ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

With the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism entered a transition period between its second and third phases, which lasted about ten years. This transition period is not only a crisis of economics but also a crisis of the sociocultural hegemony that legitimizes the system. This paper analyzes the British novel Elmet (Fiona Mozley, 2017) as a testament to the crisis of financial cultural hegemony and British neoliberalism that peaked during the mid-1990s, as well as the hegemonic idea of perpetuation of the capitalist system. Through the lens of Marxist feminism’s capitalist social reproduction theory, this paper reads Elmet in terms of capitalist exploitation as the exploitation of “total social capital” and the destructive properties of oppression and subsumption that control and exploit the laboring body. Elmet, this paper argues, critiques the totality the capitalist system by disapproving its legitimacy; and, thus, blurs the prospect of capitalist reproduction by imagining a structure of feeling permeated by hatred and anger, disrupting gender norms, and highlighting a body that refuse to be subsumed by the capitalist exchange mode. With self-destructive practices as the only means to cut off the capitalist exchange link, Elmet urgently insists on the existence of ‘Elmet’ as a place for the invisible struggles and the need for alternatives.

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