Abstract

This paper explores three narratives of violently transgressive lesbians in a prison setting. The stories are two English novels, Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter (1984), Affinity by Sarah Waters (1999) and an English TV series, titled in an apparently tongue in cheek moment, Bad Girls (1999-ongoing). The paper explores a number of disruptive and counter-hegemonic aspects that run through these stories including their portrayal of violence as a reasonable response to oppressive social conditions, a distinct problematising of heterosexuality and the metaphor of a prison panopticon to explore the constraints imposed on all women's lives. The main focus of the paper is on the role of lesbian desire. I argue that the representation of lesbian desire in all three tales is truly radical in that it acts to dissolve unequal power dyads, although I also come 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.