femininity. Drawing on the work of Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill, Roberta Seelinger Trites, and Soňa Šnircová, the chapter highlights how the novel links female sexual agency to punitive consequences and professional self-fashioning, revealing the contradictions of empowerment under neoliberalism. Particular attention is given to the novel’s ambivalent treatment of sexual subjectivity, its negotiation of class precarity, and its conclusion in relation to the 2019 film adaptation, which reframes Johanna’s self-making within the logic of the “global girl.” By situating Moran’s novel within the historical legacy of Thatcherism and the cultural economy of postfeminist girlhood, the chapter underscores the persistent tension between autonomy, discipline, and marketable empowerment in representations of female adolescence.