Abstract:
This article explores three narratives of violently transgressive lesbians in a prison
setting. The stories are two English novels, Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
(1985), Affinity by Sarah Waters (1999) and an English TV series, Bad Girls (1999-
ongoing). A number of disruptive and counter-hegemonic aspects run through these
stories including their portrayal of violence as a reasonable response to oppressive
social conditions, a distinct problematizing of heterosexuality and the metaphor of a
prison panopticon to explore the constraints imposed on all women’s lives. The article
argues that the representation of lesbian desire in all three tales is truly radical in that
it acts to dissolve unequal power dyads, although it also comes to question the extent
to which it is possible, even in fiction, to sustain such rupture in the face of dominant
cultural imperatives to ‘re-capture’ and ‘domesticate’ homo-normative images.
