Neo-Feminism and the Indian Chick Lit: Aesthetics, Possibilities & Feminine Sensibilities

Neo-feminism and the Indian Chick Lit: Aesthetics,

Possibilities & Feminine Sensibilities

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s the distinction made between “high” and “low” culture via specific standards have been evident in the critical reception of the genre known as “chick lit” which is largely written by women using a distinctly feminine style and address. While the question of chick lit’s merit as a form of women’s writing and its claim to literary status remains undecided, chick lit has travelled a long way since Bridget Jones’s Diary and the conclusions drawn about Western chick lit cannot be seamlessly mapped onto chick lit’s others – its racially inflected and transnational iterations. Drawing on theories of feminine aesthetics, life writing, performativity, confession and memory, this paper moves from a consideration of the main arguments surrounding the aesthetic possibilities of the Western chick lit novel to the distinctive creative expression present in Indian chick lit to argue that the answer to the question of the genre’s aesthetic value may be found in some of its global transformations.

Key words

chick lit, women’s writing, post-colonialism, neo-feminism, neo-liberalism, subjectivity, popular culture

Introduction

Defined by Heather Cabot as books featuring “everyday women in their 20s and 30s navigating their generation’s challenges of balancing demanding careers with personal relationships,” (H. Cabot, 1, 2015) chick lit spread to television and film with similar visions of feminine subjectivity and storytelling emerging across the world. The influence of what is arguably chick lit’s founding text, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, is evident not only in the novel’s commercial success, but also in the outpouring of discussion surrounding Bridget Jones. She became “an icon, a recognizable emblem of a particular kind of femininity, a constructed point of identification for all women.” (R. Gill, 227, 2007).

In addition to its cultural implications, chick lit, as a genre by and for women, also merits evaluation as an aesthetic phenomenon. Although chick lit is largely written by women drawing on their own lives and experiences, and using a distinctly feminine style and address, the question of the genre’s potential as a form of women’s writing and its claim to literary status remains undecided. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young observe that the discourse surrounding chick lit has been polarized, attracting on the one hand “the unquestioning adoration of fans” and on the other “the unmitigated disdain of critics.” (S. Ferriss, M. Young, 1, 2006). The critical dismissal is evident in the genre name, which lacks the gravitas and timelessness expected of art, thus relegating work within the genre from the outset to the domain of the popular and the frivolous.

In a rare article tackling the question of chick lit’s literary value, Juliette Wells notes that

[...] perceptions of the genre are affected by entrenched views that women’s writing is inferior to men’s and that women readers prefer lightweight novels to literary ones. To judge whether an individual work of chick lit, or the genre as a whole, has literary merit is to participate in the long tradition of discounting women writers and their readers. (J. Wells, 67, 2006 )

Nevertheless, Wells’s opinion of the genre’s claim to literary pedigree is not optimistic and she concludes: “Chick lit amuses and engrosses, but does not richly reimagine in literary form the world that inspires it.” (J. Wells, 67, 2006). This is an unambiguous answer to the not-oft-posed question of chick lit’s aesthetic value, but the standards by which this conclusion was reached are less obvious. Even if one were to accept Wells’s dismissal of the aesthetic qualities of the genre in its classic Western form, chick lit has travelled a long way since Bridget Jones’s Diary and its ilk, both literally and figuratively.

Chick lit and its particular feminine subjectivity in the West emerged at a moment when a number of formerly closed economies around the world were being pried open by structural adjustment programmes designed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In India, the post-1991 economic liberalisation provided increasing opportunities for educated young women from the middle and upper-middle-classes to find work in the corporate workplace (P. S. Budhwar, 179-193, 2005) and for the formation of new neoliberal subjectivities whereby individuals are conceived of as entrepreneurial actors (W. Brown, 37-59, 2005). One would argue that relative financial independence and growing exposure to Western ideas of companionate love have made the chick lit protagonist a workable model around which a certain kind of modern Indian woman could concretise her identity, expressed in the chick lit novels written by Indian women from 2004 onwards. Further, one can suggest that the conclusions drawn about Western chick lit cannot be seamlessly mapped onto chick lit’s “others” – its racially inflected and transnational iterations. In this regard, this paper will move from a consideration of the main arguments surrounding the aesthetic and literary possibilities of the typical Western chick lit novel to an analysis of the distinctive creative and aesthetic expression in Indian chick lit.

To evaluate chick lit’s aesthetic value, it is useful to revisit arguments advancing the possibility of a female aesthetic practice. The idea of a distinctly female form of writing or écriture féminine has been closely identified with the group of theorists knows as the “French feminists”. (J. Kristeva, “Women’s Time”, [in:] French Feminism Reader, ed. K. Oliver, Maryland  2000; L. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca 1985). Perhaps the most potent statement of écriture féminine comes from Hélène Cixous in The Laugh of Medusa in which she exhorts women to proclaim the “unique empire” of their own bodies, sexuality and limitless imaginary, so as to unleash what is repressed in the masculine economy (H. Cixous, K. Cohen, P. Cohen, 876, 1976). For Cixous, women’s writing is infused with musicality, with low defences against the drives, and with proximity to the mother. To write, particularly as a woman is “precisely working (in) the in-between”, inhabiting a bisexuality which stirs up differences rather than effacing them (H. Cixous, K. Cohen, P. Cohen, 884, 1976).

Ferriss and Young state that chick lit is both indebted to women’s literature of the past and independent of it. They note that