Exploring the rhetorical and discursive mechanics of literary “bad girls” from fiction produced during the millennial turn (1990 - 2010), the book contends that women writers today deploy truant, unruly, restless, and aggressive female protagonists not to challenge the status quo but rather to reaffirm it. Showing how transgression has not only lost its political and disruptive valence in contemporary women’s fiction, this book further reveals how discourses of dissent can be retooled to promote a conservative worldview.