The Literary Sad Girl: Female Disaffect and Passive Dissent in 21st-Century Anglophone Fiction

Referred to as ‘the sad girl’ in popular discourse, depictions of disaffected, inactive women increasingly pervade 21st-century literature, particularly female-authored Anglophone narratives. Drawing on Laurent Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005), this article develops the notion of disaffect (noun) – the absence of affect rather than the existence of negative affects such as disaffection – to trace the sad girl’s gradual loss of affect that renders her emotionally numb and physically passive. By delineating the rise of this literary figure throughout the 21st century and identifying its key characteristics, the article illustrates the literary sad girl's critical potential. Instead of reducing the literary sad girl to a trope, genre, or marketing ploy, the literary sad girl is understood as enacting a materialist critique on normative feminism and affective labour under neoliberal capitalism. Her enduring rise mirrors the shifts in feminist discourse since the beginning of the new millennium, reflecting female disillusionment throughout the failures of neoliberalism in the past decades, from the shallow empowerment rhetoric of early 2000s postfeminism to increasing socioeconomic precarity throughout 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, political idealism, and subsequent turn to 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, and somewhat ambivalently, the literary sad girl signifies a deliberate resistance to affective norms imposed on women, and articulates a passive but resolute form of dissent.