Everything Is Sex, Except Sex, Which Is Power: Review of Rachel Feder’s The Turn

Marisa Mercurio Under Review:The Turn. Rachel Feder. Triquarterly Books, July 2026. Title, in this particular sequence of words, borrowed from “Screwed” by Janelle Monáe (2018) I missed my train. I was going to York. Copy of Rachel Feder’s novella The Turn in my hand, I was thinking about Charlotte Brontë, famous daughter of Yorkshire, whose contributions to Gothic literature are all but inescapable, a genre indelibly hewn from her and her sisters’ work. Their reinvention of the Gothic from Radcliffean centuries-past narratives about aristocratic Europeans to (mostly) modern life served as an early reminder that horrors are often right at our doorstep. One of Brontë’s stickiest contributions is the role of the governess in Jane Eyre, a nineteenth-century figure whose class position was neither servant nor gentry—she was an isolated member of the middle class living within an otherwise neatly divided household. Brontë’s bourgeois triumph is Jane’s elevation and Rochester’s degradation,…