Beyond Ethnic Chick Lit

This book is based on the dissertation Beyond Ethnic Chick Lit, which was awarded the prize of the Gender Studies Association Austria (ÖGGF) in 2020. It focuses on the contemporary literary genre of chick lit that purportedly originated with Helen Fieldings Bridget Joness Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnells Sex and the City (1996). These ironic and humorous novels typically focus on young metropolitan women heterosexual, affluent, and (notably) white who face the everyday challenges of their careers and the search for Mr. Right along with their friends. However, chick lit has steadily been changing since its beginnings, crossing gender and genre lines as well as cultural, geographical, and linguistic boundaries. Furthermore, the term has increasingly become a label and catch-all term for different kinds of literatures by, about, and/or for women. By now, texts by authors from socio-cultural backgrounds other than so-called Western ones are frequently treated as ethnic subgenres or variants of an Anglo- American prototype and subsumed under problematic terms such as ethnic chick lit. The genres global popularity paved its way into research and the media primarily as a kind of genre transfer from the white Western centers (in most cases the US and the UK) to the peripheries. In order to question such one-sided representations, I examine chick lit through a transdisciplinary lens using theories and methods of comparative literature and gender studies. I begin with a survey of relevant literature that demonstrates that research has so far neglected both the global dimension of so-called womens literature and the gender-specific dimension of world literature. The following analyses counter this by positioning chick lit as a new world womens literature. After revising and updating the state of research on Anglo-American chick lit, the last part of the book focuses on the world literary dimension of the genre. Through selected case studies of supposedly peripheral chick lit from Indonesia, China, the Arab world (primarily Saudi Arabia), and Africa (primarily South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria), I examine the marginalization and homogenization of contemporary popular literature by women through gendered as well as ethnicized labeling practices and corresponding marketing strategies. On the one hand, such a transcontinental comparison illustrates local peculiarities behind global labeling practices; on the other, it also reveals similarities between literary phenomena, which are generally not read together, but rather separately, or as ethnic forms and adaptations of Anglo-American chick lit.