Volume VI Special Issue V June 2026

Name of Author : Sharanya Ramachandran, X.Disalva

Title of the paper : The Politics of Doing Nothing: Feminine Inactivity in My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Abstract: In our current neoliberal culture, women are sometimes conditioned to remain productive, emotionally available, socially visible and embroiled endlessly in cycles of self improvement. These rationales constitute mainstream femininity, which privileges activity at the expense of talk and visibility in favor of emancipation. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, contravenes these assumptions with its protagonist, who self consciously disengages from work, her relationships and social interaction to facilitate a long stretch in bed. In this paper, I analyse the novel from both feminist and decolonial perspectives to claim that the narrators inaction acts as a simple yet subversive form of protest against neoliberal femininity and capitalist modes of productivity. Instead of viewing her disengagement simply as a psychotic breakdown or depression, the paper investigates how doing nothing is a refusal to comply with systems that insist on perpetual labour, emotional work, and self optimisation from women. It examines how rest, passivity and disengagement complicate traditional narratives of feminist scholarship focusing on voice, agency and visibility. The novel foregrounds feminine fatigue and intentional inactivity to shape new possibilities for understanding resistance, subjectivity and endurance in contemporary gendered cultures. The paper concludes by arguing that this active inertia is nothing but the politically engaged response of our era, the new normal under the pressures of neoliberal modernity.

Keywords : Feminine Inactivity, Neoliberal Feminism, Resistance, Exhaustion, Withdrawal

DOI :

Page Number : 241-253