A Millennial Woman: Navigating and Negotiating Narrative Knots

In 2023 I completed the Afterword to my monographic study 1960s Model Girl: Narrative Identities in Fashion, Time and History (2025). Employing the knot as historical model and critical metaphor, I surmised that there remained for some, if not many Sixties women, a chronotopic knot – ‘a narrative loop, pulling, feeding, tightening and loosening, back and forth, round and round, the subjective and individual self’ (McDowell 2025: 151). Leading me to reflect upon how from the vantage point of a woman then entering her early forties, living through their own experiences of history and memory, a process of recognition regarding the narrative knots binding her own ‘overlapping subject positions’ (Kaiser and Green 2021: 203) had begun.

The present paper marks a significant point of departure and transformation from this earlier study and work as I set out to research a generational demographic of millennial woman via the critical lens of fashion, hauntology and narrative failures. Drawing upon philosophy, critical theory, social history and auto/biographical studies I outline the developmental conceptualisation of narrative knots as a foundational methodological framework from which to approach doing recent fashion histories. In addressing the navigation and negotiation of these narrative knots I question the possibility of negating neo-liberal feminism/s in the very production of fashion studies and wider academia.

An interdisciplinary work-in-progress this paper invites other such responsive recognitions regarding the varied, overlapping and interlocking narrative knots that interloop between the auto/biographical in researcher and subject, writer and history, profession and the personal.