Chick Lit Gone Ethnic, Chick Lit Gone Global?! A Plural-Queer Comparison of Chick Lit’s Straightened Beginnings and Developments
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17169/ogj.2018.21Keywords:
Chick Lit, Ethnicity, Gender, Queer, IntersectionalityAbstract
Originally defined as an Anglo-American, ‘white’, heterosexual, and middle-class phenomenon, starting with the bestseller novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (1996), chick lit changed rapidly, crossing genre and gender as well as various cultural, geographic, and linguistic boundaries. There is a broad consensus about this being a transfer from the ‘original’ genre to numerous adapted subgenres, from ‘the center’ to ‘the periphery’. In order to call this narrative, which has been (re-)produced by booksellers, publishers, literary scholars and critics alike, into question, a plural-queer perspective proves useful; especially since this perspective is as skeptical of a certain sex/gender-centrism that tends to neglect other socially defining categories like ‘race’/‘ethnicity’ as it is of heteronormativity. By comparing chick lit’s homogeneous promotion and reception with its subversive beginnings and developments, this article aims to illustrate the genre’s queer potential, largely rendered invisible by commercialization.
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