Circulating as “Mommy Porn” in mass culture, E.L. James’s phenomenally popular Fifty Shades trilogy (2011) (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed, respectively) has generated significant media attention for its appeal as an edgy and sexually provocative set of texts, purportedly legitimising women’s foray into BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism) in their own bedrooms. The figure of the mother certainly goes to the heart of the widespread cultural appeal of these texts, though not, perhaps, for its function as sexually liberating, but rather for the way in which this figure is used to rehabilitate a “wounded” version of white masculinity. In rereading some seminal critiques of the popular romance, this paper will suggest that anxieties around heterosexuality and gender are managed in these texts through a reconfiguration of the popular romance in ways that foreground the mothering function of the heroine in relation to a wounded hero. The use of BDSM as a thematic construct becomes a means to ritualise the abjection of the “mother” and play out the tension between maternal semiotic authority and paternal symbolic law in late-capitalist culture. Fifty Shades thus becomes a particularly contemporary variant on the romance novel, with the texts performing significant cultural work for white masculinity in the fallout of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), while the interplay of wounded masculinity with BDSM themes re-fixes the terms of the gender binary in service of a return to a more regressive depiction of paternalism.
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