ABSTRACT
I find it somewhat difficult even to begin talking about chick flicks because it is a label that for a long time I have hesitated to use, considering it a disparaging term that diminished the significance of women-oriented cinema. The essays in this volume, however, are trying to do something quite different. They are trying to reappropriate the term and use it as a positive descriptor for what one might otherwise call contemporary woman’s films. Once I got over my disinclination even to use the term in the first place, the next question that came to mind is what exactly is a chick flick anyway? Is it a genre per se or rather a loosely defined umbrella term uniting a disparate group of films that have really three things in common: their primary appeal to female viewers, their concentration on issues relevant to women, and their focus on a female protagonist? This is, in fact, a definition with some history, and it raises perhaps one of the fundamental questions that we can ask about these contemporary chick flicks: How do they relate to the history of women’s cinema?
