- Paula García-Rodríguez: “Reclaiming Female Identity through Transformation in Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021)”
Description of the activity.
From 17 to 18 June 2025, Birmingham City University hosted the conference “Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities”, organized by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. The two‑day event explored how media, culture and society shape forms of identity and subjectivity that transgress mainstream norms, offering fertile ground for research into resistance, difference, and subversion.
At this conference, Paula García-Rodríguez presented a paper on Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021), examining how the protagonist’s gradual transformation into a half-human, half-animal creature destabilizes normative motherhood, femininity, and domesticity. By embracing monstrosity, the novel offers a radical reimagining of maternal subjectivity that escapes binary gender expectations and repressive gender norms. The paper argues that the metamorphosis in Nightbitch becomes an act of insurgency that autonomously defies dominant structures limiting the female body and identity. Rather than depicting motherhood as sacrifice or containment, Yoder envisions it as a visceral practice of transgression, care, and untamed animality. Within this framework, the novel reclaims the fantastic, traditionally coded as male territory, to narrate the female condition from a disruptive, queered perspective.