ABSTRACT
The emergence of the southern chick flick comes on the heels of what Susan Faludi saw as a conservative reaction against the gains that women made during the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In her 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Faludi argues that Hollywood producers, influenced by the backlash trend in the media, created a series of movies that pitted the angry career woman against the domestic maternal “good woman.”1 These 1980s films, such as Fatal Attraction-which Faludi sees as the ultimate anti-feminist, anticareer woman movie-portray women as rivals (and often deadly rivals); the women rarely seek solace or help from other women, only from men. Arguably the chick flick goes against the trend Faludi documents in the 1980s backlash movies that depict little or no female bonding.2 Yet the name alone-chick flick-flies in the face of the feminist movement’s objection to the demeaning gender appellation chick. The films are further denigrated as tearjerkers, another dismissive title used to belittle the earlier category of “woman’s films” from the 1930s and 1940s. Is the chick flick then a product of the backlash or a feminist reaction against it?
