How do you say Brexit in French? Gender, class and exceptionality

This chapter reads with my short story “Daddy’s Little Girl” to navigate the disbelief I felt when I discovered my dad had voted for the UK to leave the EU in 2016. My reading aims to put his desire for sovereignty in historical and social context, to begin to craft a history of populism that has a turn to the right as available for white class-transitional ambition. But I also want to weave in my own attachments to those same desires, even in their disavowal: to explore the ways my familial status as transcending gendered expectations, as “exceptional”, underwrites that ambition. Drawing on memory work by feminist authors Marianne Hirsch and Annette Kuhn, the chapter foregrounds accountability and contradiction in reading the past and present together, and uses an interdisciplinary mix of creative writing, feminist and queer theory and political history. Throughout, I advocate an ethos of care as central to the ability to do “memory work” that is attentive to the complex location of the author or narrator in the stories they tell of others.