ABSTRACT
The popularity of the chick-flick phenomenon poses new challenges for feminist criticism and politics. The genre’s commercial success signals women’s increasing clout as both consumers and producers of shared social meanings. The appeal of woman-as-spectacle is by now a film theory cliché, but the commercial success of the chick genre attests to women’s influence as paying spectators. It suggests that female subjectivity and desire are marketable commodities, and that female audiences play a vital role in the cultural economy. But in a US media culture driven by the demands of the marketplace, can chick flicks muster the political commitment associated with earlier traditions of women’s filmmaking? Critics debate whether chick flicks reflect women’s increasing options and lifestyle choices or trivialize and de-politicize values associated with feminism. They note that chick heroines are often white middle-class women who embody consumer values and the mantra of individualism and self-gratification. Indeed, the genre is often identified with a “postfeminist” retreat from social activism and a “return to lifestyle choices and personal consumer pleasures.”1 Defenders counter that chick flicks revitalize feminism, positing more playful, ironic subjectivities and resisting claims to any “authentic” feminist agenda that can bind women across differentials of sexuality, race, and class.
