ABSTRACT
Being in their early to mid-twenties, Shoshanna and Jessa are part of the generation which grew up in the midst of the cultural and media hype created around Carrie Bradshaw and the surge of copycat texts (both on paper and screen) which followed. Shoshanna’s analysis shows that she identifies with Sex and the City and its protagonists, and it marks her as knowledgeable in a form of cultural production which has become known as “chick culture”. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young have defined chick culture as “a group of mostly American and British popular culture media forms focused primarily on twenty-to thirtysomething middle-class women” (Chick Flicks 1). The “chick” is the gender construct popularized by Carrie Bradshaw, the heroine of Candace Bushnell’s novel Sex and the City (1997) in the US, and Bridget Jones, the heroine of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) in the UK, as well as their respective adaptations for the small and big screen. The stereotypical chick is single, lives and works in an urban center, is surrounded by a network of friends, and is struggling to find a fullfilling job and a meaningful relationship. The best-known elements of chick culture are certainly chick lit, lit being the abbreviation for literature, and chick flicks, i.e. films; Other media forms comprised by the term are TV programmes, advertisements, music, magazines, websites, and blogs (cf. Chick Flicks 2). Chick lit entered mainstream popular culture almost immediately after the publication of Bushnell’s and Fielding’s novels, and the label
“chick lit” itself soon became a ubiquitous reference for all things pink, frothy, funny, and generally targeted at female readerships and audiences. Gripping popular media culture for little more than ten to fifteen years, chick lit became an incontestable moment of the nineties and early 2000s: entire sections in bookshops were reserved for the brightly hued novels, women got together to watch the latests episodes of Sex and the City, and words like ‘abso-fucking-lutely’, ‘brazilian’, ‘singleton’, and ‘smug-marrieds’ became common parlance. As with any hype, the market for chick lit and its television or film adaptations reached a point of saturation relatively quickly. Chick lit’s mass success slowly petered out towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, triggering many voices in the publishing industries to proclaim its death and to celebrate more recent publishing trends such as the vampire hype following the Twilight Saga and the erotic turn in popular fiction promoted by the Fifty Shades trilogy. Yet, the big names in the chick-lit genre, whose novels have helped to spur the publishing buzz - e.g., Marian Keyes, Jenny Colgan, Sophie Kinsella in the UK, and Jennifer Weiner, Meg Cabot, or Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus in the US - still publish roughly a novel a year (sometimes two), and they are still rewarded with more than satisfying sales figures. Chick lit may no longer figure as prominently on bestseller lists as it used to, but it has fostered a thriving online culture and an active network of fan communities on the internet. Chick lit’s fans continue to celebrate the genre and support new and promising authors, who have sometimes risen from their own ranks. One reason why chick lit is no longer quite as visible in mainstream media is that the original formula of the genre, encapsulated in the many ‘single-girlin-the-city’ novels, has changed considerably over time and brought forth numerous permutations. Chick lit as it once was may thus be a residual discourse (cf. Williams 1977), but rather than calling it ‘dead’, I contend that it remains an eminent point of reference and an inspiration for new formats of postfeminist media culture and literature. Dunham’s show Girls, which has adapted chick aesthetics to a post-recession, post-SATC-glamour New York, is just one example for the evolution of the chick-lit formula.
