Maternal Dissonance and the Crisis of Choice: Postfeminist Negotiations of Motherhood in Percival Everett’s Cutting Lisa

Maternal Dissonance and the Crisis of Choice: Postfeminist Negotiations of Motherhood in Percival Everett’s Cutting Lisa
Shelly Virdi and Madhumita Purkayastha

Abstract

Percival Everett’s Cutting Lisa (1986) interrogates the contradictions of postfeminist discourse by staging a moral and emotional crisis around reproduction, agency, and care. Through the Livesey family’s domestic space, the novel exposes how postfeminist “choice” operates as both empowerment and constraint. Drawing on Angela McRobbie’s critique of postfeminist autonomy, Adrienne Rich’s theorisation of the institution of motherhood, and Lisa Baraitser’s concept of maternal dissonance, this paper argues that Everett reframes reproductive choice not as freedom but as a site of anxiety in which patriarchal care masks coercion. Lisa’s silence and erasure dramatise the postfeminist tension between autonomy and regulation, while Dr John Livesey embodies a paternal authority that conflates protection with possession. Lisa’s muted subjectivity embodies the postfeminist condition of self-surveillance: she internalises the neoliberal demand to choose while being denied emotional or social validation for that choice.