Gender politics

The shifting terrain of how men and women relate to each other — culturally, sexually, and as members of opposing camps in the wider culture war. As a literary subject it covers everything from the mechanics of dating and desire to the more abstract battles over masculinity, femininity, feminism, and who gets to speak for whom. It runs from Victorian marriage plots through second-wave consciousness raising to the contemporary online discourse around incels, post-feminism, and the gender gap in politics — and recurs in David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Houellebecq's Atomised as the place where intimate life and ideological battle become indistinguishable.