Doing what your big sister does: sex, postfeminism and the YA chick lit series (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
This dissertation examines the anxieties that the contemporary genre of women's fiction known as "chick lit" expresses about female sexuality, women and work, and the relationship between female identity and the global consumer marketplace. Furthermore, this project argues that chick lit can be productively traced to male-authored canonical texts that establish tropes and themes that chick lit novelists still grapple with at the turn of the twenty-first century. Chick lit heroines have benefitted from feminist progress, but they frequently participate in a backlash against the advances that empower them to pursue sexual pleasure outside marriage, find fulfilling careers, and challenge constructions of identity. Chapter 1 examines scholarship on constructions of gender and sexuality, affect theory, and Marxist theories. It also explores historical context through critiques of popular women writers. Chapter 2 argues that Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) establishes the first-person confessional narrative voice and a sexualized secondary female character who is punished for her non-normative sexuality. Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) and Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada (2003) demonstrate that female sexuality must still be negotiated and contained in postfeminist culture. Chapter 3 explores how work contributes to female agency in literature. Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) depicts a heroine who successfully manages her gender, race, and class performances in order to thrive in an urban space, while Kate Reddy, from Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It (2002), must pass as a non-mother in order to participate in the affective economies that prevail in the gendered workplace. Chapter 4 analyzes the role of consumer culture in female subject formation in a capitalist material culture. In Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and Blake Edwards's film version (1961), heroine Holly Golightly's proximity to the luxury
Voice, Choice, And (Material) Agency: The Sexualized Feminine Body In Young Adult Literature
My study unites two disparate strands of feminist theory: the linguistic, which emphasizes the relationship between language and power, and the material, which argues that the human body has its own agency. I raise three main points. First, I contend that the sexualized feminine body is the site of neither the linguistic nor the material independent of one another, but both the linguistic and the material existing in a state of fluidity and interdependency, which combine to grant the young female character agency. Second, I contend that feminist novels should not only have strong female characters, but that they should also portray sustainable female friendships. Keeping in mind the trope of heteronormative female relationships in contemporary young adult literature, I argue that companionship and female friendships are sustainable only when female protagonists have access to both language and the material, as a person needs both for successful social integration. My third and final point is to conclude that, contrary to the arguments of scholars like Lissa Paul and Roberta Seelinger Trites, silencing or the loss of voice does not result in a loss of agency; my overarching goal is for our field to better understand this interdependent (if dichotomous) relationship between voice and materiality. Accordingly, the chapters in my dissertation will closely examine the varied aspects of the sexualized feminine body as they appear in contemporary young adult literature and film, with regard to the sexually active adolescent body, the maternal body, the cyborg body, and the transgender body. The final chapter of my dissertation focuses on the practical implications of the confluence of the discursive and material based on my experiences teaching feminist theory and young adult literature in the General Education classroom.
Atlantic Journal of Communication, 2015
This study explores portrayals of girls and women in 10 popular young adult novels published between 2000 and 2010, and complements the textual analysis with in-depth interviews with 14 teenage readers. The goal is to determine how depictions of girls and women in young adult fiction affect teenage readers’ gender identity construction and social attitudes. The novels’ analysis suggests a prevalence of stereotypical narratives focused on mean girls, competitive friendships, and unrestrained desires for beauty and riches. Although more recent young adult books include some independent and emotionally secure characters, the genre enforces traditional femininity through an overall insistence on clingy, insecure, and ever-dieting heroines. The interviews with young readers suggest they often identify with and form parasocial relationships with characters in the novels. The interviews suggest that girls tend to use these novels as a guide to life. Not only do they idolize their favorite characters, but some (especially those in their early teens) also believe the majority of events described in the novels to be true to life. The coexistence of divergent ideals of womanhood–both in young adult texts and among their readers–reflects an increasing ambivalence about the contemporary construction of femininity, foretelling the complexities of an upcoming fourth wave of feminism.
Commodification and Identity in Chick Lit
Gender Studies, 2012
This paper looks at the parochial facets of femininity versus their globalized avatars as apparent in two chick lit novels, Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" 1999 and one of the novels in Sophie Kinsella's The Shopaholic series, "Shopaholic Abroad" 2001. The paradigm I am operating within is that of consumerism and commodification as the new forms of globalization. More specifically, the paper sets out to investigate the extent to which global and local facets of (feminine) identity overlap, thus engendering what I label 'glocal' femininities, and the role of the commodification thereof.
In recent decades, chick lit has become a ubiquitous – if not always celebrated – feature of the contemporary literary, social and cultural landscape. In Australia, Anita Heiss is one of the genre’s preeminent practitioners, and the only Aboriginal author writing chick lit for a mainstream, middleclass audience. A close reading of two of her novels (Not Meeting Mr Right and Manhattan Dreaming) reveals a deep political engagement running through her fiction. On the one hand, this political engagement is expressed by Heiss’ commitment to foregrounding the lives and experiences of young, urban, Aboriginal women. On the other hand, the narrative is peppered with references to, and discussion of, urgent political issues: from banning the burqa in France to protesting the Northern Territory intervention in Melbourne. By recasting the chick lit genre in an explicitly political light, Heiss joins a growing number of authors who challenge the genre’s fixation with exclusively white subjectivities and epistemologies. In this paper, I argue that changing one aspect of the chick lit genre, such as the race of the heroine, is enough to destabilise the genre as a whole. This destabilisation creates a political hierarchy where racial politics gain precedence over other issues such as feminism and sexual diversity. Humour, one of the requirements of the chick lit genre, also underscores this destabilisation: while some subjects are played for laughs, others are designated as strictly off-limits.