Theorizing Ethnicity and

Nationality in the Chick

Lit Genre

Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous B
­ ridget
Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional
characters are the most recognizable within the chick lit genre, there are
certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While
previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, The-
orizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre takes a wider
look at the genre by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from
a variety of ethnic backgrounds, set both within and outside of the US.

Erin Hurt is an Associate Professor of English at West Chester Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania. She has published articles on the work of Alisa
Valdes and Sofia Quintero, and her research areas include chica lit, US
Latinx and American literatures, and women’s and gender studies.
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

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27 Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre

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Theorizing Ethnicity
and Nationality in the Chick
Lit Genre

Edited by Erin Hurt

First published 2019
by Routledge
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Contents

Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors ix

Introduction 1
E rin H urt

Prologue: A Second Read: Further Reflections on

Women-of-Color Chick Lit 25
Pamela B utler and J i g na D esai

Section I
Categories of Chick Lit 39

1 “More Than Sex, Shopping, and Shoes”:

Cosmopolitan Indigeneity and Cultural Politics
in Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit 41
L auren O ’ M ahony

2 Against Asianness: On Being Cool, Feminist, and

American in Asian/American Chick Lit 69
J enny H eijun W ills

Section II
Texts and Tropes 85

3 Narratives of Latina Girlhood in Malín Alegría’s

Estrella’s Quinceañera and Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to
Getting Lost in Mexico 87
F elicia S alinas - M oni z
vi Contents
4 “I live a fabulous Asian-American life—ask me how!”
Kim Wong Keltner Unpacks Contemporary Asian
American Female Identity in The Dim Sum of All Things
and Buddha Baby 102
J ennifer Woolston

5 The “Aha Moment”: Representing Transformation and

Black Women’s Trauma in the Chick Lit Genre 115
C herise P ollard

Section III
Decentering Whiteness 129

6 Neoliberal Fantasies: Erica Kennedy’s Feminista (2009) 131

H ei k e M i ß ler

7 The White Terry McMillan: Centering Black Women

Within Chick Lit’s Genealogy 150
E rin H urt

Section IV
Authorial Voices 175

8 Writing Chica Lit 177

L inda C h áve z D oyle

9 Interview with Kavita Daswani 193

10 Interview with Kim Wong Keltner 197

11 Interview with Sofia Quintero 203

Conclusion: Reading Neoliberal Fairy Tales 211

E rin H urt

Bibliography 225
Index 231
Acknowledgments

This project could only reach fruition with the help of many of my col-
leagues. I am incredibly grateful to Beth Womack and Brooke Hunter
for reading early versions of an article that became the introduction and
my chapter in this edited collection. Their suggestions that this project
could and should be an entire edited collection motivated me to pursue
this project.
Many, many thanks to the students in my Fall 2015 ENG 400 course,
The Phenomenon of Chica Lit, whose questions and comments, along
with many laughs and lively discussions, helped me to refine my own
ideas about chica lit and other categories of chick lit.
I was able to complete this manuscript in a timely fashion due to the
award of a research sabbatical from West Chester University of Pennsyl-
vania, and I was guided through the publishing process with the help of
Jennifer Abbott and Veronica Haggar at Routledge.
Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, who supported
me throughout this endeavor with their kind words and genuine enthusi-
asm for the project, especially Karen Umminger, A. Layne Craig, Emily
Hurt, Mary Ebeling, Cookie Factorial, Kathleen Riley, and Mary L. To
Ron and Kathy Hurt, thank you for all those trips to the library.
The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and
Representation by Missler, Heike Reproduced with permission of Rout-
ledge in the format Book via Copyright Clearance Center. Order Detail
ID: 70608925
From Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico by Malin
Alegria. Copyright © 2007 by 360 Youth, LLC d/b/a/ Alloy Entertain-
ment and Malin Ramirez. Reprinted with the permission of Simon &
Schuster Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Children’s Publishing Division. All rights reserved.
From Estrella’s Quinceañera by Malin Alegria. Copyright © 2006
by 360 Youth, LLC d/b/a/ Alloy Entertainment and Malin Ramirez.
Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young
Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Divi-
sion. All rights reserved.
List of Contributors

Pamela Butler is the Associate Director of the Gender Studies Program

at the University of Notre Dame. She is a teacher, scholar, and activist
whose work focuses on the cultural politics of race and empire in US
feminisms. She is currently writing a book about the political history
of knitting.
Jigna Desai is Professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sex-
uality Studies and the Asian American Studies Program at the Uni-
versity of Minnesota. Her research interests include Asian American,
postcolonial, queer, and diasporic cultural studies. She has published
widely on issues of race, media, gender, and sexuality.
Linda Chávez Doyle is a writer and former librarian. She is the author of
the novels My Doormat Days and Silence, Please, and of the forth-
coming White Mexican. She was the Ethnic Materials Evaluator for
the County of Los Angeles Public Library and Director of its Chicano
Resource Center.
Erin Hurt is an Associate Professor of English at West Chester Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania. She has published articles on the work of Alisa
Valdes and Sofia Quintero, and her research areas include chica lit,
US Latinx and American literatures, and women’s and gender studies.
Heike Mißler is a Senior Lecturer in British Literary and Cultural Stud-
ies at the English Department of Saarland University, Germany. Her
book The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfemi-
nism, and Representation was published in 2017. Her main research
interests include feminist theory, gender and queer studies, and pop-
ular culture studies.
Lauren O’Mahony is a Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies
in the School of Arts at Murdoch University, Western Australia. Her
PhD research focused on the narrative conventions of romance and
feminism in five types of Australian chick lit: urban novels, suburban
novels, Aboriginal chick lit, rural romances, and red dirt romances.
Her research has been published in The Australasian Journal of
x  List of Contributors
Popular Culture, The Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Commu-
nication Research and Practice, and Text Journal.
Cherise Pollard,  PhD, is Professor of English at West Chester Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania. She teaches Composition, Creative Writing, and
­African American Literature. Pollard has published critical essays
about contemporary black feminist poetry and fiction, including urban
literature and the contemporary historical novel. She also published an
award-winning poetry chapbook in 2015, entitled Outsiders.
Felicia Salinas-Moniz received her PhD in American Studies from Brown
University, where she also works as the Assistant Director of the Sarah
Doyle Women’s Center. She has taught courses on girlhood in popular
culture at Brown and Rhode Island School of Design.
Jenny Heijun Wills  is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Winnipeg and Director of the Critical Race Network at UW. Her
research focuses on Asian/North American literatures, and she has
authored several articles in the field of transnational Asian adoption
studies. She is the author of the forthcoming book Unni.
Jennifer Woolston is Associate Dean of Instruction for the Bullhead City
campus of Mohave Community College. Her essays have been fea-
tured in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Studies in
the Novel, Hispanic Culture Review, Persuasions Online, The Per-
formance Identities of Lady Gaga, and Grace Under Pressure: Grey’s
Anatomy Uncovered.
Introduction
Erin Hurt

The Phenomenon of Chick Lit

Scholars and readers alike need little help recognizing the characters
of Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. Furthermore, it is no stretch to
claim that in the US, and indeed the global cultural imaginary, these
two fictional white women have come to exemplify the genre of chick lit,
though they have been joined by other protagonists, such as those fea-
tured in best sellers that became popular films, like Lauren Weisberger’s
The Devil Wears Prada (2003) or Jennifer Weiner’s In Her Shoes (2002),
or in series, like Sophia Kinsella’s Shopaholic series or Meg Cabot’s The
Princess Diaries series. Author Heather Cabot defines the features of
this genre as “single women in their twenties and thirties ‘navigating
their generation’s challenges of balancing demanding careers with per-
sonal relationships’” (Cabot qtd. in Ponzanesi 190), while Ferriss and
Young describe the genre as “offer[ing] a more realistic portrait of single
life, dating, and the dissolution of romantic ideals” (3). Chick lit novels’
focus on the challenges women face, combined with their distinctive ap-
proach to characters; narrative style; and tropes such as a first-person
narration, humorous tone, middle-class status for the protagonist, city
setting, professional job, college education, and group of friends, helped
to distinguish chick lit from genres such as romance, which focus on the
protagonist’s romantic relationship, often to the exclusion of other plot
points.
In the more than twenty years since the debut of the genre—marked
by Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992) and Helen Fielding’s
Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996)—its initial boom has slowly faded in the
commercial realm, and it no longer boasts the same meteoric profits.
Though consumer demand has declined from the high watermark set
during the early 2000s, and some commercial publishing imprints,
such as Harlequin’s Red Dress Ink imprint or Simon and Shuster’s
Downtown Press, have become less prominent, this genre is still de-
serving of our scholarly attention. This is not only because of the
powerful position that chick lit occupied in the marketplace during its
peak profits but, more importantly, because the genre’s success was the
2  Erin Hurt
result of readers connecting intensely and meaningfully with the plots,
style, and characters found within the pages of its novels, a response
of recognition that Nóra Séllei describes as “That’s me, that’s about
my life” (175).
The phenomenon of chick lit, which includes both its emergence into
the commercial realm and the multiplicity of ethnic categories it has come
to include, deserves critics’ attention because this genre offers readers
representations of women not seen before. These representations reflect
the anxieties, opportunities, and possibilities of the present cultural mo-
ment in which women find themselves, almost as if women’s emotional,
psychological, and economic struggles induced the novels that marked
the commencement of this genre. Elsewhere, Imelda Whelehan articu-
lates the underlying dilemma that these often-humorous novels probe,
which is also one of the reasons readers found them appealing, writing,
“today’s young women are burdened by the freedoms won by feminism
and are, in fact, looking for a sense of order or some ‘rules’ that at least
might bring some logic to their romantic lives” (5). Chick lit functions
as a site where women can see the reality of their lives, and when this
genre first appeared in England and the US during the 1990s, readers
were drawn to literature that finally seemed to depict the challenges they
faced. Though many chick lit novels drew from conventions found in
earlier women’s writing (such as marriage plots, confessional narrators,
a diary format, the sex lives of single women, finding romance), they did
so in a way that used these conventions to speak specifically to women’s
experiences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Chick lit, at its moment of conception, told the story of women at-
tempting to achieve—or perhaps simply define—success in the areas of
romance, friendships, a career, and beauty. While not new, this narrative
appealed to readers because of how it was told. They found appealing
not just the first-person narration, the protagonist’s relatability, or even
her search for the perfect happily ever after but the less obvious elements
these novels divulged: the impediments that kept women from finding
love, achieving professional success, understanding their ethnic identity,
or negotiating multiple cultural and/or national communities. This was
a time when women were being told by the media and popular culture
that, post-Women’s Movement, they could “have it all”—a professional
career, a successful marriage, children, beauty, intelligence, a good sal-
ary with benefits, and cultural belonging and acceptance—but many
women, women of color especially so, quickly discovered that “having it
all” was often unachievable. Chick lit offered readers fictional heroines
who attempted, often in humorous and relatable ways, to navigate this
landscape where the promise of equality and opportunity did not match
the actuality of a patriarchal, classist, and racist society. These depic-
tions validated readers’ experiences by mirroring their frustrations and
confusion.
 Introduction  3
For women, the period of the 1990s was marked in the US by social
transformation and empowerment but also by disappointment. Third
wave feminism named itself into being through the voices of Rebecca
Walker and many other young feminists, who built on earlier critiques
of feminism by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreak-
ing collection The Bridge Called My Back (1981) by demanding that
feminism make room for previously excluded aspects of their identities,
including ethnicity, disability, sex positivity, conflicting definitions of
femininity, and more. Patricia Hill Collins theorized the lived expe-
riences of black women, and US Latina novelists began publishing en
masse. These ideological shifts happened at the same time that feminists
began to claim space in the realm of popular culture, even as the mass
media sought to co-opt and define feminism on its own terms.
Yet it was also a time of ambivalence and hostility as white femi-
nists and communities of color began to experience cultural and legal
pushback against the gains of the Women’s Movement and the Civil
Rights movements, led by anti-feminist voices such as Christina Hoff
Sommers and others, who argued that feminism was detrimental and/or
no longer needed. Governmental policies during this time enacted harsh
punishments for drug crimes, effectively criminalizing many black men
and disrupting the stability of black communities. Simultaneously, the
US cultural imaginary seized on the images of the welfare queen and
the crackhead to represent black men and women, and these images
were used by politicians to justify harsh cuts to the US’s social safety
net. Communities grappled with rising anti-immigration sentiments and
policies, while US-born children of immigrants from countries such as
China and India, and many Latin American countries, alongside those
from indigenous communities, grappled with defining their cultural
identities after being raised in schools and sometimes homes that had
adopted pro-assimilation policies around language and other cultural
markers. All of these US-specific sociocultural developments took place
against the backdrop of increasing globalization, a process that has con-
tinued to economically and culturally benefit Western countries at the
expense of developing ones. And finally, and perhaps most perniciously,
neoliberalism, a set of economic theories that prioritize free markets
and deregulation, and resulting cultural elements that “emphasize self-­
mastery and personal responsibility” (Meyers 357), continued to embed
and reproduce itself in cultures across the globe. The result of neolib-
eral policies is a shifting of responsibility for systemic oppression from
the larger forces that are actually accountable to individuals; the same
is true of neoliberal solutions for structural inequality: in neoliberal-
ism, the individual becomes the agent responsible for making change.
While neoliberal economic policies had been in place since the previ-
ous decade, the 1990s marked a moment when we begin to see what
Philip Mirowski terms everyday neoliberalism. Having burrowed into
4  Erin Hurt
the cultural and individual consciousness, neoliberal policies became
“an order of normative reason” that became “a governing rationality
extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and met-
rics to every dimension of human life” (Brown  30), including democ-
racy, politics, and justice (Brown 22), in ways that generally undermined
structural critique or a sense of collective action. The US cultural imag-
inary offered an aspirational vision of the US to women, but their lived
experiences showed otherwise.
Chick lit emerged during this period of turbulence and struggle over
ideologies and representation, and depicted the confusion women faced
in trying to figure out how to be in the midst of this. However, and
this is perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of the genre, these
­novels simultaneously offered an aggressively aspirational vision, tell-
ing readers, “here is the you that you could be” by offering up protag-
onists whose problems are solved through a neoliberal feminism based
on hard work, perseverance, and individual action but also, often, on
wealth. These novels offer verisimilitude mixed with optimism, ac-
knowledgment, and wish fulfillment. A depiction that makes one feel
seen but also offers a solution—this is a captivating and irresistible vi-
sion. As Tace Hedrick has argued, chick lit novels function for readers
as manuals (Chica Lit 343); they offer some sense of order, even if the
rules protagonists follow are more aspirational than realistic, and the
solutions protagonists rely on to solve their problems are based on a
neoliberal feminist worldview.
This genre catalogs the experiences of different women in contempo-
rary society but also offers rules for succeeding in this present moment.
Chick lit novels, then, are an excellent site of study for scholars because
of the wealth of information they offer. These novels reveal to critics
the struggles protagonists face and how these play out for women who
have complicated relationships with the one or more ethnicities and/or
nationalities that they claim. For some critics, these novels are a place
to view how these characters participate, and see themselves as partic-
ipating, in the daily life of the nation-state(s) in which they live and to
understand their own sense of social and cultural belonging. Of particu-
lar note is how some chick lit characters and authors challenge the ways
scholars assign or mark cultural assimilation. These characters usually
explain to readers that they do not fit the criteria often used to signify
their ethnicity and often align themselves consciously with cultural prac-
tices that signify dominant culture. For example, Lindsey Owang, the
protagonist of Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things (2004),
is described by the narrator as a “third-generation San Franciscan of
Chinese descent who could not quote a single Han Dynasty proverb, but
she could recite entire dialogues from numerous Brady Bunch episodes”
(Keltner 1). Jennifer Woolston, in her chapter in this collection, describes
Keltner’s protagonist as “an educated woman who is, at least initially,
 Introduction  5
somewhat distanced from knowledge about the Chinese immigrant ex-
perience in the US.” We see this same idea in a speech author Anita Heiss
gave for 2008 International Women’s Day, in which she explains how
she conceives of her Aboriginal identity:

It’s fair to say then that many of my students are disappointed when
they see me take the microphone. I have to explain that: I don’t wear
ochre – the naturally tinted clay worn on the body for ceremony.
Instead I wear Revlon, or Clinique or Max Factor. I don’t go “walk-
about” – the term used for Aboriginal people who travelled for busi-
ness, ceremony and food. Instead I drive a sports car – because it’s
faster than walking. I don’t speak my traditional Wiradjuri language
because it was outlawed and then all but died as part of the coloni-
sation process. Instead, I speak the coloniser’s language that of the
English. I don’t tell time by the sun – I tell time by a gorgeous Dolce
and Gabbana watch. But I do tell my students that I hunt kangaroo
three times a week – in the supermarket, where most urban dwellers
shop for food. I make an excellent kangaroo stir-fry and kangaroo
curry.

This act of naming one version of an ethnic or national identity, then

reading oneself against it, happens across many categories of chick lit.
Heike Mißler writes in her chapter, included here, that “representations
of race in chick lit can … complicate the binary between assimilation
and difference and instead express a spectrum of experiences” and that
“ethnic chick-lit novels … disrupt unified visions of ethnic identities of
their African-American, Latina, Chicana, or (South) Asian-American
characters.” In chick lit set in the US, hyphenated and/or diasporic char-
acters may work to construct a sense of who they are by reclaiming their
heritage, they might distance themselves from markers of foreignness,
or sometimes they jettison their cultural practices in order to become
American. As a result, this articulation of identity asks scholars to re-
consider how we constitute a particular ethnic identity; what criteria
we use; and who judges the validity of a character’s racial, ethnic, or
national identity.
As a genre that features protagonists of color, many of these novels in-
clude moments where characters face discrimination or stereotypes from
those outside but sometimes also those within their communities. This
feature of chick lit offers scholars the opportunity to consider how these
novels depict the cultural citizenship of their heroines. Lok Siu explains
that cultural citizenship

underscores the behaviors, discourses, and practices that give mean-

ing to citizenship as lived experience…. [and] attends to the differ-
ent understandings, perspectives, and experiences of citizenship for
6  Erin Hurt
differently positioned groups. It focuses on how belonging is enacted
and constituted in quotidian practices of inclusion and exclusion.
(9)

As I have argued elsewhere, “Cultural citizenship accounts for the space

between legal and political citizenship: the affective and everyday ex-
perience of living within and belonging to a nation state” (“Cultural
Citizenship” 7). This genre functions as a site to study how characters
do and do not belong; the degree to which they do; how they fight for
belonging; how they articulate the limits of their belonging; and, some-
times, if they understand who or what constitutes these limits. Further-
more, these novels themselves are enacting and constituting belonging
in a different sense—authors of color often see chick lit, a commercially
successful genre, as an opportunity to bring their characters to the atten-
tion of a large existing readership.
Last but not least, these novels offer scholars rich material in terms
of the aspirational elements of the genre—most notably the ways these
books and/or their protagonists resolve obstacles and complications that
arise over the course of the novel. I have argued elsewhere that Latina
chick lit novels often depict “a neoliberal construction of agency” and
that these novels

represent individual action as capable of solving systemic problems

and producing protagonists and fictional universes that do not ac-
knowledge inequality on a social and cultural level. When these nov-
els do acknowledge the cultural logics that govern the US national
imaginary, they do so only through a framework that presents indi-
vidual action as a solution to marginalization.
(“Cultural Citizenship” 15)

Though these claims come from an argument about chica lit, I would
posit that we can extend this claim to other ethnic categories within
chick lit. Though novels in this genre do offer new representations
and make visible the specific forms of racism and sexism that differ-
ent women face, they can also offer false visions of belonging. When
chick lit novels present individual action—such as finding the right
man, getting a promotion, becoming wealthy, and finding yourself—
as the route to achieving cultural belonging, they lead to what Lauren
­B erlant terms “a relation of cruel optimism” (1). Berlant describes this
bond as

exist[ing] when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your

flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a
fantasy of the good life, or a political project. … These kinds of
optimistic relations are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only
 Introduction  7
when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the
aim that brought you to it initially.
(1)

Scholars can find in chick lit examples of what Berlant terms “the good
life” (2)—fantasies that depict a life that we hope to live and our at-
tachment to which prevents us from being able to live that good life.
While not every chick lit novel traffics in these neoliberal feminist vi-
sions, many do. In order to deeply understand the forces that shape the
lived experiences in these novels, scholars can tease out the particular
“good life” fantasies contained in them. The goal here is not to discredit
or dismiss this genre as a purveyor of these fantasies—since these fan-
tasies are generated by neoliberalism as a protection mechanism to hide
real systems of oppression—but rather to understand why protagonists
and readers desire these fantasies and continue to feel attached to them.
This introduction argues that chick lit struck an important chord for
readers because its conventions represented the experiences of contem-
porary US women in a way not seen before. While scholars have ad-
dressed the attraction chick lit held, and holds, for readers, this genre
remains undertheorized in key ways, especially with regard to ethnic-
ity and nationality. Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai argue that chick lit,
specifically those novels by women of color “can actually forward and/
or incite critical race and transnational feminist critiques and under-
standings of feminist subjects” (27). By turning our attention to the ig-
nored works of this genre, scholars gain a richer, more intersectional
understanding of chick lit as a whole but also of the lived experiences of
women in our global culture.

Scholarly Responses to the Genre

The usage of the term chick lit first became prominent in 1996, following
the publication of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary in the UK and the
US, as publishers began to apply this label to Fielding’s best seller. The
term grew to greater prominence in 1998, when Candace Bushnell’s
novel was adapted to the US television series Sex and the City. Fielding’s
novel, and the label of chick lit, inspired strong responses from fellow
authors such as Elizabeth Merrick, Lauren Baratz-Logsted, and Beryl
Bainbridge; literary reviewers (Maureen Dowd is frequently cited); and
scholars such as Angela McRobbie, Imelda Whelehan, Yvonne Tasker,
and Diane Negra. Responses to the genre ranged from glowing to curi-
ous to disgusted. At this point, critics debated whether or not this new
genre was actually feminist. Some saw chick lit as “advanc[ing] the po-
litical activism of feminism” by “offer[ing] inspiring images of strong
powerful women,” while others saw the genre as a powerful reflection
of “the reality of young women grappling with modern life” (Ferriss
8  Erin Hurt
and Young 9). More recently, Sandra Ponzanesi summarized this debate
as “whether chick lit, featuring empowered, professional women, actu-
ally advances the cause of feminism by appealing to female audiences,
or whether it mirrors the same patriarchal narrative of romance and
femininity that feminists once rejected” (Ponzanesi 189). Galvanized by
Bridget’s success, commercial publishing houses scrambled to publish
other novels that offered similar fare to Fielding’s work, giving rise to a
marketing category-cum-literary genre.
Just as the genre continued to grow after its inception, so did schol-
arly work on this literary phenomenon. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory
Young’s book Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction (2006) was the
first edited collection of work, and it offered work that examined topics
such as chick lit’s origins and influences, its literary merit, and vari-
ations such as mommy lit and African American chick lit, alongside
chapters that examined the relationship between this new genre and
feminism. Following the publication of Ferriss and Young’s collection,
monographs began to appear. Caroline J. Smith’s Cosmopolitan Culture
and Consumerism in Chick Lit (2008) is the first single-author study
of the genre and focuses on the genre’s connection to women’s advice
writing, such as self-help novels, women’s magazines, romantic come-
dies, and other mediums. Much of the criticism that emerged at this
time focused on investigations of chick lit as a postfeminist text and ex-
plored what these novels could tell us about the postfeminist condition.
Wenche ­Ommundsen summarizes the genre’s ambiguity with regard to
feminism, explaining,

From frivolous and facile to complex and sophisticated, from com-

placent to politically astute, from formulaic to genre-bending, chick
lit both reinforces and critiques dominant trends in contemporary
culture. Like their often conflicted heroines, the novels approach
the central theme of female identity with a postfeminist perspective
which almost invariably both acknowledges and questions the fem-
inist agenda.
(“From China” 333)

Harzewski’s Chick Lit and Postfeminism (2011), the second monograph

on the genre, offered an in-depth examination that defined its tropes,
explored its relationship to the romance genre, and explored these field’s
relationship to postfeminism in order to “examine gender relations in
US and British society since the late 1990s” (Harwzewski 15). Most
recently, Mißler’s The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction,
Postfeminism and Representation (2017) offers a superb description of
how the context of second wave and third wave feminism, as well as
postfeminism, created but were also reflected in the conventions of chick
lit as well as analysis of fan responses to the genre and examinations
 Introduction  9
of humor and neoliberalism in various chick lit novels. Diane Negra
and Yvonne Tasker have done substantial work analyzing chick lit as
a postfeminist genre in their edited collection Interrogating Postfem-
inism: Gender and Politics of Popular Culture (2007) and in Negra’s
monograph What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in
Postfeminism (2009). Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism
(2009) also considers the ambivalent relationship chick lit has to femi-
nism and considers its postfeminist qualities. Adding to these scholarly
works, this collection recognizes that this genre is an important site for
studying contemporary women’s experiences and the complicated nar-
ratives that exist about womanhood, femininity, race and ethnicity, cul-
tural belonging, nationality, (post)feminism, and romantic and family
relationships—in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Whitewashing the Genre

A review of existing chick lit scholarship reveals that much of the critical
work about chick lit, while having produced incisive thinking about how
popular culture represents white women and feminism, often maintains
a conspicuous focus on white chick lit and thus whiteness. This scholar-
ship shares the same underlying blind spot: the conflation of “women’s
experiences” with “white women’s experiences.” This critical approach
has discouraged scholarly consideration of nonwhite characters or, when
chick lit of color is considered, encourages incomplete readings of the
novels’ cultural work. Though chick lit has been defined in scholarly
work primarily using the lives of white protagonists, this does not match
the diversity found in the pages of chick lit novels, which feature pro-
tagonists who identify as Latina, South Asian, Chinese, Koori, African
American, Middle Eastern, and East Asian, among other ethnicities and
nationalities. While this collection aims to remedy these limited ways
of reading these novels by modeling new perspectives, it first discusses
how current approaches center whiteness in order to make visible how a
white-centered gaze is established and how, once established, this gaze
works to reinforce itself.
More than any other, the practice that leads to white-normative schol-
arship is selecting for study white-authored novels that feature primarily
white-identified protagonists. Choosing to work primarily with white
chick lit enables the creation of critical approaches that only address
white texts. Applying these approaches to women of color and diasporic
chick lit narratives quickly illustrates that what may have seemed to be
a critical approach to chick lit more generally is in fact a framework
made for white chick lit. For example, Bridget Jones, as the result of her
white, middle-class, naturalized British privilege, does not contemplate
her cultural identity or worry about how she defines her ethnicity or
nationality, an approach shared by most white chick lit protagonists. As
10  Erin Hurt
a result, the critical approaches scholars have created in order to analyze
Bridget Jones and the white chick lit that followed have been shaped
by the concerns found, and not found, in its pages; these approaches
mirror Bridget’s same myopia, rarely interrogating issues of race and
ethnicity, diaspora, and belonging, among others. This is in sharp con-
trast to Indian chick lit novels, which share white chick lit’s focus on
“consumption, marriage and career but incorporate issues of tradition,
modernity, working life and the new emerging sectors for women in
India and abroad, and issues of race, class, ethnicity and education”
(Ponzanesi 227). The protagonists in Kavita Daswani’s novels, for exam-
ple, couple critiques of consumption with depictions of “Indian heroines’
cultural struggle in the diaspora in America” as well as “alienation after
colonialism” (Barber quoted in Ponzanesi 226). Focusing on white chick
lit novels to the exclusion of all others has led scholars to focus on a
small subset of the many questions that chick lit inspires us to ask.
Less obvious methods also work to center whiteness, however. As
Butler and Desai note, genealogies constructed for chick lit often posit
Western white women writers such as Jane Austen as progenitors (4–5).
While Austen’s novels do seem to be in conversation with white chick lit,
positing white Western writing as the sole literary predecessors of this
genre not only centers but also reinforces whiteness. A chapter contained
in this collection argues that naming white literature as antecedents nat-
uralizes white chick lit as the true center of this genre and positions other
ethnic categories as subgenres with no literary history of their own. An
example of this can be found in Harzewski’s Chick Lit and Postfem-
inism. One chapter “expands the literary genealogies of Austen and
Wharton… by exploring continuity between chick lit and single female
urban fiction classics such Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (1958)”
(Harzewski 19). In this moment, Harzewski links the entire genre to
white authors; Austen and Wharton’s novels feature white women in
marriage plots, while Jaffe’s work depicts white female urban fiction.
However, a more expansive literary history of the genre might imagine
black, South Asian, Chinese, and/or Latina literary predecessors, which
would shift what we understand this genre to be and what we see it do.
Whiteness implicitly becomes the norm when chick lit scholarship
treats ethnicity and race as a focus rather than a framework, thus im-
plying that race and ethnicity are secondary or optional elements when
analyzing chick lit. This happens in several ways. White chick lit is rarely
labeled as white or recognized as a raced category. In this way, race and/
or ethnicity become synonymous with nonwhite, while whiteness be-
comes invisible. This also happens when, instead of always using race as
a lens, race is addressed in certain sections or chapters in a monograph
or edited collection. For example, Ferriss and Young’s anthology groups
Guerrero’s article on black chick lit and Nóra Séllei’s chapter on Hun-
garian chick lit in a section titled “Free Range: Varieties and Variations.”
 Introduction  11
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra’s collection, which discusses chick lit
as part of their larger exploration of postfeminism, contains chapters on
Riot Grrrl culture, women’s magazines, the new gender regime, and the
trope of the working girl, and these chapters do not specify race, though
their focus is primarily on white tropes and texts. When these studies of
white women and white postfeminist texts lay alongside the collection’s
other chapters, such as Sarah Banet-Weise’s “What’s Your Flava? Race
and Postfeminism in Media Culture” and Kimberly Springer’s “Divas,
Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African American Women
in Postfeminist and Post-Civil-Rights Popular Culture,” race becomes
conflated with blackness, and whiteness becomes normalized. The im-
plication here is that postfeminism’s relationship to race only matters
when that race is not white. One last variation of ethnicity and race as
secondary happens when scholars refer to certain ethnic categories of
chick lit as subgenres or, perhaps more powerfully, treat these subgenres
as “ethnic” versions of white chick lit with “concerns and interests…
identical to or derivative of their white counterparts” (Butler and Desai 3).
In these moments, the histories and specificities of these other ethnic cate-
gories are positioned as tangential to white chick lit.
Scholars do at times incorporate women of color and diasporic chick
lit into their analyses of the genre. However, if their scholarship relies
on a white-centric framework, these scholars’ ways of reading can be
shaped by whiteness. In these moments, scholars analyze the protago-
nists of these texts as if they are white, leading to readings that, while
productive, are often incomplete. An example of this can be seen in
Harzewski’s introduction, which, though theoretically rigorous in many
ways, could read more deeply into the way race and ethnicity inform
a character’s motivations in her reading of a chica lit novel. About the
genre as a whole, Harzewski writes, “chick lit protagonists can experi-
ence romance, desire, or self-esteem only through commodities” (12). As
part of her discussion of commercialism and commodification in chick
lit more generally, she refers to a character in a chica lit novel, The Dirty
Girls Social Club (2003), in which the character, Usnavys, embraces and
privileges designer labels above all else. While Harzewski’s ­argument—
that commodities (and the ownership thereof) are often the most mean-
ingful items to a chick lit protagonist—does apply to Usnavys in this
textual moment, her approach—reading Usnavys and Dirty Girls as just
one more chick lit work, in a series of works, that happens to have Latina
protagonists—misses that for Usnavys, these labels are about more than
just creating (white) self-esteem through conspicuous consumption. Us-
navys prizes these expensive items because her ownership of them, how-
ever tenuous (she buys and wears clothing with the tags attached, so
she can return them later), functions to negate powerful cultural logics
against which she, as a Latina protagonist, struggles. As a character says
elsewhere in Valdes’s novel, Usnavys’s purchases tell other Nuyoricans
12  Erin Hurt
that she has finally made it, and her commodities demonstrate that she
has transcended the culture of poverty so often associated with Latina/
os in fiction and real life. In fact, a key characteristic of the chica lit
genre more broadly is a character’s eschewal of, or distancing from, any
hint of poverty. This is not to say that chica lit protagonists are always
affluent—they aren’t. Rather, this distinction between Harzewski’s
reading of this scene and my own serves to illustrate that Latina protag-
onists, compared to white chicks, have a different historical experience
with both affluence and conspicuous consumption and ­representations
thereof, and Latina protagonists have a more vexed and weighted rela-
tionship with consumerism and middle-class status. As Tace Hedrick
explains,

Chica lit activates two seemingly opposing, yet actually connected,

US imaginaries around the presumed class status of Latinas/os. The
first is an image of a Latina/o population as born to be laboring,
working poor, or worse, birthed in barrios where a perverse atti-
tude of resistance to success comes with the package. This is the
imaginary against which these novels must construct their counter-­
representations of Latina success.
(Chica Lit 63)

While white protagonists are told by white culture that they are entitled
to the American Dream, security, and purchasing power, Latinas in the
pages of some chica lit must “raise the specter of ethnic poverty or ethnic
resistance—the two are sometimes conflated—in order to instruct both
heroine and reader how to avoid or transcend such states” (Hedrick,
Chica Lit 64). This illustration is but one instance of many; other chick
lit scholarship uses this same framework and produces similar readings.
The ability to write about white protagonists, or those of other eth-
nicities, without realizing that one is prioritizing whiteness and white-­
centric theoretical frameworks is part and parcel of the larger system of
white supremacy, which always seeks to protect itself by nurturing blind
spots and preserving ways of thinking that reinforce the privileging of
whiteness. Having laid out these problematic ways of reading, one can
see how they are easily reproduced. White chick lit does not call atten-
tion to the white-centric gaze, which, in turn, does not call attention to
the absence of any other ethnic categories of chick lit. Scholars must pri-
oritize intersectional frameworks and must be attentive and self-aware
in order to identify moments where we assume whiteness is normative.
Some scholarship offers substantive analyses of ethnicity. Scholars
such as Cecilia Koncharr Farr, Lisa Guerrero, and Heike Mißler of-
fer intersectional readings of chick lit novels, and they produce think-
ing about women’s experience and conceptions of womanhood that
allows for differences as a result of ethnicity. The chapters contained
 Introduction  13
in this collection, including one by Mißler, offer a way to move be-
yond the dominant perspective established by earlier critical writings
which relegate studies of nonwhite chick lit to the margins of chick lit
scholarship.

Reading Ethnicity, Race, and Nation in(to) the Chick Lit

Genre
While assumptions of whiteness dominate discussions of chick lit, sev-
eral scholars have forged new scholarly pathways that modeled how
the field of chick lit criticism could reorient itself toward more expan-
sive theoretical frameworks. Lisa Guerrero’s “‘Sistahs Are Doin’ It For
Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black and White” (2006) and Pamela Butler
and Jigna Desai’s “Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras: Chick-Lit Criti-
cism and Transnational Feminism” (2008) both demonstrate how schol-
arship can decenter whiteness in terms of texts as well as frameworks.
Guerrero’s oft-cited article, which appeared in Ferriss and Young’s
anthology, “examines how race socially, politically, and historically
informs the ways in which these two powerhouse genres and their her-
oines diverge, especially in their attitudes toward and relationships to
men, marriage, and the struggle for worth, fulfillment, and respect”
(88). This comparison explicitly critiques scholarship that views chick
lit as one monolithic genre by demonstrating that significant differences
exist between white chick lit and black chick lit, which she terms sistah
lit. Her chapter shows how critical approaches that view black chick lit
novels as “simply [white] chick lit in blackface” (88) flatten the lived ex-
perience of the characters found in sistah lit by misunderstanding their
desires and choices while reinforcing a gaze that posits whiteness and
narratives about white womanhood as normative. For McMillan’s char-
acters, understanding how to be means negotiating cultural narratives
about black femininity. By juxtaposing close readings of Bridget Jones
alongside Savannah, Robin, Bernadine, and Gloria, the protagonists of
Terry McMillan’s novel Waiting to Exhale (1992), Guerrero illustrates
that different definitions of womanhood, determined by different racial
histories, result in different desires, aspirations, and measures of suc-
cess for black women and their white counterparts. The importance of
Guerrero’s work lies in its demonstration that chick lit conventions, such
as professional success, romance, and definitions of Happily Ever ­A fter,
change depending on the protagonist’s race and gender. Her article calls
for scholars to attend to how cultural narratives attached to ethnic and/
or diasporic identities produce different versions of womanhood, rather
than using narratives about white women and white femininity as the
yardstick for protagonists of all ethnicities, in order to fully understand a
novel’s cultural work. Guerrero’s claims about black chick lit, following
her chapter’s publication, inspired many scholars to begin articulating
14  Erin Hurt
the different versions of womanhood found in other ethnic categories
of chick lit.
As with Guerrero’s work, the publication of Butler and Desai’s article
marked a turning point for chick lit scholarship. “Manolos, Marriage,
and Mantras” made several key interventions in chick lit criticism. It
dismantled key assumptions about the genre that had been accepted by
scholars and had functioned as gatekeepers—that chick lit was written,
read, and featured white women; that white-centric feminist debates
and white femininity were the aspects most worth exploring; and that
scholars should use a postfeminist theoretical approach to analyze these
novels. The article states, “the framework of postfeminism hegemon-
ically predetermines how chick lit is read” (27), meaning that using a
postfeminist lens dictates the kinds of questions a scholar might ask
of a text and, I would add, the particular texts one selects. Reading
only white novels allowed postfeminism to emerge as the primary lens
through which scholars understood chick lit, and in return, this theoret-
ical approach encouraged the continual selection of white texts since it
aligned most closely with their concerns. When scholars began to study
other ethnic versions of the genre, such as Latina chick lit, South Asian
chick lit, and black chick lit, the inadequacy of postfeminism as a lens
became clear.
At the same time, Desai and Butler, using South Asian chick lit as
their case study, offered a new critical framework grounded in transna-
tionalism, neoliberalism, and the lived experiences of women of color.
Their theoretical approach, by centering South Asian chick lit, chica lit,
and other categories, revealed new lines of inquiry because these catego-
ries of chick lit depict protagonists whose concerns include gender and
feminism but who also “deal with cosmopolitan ways and global lives,
mediating between political economy, sexual agency, consumer culture,
and transnational mobility” (Ponzanesi 229). Ponzanesi summarizes
their argument, writing, “Understanding chick lit as a genre cannot be
disconnected from the analysis of issues of race, empire, nation and po-
litical economy” (227). Furthermore, undertheorized ethnic categories
of chick lit such as South Asian chick lit call attention to “relations of
power in the U.S.” and “multiple social and economic formations” in
ways that texts rooted in whiteness are unable to do (Butler and Desai 4).
And so, when the authors call for scholars to ask “how … [chick lit] op-
erates in regard to race, nation, empire, and political economy” ­(Butler
and Desai 27), we might imagine how white chick lit could answer this
call, perhaps by reading Bridget Jones’s character as one “located in and
produced by and through neoliberalism, race, global political economy,
empire, and nationalism” (Butler and Desai 27).
Butler and Desai’s piece laid a theoretical framework for future schol-
ars by shifting the critical conversation away from a consideration of
postfeminism to a discussion of neoliberal feminism. Building on the
 Introduction  15
work of Lisa Duggan and Inderpal Grewal, the authors explain their
proposed theoretical substitution, writing,

Instead of “postfeminism,” then, a term typically used by scholars

and critics to indicate a lack of interest in state politics or structural
inequalities, we use “neoliberal feminisms” to refer more precisely
to the multiple contemporary feminist discourses that reflect this
shift from liberal concern with state-ensured rights to a neoliberal
politics understood through the notion of “choice.” … Moreover,
critiques of neoliberalism can help shift feminist analyses of culture
away from a focus on individual agency and “choice” toward an
engagement with identities, subjectivities, structure, and power.
(Butler and Desai 8)

This framework of neoliberal feminism has given later scholars the the-
oretical vocabulary to explore chick lit in new ways (many of which are
evident in the following literature review). These shifts, in novels and
theoretical approach, enabled scholars to see chick lit “as part of a pop-
ular culture that participates in forming and providing insights into na-
tional and global citizenship, and therefore as a location of contestation
over meanings” (Ponzanesi 229). The importance of this scholarship is
evidenced by its numerous citations in scholarly articles, not to mention
the centrality of its arguments to this introduction and the rest of this
collection.
Building on the calls from Guerrero, Desai, and Butler, scholars have
begun publishing more work in the past decade that examines chick
lit featuring protagonists of color set in the US and other countries. As
more scholars have taken up these novels, one ethnic category, Latina
chick lit (or chica lit), has received sustained critical attention. Tace He-
drick offered the first definition of the genre in her chapter “Chica Lit,”
published in the Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (2013).
She then expanded her analysis of the genre in her book-length Chica
Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First
­Century (2015) by constructing a history of literary influences and ex-
ploring common tropes, including the genre’s engagement with the cul-
ture of poverty. While Hedrick’s work offers incisive commentary that
explains the category of chica lit, other publications explore this category
in more granular detail. Focusing on particular authors, novels, and/or
tropes, these pieces illustrate the many directions that critical inquiry has
taken. Some of the earliest work on chica lit, from Amanda Morrison
and myself, in 2010 and 2009, respectively, examines the novels of “the
godmother of chica lit,” Alisa Valdes. These pieces argue that Valdes’s
novels succeed at introducing new representations of professional, upper-­
middle-class, twenty-first-century Latinas but do so by way of mocking,
ridiculing, or simply making invisible poor Latinx characters, especially
16  Erin Hurt
those who identify as Mexican or Chicana/o. This work argues that Val-
des defines contemporary Latinidad as an ambivalent ethnic identity that
must be different but not too different from white womanhood in order
to sell books, and this can only be achieved through the rejection of
earlier social protest models of Latinidad. Other scholars have studied
the work of Lara Rios, whose protagonists struggle to see themselves
as fully ­Mexican American or fully “Americana,” respectively. Maryam
­Mazloomian, Raihanah M.M., and Shahizah Ismail Hamdan analyze
Rios’s novels using a methodology based on Brofenbrenner’s ecological
systems of development to chart how Rios’s fiction depict its protago-
nists’ cultural transformations from Latina to “Americana.” Alexandra
Ganser’s work investigates the fiction of Erika Lopez as a third wave,
queer, feminist version of the genre. Most recently, I have argued that
Sofia Quintero’s Divas Don’t Yield (2006) offers an intersectional
feminist version of chick lit that highlights the false visions of cultural
­belonging—the result of neoliberal feminism—at work in other chica lit
novels. Other authors have read chica lit comparatively, connecting it
to other literary traditions and categories. Ellen McCracken juxtaposes
chica lit with Chicana literature as two examples of postmodernist nar-
ratives; ­Frederick Aldama uses chica lit as an example in the typology he
constructs of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow Latina/o literature;
and Catherine Ramirez analyzes the relationship between the emergence
of chica lit and the rise of third wave feminism. This survey of chica lit
scholarship, a robust body of work still in its infancy, shows how quickly
this new body of criticism has achieved both depth and range.
This same kind of scholarly development has been true for work that
centers on chick lit set beyond the bounds of the US and Britain. Some
of these publications explore how other national literary spheres modify
Bridget Jones’s Diary, or other white chick lit from the US or Britain, so
as to reflect their own nation’s cultural values around gender, feminin-
ity, and womanhood. As Wenche Ommundsen explains, “[Chick lit] has
acquired the capacity to accommodate cultural difference and produce
local variants which speak directly to the pressing concerns of women in
a wide variety of circumstances,” and the genre “has tapped into larger
social shifts in places like India and post-Communist Eastern Europe,
where traditional values collide in unexpected ways with a new eco-
nomic order” (“From China” 333). Séllei’s “Bridget Jones and Hungar-
ian Chick Lit,” the earliest example of this category of chick lit criticism,
echoes Guerrero’s comparative approach by juxtaposing “the Hungarian
singleton novel and British chick lit,” and showing how Hungarian chick
lit is “not merely a cultural translation of Bridget Jones but a transfor-
mation” (175). In her chapter, “Postcolonial Chick Lit: Postfeminism or
Consumerism?,” Sandra Ponzanesi considers how the chick lit genre has
been adapted and reshaped within other national literary spheres, such
as China and Brazil, before focusing her analysis on Indian chick lit.
 Introduction  17
Like Séllei, she presents the ways in which Indian chick lit novels trans-
form the genre’s conventions to speak to contemporary Indian women’s
lived experiences and concerns, and offer critique of Western versions
of femininity (230). Most recently, Muhammad Abdullah and Safeer
Awan, in their article “Islamic Postfeminism and Muslim Chick-Lit: Co-
existence of Conflicting Discourses,” explain how Pakistani authors use
chick lit as a means of challenging stereotypical depictions of Pakistani
Muslim women as “victimized” by featuring representations of modern
protagonists who lead happy lives while also negotiating religious and
cultural restrictions.
Other scholarly articles trace the possibilities and/or conflicts that
arise as authors rewrite the conventions of Western white chick lit, and
some move beyond the national framework to study the genre as a global
phenomenon. Imogen Mathew examines the work of Anita Heiss, who
writes Aboriginal chick lit, and argues that Heiss’s decision to write chick
lit with Aboriginal heroines allows her to “forgroun[d] a non-Western,
non-white subjectivity” that “destabilises the genre as a whole” (1, 2).
Marian Aguiar examines how South Asian chick lit works to recuperate
the practice of arranged marriage for transnational subjects. Moneera
Al-Ghadeer investigates the 2005 novel Banat al-Riyadh (translated as
Girls of Riyadh) as the first version of Arabic chick lit, while Marilyn
Booth, writing about the same novel, presents a case study on the pol-
itics of translating a chick lit novel from one language and audience
to another. Wenche Ommundsen’s article on Chinese chick lit explores
how Chinese authors have used this genre to create a new kind of di-
asporic literature that challenges previous depictions of “China as the
past and the West as present and future” (“From China” 342), while her
other work on this genre, “Sex and the Global City: Chick Lit with a
Difference,” examines the transcultural work of the genre in a broader
way by tracking the emergence of chick lit in Saudi Arabia, China, and
Australia, and mapping how Western chick lit changes and is changed
in these new cultural contexts. Some scholars, such as Eva Chen, the-
orize about the genre’s connection to other global forces. Chen’s work
argues that chick lit is a global force that “works in tandem with the
economic policies of global capitalism” to “propagate[e] the idea of a
neoliberal, global sisterhood of chic, empowered, consumerist and indi-
vidualistically minded women who find freedom through consumption
and progress in following Western commodities and values” (214), us-
ing Wei Hu’s Shanghai Baby, published in China, as a case study. In a
similar vein, Kelly Yin Nga Tse’s “Post/Feminist Impulses: Neoliberal
Ideology and Class Politics in Annie Wang’s The People’s Republic of
Desire (2006)” explores how Wang’s seemingly feminist novel ultimately
espouses a neoliberal, postfeminist worldview that undermines the text’s
critique of China’s Westernization. This scholarship demonstrates that
chick lit can tell us a great deal about national and transnational beliefs
18  Erin Hurt
about women, femininity, class, and consumption, both actual and aspi-
rational, and how these beliefs can be shaped by globalization, diaspora,
colonialism, and capitalism. This review emphasizes that the aforemen-
tioned scholarship asks and answers a different set of critical questions
than white chick lit scholarship, illustrating that moving beyond Bridget
Jones and other novels of its ethnic ilk allows new critical questions to
emerge.

New Voices, New Frameworks, New Questions

As we acknowledge that chick lit includes women of color and diasporic
narratives, the questions that we have asked in the past of white chick
lit shift and make way for emerging critical conversations that arise as
a result of attention to these neglected novels. The goal of Theorizing
Ethnicity in the Chick Lit Genre is to bring together in one place new
work on chick lit alongside a review of existing literature. Collecting
these chapters together builds a genealogy for chick lit scholarship that
maps both a timeline and the various directions that criticism about the
genre has taken. The chapters that follow are divided into four sections
that, when taken together, endeavor to raise up new titles, new critical
frameworks, and new ways of reading.
The first section, “Categories of Chick Lit,” contains chapters that
define a particular ethnic category of chick lit. These two selections
demonstrate that when we study novels that exist but have been ignored
by scholars, we expand our catalog of narratives about womanhood and
women’s lived experiences. Furthermore, we see how protagonists nego-
tiate their cultural identities alongside the cultural messages they receive
about their gender, race, and ethnicity. In “‘More Than Sex, Shopping
and Shoes’: Cosmopolitan Indigeneity and Cultural Politics in Anita
Heiss’s Koori Lit,” Lauren O’Mahony offers a strong argument for the
promise of chick lit by tracing the ways that one author harnesses the
power and reach of the genre to combat stereotypical representations
amongst readers. Her chapter explores how Heiss founded the field of
Aboriginal chick lit, termed Koori lit, from a desire to use a popular
commercial medium as a vehicle for contemporary representations of
Aboriginal and Indigenous Australians that transcended the negatives
ones that populated popular fiction. This chapter argues that Heiss’s
novels “repurpose characteristics of the wider genre to represent Indig-
enous women navigating romantic, professional and cultural scenarios”
in order to “redefine popular representations of Indigenous women and
Indigenous culture,” and engage readers in a kind of consciousness-­
raising that “prompt[s] deeper engagements with Indigenous Australians
and the issues that affect them.”
The central argument in Jenny Heijun Wills’s “Against Asianness:
On Being Cool, Feminist, and American in Asian/American Chick
 Introduction  19
Lit” concerns the way Asian American chick lit protagonists construct
their American identities. Wills argues that Michelle Yu and Blossom
Kan’s China Dolls, Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things,
and Caroline Hwang’s In Full Bloom all demonstrate that “a contem-
porary American identity” can only be obtained by positioning oneself
as a modern, progressive, Asian American woman whose modernity is
achieved by “rejecting Asian cultures using … distressing colonial as-
sumptions about ‘Oriental’ non-modernity, non-civility, and backward-
ness.” Wills offers close readings of the novels to demonstrate the various
forms these logics take, including framing Asian/American men as “con-
servative, antiquated, and patriarchal” but also asexual and undesirable.
The chapter argues that within the genre of Asian/American chick lit,
“heroines pursue pleasure and freedom not by questioning white and
Western supremacist frameworks that oppress them” but by reinforcing
stereotypes of Orientalist Others, which they can then reject, thereby
constructing a modern American identity.
The second section is titled “Texts and Tropes,” and it offers close
readings and literary analyses of particular texts or tropes found in
chick lit novels. Felicia Salinas-Moniz’s “Narratives of Latina Girlhood
in Malín Alegría’s Estrella’s Quinceañera and Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to
Getting Lost in Mexico” explores the literary ground where chick lit and
young adult (YA) writing converge. Her chapter argues that Latina YA
fiction “does not simply repackage adult chica lit for younger readers”
but rather takes up the conventions and tropes of the adult genre chick
lit and adapts them for the coming-of-age narratives that constitute YA
literature. Though different in approach, Latina YA shares with its older
sibling an intersectional understanding of women’s and girls’ identity
formations, and these YA novels demonstrates that Latina girlhood is
shaped by the intersection of gender, race, and class in contemporary US
society. Salinas-Moniz’s analysis demonstrates that, for Alegría’s pro-
tagonists, personal metamorphosis requires a negotiation and reconcili-
ation with Latinx culture and heritage.
Jennifer Woolston investigates the potential of Asian American chick
lit to tell the specific history of Asian American women in the US in “‘I
live a fabulous Asian-American life—ask me how!’: Kim Wong Keltner
Unpacks Contemporary Asian American Female Identity In The Dim
Sum Of All Things And Buddha Baby.” Woolston argues that like many
other chick lit novels, excepting those with white protagonists, Keltner’s
novels “offer some of the traditional elements of the genre (such as a
focus on self-identity, romance, career) while simultaneously intertwin-
ing those concerns with those faced by women of color.” This chapter
explores the way external social forces—stereotypes and discrimination
but also knowledge about her family and community—shape Lindsey’s
struggle to define “what it means to be a Chinese American woman.”
Woolston’s piece validates Lindsey’s fictional experiences by pairing
20  Erin Hurt
moments from the novel with historical commentary and the voices of
Asian American men and women. As this chapter shows, history also
becomes Lindsey’s key to claiming her identity as she eventually learns
more about her family and the choices her grandparents and parents had
to make.
In “The ‘Aha Moment’: Representing Transformation and Black
Women’s Trauma in the Chick Lit Genre,” Cherise Pollard investigates
the hybrid nature of K.L. Brady’s The Bum Magnet (2009), which brings
together in one text multiple strands of the black literary tradition. As
Pollard argues, Brady’s novel fits the conventions of the chick lit genre
with its focus on conspicuous consumption, commodification, and the
desire to find the right man but also qualifies as a novel centered on
trauma and healing. The novel draws on Tamika L. Carey’s work on
the rhetorics of healing to argue that Brady’s novel produces a contem-
porary, twenty-first-century depiction of the healing narrative found
in the work of earlier black feminist authors, such as Toni Morrison,
­A lice Walker and Gloria Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara. Through its
blending of multiple literary genres and traditions, she argues, this novel
offers readers a healing journey that is both spiritual and commodified,
guided by a pop culture celebrity, and one that teaches readers how to
heal while promising them “that a good man is the reward for doing this
difficult emotional work.”
The third section, “Decentering Whiteness,” contains chapters that
interrogate, make visible, and dislodge whiteness from its central posi-
tion in scholarship about this genre. Heike Mißler’s “Neoliberal Fan-
tasies: Erica Kennedy’s Feminista” employs the approach modeled in
Lisa Guerrero’s work. Her chapter disrupts critical assumptions that
posit “the Ideal of White Womanhood” (Guerrero 97) as the stan-
dard for assessing and understanding chick lit protagonists and in-
stead excavates the particular version of womanhood experienced by
this ­novel’s biracial protagonist Sydney Zamora. Mißler’s study il-
lustrates how Kennedy’s novel critiques the tropes of white lit chick
by showing how Sydney, who has an Afro-Cuban father and a white
mother, attempts to “have it all” as promised by US culture to white
women—meaning a partner, marriage, and kids—only to find that her
blackness presents significant obstacles to doing so. Mißler argues that
in Kennedy’s novel, a modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew,
­Sydney can only achieve the domestic life she seeks, albeit ambiva-
lently, by relinquishing what makes her a “shrew” and, as Mißler ex-
plains, those aspects of her personality (like staying independent) that
mark her as nonwhite. Mißler’s chapter shows that Kennedy’s novel
makes visible the tropes of white chick lit but also reveals who they do
and do not include.
Inspired by Butler and Desai’s call, along with Cecilia Conchar
Farr’s pointed comments about Terry McMillan’s exclusion from the
 Introduction  21
chick lit lineage (Farr 203), my chapter, “The White Terry McMillan:
Centering Black Women Within Chick Lit’s Genealogy,” seeks to an-
swer the following question: what happens if we position Terry Mc-
Millan’s Waiting to Exhale as an originary text of chick lit, alongside
Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary? This chapter’s approach to the
genre’s literary history centers on the experiences of black women,
thereby “open[ing] up a space where we can imagine a more intersec-
tional literary lineage, one that names a more inclusive selection of
textual influences.” The first half of this chapter rereads the emergence
of the genre, showing how it responded to the anxieties and concerns
of black women while also linking its rise to black feminists and other
feminists of color. The second half of this chapter offers a playful and
provocative exploratory vision of what a more expansive literary his-
tory of chick lit, one that includes black literary predecessors, might
look like.
The fourth and final section of the collection, “Authorial Voices,”
turns from scholarship to authors’ voices. This section creates for
scholars and students an archive of authors’ voices previously found in
mostly newspaper or magazine interviews. The reader’s connection to
the women they find in the pages of chick lit novels—never before seen
fictional depictions that echo their own lives and anxieties—makes this
genre worthy of study. However, it matters just as much that these
novels often serve the same function for their authors: chick lit offers
a space for authors to construct representations they find missing from
the larger national cultural imaginary. In trade publications and in-
terviews, chick lit novels are often described as semiautobiographical,
while chick lit authors, when explaining why they wrote a novel, often
answer that they could never find women like them in popular fiction,
so they wrote them into existence. Whether or not these authors iden-
tify as chick lit authors, or as readers of chick lit (and not all do), they
created works that fit the genre’s conventions in order to see their ex-
periences on the page. This section offers a different perspective on the
cultural work of this genre by contextualizing these literary analyses
with authors’ voices, explaining their own relationship to the genre,
to their novels, and to their readers’ responses in essay and interview
forms. Linda Chavez Doyle’s chapter details her motivations for writ-
ing chica lit, the story she sought to tell, and her writing process. Kim
Wong Keltner, Kavita Daswani, and Sofia Quintero explain their rela-
tionships to the “chick lit” moniker and the connections between their
lives and their narratives.
These scholarly chapters and author reflections provide readers with
a vision of what chick lit in its fullest capacity can tell us about many
different women’s lives, cultural identities, and relationships to their
communities and cultures. Though each section functions as a separate
and discrete part of the collection, when taken together, they model for
22  Erin Hurt
readers the new forms that chick lit scholarship can take. In order to en-
courage readers and researchers in their own future explorations of these
works, this collection offers a bibliography of chick lit novels, grouped
by ethnicity and/or nationality. This will provide readers with a robust
categorized list of novels so as to encourage scholarship on these works.
Belinda Edmondson explains, “As popular culture studies have taught
us in the past twenty years, popular literature should always be taken
seriously for what it tells us about our society” (193). Chick lit, then,
shares women’s experiences that we might not find in most other com-
mercial mediums while mirroring back to us the ideologies about gen-
der, womanhood, and agency which twenty-first century women must
navigate.

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Prologue
A Second Read: Further
Reflections on Women-of-Color
Chick Lit
Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai

The Goddess Got Us: The Pleasures of South Asian

American Chick Lit
In 2006, our summer reading list was stacked with desi lit—South Asian
American chick lit. Our desks were littered with bright, cheery book
covers that blended what had by then become the definitive icons of
white chick lit (martini glasses, shopping bags, high-heeled shoes) with
neo-Oriental signifiers of South Asian ethnic identity (hennaed hands,
saris and spices, lotuses and bindis, and the ubiquitous mango). This
reading was, for us, a pleasure project. There was a sweet and sticky
enjoyment in rapidly devouring the fun and humorous fiction, in its rep-
etition and predictability, in its quick gratification, in consuming its con-
sumption. There was pleasure too in being interpellated and affirmed by
its anti-racist multicultural lessons: get a good partner but also a good
job; respect your parents, but be true to yourself; embrace your heritage,
but be American too. We recognized ourselves, with ironic pleasure, in
Kavita Daswani’s migrant and working-class aspirational and hustling
characters, wearing borrowed polyester clothes at their first professional
jobs before learning to shop for more fashionable bargains (or so we
like to think). The generic conventions and the pertinent variations were
delicious, repetitions and interpellations that offer to readers familiar
negotiations affirming the “choices” of straddling multiple worlds and
identities. Along the way, we also encountered Daswani’s musings in For
Matrimonial Purposes about rapid serial consumption—consumption
that provides both immediate gratification and an ongoing experience
of emptiness.
As scholars grounded in transnational and critical-race feminisms,
we also found pleasure in critiquing and locating alternative paradigms
to heteronormative gendered ethnic nationalism. Desi lit characters’
experiences of straddling multiple worlds and identities were ones we
read through transnational and diasporic feminist thought. The fiction
and its heroines took the position of not assimilating fully into white-­
normative Americanness but also refusing (and perhaps sabotaging) the
heteropatriarchal demands of cultural nationalism. We conjured the
26  Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai
possibilities of women-of-color and diasporic chick lit narratives, not as
decolonial but at least as anti-national. Indeed, we encountered possibil-
ities that not only refused assimilation and patriotism but also gendered
ethnic nationalisms through iterations of internationalism, globalism,
diaspora, and/or cosmopolitanism. Often these possibilities articulated
themselves through narratives evoking global capital, migration, and
transnational flows. In Daswani’s For Matrimonial Purposes and The
Village Bride of Beverly Hills, we recognized formations of cultural,
consumer, and political citizenship that locate her protagonists as racial-
ized and gendered subjects within neoliberalism; Daswani’s expansive
oeuvre frequently evokes the newly arrived transnational migrant as she
strives to gain her footing in a globalized world. We took notes and
exchanged ideas. We began to write. And then we read Sonia Singh’s
Goddess for Hire, and our writing began to sing. In the end, it was the
goddess that got us.
Goddess for Hire tells the story of Maya Mehra, a Southern C ­ alifornia
slacker who discovers on her thirtieth birthday that she is the human
reincarnation of the goddess Kali-Ma and whose subsequent “coming
of age” includes reconciling her humanity with “the goddess within.”
As she learns to develop and control her mystical powers, Maya be-
comes a kind of superhero: she is able to sense “malevolence” in the
world and uses her supernatural strength and agility both to protect
the disempowered and to pursue justice on their behalf. We found this
literary device notable for at least two reasons. First, the book deployed
gods and goddesses within modern settings as a mechanism to depict
the battle between good and evil; Singh’s use of this device in popular
fiction preceded Rick Riordan’s best-selling and award-winning series
featuring the young demi-god Percy Jackson as the son of Poseidon.
(It takes Riordan almost an additional decade to feature non-European
mythology in the Egyptian-centric Kane Chronicles.) Clearly, Singh was
onto something. Additionally, the novel exploits the familiarity of Kali
in the US due to Orientalist feminist appropriation but also evokes her
avatar as an agent of South Asian ethnic feminism. Singh’s humor-laden
use of fantasy and her emphasis on social justice—and the playfulness
with which she deploys both—captured our imaginations and put into
sharper relief the significance both of South Asian American chick lit
and of women-of-color and diasporic chick lit more broadly. In reimag-
ining the central themes of dominant white chick lit, these novels ex-
ceeded the logics of postfeminism and demanded that we considered the
genre through a transnational and critical-race feminist lens. Nudging
open the fissures in neoliberal ideologies, they envisioned possibilities
for feminine popular fiction within. Moreover, Goddess for Hire less
promised a good life where gender barriers were overcome, than helped
locate its protagonist in an ongoing struggle against racism, sexism, and
injustice.
 Prologue  27
As chick lit has often been identified as a narrative of postfeminism,
we cautioned against dismissing it solely for its consumerism. We held,
and continue to hold, a more ambivalent perspective that seeks to work
through the relationships between pleasure, the popular, and the po-
litical in writings by women of color that demonstrate a complex en-
gagement with neoliberalism through the culture industry. For us, the
compelling question has been not “What is chick lit?” but “What can
chick lit do?” Hence, we have sought less to define the parameters, gene-
alogies, and purpose of the genre and its semiotics, and more to elucidate
what it makes possible. This is not to argue that feminist literary criti-
cism outlining and debating its definition, boundaries, and significance
is misguided, only that we have undertaken instead to make chick lit
our accomplice. Put differently, Goddess helped us distinguish between
an approach that seeks to define what women-of-color chick lit is, and
one that asks what it does and what it imagines. More than anything, it
is this distinction that drove our methodology and approach to reading
women-of-color chick lit as something to be analyzed for its failures
and complicities as well as its possibilities. The popular genre no doubt
engages and produces racialized cultural citizenship enmeshed within
neoliberalism. But can it be understood also as a site where such citizen-
ships are negotiated and even challenged? While we remained invested
in understanding chick lit as a popular genre, we sought to delineate the
possibilities imagined by this genre, and particularly by women-of-color
and diasporic subgenres. We placed recent, global-era media representa-
tions within a US context, and we also put them in dialogue with texts
resonant across national cultures, responding to recent calls for trans-
national methods in feminist media and cultural studies and critically
examining the global cultural politics of neoliberalism. In revisiting
women-of-color and diasporic chick lit today, we have an opportunity
to give a second reading to, and of, this twenty-first-century popular
fiction.

Pre-recession/Postfeminism
We wrote “Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras: Chick Lit Criticism and
Transnational Feminism” as a contribution and a corrective to the crit-
ical and scholarly literature debating the parameters, meaning, and sig-
nificance of chick lit as a genre. We had found feminist chick lit criticism
to be white and US centric, and dismissive of popular genres and those
who consumed them. Chick lit criticism was particularly disparaging to-
ward women-of-color subgenres, which much of the scholarly and crit-
ical literature characterized as derivative Jane-come-latelies, dismissing
them as diluted mimicries of a genre not worth mimicking. As white-­
normative chick lit criticism sought to identify feminist predecessors, it
typically created genealogies that arced from Jane Austen to Bridget Jones.
28  Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai
Mapping this white-centric paradigm onto ethnic chick lit, critics and
scholars rarely considered other ur-texts such as Terry M ­ cMillan’s Wait-
ing to Exhale or Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as possible precursors.
In doing so, chick lit criticism replicated the genre’s own white centrism.
In hindsight, we also see now that scholarly and critical dismissals of the
feminine popular were dominating just as the feminine popular and its
negotiations of global capital were becoming more ­racially ­diverse and
transnational.
In the 1990s, the perennial we-are-coming-to-the-end-of-print-books-
and-literature warning appeared in reference to the emergence of hy-
pertext and advanced telecommunications. Similar warnings erupted
about the death of print books, with references to the rise of e-books
and social media a decade or two later. The emergence of new technol-
ogies frequently results in anxieties among the cultural elite about the
supposed death of an old one. These periodic laments about the death
of an old form minimize how the new and old intermingle and trans-
form each other. Indeed, book publishing has continued to change as
new technologies, such as e-books, have supplemented rather than re-
placed previous forms. Additionally, online forums have supported and
buttressed rather than undermined the significance of popular literary
genres and print fiction. Online cultural production in the form of fan
cultures and fan fiction, for example, has expanded reading and cul-
tural communities globally. In contrast to dire predictions of the death
of the book, the last few decades have seen a growth in the publication
of fiction print and electronic books both in the US and globally. Print
did not die. Genres such as romance and memoir continued to be popu-
lar, while other forms such as chick lit and young adult (YA) expanded
both in the US and globally. Amidst anxieties over the demise of print
culture, novels have continued to adapt to marketplaces, socialities, and
the changing meanings of the popular, while simultaneously becoming
more socially influential.
We heard a similar or parallel cry about the death of feminism with
the arrival of chick lit. As the Introduction to this collection deftly re-
lays, many critics understood chick lit as commodified feminism or sim-
ply feminism in the marketplace. Chick lit and its subsequent criticism
reignited debates about feminism, political economy, and the popular.
We see chick lit as an opportunity to examine both feminism in the
marketplace and feminism as a critique of the marketplace. The diversi-
fication of popular literary markets, of course, follows capital. We un-
derstand this well. But the emergence of feminine popular fiction genres
such as chick lit within women-of-color and global-South markets can-
not be easily dismissed. In fact, as sales of chick lit plateaued in the
US and British markets, they continued to grow elsewhere, most signifi-
cantly in places such as China and India, where a burgeoning middle
class with increasing access to cultural products and consumerism was
 Prologue  29
configuring the new modern woman. Within the Indian market, for ex-
ample, English-language chick lit appeared as a cosmopolitan and trans-
national genre in the mid-2000s. This subgenre and its audiences have
much crossover with its diasporic counterparts in the US and the UK,
as its stories target a transnational elite class with aspirations to lean in
and move up—and often North—within global capital. These novels
seek to represent a twenty-first-century neoliberal and global version
of India, sometimes one that is also neo-Oriental. Like other postcolo-
nial literature, however, they also make claims to postcolonial moder-
nity and subjectivity. For us, the significance of popular postcolonial
fiction cannot be dismissed for its imbricated location within capitalism
and neoliberalism. We refuse such a binary, which requires that we toss
women-of-color, diasporic, and transnational feminist chick lit on the
heap of global capitalism’s obsolete commodities. We suggest instead
that popular postcolonial feminine fiction offers further opportunities
to consider postcoloniality, race, and global capitalism at their points of
engagement with feminine subjectivities.
We wrote “Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras” on the cusp of the
Great Recession of 2008, which subsequently transformed the politi-
cal and cultural landscape for representing working women’s lives. For
more than a decade, dominant white chick lit had centered on wom-
en’s professional achievement and conspicuous consumption as signs
of neoliberal agency, signifying through the ability to earn and spend
capital on items—designer fashions, mixed drinks, vibrators, yoga
classes—that were metonymic for feminine agency. These were stories
of upward mobility, in which women came of age finding their niches
in the labor economy, usually through positions in the creative sector
that simultaneously provided professional advancement, personal ful-
fillment, and economic security. As publishing, fashion, and other cre-
ative industries collapsed and the job market contracted, these were
aspirational fantasies that did not bear the recession well. At the height
of white chick lit’s reign, no text appeared in the scholarly literature
about chick lit more often than HBO’s adaptation of Sex and the City,
which took for granted its white Gen-X characters’ prosperity, pro-
fessional success, and designer fetishes. In 2012, HBO began airing
Girls, which took for granted its white millennial characters’ economic
dislocation and the empty promises of feminine empowerment for a
generation of college-­educated middle-class women graduating into a
recession. Chick lit novels are texts of governmentality in that they serve
as technologies of subjectivity that guide readers to govern themselves.
­Recession-era neoliberal feminist narratives express intensified anxiety
about survival, while still functioning pedagogically as technologies of
neoliberal governmentality. Within women-of-color and diasporic chick
lit, this often means locating the subject within global capitalism and
neoliberalism to modulate new formulations of consumer, media, and
30  Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai
political citizenship. And while women-of-color and diasporic chick lit
subgenres, like dominant white chick lit, often include consumer de-
sires and career plots, those stories are told through the dislocations
of im/migrant and racially stratified economic worlds, where wealth is
never experienced as entirely secure. Even goddess Maya Mehra’s afflu-
ent parents are so preoccupied with their children’s economic futures
that they only embrace Maya’s divine role after it becomes clear that it
can be financialized into an ­income-generating gig. And while consump-
tion and professional achievement are recurring themes in ethnic chick
lit, these subgenres’ central concerns are about locating the self within
other social, cultural, and political neoliberal worlds. Hence, women-
of-color and diasporic chick lit were set up to survive the recession and
remain relevant in ways that dominant white chick lit was not.

Women-of-Color and Diasporic Chick Lit Now

In addition to the transformations wrought by the recession, significant
shifts in both popular and academic feminisms in the US have produced
cultural conditions in which dominant white chick lit and its criticism
may seem dated and problematic to readers, while women-of-color and
diasporic subgenres remain relevant. First, North American colleges
and universities have experienced the gradual institutionalization of
transnational and critical-race feminisms, both in women’s and gen-
der studies, and across the disciplines, as faculty and graduate students
have transformed the field through engagement with anti-racist and de-
colonial feminist theory and praxis. This transformation is, of course,
not ­universal—not every feminist scholar is pursuing decolonial work.
The field has changed, however, at least to the degree that the National
­Women’s Studies Association lists “variation in women’s experiences
across nations, cultures, time, class, race, etc.” and “intersectionality
of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality; interlocking oppression” as
standard content for undergraduate curricula. This expectation extends
to other inter/disciplines such that academic feminism broadly includes
the understanding that factors such as race and empire are crucial to the
study of gender and sexuality. As Erin Hurt illustrates so clearly in the
Introduction to this volume, within this intellectual context, chick lit
scholarship that leaves race and ethnicity unexamined seems out of step
with both the state of feminist cultural criticism and the racial and ethnic
diversity of the chick lit genre. The recent explosion of chick lit scholar-
ship focused on women-of-color and diasporic subgenres, including the
diverse body of essays collected here, seeks to fundamentally transform
how woman-of-color chick lit is read.
Similarly, in the last decade, US-based popular feminisms have seen
the mainstreaming of intersectionality as a guiding principle. In J­ anuary
2017, millions of people attended political demonstrations across the
 Prologue  31
US in support of a Women’s March platform whose opening lines read
“gender justice is racial justice is economic justice.” As of January 2018,
a Google search for “intersectional feminism” yielded more than a half
million results, including websites, memes, Tumblr pages, t-shirts, and
needlepoint patterns. The mainstreamed understanding of intersection-
ality is often limited to the level of individual identity and divorced from
questions of systemic oppression, privilege, and violence—it’s not likely
to meet the National Women’s Studies Association’s standards for un-
dergraduate learning. Even at its least rigorous and radical, however,
even nominally intersectional feminism shifts the framework for read-
ing popular texts in ways that highlight racist representations, including
those that often undergird narratives of white women’s empowerment.
In 2008, when white women students in our college classes watched
the film adaptation of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones and the Edge of
­Reason, they saw Renée Zellweger giving bras and relationship advice
to inmates in a Thai prison, teaching them a choreographed dance while
they sing ­Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” in what Hye Seung Chung calls
“yellowvoice.” Students’ initial impression was typically that the scene
was just silly. Today, in contrast, our students immediately name that
scene as racist and imperialist. Due to the mainstreaming of i­ntersectional
feminism, readers and viewers are equipped to identify the tandem oper-
ations of gender and race even when encountering white-­normative chick
lit texts like the Bridget Jones franchise. They are likely to see white
chick lit as enmeshed and complicit with white supremacy, capitalism,
and empire as Bridget Jones, Sex and the City, and their higher-brow
counterpart Eat Pray Love rely on Orientalist tropes to establish the
liberated cosmopolitan feminism of their white protagonists. Erin Hurt’s
Introduction to this volume provides a meticulous review of the schol-
arly and critical literature on chick lit, with a r­ etrospective view that
highlights this shift from white-centric to intersectional and critical-race
analytical frameworks. This shift in ­perspective may make white-­centric
chick lit and chick lit criticism seem dated and out of touch, while
women-­of-color and diasporic subgenres—and the ­scholarly and critical
literature that surround them—continue to feel relevant and necessary.
In terms of economics, white chick lit has been overwhelmingly char-
acterized by depictions of financial success and security. In fact, much
of white chick lit functions as a manual for leaning in as it provides
pedagogic and performative representations of women’s success through
better integration into capitalism. Women-of-color and diasporic chick
lit, on the other hand, have often provided a different analysis—if not
critique—of global capitalism in showing not only how the system ex-
ploits gendered and racialized labor but also how racial capitalism is
rigged and constituted through such inequalities. Women-of-color and
diasporic chick lit can be read for the new financializations of racial-
ized and gendered labor (including divine power like Maya Mehra’s) and
32  Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai
governmentality within neoliberalism. While women-of-color chick lit
might have entered and survived the recession differently than domi-
nant white chick lit, it indexed the experiences of women of color within
racial capitalism and neoliberalism and, at times, provided cogent and
biting critique. As scholars grounded in transnational feminist cultural
critique, we do not relinquish the necessity of such a critique to more
social scientific methods and objects of study.
White feminine popular fiction genres engage, contest, claim, ne-
gotiate, and produce political and cultural citizenship through media
technologies. Hence, chick lit has been a genre ripe for examining the
circulation of technologies of citizenship. Furthermore, popular fiction
itself authorizes discrepant forms of administration while also possibly
engaging in responses to, if not reimaginings of, the practices and art
of government. We suggest that chick lit as a genre has reflected this
convergence of biopower and neoliberalism centering the reinvention of
the individual self, located within anxieties about social reproduction,
material accumulation, and belonging. Feminist cultural studies scholar
Pamela Thoma characterizes “priv-lit,” for example, as a genre that
instructs female citizen-subjects in proper self-governance within neo-
liberalism, emphasizing upscale consumption and the entrepreneurial
self in ways that romanticize women’s free and flexible labor in a post-­
recession economy. The recession heightened urgencies associated with
social reproduction, labor, political economy, and cultural citizenship.
White-centric recession lit’s narratives of precarity within neoliberalism
can be read as assertions that all labor is becoming feminized labor,
meaning that it is increasingly flexible, underpaid, and insecure, in late
capitalist economies.
In contrast to pre-recession white chick lit, post-recession and women-
of-color chick lit both foreground the requirement that women adjust for
the demands of neoliberalism by increasing their reproductive labor. It
may be, however, that while white post-recession priv-lit urges women
to mitigate economic crisis through their labor and entrepreneurial flex-
ibility, women-of-color chick lit offers a more profound analysis of how
nonwhite and im/migrant women’s labor has always already been crit-
ical to racial capitalism. Because women-of-color and diasporic subge-
nres have established a legacy of concern for characters’ location within
racial capitalism, chick lit from these subgenres emerging during and
after the recession can be read for its engagement with these deep anx-
ieties about the gendered and racialized economy. Women-of-color and
diasporic chick lit can interrogate the negotiations and reinvention of the
entrepreneurial feminine in dominant white chick lit, including the ways
in which dominant white priv-lit narratives encourage a reinvestment
of social reproductive labor within increasingly demanding neoliberal
gendered economies. Moreover, like Goddess for Hire, they can also
function as technologies of address and calls to action and activism.
 Prologue  33
Sistahs on the Reading Edge
As we write in 2018, as Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon launches her
progressive Democratic gubernatorial campaign in New York, we see an
opportunity to engage the ongoing impact of chick lit and its attendant
culture industry outside of the literary text as well. Indeed, it makes
us contemplate how little attention is and was paid to the ways that
chick lit has never been just literary. Chick media has long demonstrated
what has been referred to as the convergence of cultural forms and so-
cial practices to create new media ecologies. Sex and the City, Bridget
Jones Diary, and Girls, as well as The Mindy Project, Insecure, and
Girls Trip have proliferated across hybrid media forms (e.g., book, tele-
vision, film, vlog, and social media). Creating successful YouTube series,
blowing up Black Twitter, creating and taking online quizzes to match
viewers and readers with their favorite characters—women-of-color fans
have actively engaged texts across media and platforms. We believe that
the popular feminine gives scholars unique opportunities to understand
how technological and sociocultural change across media ecologies is
racialized and gendered.
This explosion of cross-platform fan engagement has further called
our attention to our own failure to directly address reading popular fic-
tion in our original essay. While we attended to what chick lit can do,
we neglected what is actually done with and to it. We were remiss in
thinking through how women-of-color and diasporic feminist chick lit
traveled and constituted social spaces. This is, in part, a shortcoming
of our methodology. As we have learned from Stuart Hall and Janice
­Radway, among others, what readers do with texts is as intriguing a
question as what the texts themselves do.
We know that reading chick lit is not necessarily a solitary act. Studies
of reading reveal what an interactive and collective act reading actually
is. Tamara Bhalla forwards that reading is more critical to formations of
community and belonging than is often recognized. Consuming fiction
can be an act that is critical to the formation of communities, imagined
or otherwise, either informally or through organized collectives such
as book clubs. Women-of-color reading groups can actively constitute
significant social spaces embedded within racialized and gendered capi-
talism and neoliberalism. While reading communities can further ethnic
and cultural nationalism within neoliberal multiculturalism, Bhalla sug-
gests that they can also be sites of engagement that integrate sociality,
care labor, consumption, and leisure. Bringing together chick lit scholars
and authors, this edited volume builds on the practices of fan culture
and on the close connections among readers, and between readers and
authors, that have long been part of feminine genre fiction.
The recent example of the Sistahs on the Reading Edge book club might
provide an important example of why analyzing reading communities
34  Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai
can illuminate the significance of social practices associated with chick
industries. The Sistahs book club made the news in August 2015, when
eleven of its members, ten of whom were black, were evicted from a
Napa Valley Wine Train, where they had gathered to discuss Brenda
Jackson’s romance novel A Man’s Promise. The women, who ranged
in age from thirty-nine to eighty-five, were kicked off the train after
an employee complained that they were “too loud.” Black Twitter re-
sponded immediately to the news with the hashtag #laughingwhileblack
to describe this act of blatant discrimination that perceived the women’s
racialized pleasure as excessive and targeted it for criminalization. The
women filed a racial discrimination lawsuit seeking $11 million in dam-
ages and, in August 2016, settled with the Wine Train company for an
undisclosed amount. While a book club meeting on a Napa wine train
seems like a trope straight out of a chick lit novel, it is important that we
consider not only the consumerism but also the pleasure, sociality, and
care labor (squad care) that may also occur within the collective space
of the book club. Though romance and chick lit may be seen as genres
focused on neoliberal individualism, this example, like the friendships
and squad care of The Joy Luck Club and Waiting to Exhale, opens up
other possibilities.

Chick Lit’s Offspring

If white chick lit captures the biopolitics of the good life and upward mo-
bility within the structural contradictions of neoliberalism, we suggest
that women-of-color and diasporic chick lit can provide acknowledg-
ment, if not critique, of the structural and systemic violence of neolib-
eralism and racial capitalism. Chick flicks have not disappeared, and
the popularity of the 2017 film Girls Trip continues to disprove the
racist commonsense of Hollywood that assumes features with African
­A merican stars cannot succeed. What other genres might now be in-
structive to better understand the aftershocks of the global recession and
precarity under neoliberalism? Put another way, if we trace the geneal-
ogy of women-of-color chick lit to middlebrow literature such as Wait-
ing to Exhale and The Joy Luck Club, where can we trace its present? To
what alternative futures might these alternative genealogies lead? And
rather than suggesting that chick lit is dead, who, we ask, might be chick
lit’s offspring?
Importantly, popular feminine literary forms—memoirs, romance, and
mysteries—continue to demonstrate a staying power, while the popular-
ity of graphic novels and YA fiction has skyrocketed. Chick lit continues
to thrive within YA fiction; for example, Teen Vogue’s recent recommen-
dation of “10 diverse books by YA authors of color” features Sandhya
Menon’s desi chick lit novel When Dimple Met Rishi, complete with a
 Prologue  35
cover photograph of a young South Asian woman holding an iced coffee
in hennaed hands. But the other featured titles in the slideshow span
diverse subgenres, from realist fiction about social justice to gender-­
bending fantasy. Perhaps no novel captures the rise of women-of-color
YA as does Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give. Inspired by the deaths
of Oscar Grant in Oakland and Trayvon Martin in Florida, Thomas’s
captivating novel demonstrates the aftermath of police violence on the
young black female protagonist who is inspired to action by the Black
Lives Matter movement.
In the (post-)global recession rise and dominance of YA fiction genres,
the popularity of dystopic fiction is especially noteworthy. Narratives of
unprecedented environmental disaster, economic inequality, and social
stratification have deeply resonated with readers for their contemporary
renderings of sociopolitical conditions. From E. Nesbit and CS Lewis to
JK Rowling and Rick Riordan, YA and children’s literature has often
featured tales of magic and fantasy in the battle of good versus evil. For
middle school audiences, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series attests to
the ongoing popularity of a group of underdogs battling overwhelming
odds for justice; offspring of Sonia Singh’s Goddess for Hire may well
be Sayantani DasGupta’s The Serpent’s Secret, featuring a sixth-grade
protagonist who discovers she is a princess who must battle demons to
save New Jersey while simultaneously managing her attraction to two
princes. Similarly, in Roshani Choksi’s Aru and the End of Time, the
seventh-grade protagonist discovers that she is a reincarnation of one
of the five Pandava brothers from Hindu mythology and must enter the
Kingdom of Death. For slightly older audiences, The Hunger Games,
Divergent, and The Maze Runner are among the many contemporary
dystopic YA novels that have large “crossover” adult audiences. YA
fantasy and dystopic fiction from diasporic African writers, such as
Tomi Adeyemi’s best-selling The Children of Blood and Bone or Nnedi
Okarafor’s Binti and Akata Witch, often incorporate African cultural
and religious ethos, cosmologies, and settings to address contemporary
issues of racial injustice and violence; importantly, Adeyemi has a seven-­
figure book series contract that includes a movie deal as well. Justina
Ireland’s Dread Nation, on the other hand, deploys Native and black
girls fighting the undead to convey the racial and gendered violence of
post-Reconstruction America. In short, post-recession dystopic fiction
has become perhaps the dominant popular feminine genre for youth and
adults alike. Certainly, dystopic themes in YA fiction might be seen as
a sharp contrast to the individualistic impulse of chick lit’s happy end-
ings. Instead, however, we suggest that dystopic YA fiction runs parallel
to chick lit, capturing the anxiety and fears surrounding neoliberal-
ism’s intensification of inequality, violence, and social death on a global
scale. If chick lit invokes neoliberalism’s biopolitical insistence on the
36  Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai
future-oriented optimization of life through choice, health, and the en-
trepreneurial self, then dystopic YA makes visible its necropolitics—the
state violence, structural injustice, and targeted destruction that are neo-
liberalism’s dark matter.
Women-of-color literature and media have had an enormous impact
in the domains of speculative and dystopic fiction intended for both
youth and adults. Within popular cinema, the tandem success of Ryan
Coogler’s feminist-friendly Black Panther and Ava DuVernay’s cin-
ematic adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time indicate that Afro-futuristic
reimaginings are at the forefront of intersectional conceptualizations of
new and more just futures. A resurgence of interest in black science fic-
tion writers such as Nnedi Okarafor and Octavia Butler (see also adri-
enne maree brown’s coedited collection Octavia’s Brood, focused on
the connection between science fiction and social movements, and her
monograph Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds) and
the emergence of new authors such as Justina Ireland and Tomi Adeyemi
is occurring simultaneously in popular, activist, and academic domains
as authors travel between literary, scholarly, popular, and activist genres
and realms. Again, we see these emerging imaginaries not as replacing
women-of-color chick lit but as extending its genealogies of representa-
tion, which emphasize the gendered nature of global racial capital, the
violences of white supremacy and settler colonialism, and the necessity
of mutual support networks for surviving both and for creating more
just futures.
When we read all those desi lit novels more than a decade ago, we
were compelled by the way Kavita Daswani embedded her im/migrant
characters’ lives in a world circumscribed by neoliberal global capital
and inspired by how Sonia Singh’s Goddess reimagined the magical and
material possibilities for social justice within and beyond that world. To-
day, critical engagements with racial capital, neoliberalism, and systemic
and structural violence continue to be central to women-of-color and
diasporic feminist media and cultural production across genres, from
happy endings to dystopian nightmares. Women-of-color and diasporic
feminist visions straddle these generic formulas, as women-of-color and
im/migrant culture makers straddle the biopolitical borders that deter-
mine who will be targeted for neoliberalism’s management and optimi-
zation of life, health, freedom, and choice, and who will be marked for
its technologies of social and biological death. As these cultural pro-
ductions exceed boundaries between genres and media, and between
activism and academia, women-of-color and diasporic chick lit continue
to “hold up” for us as readers, because women-of-color and im/migrant
feminist culture makers continue to hold up our scholarship, our com-
munities, and our movements.
 Prologue  37
Works Cited
Bhalla, Tamara. Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and
South Asian American Community. University of Illinois Press, 2016.
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.
AK Press, 2017.
Chung, H. S. “From ‘Me So Horny’ to ‘I’m So Ronery’: Asian Images and Yel-
low Voices in American Cinema.” Film Dialogue (2013): 172–291.
Hill, India. “10 YA Books by Women of Color to Read in 2017.” Teen Vogue,
TeenVogue.com, 10 Jan. 2017, www.teenvogue.com/gallery/10-diverse-books-
by-ya-authors-of-color-to-read-in-2017. Accessed April 2, 2018.
Levin, Amy K. Questions for a New Century: Women’s Studies and Integrative
Learning. A Report to the National Women’s Studies Association. College
Park, MD: National Women’s Studies Association, 2007.
Mowatt, Robyn. “Group of Black Women Kicked Off of Napa Wine Train
Settle Lawsuit.” Essence, Essence.com, 20 April 2016. www.essence.
com/2016/04/20/group-black-women-kicked-napa-wine-train-settle-lawsuit.
Accessed April 1, 2018.
Thoma, Pamela. “What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-Era
Chick Flick.” Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Aus-
terity, edited by Diane Negra & Yvonne Tasker. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2014, pp. 107–135.
Section I

Categories of Chick Lit

1 “More Than Sex, Shopping,
and Shoes”1
Cosmopolitan Indigeneity
and Cultural Politics in Anita
Heiss’s Koori Lit
Lauren O’Mahony

The sub-genre of Australian Indigenous chick lit was virtually invented

by Heiss and, in providing a more nuanced, accessible vision of Ab-
original identity, she has addressed a glaring absence from the literary
landscape. [Manhattan Dreaming] brings a fresh perspective to an often
homogenous genre.
(Fullerton)

Contextualizing Koori Lit

In the early years of the chick lit genre, a certain kind of heroine seemed
to frequently appear: privileged, white, Western, heterosexual, middle
class. Book cover art alone shapes a reader’s expectations about the kind
of story, and protagonists, that might be contained within. Early edition
covers of Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Sex and the City (1996) left
little doubt about their heroines’ Caucasian heritage. Moreover, screen
adaptations of best-selling American and British chick novels such as
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sex and the City, and Animal Husbandry (along-
side In Her Shoes, The Devil Wears Prada, and I Don’t Know How She
Does It) have reinforced claims of chick lit’s ethnocentricity as a “white
women’s genre.” Each film depicts Caucasian protagonists, many of them
glamorous and beautiful, navigating the perils of t­ wenty-first-century
white womanhood. While readers may have more latitude in imagining
a nonwhite heritage for a novel protagonist, film and television repre-
sentations of chick texts leave little room for creative readings or (re)
imaginings, especially in terms of ethnicity. It seems that at first glance,
chick lit, chick flicks, and chick television appear to connote a certain
kind of ethnocentricity, one associated with “whiteness.” While claims
of “whiteness” may hold with chick television and chick flicks, recent
developments within chick lit show an increasing range of national and
ethnic perspectives. This chapter examines one example drawn from
42  Lauren O’Mahony
Australian chick lit, specifically the five novels by best-­selling ­Aboriginal
author Anita Heiss. Her novels innovate the wider genre by utilizing
a number of new textual strategies to represent Aboriginal heroines
and numerous cultural issues. This chapter argues that Heiss’s chick lit
serves an educational and political purpose: her novels repurpose char-
acteristics of the wider genre to represent Indigenous women navigating
romantic, professional, and cultural scenarios. Readers are positioned
to reflect on their own cultural beliefs and attitudes, potentially prompt-
ing deeper engagements with Indigenous Australians and the issues that
affect them.
Anita Heiss’s “Koori lit” novels broaden what constitutes chick lit and
subsequently challenges previous assertions that the genre is dominated
by “white women.” In her introduction to This Is Not Chick Lit (2006),
Elizabeth Merrick pits chick lit against “Literature.” Differentiating her
collection from the wider genre, she explains,

Chick lit is a genre, like the thriller, the sci-fi novel, or the fantasy
epic. Its form and content are, more or less, formulaic: white girl in
the big city searches for Prince Charming, all the while shopping,
alternately cheating on or adhering to her diet, dodging her boss,
and enjoying the occasional teary-eyed lunch with her token Sassy
Gay Friend…Details about race and class are almost always absent
except, of course, for the protagonist’s relentless pursuit of Money,
a Makeover, and Mr Right.
(vii–viii)

Merrick’s claims of the preponderance of stories about the “white girl

in the big city” alongside the almost total “absence” of “details about
race and class” may well have held their weight when her collection was
published in 2006. However, such claims appear dated when one consid-
ers what currently defines chick lit, especially if new works like Heiss’s
Koori lit are incorporated.
Academic definitions of chick lit often acknowledge the preoccupa-
tions and cultural origins of many protagonists while demonstrating
shifts in the genre since its inception in the late 1990s. Merrick’s defini-
tion contains an inbuilt assumption that chick lit is a stable genre and
that what has been will continue to be. 2 Caroline J. Smith (2008), how-
ever, acknowledges that chick lit is a dynamic and evolving genre that
has changed markedly between the genre’s inception and the time her
text was published:

Loosely defined, chick lit…consists of heroine-centered narratives

that focus on the trials and tribulations of their individual pro-
tagonists. At its outset, the genre was narrowly defined in that
the protagonists depicted in these texts were young, single, white,
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  43
heterosexual, British and American women in their late twenties
and early thirties, living in metropolitan areas.
(2)3

Smith argues that the genre’s enormous commercial success has led to
an expansion in chick lit’s “demographic,” whereby “it now chronicles
the lives of women of varying ages, races, and nationalities” (2). Nu-
merous chick lit offshoots and subgenres have extended or completely
reimagined the scenarios popular in early best sellers. Yardley (2006),
for example, lists thirteen reformulations of early chick lit, including
“mommy lit,” “lad lit,” and “ethnic chick lit.” Variations also occur
in terms of setting with many novels using locations beyond England,
Ireland, and the US.
Australian chick lit exemplifies one geographical offshoot that rede-
ploys the genre’s familiar attributes to a non-transcontinental setting.
The first Australian chick lit novels were published in the year 2000
and, like their British and North American counterparts, employed a
traditional urban setting with a single white women heroine.4 However,
a good number of Australian chick plots occur in the suburbs, rural
spaces, and even remote “red dirt” locations, and feature women in
varying circumstances and with a range of cultural origins. 5 The emer-
gence of chick novels from Australia, including Anita Heiss’s Koori lit,
has contributed to the genre’s evolution and expansion beyond the early
myopic definitions that protagonists were “young, single, white, hetero-
sexual, British and American.”6 The accusation of chick lit’s represen-
tational focus on “white women” is true of Australian novels only until
2007 when Anita Heiss published the first of five “Koori lit” novels fea-
turing well-educated, professional urban Aboriginal protagonists.
Anita Heiss, a prolific fiction and nonfiction writer, made a conscious
decision to write what she calls “Koori lit.”7 Heiss found she shared
little with the characters or themes of much contemporary writing and
noticed that Aboriginal authors were largely absent from commercial
fiction (Black Enough 212–213).8 Heiss was motivated to write com-
mercial fiction due to the potential for a wider market reach. As she ex-
plained in an interview for Australia’s national public radio broadcaster
ABC, “I’ve published a textbook and maybe 500 people have bought it
but I’ve published commercial women’s fiction and 15,000 people buy it”
­(Valentine).9 Her statement acknowledges the influence of text format on
audience reach whereby utilizing chick lit’s format enabled her to access
a different market in comparison to her nonfiction texts. She aimed for
her Koori lit to appeal to certain readers and be read under certain cir-
cumstances: “I was driven to write a book that other Australian women
like me would read in the bath, on the beach or the train or bus and so
forth” (Black Enough 213). In reaching a particular market, Heiss in-
sists she wanted to engage audiences intellectually, especially those “that
44  Lauren O’Mahony
weren’t previously engaging with Aboriginal Australia in any format,
either personally, professionally or subconsciously” (Black Enough 214).
Like other chick lit authors before her, Heiss has defended her novels
and her “choice” to write them against claims she has “dumb[ed]-down”
or “betray[ed] readers of [her] serious work” (Black Enough 215). She
emphasizes that people, including Aboriginal women, are more likely to
read her novels than her nonfiction texts.
Heiss regards chick lit as a familiar and enjoyable format for readers
who she says will generally “look for a book that looks like the book
they just read” (Valentine). Using the familiar chick lit format, particu-
larly “the journey of relationships” (Valentine), Heiss aims to encourage
readers “to think about Aboriginal issues and reflect on contemporary
Australia culturally, socially and politically” (Valentine). Her works, as
she explains, offer “an insight into just some of the realities of just some
of the Aboriginal women like me” (Black Enough 216) and “smash”
stereotypes associated with Indigenous Australians generally and Indig-
enous women particularly (Keenen). As Heiss has stated of herself,

I don’t tell the time by the sun—I tell time by Dolce & G
­ abbana…
I  don’t wear ochre, I wear Clinique. I don’t go walkabout, I
drive a sports car. I hunt for kangaroo three times a week in the
supermarket.
(Keenen)

Such humorous statements, often echoed by her Koori lit heroines, of-
fer a powerful corrective to persistent stereotypes about Aboriginal and
Indigenous Australians. Through her Koori lit specifically, Heiss aims
to challenge stereotypes associated with Aboriginal Australians and ul-
timately redefine popular representations of Indigenous women and In-
digenous culture.
Heiss’s Koori novels explore the lives of Aboriginal heroines living in
cosmopolitan urban cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, and New York.
To 2017, Heiss has written five Koori lit novels: Not Meeting Mr Right
(2007), Avoiding Mr Right (2008), Manhattan Dreaming (2010), Paris
Dreaming (2011), and Tiddas (2014).10 Her novels represent indepen-
dent, professional heroines navigating the ebbs and flows of their ca-
reers, friendships, families, and romantic relationships. Readers learn
that her heroines endure dating and romantic disasters, not unlike
heroines in the wider genre. However, these difficulties are often com-
pounded by stereotypes, assumptions, and expectations associated with
Aboriginal cultural identity. For her heroines, romantic success depends
on the successful negotiation of cultural politics very differently to the
genre’s Caucasian heroines.
This chapter argues that Heiss revises some of the key stylistic and
narrative attributes of chick lit to represent her Aboriginal heroines. In
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  45
writing chick lit from an Indigenous perspective, Heiss has maintained,
reworked, and departed from some of chick lit’s usual features. Heiss’s
first novel Not Meeting Mr Right clearly echoes aspects of Candace
Bushnell’s novella Sex and the City (1996). One reviewer described Not
Meeting Mr Right as “the Indigenous version of the original Sex and the
City columns” (Brunt) while Heiss found herself badged as an emergent
“Koori Bradshaw.” While Heiss has acknowledged her repurposing of
the familiar chick lit format, her novels contain significant departures
from the genre. For example, while Sex and the City explores the ur-
ban adventures of a newspaper columnist and her friends, Heiss’s novels
focus on professional Indigenous women working in education, govern-
ment, and the arts. While Carrie Bradshaw delighted in experiencing
New York as a familiar city, three of Heiss’s heroines move to a new city
which leads them to explore a new cultural context while reflecting on
Aboriginal cultural identity. Her novels also reconfigure the romantic
narrative structure usually employed in chick lit by frequently delaying
and decentralizing romance and its resolution to focus on professional,
social, and cultural issues. In revising chick lit from an Aboriginal per-
spective, as Mathew has argued, Heiss “bring[s] chick lit into the fold
of Aboriginal Australian Literature” (“Educating the Reader” 334).
Arguably, Heiss’s Koori lit also brings an Aboriginal perspective to the
wider chick lit genre. In both cases, her novels have the potential to
reach a wider readership and encourage thinking about the cultural is-
sues represented.
This chapter explains three distinct textual strategies employed in
Heiss’s Koori lit to prompt readers to reflect on Aboriginal culture,
identity, and history. First, her novels use the “journey of relationships”
to explore inter- and intra-cultural relationships between heroines and
potential suitors. This journey is often structured through the vital ro-
mantic elements. Second, Heiss communicates key issues relating to
Indigenous and Aboriginal culture through the characterization of her
heroines, especially via their careers, travel to unfamiliar cities, and
professional activities. In doing so, Heiss’s novels challenge what Guer-
rero describes as chick lit’s “popular ethnocentrism that assumes that
women of color don’t exist in urban worlds of glamour” (100).11 Lastly,
I discuss the metafictional qualities of Heiss’s fifth novel, Tiddas. The
novel employs a reading group motif to discuss the form and content of
numerous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literary texts. Tiddas
prompts readers to reflect on writing and reading practices, use the novel
as a reading group text, and seek out the literary texts discussed by the
group. Together, these three central strategies encourage reflection on
Aboriginal culture and the past and present situation of Indigenous Aus-
tralians. Such an engagement may develop intercultural competence in
readers, in turn possibly encouraging reconciliatory social and cultural
change.
46  Lauren O’Mahony
Developing Cultural Awareness Through “The Journey
of Relationships”
As scholars such as Stephanie Harzewski (2011) and Rocío Montoro
(2012) have discussed extensively, demarcating chick lit from what con-
stitutes “romance” is neither straightforward nor easy. Harzewski ar-
gues that chick lit “displaces” popular romance of the Harlequin kind,
offering a “postfeminist alternative” that comprises more realism, dif-
ferent ways of representing the hero and a questioning of romantic ideals
(Chick Lit and Postfeminism 18). Montoro (2012) argues that disen-
tangling romance, romantic fiction, and chick lit is a complex task.12
Montoro’s study focuses on chick lit’s linguistic and stylistic attributes;
thus, her analysis largely excludes the genre’s narrative conventions in
comparison to romance novels. She does, however, note that chick lit
shares the “romantic resolution” of popular romances. I concur with
Harzewski and Montoro that chick lit eschews simply reproducing the
ingredients of popular romance; rather chick lit updates, expands, and
extends the generic traits of popular romances.13
Like many chick lit novels, Heiss’s Koori lit utilizes the basic nar-
rative conventions of romance while engaging with love and romance
thematically to offer a cultural critique. Heiss’s novels make visible the
cultural and social complications that her Aboriginal characters must
navigate and overcome to enter loving relationships. For Heiss’s Aborig-
inal heroines, dating and the progression of romance is complicated by
the cultural context and the cultural differences between the heroine
and potential suitors. Pamela Regis’s (2003) theory of the popular ro-
mance novel is a useful entry point to analyzing how Heiss’s novel use
the romantic journey to explore the cultural context of Australia and
beyond. In A Natural History of the Romance, Regis theorizes a basic
and extended definition of any romance novel. The basic definition sees
any romance novel as “a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the
courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” (19). The extended
definition features eight essential elements, including the “society de-
fined,” “meeting,” and “betrothal.”14 Heiss’s five Koori lit novels con-
form to Regis’s basic and extended definition (O’Mahony “In Search”).
This section examines Heiss’s novels through two of Regis’s essential
romantic elements: the society defined and the meeting. A focus on these
elements reveals some of the problems that arise when Aboriginal hero-
ines date potential suitors.
Heiss’s first four novels, Not Meeting Mr Right, Avoiding Mr Right,
Manhattan Dreaming, and Paris Dreaming, reproduce a familiar chick
lit premise of a “single woman” navigating the perils of dating to even-
tually secure a good man’s love. Regis’s “society defined” is useful for
identifying the cultural and social forces in a romance’s fictional uni-
verse that make finding love difficult for these heroines. The “society
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  47
defined” often occurs near the start of a novel, revealing the “corrupt”
or problematic aspects of the storyworld depicted (Regis, Natural His-
tory 14). Although the portrayal of society differs between romance
novels, for Regis, society will always be “flawed” in some way: “it may
be incomplete, superannuated, or corrupt” (Natural History 31). Regis
argues that a romantic couple’s eventual union ultimately “reforms” the
society and potentially the corrupt aspects (Natural History 14). Read-
ing Heiss’s novels through the “society defined” illuminates the contem-
porary issues that arise when her Aboriginal heroines date, fall in love,
work toward their professional aspirations, and travel to new cities. For
these heroines, dating and friendship occur in the contemporary Austra-
lian cultural context where racism and cultural ignorance is common-
place; often these become obstacles that heroines must surmount to find
companionate love.
Identifying the “society defined” where the romance occurs is espe-
cially important in Heiss’s Koori lit because it is largely a representation
of contemporary Australia including its cultural politics. The social and
cultural context influences the kind of “Mr Rights” available to Koori
heroines. In Not Meeting Mr Right’s first chapter, Alice Aigner worries
that at age twenty-eight, she is unmarried and childless; however, she
also draws attention to her background as a “Blackfella from La Per-
ouse” (1), her interest in social justice issues, and her mother’s nagging
“about breeding and maintaining the race” (17). Alice begins the novel
with a personal motto of “I love being single” that is soon transformed
into “I want to meet and marry Mr Right” after she attends a disastrous
high school reunion. To meet her perfect man, Alice realizes she will
have to meet and possibly kiss a few frogs. To assist this process, Alice
and her friends devise a list of ten “Essential Selection Criteria for Mr
Right,” including “single, straight and wanting to be in a relationship,”
“financially secure and debt-free,” and “[m]ust be a non-racist, non-­
fascist, non-homophobic believer in something, preferably himself” (37).
Alice’s criteria for Mr Right recalls Bridget Jones’s list of New Year’s
resolutions, including her exclusionary criteria of “I will not…Fall for
any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics,
people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomaniacs, chauvin-
ists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts” (Fielding 2). The dif-
ference between Bridget and Alice is that Bridget apparently never had
to worry about encountering racists or xenophobes. As an Aboriginal
woman, however, Alice fears dating a racist or a culturally insensitive
man. Of course, Alice’s fears are realized during numerous encounters
with inappropriate men. For example, Alice’s mother attempts to pair
her up with Cliff, the son of a family friend. Despite her mother’s match-
making aspirations, Alice suspects that Cliff is gay and bluntly confides
her real impressions to the reader, “I thought Cliff was a right-wing
fuck-knuckle… Cliff was a huge fan of John Howard and his views, and
48  Lauren O’Mahony
Keith Windschuttle was his favourite historian” (56). In this case, Alice
has concluded that she is not compatible with Cliff, less because of his
sexuality than because of his political and historical views. For Alice,
Cliff’s right-wing views immediately impede any attraction. Romantic
choices based on political persuasion are frequently glossed over in the
wider chick lit genre, yet Heiss’s novels explore the importance of politi-
cal compatibility especially in terms of culture and ethnicity.
As well as political incompatibility, Alice fears potential suitors may
be motivated to date her because of her ethnicity. Dating scenarios of
this kind offer a perspective on intercultural relationships often absent in
the wider chick lit genre. As Guerrero (2006) and Merrick (2006) have
argued, chick lit contains mostly “white” heroines and their “white” ro-
mantic suitors. Novels that centralize “white” experiences, particularly
in romantic relationships, often do not examine interracial or intercul-
tural relationships. Heiss’s Aboriginal heroines, however, often consider
intercultural dynamics including the possibility that they will attract a
potential suitor because they hold an ethnically based exotic appeal to
the other sex. In Not Meeting Mr Right, Alice states that her ideal Mr
Right should think her “gorgeous” but not “adore me because I’m Black.
I don’t want to be someone’s ‘exotic other’” (34).15 When mentioned in
Heiss’s novels, “exotic other” discourses imply an awareness that some
“white” men either partly or wholly choose a romantic partner because
they embody cultural difference. In her discussion of writing about Ab-
original people by non-Aboriginal writers, Linda Miley (2006) argues
that there is a danger in “[r]epresenting the black person as a stereotypi-
cal object of fantasy and desire”; for Miley, such representations may re-
sult in reducing “black people… to something more akin to animal than
human” (11). This dehumanizing reduction of “black people” as akin to
animals or as “fantasy objects” is precisely what Heiss’s heroines show
awareness of and want to avoid at all costs in a romantic relationship.
Indigenous readers who may have had a similar experience to Heiss’s
heroines, perhaps of being treated as an “exotic other,” may feel a sense
of shared experience. Non-Indigenous readers may reflect on whether
they make racist assumptions or hold stereotypical views of Indigenous
peoples; non-Aboriginal readers may also consider how it might feel to
be an “exotic other.” Such reflective thinking positions may lead to atti-
tudinal or behavioral change in readers toward intercultural awareness
and empathy.
Heiss’s critique of the “exotic other” discourse occurs in an extended
example in Not Meeting Mr Right, further demonstrating how contem-
porary Australian culture produces certain stereotypes about cultural
identity. Alice dates a man she calls “Casper” due to his very pale skin.
Her encounter with him begins when she wakes in his flat after a night
of drinking and dancing. She notices the messy apartment around her,
an Anthony Mundine poster above the bed, and is thankful that there is
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  49
no evidence to suggest they have had sexual intercourse.16 She flees the
apartment realizing she is in “Blacktown.” Alice later agrees to go on
a date with “Casper,” whose real name is Simon. The date is a disaster
from start to finish because of Simon’s misguided desire to explore what
he perceives as his Aboriginal cultural origins. Though exceptionally
pale skinned, Simon attempts to perform “blackness”; he adopts what
he sees as “black” signifiers: he wears a “black and white Treaty t-shirt,”
smokes a cigarette, and drinks a “black beer” (159–160). The first-person
narrative allows readers insight into Alice’s thoughts: “If he thought he
was doing his bit for reconciliation by doing all this ‘Black’ stuff, he was
sadly mistaken” (160). Simon reveals that the night they met, he was at
“Koori-oke” because he likes “hangin’ out with my people…I’m Koori,
can’t ya tell?” (162–163). A shocked Alice tells the reader that although
“Identity’s not about skin color,” none of the usual Koori “identifying
characteristics” were evident to her. Readers are positioned to note that
Simon seems completely unaware of what it means to be Aboriginal, let
alone a “Koori.” When Alice asks, “who’s your mob,” Simon is clearly
uncertain, citing vague evidence of a distant Aboriginal blood relative. A
furious Alice provides an internal commentary for the reader, explaining
Simon’s feeling of being “out of place,” suggesting it is because he is a
“deadset weirdo and a loser. It had nothing to do with Aboriginal her-
itage” (164). She asks when he has experienced racism and discrimina-
tion and what he knows of “Aboriginal community.” His only response
is to sit “stunned, mouth agape, and obviously offended” (165). Alice
explains to Simon her own view of Aboriginal cultural identity as being
“spiritual” and “a lived experience—not something you find by accident
and then attach its name to yourself” (165). Alice concludes that Simon
was trying to “align himself with a strong Koori woman to help him in-
filtrate the community and be accepted by the local mob” (166). Clearly,
Alice is disgusted that Simon is treating her as an “exotic other” as well
as his motives for doing so. The interaction between Alice and Simon
prompts readers to reflect on discourses around the definition of “Ab-
originality” in Australia.17 The novel positions readers to follow Alice’s
interpretation of the situation that Simon is experiencing a “white Black-
fella” identity crisis. This dating disaster exemplifies and makes visible
an added complication to romantic relationships for Indigenous women:
that they need to be wary of men wanting to date them for racially and
culturally motivated reasons.
Other dating scenarios in Heiss’s novels show heroines encountering
racism and cultural ignorance in their meetings with potential suit-
ors. For example, Avoiding Mr Right’s Peta Tully meets a handsome
stranger named Jason in a bar and he soon enthusiastically asks for
her contact details to arrange a proper date. His attitude toward her
changes immediately upon reading her business card, “Peta Tully, Na-
tional Aboriginal Policy Manager, DOMSARIA” (128). As the narrator
50  Lauren O’Mahony
recounts, “Obviously confused, he asks, ‘Are you an Aborigine?’ As if
I’m a leper or some other highly contagious patient with a debilitating
disease” (128). Clearly, his attraction diminishes upon discovering her
cultural background. An enraged Peta ponders their interaction, “How
could one word on a piece of cardboard make someone change their
mind so quickly about another human being?” (129). Such scenarios
remind readers that cultural ignorance can appear in many forms and
for a range of reasons. Jason appears to have internalized negative ste-
reotypes regarding Aboriginal Australians; although attracted to Peta, it
is insufficient to overcome his negative views. Readers are positioned to
sympathize with heroines such as Peta, for she does not just endure the
run of the mill dating woes of heroines in the wider chick genre; Heiss
reveals that Aboriginal heroines face unique situations rarely encoun-
tered by their “white” counterparts.
Heiss’s novels certainly show the dating woes of her Aboriginal her-
oines as they endure culturally insensitivity and ignorance. Although
Avoiding Mr Right’s Peta encounters some men who are so culturally ig-
norant that they are not worth talking to, she ultimately finds love with
Mike, a “white” policeman. Their relationship blossoms after much dis-
cussion and dialogue about a range of issues affecting Aboriginal Aus-
tralians. Mike initially uses an array of corny pickup lines to engage Peta
in conversation. However, when Peta learns he works as a police officer,
she is automatically repulsed, telling him, “A Blackfella dating a cop is
like a Jew dating a Nazi. It just can’t happen” (124). This is an interest-
ing role-reversal in comparison to her meeting with Jason. Unlike Jason’s
response to Peta, Mike is unperturbed by the cultural difference between
himself and Peta; yet for Peta, cultural difference creates a major barrier,
specifically because Mike’s job as a police officer symbolizes the long
and fraught history between Aboriginals and law enforcement officials
since colonization.18
Avoiding Mr Right positions readers to see that Peta’s reluctance to-
ward Mike relates to an internal fear that he may reproduce the con-
flicts that have tainted the relationship between Aboriginals and police
in Australia historically. Moreover, Peta fears the potential social judg-
ment that may arise should she become a police officer’s friend, let alone
his lover.19 Eventually, Peta’s fears about Mike are confirmed when they
have dinner together but quickly find they cannot find common ground
on issues related to the relationship between police and Aboriginals. For
example, Mike explains his support of the “due process” in the case of
a police officer accused of killing a “Black man” (144). Peta argues that
despite a coroner’s report showing “a Black man died at the hands of a
white policeman” (144), no charges were laid until after public outrage
erupted, and a special inquiry was launched. Peta tries to persuade Mike
of the unacceptable double standard between the treatment of police and
Aboriginals, stating, “so we have a policing and legal system that says
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  51
it’s worse for a Black man to spit at a white cop than it is for a white cop
to kill a Black man and that’s your fucken process” (144–145). Peta de-
cides that Mike has exercised poor judgment in supporting the accused
officer. However, she realizes that if he sincerely wants to know her bet-
ter, there is an opportunity to encourage his critical engagement with ex-
amples of culturally based inequality in the criminal justice system. Peta
is adamant that to secure another date Mike will have to read Simon
Luckhurst’s Eddie’s Country which she says will “explain the history of
relations between the cops and Kooris and then you’ll understand why
I’m so angry now” (145).20 The developing relationship between Mike
and Peta demonstrates the potential to navigate and negotiate cultural
issues as a romance progresses.
Avoiding Mr Right demonstrates two-way consciousness-raising that
can occur through a developing romantic relationship. Mike certainly
increases his awareness and understanding of the history and current
issues facing Aboriginal Australians through the development of his re-
lationship with Peta; likewise, Peta adjusts her attitude toward the police
as she learns more about Mike’s profession. Late in the novel, after Mike
has developed a more informed view of Australian cultural relations, he
questions Peta’s attitude toward him as a police officer. Her judgmen-
tal treatment of him begins on their first dinner date, when she makes
an offhanded reference to the derogatory expression for police officers,
“pigs.” When scouring the menu, Mike innocently says that the “suck-
ling pig looks good” (141). Peta responds aloud to Mike, “So can pigs
eat pig?” (141) while telling the reader, “As soon as I said it I knew I’d
gone too far” (141). On this occasion, Mike is good-humored. Later on,
though, he suggests that she is being discriminatory toward him, asking
how she would feel if he refused to kiss her because of her Aboriginality.
In response, Alice says she would think he was a “racist prick and proba-
bly tell you so” (236). Mike explains his perspective of her attitude to his
profession as a police officer: “And fair enough. I would be a racist prick
if I said that. But it feels the same when you say to me that you could
never kiss a cop. Can you see how discriminatory you’re being?” (236).
Peta confesses to the reader: “he was right.” The novel positions read-
ers to see that both Peta and Mike have made assumptions about each
other as individuals. Mike demonstrates ignorance about police brutal-
ity toward Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples, while Peta harbors anger
at institutionalized racism, directing some of her anger at Mike. This
particular scene suggests that through dialogue and discussion, both
characters adjust their cultural attitudes toward having a more harmo-
nious relationship. Mike’s suggestion that “it feels the same” though
raises a question of equivalence in terms of Peta’s prejudice and Mike’s
misinformed racism. For some readers, this section will be problematic
because the dialogue between the characters seems to suggest that Peta’s
anger at structural racism within the police force is equivalent to Mike’s
52  Lauren O’Mahony
ignorance about police brutality toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islanders. Over the story, Peta realizes that Mike does not embody the
stereotypical characteristics she assumes all “white” police to have. This
section suggests that Peta’s catharsis in directing her thoughts and feel-
ings about the police toward Mike can inhibit dialogue and individual
change. The narrative shows that the friendship and dialogue between
Peta and Mike has prompted an adjustment of their intercultural compe-
tence and mutual treatment of each other. Peta and Mike’s relationship
and growing cross-cultural awareness exemplifies Miley’s (2006) argu-
ment that productive intercultural interactions can “test” those involved
and result in an “adjustment” of responses and attitudes.
Heiss’s first two Koori novels predominantly represent intercultural
relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal characters within
an Australian context, while her two “Dreaming” novels explore in-
tercultural relationships with men the heroines meet overseas, one a
­Mohawk Indian and the other an Aboriginal diplomat. Heiss’s Koori lit
shows her heroines meeting and dating men from many backgrounds.
Alice in Not Meeting Mr Right dates many men on her quest for Mr
Right, including a Filipino, Samoan, Torres Strait Islander, and a Koori
man. In Manhattan Dreaming, Lauren Lucas begins the novel in a rela-
tionship with Adam, a professional rugby player and “whitefella” (11).
Suggestive photos of Adam with other women keep appearing online
and in the media, which leads Lauren to suspect his infidelity. Adam
strings Lauren along in the relationship, even after she embarks on a cu-
ratorial fellowship at New York’s Smithsonian Gallery. Lauren finds the
relationship with Adam highly ambiguous and ends up dating other men
while in New York, including Cash Brannigan, who the novel implies has
an African American background. Lauren finds that although they have
an enjoyable relationship, she does not love Cash nor can she commit to
staying in New York, a home he never intends to leave. Ultimately, Lau-
ren is let down badly by Adam but ends the novel romantically involved
with Wyatt, her work colleague at the Smithsonian. Wyatt is described
as a “dark guy with a huge white smile” who “looked like a city-styled
cowboy” (122). When they first meet, he reveals he is Mohawk Indian
and briefly explains their cultural history (123–124). Lauren concludes
of their meeting: “I liked Wyatt immediately—he was down to earth,
smart, funny and well dressed, and he was a good sort. I felt at ease
with him straight away” (124). When Wyatt and Lauren eventually re-
alize their mutual affection for each other at the top of the Empire State
Building, as Lauren explains, “it was love and lust and friendship and
possibility all in the one kiss” (298). In this case, Adam the “white”
rugby player is a false hero for Lauren, and the narrative certainly pun-
ishes him for his lack of backbone and failure to be honest with himself
or Lauren: he fails to contribute to a loving relationship with Lauren and
shows little interest in her cultural passions. With Wyatt, Lauren finds a
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  53
mutually beneficial relationship and someone who understands what it
means to live in a society where cultural difference can impact the lives
of individuals.
Alongside exploring intercultural relationships, Heiss’s Koori novels
represent relationships between Aboriginal heroines and heroes. While
Manhattan Dreaming’s Lauren Lucan finds love in New York with her
colleague Wyatt, Paris Dreaming’s Libby Cutmore navigates a relation-
ship with a senior Aboriginal diplomat, Jake Ross. While the heroines
of her other novels seem to predominantly date non-Aboriginal men,
Libby’s relationship with Jake explores the romantic suitability of two
highly educated, well-traveled, and high-flying Aboriginal protagonists.
Readers of Heiss’s Koori lit know that her heroines are usually careful
when dating an Aboriginal suitor, quickly inquiring about family origin
to be certain they are not related (20). Because Heiss’s Koori heroines are
high-powered, well traveled, and well educated, Libby’s meeting with
Jake introduces a similarly qualified Aboriginal man in the storyworld.
When they first meet, Libby is reluctantly attracted to Jake, telling her
friend Canelle, “he’s a Blackfella from Australia and I certainly didn’t
come to Paris to meet a guy I could meet at home. Apart from that, we’re
probably related, stranger things have happened in more unlikely places”
(186). Despite numerous barriers that threaten to keep them apart, they
eventually find love and enter a committed long-term relationship. Their
compatibility is demonstrated in many ways, in particular they enjoy
each other’s company, as Jake explains, he “miss[ed] just sitting and
yarning with Blackfellas about anything” (237). Lauren and Jake dis-
cuss “every Black issue possible.” Heiss’s novels exemplify aspects of
Andrew King’s (2009) analysis of Indigenous sexuality in contemporary
­Australian films, television shows, magazines, and music. Although
King did not include Heiss’s work specifically or contemporary novels
generally in his analysis, his conclusions assist in discerning the repre-
sentational significance of romantic relationships in her Koori lit. Indig-
enous peoples have historically been viewed as separate or outside the
mainstream whereby, as King suggests, “[i]n the media Indigenous peo-
ple are not represented as leading identifiably ‘ordinary’ lives” (King 14).
King traces the increasing prevalence of media representations of Indig-
enous characters in sexual and romantic relationships that conveys a
sense of “ordinariness” and “everyday-ness” that orient to middle-class
or suburban Australia (King). King states that such representations “can
be seen as contributing to a broader process of reconciliation between
non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australia” (King 12) because they work
to locate Aboriginal Australians within mainstream culture.21 Heiss’s
novels represent Aboriginal characters as living ordinary, middle-class
lives: her heroines date, they fall in love with a range of men, they travel
and have high-powered careers. Some relationships are built on shared
cultural experiences while others require negotiation and dialogue.
54  Lauren O’Mahony
Heiss’s novels utilize the narrative conventions of romance used prom-
inently in the chick lit genre but do so with a focus on the issues that
affect Aboriginal heroines. Reader engagement is encouraged through the
“society defined” and progression of romance from the “meeting” to the
“betrothal.” Unfortunately, for Heiss’s heroines, some dates never make
it past the “meeting,” sometimes because of cultural ignorance or racism,
others because of little attraction or chemistry. The endings of her novels
show heroines finding companionate love. In forming a long-term union,
whether it be with a hero who is white, Aboriginal, or from another cul-
tural background, society is redefined: ignorance and cultural intolerance
are challenged, false heroes are punished, and lovers engage in cultural ne-
gotiation or consciousness-raising and honestly speak about their feelings
for each other. In Heiss’s case, romantic conventions are one way that read-
ers are positioned to engage with issues relevant to Aboriginal Australians.
Readers learn that dating can be complicated for Aboriginal women who
frequently have to contend with ignorance, racism, or being treated as an
“exotic other,” something that “white” chick heroines rarely experience.

Representing Cosmopolitan Aboriginality, Teaching the

Reader
Heiss’s Aboriginal heroines, like those of sistah lit, challenge what Guer-
rero has noted is chick lit’s “Sex and the City syndrome” where “women
of color don’t exist in urban worlds of glamour” (100). Koori lit, sim-
ilarly to sistah lit, represents “black women who are upper class, cou-
ture wearing, trendsetting, and powerful, culturally and economically”
(Guerrero 101). Heiss’s heroines live in cosmopolitan cities: they shop;
date; and have high-powered careers in education, government, and the
arts. These heroines show they have benefited from women’s rights to
education, careers, and financial independence. However, as Indigenous
heroines, their freedoms and choices have been impacted by Australia’s
colonial history. 22 This section examines how Heiss’s Koori lit offers an
Indigenous perspective on Australian history, government policy, and
cultural issues specific to Australia, North America, and France through
her heroines’ career and travel experiences. Through these representa-
tions, as Mathew argues, Heiss’s novels serve a pedagogical function by
educating readers about Indigenous issues (“Educating the Reader”). Ul-
timately, Koori lit demonstrates chick lit’s ability to consciousness-raise,
in this case to increase readers’ understanding and awareness of issues
associated with Australian Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples.
While the previous section focused on heroines dealing with cul-
tural issues through the prism of romance, this section examines how
a heroine’s career experiences can function as a pedagogical strategy
to inform the reader or provide different perspectives on current issues.
Harzewski (2006), drawing upon previous inquiries into the “career
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  55
romance novel,” argues that “when the romance plot begins to thicken,
the heroine’s job that initially imbued her with glamour then becomes
temporary” (“Tradition and Displacement” 39). However, in chick lit,
Harzewski finds there is a “greater integration” between work and ro-
mance, thus more deeply engaging with the professional lives of hero-
ines. Nevertheless, as Wells (2006) has suggested, chick lit is generally
“driven” more by the love plot than the career plot (54–55). The balance
between the representation of career and romance seems highly variable
in the chick lit genre with some novels more firmly focused on the work-
ing life of heroines while others engage deeply with romance. This is part
of the internal variation within the wider genre.
In Heiss’s novels, more plot time is devoted to the heroines’ career than
to the “courtship and betrothal.” In Not Meeting Mr Right, Avoiding
Mr Right, Manhattan Dreaming, and Paris Dreaming, though a heroine
may meet her Mr Right early in the novel, the development of romance
and its happy resolution is largely compacted into the final pages. Delay-
ing the development and resolution of romance allows the narrative to
refocus on the heroine’s career and sociocultural context. Koori lit’s ca-
reer and travel focus allows the novels to deeply explore and sometimes
critique aspects of colonialist Australia, including perspectives on his-
tory, policy, politics, art, and culture. In Not Meeting Mr Right, heroine
Alice Aigner works as a high school history teacher. Key scenes depict
Alice communicating with her students and the reader about Australian
history, especially its colonial past. In one example, Alice is teaching her
female students about “significant moments for women in Australian
history” (66). The girls identify the following dates: “1881—Women are
allowed to enrol in the same subjects as men at Sydney University for
the first time”23 and “1901—Women are granted the right to vote” (66).
A student who Alice notes is “non-Koori” points out that “only white
women got the vote in 1901. Aboriginal women didn’t get it until the
1967 referendum” (66). 24 Alice confides in the reader her “pride” that
this student has “pick[ed] up this fact” (67), making the point,

I’d once heard feminist Dale Spender say that if a man ever made a
sexist remark in public, it was up to another man to correct him, not
a woman, and I totally agreed. It was the same with racial issues.
(67)25

Alice’s comment acknowledges that a “non-Koori” student has just cor-

rected another on a cultural issue. This example critiques Australian
history from a feminist and postcolonial perspective while reminding
readers to correct misunderstandings or factual errors relating to cul-
tural history. The reader, especially the “white” reader, may reflect on
these “facts” regarding marginalized peoples, specifically women and
Indigenous Australians. Readers unaware of these dates, especially how
56  Lauren O’Mahony
recently Aboriginal women were permitted to vote, may well be shocked
enough to reflect on the mechanisms that influence basic human rights. 26
This history lesson also compares the varying histories of men, women,
and Indigenous Australians simultaneously to position readers to reflect
on their own understanding of “history.”
Heiss further utilizes Alice’s engagement with “history” to c­ onsciousness-
raise the reader about colonial and Indigenous histories. This is import-
ant when one considers Maddison’s (2009) argument that Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Australians have “failed to properly address past harms
and to resolve national sentiment about our history.” Not addressing “his-
tory” properly can prevent healing and forgiveness. Maddison outlines the
“history wars” of the early 2000s, including Keith Windschuttle’s book
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002) and John Howard’s view
that a “positive” version of Australian history be told. Maddison argues
that such accounts attempt to discredit or ignore Aboriginal historical per-
spectives including violence and massacres that have occurred against Ab-
original peoples (Maddison 214). Heiss’s Not Meeting Mr Right explores
this contested view of Australian “history” when Alice attends a history
teacher’s meeting. Clearly expecting most of the attendees to be “white,”
Alice decides on a mantra for the evening: “I will be kind and compassion-
ate to all the white people I meet today” (279). On arrival, she discovers
unsurprisingly “no brown faces in sight” (279) and soon begins a conver-
sation with “two greying men in suits,” one of them introducing himself
as “a descendant of the first people of the area” (280). Alice’s narration,
initially directed to the reader, queries his statement, “I was fairly sure he
didn’t mean he was Gadigal” (280).27 When Alice questions the man out-
right, he replies that “No, don’t know that family. I’m a descendent of the
Colllinses—­you know the Colllins family, that’s Colllins with three els”
(280). Emboldened, Alice asks, “So you’re a descendent of the first family
who were given a land grant after the local Aboriginal clan, the Gadigal,
were dispossessed of their land, then?” (281). She reveals to the reader that
the men laugh at her condescendingly. Alice asks another question, “Seri-
ously, this is a history association—surely you recognise all history and not
just that which serves the coloniser?” (281). One of the men states, “We
here at the Eastern Suburbs Local History Association recognise Australian
history, Aboriginal history and prehistory as well” (281). Alice expresses
her anger to the reader then queries the logic of their statements:

What Aboriginal history? Everything that happened post-invasion is

Australian history. Aboriginal people didn’t dispossess themselves,
they didn’t poison their own watering holes or place themselves on
government-run reserves and church-run missions. The colonisers
and settlers—the so-called Australians—did that. That’s Australian
history. And as for prehistory, what the hell does that mean?
(281–282)
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  57
Alice directly contests a stereotypically “white male” view of history
from her personal and Aboriginal perspective. She confides in the reader
that she knew “what [Colllins’s friend] meant, but wanted to hear him
say it” (282). This example shows how Heiss uses career-related situ-
ations and the dialogue that accompanies them to represent different
perspectives on important contemporary issues, in this case, contrasting
and ultimately challenging colonial views of Australian history, both
those held by characters within the novel and potentially those held by
readers. For “white” readers, this interaction between characters serves
a reflective purpose; by being aligned with Alice’s view, a “white” reader
might reflect on their own understanding of history and the discursive
forces that have shaped such a view. The reader may realize that they
unintentionally hold such views. Upon reflection, the reader may rene-
gotiate their own understanding of “history” to reconsider how they
understand Australian “colonialism.”
Heiss’s first Koori lit novel engages with contested views of Australian
history via Alice’s career as a history teacher, while her second novel pro-
vides insight into Australian cultural policy and Aboriginal art with her-
oine Peta Tully working as a manager for a government department. In
Heiss’s third and fourth novels, Manhattan Dreaming and Paris Dream-
ing, heroines travel to New York and to Paris, respectively, to undertake
art-related career postings. Both trips coincide with important national
cultural and social moments that prompt comment and reflection by
the heroines alongside a comparison to Australia. For example, ­Lauren
Lucas’s yearlong trip to New York coincides with Barack Obama’s in-
auguration. On inauguration day, she visits the Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture with Cash, a man she is dating. There they
attend an exhibit of “the history of Black politics and politicians in
America” (246). Both “cry” as they watch footage from Obama’s vic-
tory speech. Lauren realizes that “what Cash and I shared was an under-
standing and respect as people of colour, who have remained essentially
voiceless in mainstream politics” (247). When Obama is sworn in the
next day, Lauren wonders if “one day we might have a Black president of
the Republic of Australia” (247). Manhattan Dreaming thus sees Lauren
travel to a new city for her career but in the process learn much about
North American culture, including the treatment of marginalized Afri-
can American people. Lauren’s experience of North American culture
becomes a touchtone for reflecting on similar issues in Australia.
Similarly, when Paris Dreaming’s Libby Cutmore travels to Paris to
work at the Musée du Quai Branly, she encounters cultural inequalities
specific to France. Before departing for Paris, Libby reads about France’s
efforts to ban the burqa and deport Romanian gypsies. On arrival, she
encounters different points of view on the burqa issue. For example, the
Musée’s marketing manager supports banning the burqa because he fears
“the Muslims are going to take over Europe” (144). When he asks for
58  Lauren O’Mahony
Libby’s view, she says she “share[s] the same views as President Obama:
you can’t tell people what to wear, especially if it’s going to stigmatize
Islam” (145). Later in the novel, Libby and her colleague Canelle discuss
the burqa issue after witnessing an elderly French couple “tut-tutting
and shaking their heads in disapproval [at two women wearing burqas
on the train]” (213). Canelle and Libby identify themselves as feminists
and then explore different viewpoints on the burqa, including the ar-
gument that it is “oppressive to women.” Canelle exclaims her shock at
France’s approach: “I cannot believe we have done this with the burqa”
(213). Libby asks, “And while feminists argue that the veil is oppressive
to women and a symbol of men’s power over us, what about women
who choose to wear the veil?” (214). Libby likens wearing the burqa to
“asserting our right to dress to make a statement about our identity as a
woman by choosing what we wear” (214). Libby and Canelle appear to
share the same view of this issue, discussing different perspectives on the
rights of burqa wearing women to dress as they choose. Although Libby
tells Canelle any attempt to ban the burqa “wouldn’t happen in Austra-
lia” (214), Libby confides in the reader that she is not completely con-
fident. Libby and Canelle’s nuanced view regarding the burqa appears
to be influenced by liberal feminist and postcolonial perspectives that
emphasize tolerance, empathy, and intercultural respect. The novel’s ex-
ploration of character viewpoints impresses upon readers the complexity
of the issue and the need for intercultural empathy in understanding nu-
merous perspectives alongside the reasons behind them. Examples such
as this illustrate how Heiss’s Koori lit uses textual strategies such as the
machinations of romance and the professional activities of her heroines,
including travel, to invite readers to reflect on cultural issues in Australia
and beyond. Koori lit heroines learn through experience, in turn vicar-
iously exposing readers to various cultural situations and viewpoints.
Koori lit, therefore, exemplifies the power of the wider chick lit genre to
invite dialogue and reflection on contemporary cultural issues.

Further Reading: Metafiction and the Book Club

Heiss’s first four Koori lit novels used their textual features, especially
the progress of relationships and the professional experiences of hero-
ines, to encourage reader reflection on contemporary issues. Her fifth
novel Tiddas (2014) employs slightly different textual strategies within
and beyond the text to engage readers with Aboriginal culture. Unlike
her other Koori novels, Tiddas depicts five female protagonists who
come together as a reading group to engage with Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander literature. The books read by the group become a touch-
tone for discussing a range of topics including issues affecting Indige-
nous Australians. This section examines Tiddas as a work of metafiction
that invites reflection and questions about literature while encouraging
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  59
readers beyond its pages to the fiction works discussed. Metafictional
texts generally represent the process of creating, publishing, and/or in-
terpreting fiction as well as inviting consideration about who writes fic-
tion, what is written, and the interpretive practices used to understand
written texts. Patricia Waugh (1984) explains that metafiction draws
attention to its own textuality through “writing which consistently dis-
plays its conventionality, which explicitly and overtly lays bare its condi-
tion of artifice, and which thereby explores the problematic relationship
between life and fiction” (4). For Waugh, metafictional narrators often
demonstrate a self-consciousness, where they reflect on the limits of rep-
resentation, interrogate what it means to write a novel, or ask what the
term “novel” means (5). This section asserts that Tiddas invites reflec-
tion on the novel form and more widely on Australian fiction through
intratextual dialogue between characters and extratextual options for
readers to continue their engagement with Indigenous and Torres Strait
Islander literature after finishing reading Tiddas.
Tiddas is one of numerous chick novels that utilize a reading group
motif. 28 Eileen Hyder (2014) notes that fictional representations of read-
ing groups can “often show the characters both within and outside the
book club, allowing their current and back-stories to be linked to and in-
terwoven with the reading group meetings” (2). The Tiddas group read
nine Australian novels that together deal with a range of cultural and so-
cial topics. Larissa Behrendt’s Legacy (2009), for example, explores the
life of an Aboriginal lawyer studying at Harvard while Nicole ­Watson’s
Boundary (2011), a crime novel set in Brisbane, examines current na-
tive title claims. Boundary’s narrative present interconnects with the
geographical “boundary” of the past that was used to prevent Aborigi-
nals entering the city of Brisbane. Novels such as Legacy and Boundary
provide opportunities for the reading group to discuss and reflect on
Australian culture and the narrative form, in some cases making con-
nections to their own lives or wider social or cultural issues. The book
club trope demonstrates a function of chick lit to provide commentary
on contemporary womanhood, often through the conversations between
characters. Chick lit may appeal to readers as a source of entertainment
or for relaxation; however, there is the potential for other types of en-
gagements: reassurance, learning, critical thinking about one or more of
the issues represented, or reflection on the formal or textual qualities of
the novel at hand.
The Tiddas reading group motif invites consideration of what it means
to read and the process of interpretation and meaning making. When the
Tiddas group discusses Terri Janke’s Butterfly Song (2005), their inter-
pretation includes dominant themes, technical qualities, and the text’s
appropriateness for educational purposes. Butterfly Song explores the
career aspirations of a recently graduated “black” lawyer and her place
in the “white” legal system. Members of the Tiddas book club relate the
60  Lauren O’Mahony
protagonist’s experiences to their own lives and express their different
interpretations. For example, Xanthe notes that “[t]he main character
had career aspirations, lived in the city, had a love life and had commit-
ment to community” (109). Xanthe’s enjoyment of the novel is, there-
fore, tied to the heroine’s ability to “have it all” by reconciling the public
and private aspects of her life. Izzy suggests that Butterfly Song’s protag-
onist Tarena is potentially a “role model in literature to heaps of young
women” and “hope[s] they teach this in schools” (109–110). Meanwhile,
Nadine, a successful author, notes the text’s crime novel characteristics
while envying the “eloquent writing” (110–111). Veronica, meanwhile,
offers a practical reading and a future use of the novel: “I really ap-
preciated getting a simple understanding of native title and the Mabo
decision. I want to be able to articulate it better when I meet people
who are racist” (111). The book club environment, therefore, allows ex-
ploration of their own personalized readings of the novel and the pool-
ing together of their interpretations. Xanthe’s unspoken question “How
could we both read it so differently?” (111) summarizes the interpretive
variations between the women including her own reading of Butterfly
Song in terms of romance and Nadine’s in terms of crime. Her question
and the varied readings illustrate the polysemic nature of texts as open
to multiple interpretations. Such probing of meaning and interpretation
via the book club has connotations for readers of Tiddas. Readers may
well defer from the preferred readings of Tiddas to have a negotiated or
privileged reading. 29 Moreover, if a Tiddas reader has encountered a
book discussed by the group, then they may identify their own similar
or different reading of a novel with that of one or more characters. Alter-
natively, the characters’ discussion over meaning may encourage Tiddas
readers to obtain novels such as Butterfly Song to discover their own
meanings. This representation of the process of meaning making and in-
terpretive variation signals some of the deeper cultural work undertaken
by Heiss’s Koori lit. While it is hoped that readers reflect on and engage
with the issues represented, not all readers will interpret the novels in a
way that invites deeper thought and intercultural empathy.
During the book club sessions, the Tiddas characters discuss im-
portant cultural issues and the significance of each novel to their own
understanding of real issues affecting contemporary Australia. When
discussing Legacy (2009), Veronica explains that while the personal
relationships explored are important, “there’s the cleverly woven his-
tory of the tent embassy, as well as a layman’s guide to native title and
sovereignty” (23). In terms of The Old School (2011), the women note
the enjoyable and informative qualities: a half-Vietnamese protagonist
who works as a detective, the exploration of “inter-racial relation-
ships” and the “brave” incorporation of the Aboriginal Legal Service.
The Tiddas book group discusses the strengths of the novels, including
the qualities that may determine a “great Australian novel.” When the
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  61
group discusses Mullumbimby (2013), they propose numerous qualities
that might be exhibited by a great Australian novel, including that it
should “be political and philosophical,” “challenge the reader’s values
as Aussies,” “entertain while providing a message,” and “it most defi-
nitely should include Indigenous themes and characters” (280–281). Izzy
concludes that it is “all subjective. Everyone will define it in a different
way, especially anyone in Academia” (281). The reader may fold this
discussion back onto Tiddas, asking whether Tiddas could exemplify a
great Australian novel. Alternatively, the reader might interpret Heiss’s
representation of alcoholism or the desire for parenthood via in vitro
fertilization (IVF) reproductive technologies in Tiddas as “brave” or
otherwise challenging for the reader. Such reading group discussions tap
into claims of legitimacy and quality, some of which have dogged wom-
en’s writing historically and the popular romance and wider chick lit
genre more recently. This discussion of “greatness” folds back not only
onto Heiss’s oeuvre but also onto the wider chick lit genre. Novels such
as Tiddas and Heiss’s Koori lit have all the qualities that the characters
identify in great works of Australian fiction. More so, Heiss’s reformula-
tion of chick lit proves that the genre generally and her own novels spe-
cifically can do the valuable cultural work needed to encourage healing
and reconciliation in Australia.
Heiss’s novels prompt readers to critically reflect on the history and
current situation of Aboriginal Australians; her novels also point be-
yond their pages to other resources for developing cultural awareness.
Tiddas especially positions readers to seek out the novels discussed by
the fictional book club, thereby encouraging continued engagement with
Aboriginal literature. In the final pages of Tiddas, Heiss lists the books
discussed by the group and encourages Tiddas’s use as a book club text
by providing prompt discussion questions. Additionally, Heiss publicizes
two of her own initiatives that may prompt additional reading of Ab-
original works of literature. Called “Anita’s Black Book Challenge #1
and #2,” Heiss lists ninety-nine poetry, drama, fiction, children’s books,
and nonfiction works by Indigenous Australian authors. She encourages
the list to be used to guide reading choices foremost, then for readers
to use an online blog to suggest a “favourite read that you think oth-
ers should read” for the 100th spot (Anitaheiss.wordpress.com). 30 Tid-
das thus powerfully represents the process of reading and discussion of
Aboriginal literature, then strategically encourages readers beyond the
text to other literary sources. Such initiatives continue the process of
learning and engaging with issues related to contemporary Australian
culture and society, especially as it relates to Aboriginal and Indigenous
Australians. Heiss’s reading initiatives within and outside her texts point
to a wider personal project to engage Australians with Aboriginal cul-
ture and contemporary issues. Heiss and her Koori literature, therefore,
symbolize how chick lit may promote cultural change. In this case, chick
62  Lauren O’Mahony
lit is the perfect vehicle for Heiss to undertake important cultural work
and cultural critique: she redeploys the familiar qualities of chick lit that
readers enjoy from an Aboriginal perspective. In doing so, Heiss taps
into chick lit’s larger readership to increase awareness of issues affecting
Aboriginal Australians and potentially ignites reconciliatory social and
cultural change.

Notes
1 Rosalie Higson, “Wagging the Finger Wrongfoots Romance,” The Austra-
lian, 23 August 2008.
2 Merrick’s definition exemplifies what Regis (2011) identifies as “hasty gener-
alisations,” a common error in logic committed by romance novel critics. As
Regis explains, hasty generalizations occur when critics make broad state-
ments about romance novels without providing sufficient evidence to sup-
port their claims. In Merrick’s case, her hasty generalization occurs for two
reasons: first, she provides little evidence of the sample used to determine her
definition, and second, her definition generalizes temporally by confining
“chick lit” to previously published texts without indicating the possibility
for future evolution and change in the genre.
3 Montoro (2012) reinforces Smith’s observation of the “narrowness” of early
chick lit definitions more recently.
4 Australian chick lit emerged slightly later than similar novels published in
North America and Britain: many forerunners of the genre were first pub-
lished in 1996. Australian chick lit novels emerged in 2000 with the publica-
tion of Maggie Alderson’s Pants on Fire, Pip Karmel’s Me, Myself and I, and
Allison Rushby’s Allmenarebastards.com.
5 See O’Mahony “In Search”; O’Mahony “Teaching an Old Dog”; O’Mahony
“Australian Rural Romance.”
6 Cultural representations in the genre have expanded considerably since the
genre emerged. The age range of heroines has widened (including teens, mid-
life women, older women) and heroines have been depicted in varying life
situations (as brides, married women, divorcees, widows). Chick lit has also
been written and studied from a numerous range of national perspectives,
including Chinese (see Chen; Ommundsen “From China”; Ommundsen
“Sex and the Global City”), Saudi Arabian (Ommundsen “Sex and the Glbal
City”), Hungarian (Séllei), Indonesia (Djundjung), Asian Amercian (Thoma;
Butler and Desai), British Muslim (Newns), and Australian (O’Mahony “In
Search”; Mathew “Educating the Reader”; Mathew “The Pretty and the
Political”).
7 In 1996, Heiss published Sacred Cows, described on her website as “a satir-
ical take on white Australian icons from an Indigenous perspective” (Heiss
website 2013). In 2001, Heiss graduated as the first Aboriginal person to
complete a PhD in Communications and Media from the University of
Western Sydney. Her thesis focused on Indigenous writing and publishing
in Australia. She has coedited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aborig-
inal Literature (2008) described as “the first comprehensive anthology of
­Australian Aboriginal writing from the late 18th century to the present”
(Heiss Website 2013). In 2010, she published her historical novel, Who am
I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937, the story of a young Aboriginal
girl from the stolen generation. Heiss has also coauthored a picture book,
Yirra and her Deadly Dog, Demon (2007), with the students of La Perouse
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  63
Public School as well as a book of poems, Token Koori. Heiss’s nonfiction
includes I’m Not Racist But…: A Collection of Social Observations (2007),
Sacred Cows (1996), and Am I Black Enough For You (2012).
8 Despite her nickname of “Koori Bradshaw,” Heiss admits she had not
watched the television version of Sex and the City and then only the first
movie (Black Enough 212–213).
9 Heiss revises chick lit in the same way that feminists have rewritten dif-
ferent types of genre fiction. Cranny-Francis (1990) explains in Feminist
Fiction that genre fiction is revered for its “large” and “diverse” readership
alongside its ability to reach markets that may be ordinarily difficult to
access (3). Cranny-Francis defines feminist genre fiction as “[T]he feminist
appropriation of the generic ‘popular’ literary forms [….] This is genre fic-
tion written from a self-consciously feminist perspective, consciously en-
coding an ideology which is in direct opposition to the dominant gender
ideology of Western society, patriarchal ideology” (1). Just as feminist writ-
ers have reenvisioned and rewritten genre fiction toward a political objec-
tive, Heiss consciously adopts chick lit’s narrative and stylistic conventions
to engage readers about Indigenous Australia. Mathew argues that Heiss’s
Koori lit novels work to educate and instruct the reader (“Educating the
Reader”).
10 Heiss’s most recent novel, Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2016), de-
parts from the chick-lit format. Set in a small New South Wales town in
1940s, the novel explores the developing romantic relationship between a
Japanese prisoner of war and a local Aboriginal woman. Mathew has ob-
served that the novel is a romance and that this aspect is one of its “chief
pleasures” (“Love in the Time”).
11 As Heiss has stated, “Aboriginal women…did not appear in contemporary
Australian women’s fiction until I put them there” (Black Enough 215).
12 Montoro surveys the definitions and constituent ingredients of these terms,
deciding to use the terms “romance” and “romantic fiction” “interchange-
ably” (11) to refer to a range of texts, including serialized Harlequin ro-
mances and single volume romances such as those of authors Georgette
Heyer and Jayne Ann Krentz.
13 Most chick novels are single volume works (rather than novels produced in
a series in the way of category romances) and those published as commercial
fiction generally do not conform to publisher guidelines in terms of length,
characterization, or themes (Montoro 2012).
14 Regis’s eight essential romantic elements are as follows:
[A] definition of society, always corrupt, that the romance novel will
reform; the meeting between the heroine and hero; an account of their
attraction for each other; the barrier between them; the point of ritual
death; the recognition that fells the barrier; the declaration of heroine
and hero that they love each other; and their betrothal.
(original emphasis, Natural History 22)
15 The phrase “exotic other” alludes to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1985).
16 Anthony Mundine is an Aboriginal Australian professional boxer.
17 Heiss explores the notion of what it means to be “black enough” in her mem-
oir Am I Black Enough For You?
18 Indigenous Australians and police have a long and troubled history. As
Haebich (1988) explains, at different points since colonization, police and
justices of the peace have been granted “special powers over Aborigines”
(87) such as through the 1905 Aborigines Act in Western Australia which at-
tempted to “control all their contacts with the wider community, to enforce
64  Lauren O’Mahony
the assimilation of their children and to determine the most personal aspects
of their lives” (83). See Haebich’s critique of the Act for further informa-
tion (83–89). In 1991, the final report into the Royal Commission into Ab-
original Deaths in Custody was signed. It made recommendations “mainly
concerned with procedures for persons in custody, liaison with Aboriginal
groups, police education and improved accessibility to information.”
19 See Evans (1982) and Saunders and Evans (1992) for discussions of the inter-
cultural relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
20 Eddie’s Country explores the death of Eddie Murray, an Indigenous man
who died in a police cell in Wee Waa, New South Wales in 1981. The book
explains the experience of Eddie’s parents who lobbied to have his death
properly investigated.
21 Such representations in Heiss’s Koori lit counter those that have historically
depicted “non-Anglo” peoples, including Aboriginals, negatively in the me-
dia. See Phillips (2009) and Phillips and Tapsall (2007) for results from their
study of diversity reporting in the Australian news media.
22 In Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, bell hooks (1984) explores the
double bind of nonwhite women where if nonwhite women support women’s
rights, it may exclude the racial aspect of their identity. If they only support
civil rights, then it may exclude the power of patriarchal structures in their
lives. hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (1981) led to a reconsideration of the white,
middle-class orientation of the Women’s Movement.
23 It is important to note the differences between the “significant moments” in
education for Indigenous Australians and “women” in Australia. According
to an Education Fact Sheet from the Reconciliation Network, in 1848, the
Board of National Education decided it was “impractical” to educate In-
digenous Australians. In 1883, schools could exclude Indigenous children
if “white parents” were against their presence. The Assimilation Policy of
1937 indicated that education could “assimilate” Aboriginal people “into
white society and [… break] connections with their culture and history.”
The Reconciliation Network states that Indigenous children had “regular
mainstream access” to primary schooling from the 1950s and secondary
school from the 1960s.
24 According to Stretton (2013), Aboriginal men could legally vote from the
1850s. Stretton explains that the Constitution stipulated that it applied to
“all male British subjects over 21” which included Aboriginal men. South
Australia gave women, including Aboriginal women, voting rights 1895
(only Queensland and Western Australia “barred” Aborigines from voting).
Stretton states that few Aboriginals knew they had voting rights, which ex-
plains why few did so.
25 The novel’s mention of Dale Spender may allude to her feminist study of
language Man Made Language (1980). Spender argues that language shapes
an individual’s consciousness and view of reality. A language that privileges
men and worldview limits women in numerous ways. Although Spender ex-
amines “man made” language, Heiss’s reference may allude to the ways that
language constructed by “white” people may limit the consciousness and
worldview of Indigenous peoples.
26 Two other “history lessons” occur in the novel. One involves Alice speaking
to her high school students about the origins of Valentine’s Day (250–252).
In the other example, Alice attends a local history association event where
she critiques the colonial view of Australian history in a discussion with two
attendees (280–283).
27 “Gadigal” are the Aboriginal people and land custodians of the area in and
around Sydney.
 Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  65
28 See also Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) and Eliza-
beth Noble’s The Reading Group (2005).
29 See Stuart Hall’s (2003) encoding and decoding model for a more expansive
discussion of the possible reading positions taken when interpreting a tex-
tual artefact.
30 Heiss’s reading challenge provides resources for off-line reading and the op-
portunity to add blog posts to continue the discussion online.

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2 Against Asianness
On Being Cool, Feminist, and
American in Asian/American
Chick Lit
Jenny Heijun Wills

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of

a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
(Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 1)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Korean mother in pos-

session of a single adult daughter is in want of a professional Korean
son-in-law.
(Caroline Hwang, In Full Bloom 2)

A number of years ago in what I assume was jest, someone gifted me a

copy of Ming Tan’s How to Attract Asian Women: An Asian Woman
Reveals it ALL. Tan’s book is a self-help book meant to guide presum-
ably white, heterosexual men in their pursuits of wooing Asian woman in
which the author relies on self-Orientalizing fetishistic tropes, as well as
native-informant autoethnography to answer questions like “Are Asian
Women Different from Non-Asian Women?” and resolve conundrums
like “Why Men Prefer Asian Women.” Part of the guidebook consists of
anecdotes from Tan herself; other suggestions come from the many Asian
women Tan interviewed in her research for the text. Central to this book
is the heterosexual romance (or desired romance) imperative as well as
the focus on white heteromasculinity. Even those moments when Tan
purports to be writing to an Asian woman reader, like she does when
she begins, “If you are an Asian woman considering the eyelid surgery
or know someone who is,” she still centers white men’s voices and opin-
ions, their subjectivity and agency. She completes this thought—“please
consider the following from a Caucasian guy”—before citing at length
Dan from Michigan’s opinion that “one of the main things that attracts
me to East Asian ladies is precisely the fact that they look different from
what I am used to” (5). This excerpt comes from the first section of Tan’s
book in which she parses out a history of anti-monolid beauty standards
and blepharoplasty (double eyelid surgery) before offering this piece of
advice: “I caution against commenting about an Asian woman’s eyelids
70  Jenny Heijun Wills
to her, particularly upon first meeting her” (6). Tan supports her asser-
tion by including several interviews with Asian/American women that
reiterate this point as well as some anecdotes from the author herself.
There are several striking elements that one can take away from this
introduction. But what is most fascinating for the purposes of this chap-
ter is the way that the intended audience of Tan’s work, Michigan Dan
and his Asian-fetish comrades, are satirized for all of their Orientalist,
fetishizing, and essentializing behavior in a number of contemporary
Asian/American chick lit novels. In fact, Michigan Dan (as well as Penn-
sylvania Jack, Bob from California, Ken in Nevada, and many others)
embodies a central trope in these Asian/Am chick lit books as protago-
nists navigate intersectional identities in their quests for hetero-romance
by dodging him. He is one of the many obstacles to their success. But as
my chapter will suggest, it is not so much him, nor his “yellow fever,”
that is the object of concern in these books but rather the stereotype of a
static, Orientalist, nonprogressive Asian woman whom he desires. This
stereotype, and more importantly its links to foreignness, is the real foil
to so many of the heroines in Asian/American chick lit books.
In this essay, I analyze three Asian/American chick lit novels: Michelle
Yu and Blossom Kan’s China Dolls, Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum
of All Things, and Caroline Hwang’s In Full Bloom. As we see in many
examples of black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) chick lit,
the protagonists in these books negotiate race and gender politics si-
multaneously. Like the heroines of mainstream white chick lit, they are
also focused on being independent, prosperous, and “modern.” The
term “modern” here serves not as an aesthetic designation but rather to
encapsulate the ways these protagonists strive to be current, relevant,
and cool. In other words, these heroines go to great lengths to show
that they are not dated, old-fashioned, or embracing values and behav-
iors of the previous generation. These goals come together in predict-
able ways: protagonists illustrate their progressiveness in connection
to the same themes of intergenerational conflict and assimilation that
frequently appear in Asian/American literature. In Hwang’s novel, for
instance, protagonist Ginger Lee is exasperated by her Korean mother’s
dogged attempt to set her up with other Korean men; Ginger insistently
positions herself as a contemporary and current American woman and
criticizes her mother’s fixations on intra-racial marriage as evidence of
her old-fashioned, non-American beliefs.
At the core of each of these novels is the theme of how one might bran-
dish a contemporary American identity, and given nearly every main-
stream chick lit heroine’s preoccupation with seeming current and fresh,
it is not a surprising motivator. But what is unique here is the way that
these Asian/American protagonists articulate their progressiveness, their
currentness, though the conventions of what Elaine Kim recognizes as
the Asian/American literary act of “claiming an American, as opposed
 Against Asianness  71
to Asian, identity” (88) which itself is a paradoxical approach to think-
ing about hybrid, postmodern selfhood. Discussing the ways that, in
order to counteract the Orientalist forever foreigner stereotype that
imagines all people with Asian ancestry as culturally alien, backwards,
and old-fashioned, Asian/Americans deliberately set out to articulate
their belonging in the US through cultural nationalist efforts that tried
to drive a strategic wedge between Asians here and Asians “over there
and back then,” Kim wonders if “this constitutes accommodation, a col-
lective colonized spirit—the fervent wish to ‘hide our ancestry’….Or is
it in fact a celebration of our marginality and a profound expression of
protest against being defined by domination?” (88) In other words, Kim
ponders the tactics behind challenging forever foreigner stereotypes and
the ways that some people attempt to Claim America by rejecting Asian
cultures using the same distressing colonial assumptions about “Orien-
tal” non-modernity, non-civility, and backwardness. This is more than
accommodation or assimilation as a survival tactic; in its most perni-
cious expressions, this is a reinforcement of white supremacist logics that
justify and maintain colonial actions and their material consequences.
What is troubling in these examples of “modern” or current Asian/
American female protagonists taken from these three chick lit novels is
the problematic reliance on a limited understanding in which claiming
an American identity necessarily means that a novel posits Asianness as
foreign, undesirable, and inapplicable to the necessary currentness of
the chick lit genre. In other words, BIPOC heroines pursue pleasure and
freedom not by questioning white and Western supremacist frameworks
that oppress them but by acts of what Eva Chen calls “constraining local
tradition” or reiterating those colonial beliefs. In these novels in partic-
ular, this disturbing reliance on a forever foreigner stereotype that has
caused so much harm (and continues to cause harm) to our communities
is made all the more prescient by the ways that these heroines do not
stand up against Orientalist and colonial misrepresentations of Asian
countries and cultures but instead underline some of those reductive ide-
ologies by laboring so diligently to be seen as disconnected from “the old
country”; the practices and beliefs of their parents; and, as I will discuss
shortly, white American approval. Given that these works are popular
and early examples of what is a now growing oeuvre of Asian/American
chick lit, one must pause and consider what representations are being
used to break into the predominantly white genre of chick lit and how
their ideologies reflect or undermine the work being done in other genres
of Asian/American literature.
The focus of this chapter is not solely on the female protagonists of
these works and the ways that Asian/American women are represented in
their pages but extends to consider the male suitors—and non/­potential
suitors—who vie for their affections. I think about not just the Asian
fetishists whom the heroines must identify and reject but also the white
72  Jenny Heijun Wills
men with whom they have relationships and the Asian/American men
they discard. What narrative is promulgated by the fact that, of the eight
romances that occur across these three novels, all but one of the suitors
is a white (or white-passing) American? Moreover, all three novels show-
case protagonists deliberately distancing themselves from what they con-
sider to be the antiquated dating customs of their parents’ generations;
as I mentioned earlier, arranged setups and intra-racial dating are seen
as old-fashioned and specifically “un-American.” Curiously, these texts
that boast racial and gender progressiveness, illustrating how modern
Asian/American women destabilize stereotypes of submissiveness and
exoticness, also traffic in anti-Asian stereotypes, including the forever
foreigner and model minority. The protagonists’ noted goals of claiming
America involves the rejection of Asian/American men who are framed
as conservative, antiquated, and patriarchal. In other words, the partic-
ular kind of Asian/American post/feminism expressed in these novels
problematically hinges on antiquated expressions of Asian/American
masculinity—which brings them into the fray of the decades-long con-
versation in Asian/American literary studies about the representations of
gender, sexuality, and masculinity in works by Asian/American women
writers. These novels feature a paradoxical version of Asian/American
ethnic nationalism that problematically hinges on Orientalist binaries
and reiterate another stereotype: that of asexual, undesirable Asian/
American men.
It goes without saying that race and ethnicity are core topics of analy-
sis in Asian/American literary studies and that there is a substantial body
of work addressing genre and characterization in chick lit; however, less
scholarly attention has been paid to the ways these two fields may be in
conversation with one another. The obvious explanation lies in the fact
that not only is chick lit notoriously white-centric, but so is the scholarly
analysis on those works. And thus, when Pamela Butler and Jigna ­Desai
published their foundational essay, “Manolos, Marriage, and Man-
tras Chick-Lit Criticism and Transnational Feminism”—their decision
to move the scope of analysis beyond the practice of reading chick lit
as symptomatic of American postfeminism and toward conversations
about globality, race, and identity was a groundbreaking one. The risk
of frameworks such as these, Butler and Desai explain, is the enabling
of a “homogenously white normative genre” that is imagined, produced,
and consumed under the fallacy of being an “apolitical” genre. In order
to challenge the naturalization of whiteness in chick lit, Butler and Desai
draw attention to BIPOC chick lit—specifically South Asian American
representations—summarizing:

Like mainstream, white-dominated chick lit, women of colour sub-

genres such as Chica Lit and Sistah Lit tell stories about young wom-
en’s individual empowerment, but the characters’ engagements with
 Against Asianness  73
femininity and gender are often articulated through questions of
race, nation, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class.
(4)

An intersectional lens, it seems, once again becomes a manner of ex-

posing the limitations of white feminism, this time when applied to the
realm of chick lit criticism. In BIPOC chick lit, expressions of feminin-
ity are rendered inextricable from race and its social articulations and
consequences: the legacies of colonialism and ongoing effects of racial
inequality, manifested through themes of assimilation, migration, mar-
ginalized labor, and stereotypes bespeak the unique struggles faced by
women of color, even in stories that promise happy endings and the uni-
versality of love (at least for the heterosexual protagonist).
Butler and Desai’s argument recalls the canonical review essay by
Sau-Ling Wong and Jeffrey Santa Ana, in which the coauthors consider
the “interconnectedness, mutual constitution, and operational simulta-
neity of race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality” in Asian American litera-
ture (171), elaborating on King-Kok Cheung’s assertion that “from the
beginning, race and gender have been intertwined in Asian American
history and literature” (10). These critics, along with countless others,
repeatedly emphasize the inextricability of race, gender, and sexual-
ity, prompting me to how chick lit scholarship and literary produc-
tion might change if we take more seriously these important calls to
intersectional thinking. Moreover, since it is apparent that Wong and
Santa Ana’s essay is at least partially influenced by the long-­standing
gendered debates in Asian/American literary communities over the
(mis)representation of Asian/American masculinity, I want to interro-
gate the productive, but also problematic, ways that gender and race
intersect in Asian/American chick lit addressing Asian characters and
relationships.
Channeling a Sex-in-the-City vibe, Michelle Yu and Blossom Kan’s
2007 novel China Dolls follows three Asian/American protagonists,
each with significant success in diverse professions, as they navigate
fashion, family, and relationships in New York City. Separated into three
main parts dedicated, respectively, to sports-reporter M.J. Wyn, lawyer
Alex Kwan, and stock-broker Lin Cho, the novel follows the Bushnell
model of supportive best friends whose contrasting personalities and
interests make for fascinating characterizations but limited plausibility
that they would have much in common beyond their preoccupation with
romance. In China Dolls, like many other chick lit novels, the romantic
fulfillment plot parallels the heroines’ professional advancement with
M.J., Alex, and Lin landing their dream jobs/accounts and a “serious
boyfriend” (or the promise of one) at each sections’ close. But for that to
happen, they must first stumble across and move past unsuitable suitors,
and true to “unsuitable suitor” convention, not just in chick lit but also
74  Jenny Heijun Wills
in its literary antecedents, they eventually realize that Mr. Right was
right under their nose.
For M.J., this involves rekindling a romance with her high school
sweetheart, Kevin Taylor, idealized, “with his chestnut hair, olive skin,
[and] green eyes” (19); being rejected again by him because this time he
wants an uncommitted relationship; then realizing that her coworker,
Jagger Quinn, is a more appropriate match. In Alex’s case, she overcomes
long-lasting hope that her college crush, a “prototypical All-American
boy with tousled, wavy chestnut hair, aquamarine eyes, and the kind
of healthy golden tan that had seen a lot of California sun” (114) when
she realizes that her coworker Brady Jameson is her Mr. Right. Lin is
instantly attracted to her new colleague, Drew, “with his gleaming white
teeth, wavy dark hair, and killer tan” (186) and starts a forbidden office
romance with him. When their affair is made public, Lin flees New York
for a six-month contract in London. Upon returning, she decides to give
her former lover Stephen Xiang a second chance. In all three instances,
the choice of male lovers emphasizes a celebration of a white beauty
ideal, whether it is the All-American ideal embodied by Alex’s Josh or in
Brady’s “ice-blue eyes” (143); by contrast, the solitary Asian/American
suitor becomes attractive only because of his now-laidback personal-
ity, not because of intense sexual and romantic chemistry like we see
­between other characters.
Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things takes a different ap-
proach. Protagonist Lindsey Owyang directly pursues her love ­interest—a
white-passing writer at Vegan Warrior, the San F ­ rancisco-based maga-
zine for which she is the office receptionist. Unlike the protagonists’ paths
in China Dolls, Lindsey’s romantic evolution does not parallel her pro-
fessional success; her sole ambitions in the novel are to seduce ­M ichael
Cartier, be supportive to her grandmother (with whom she lives), and
avoid becoming the stereotypical Asian/American woman fetishized
by white men who approach her with pickup lines like “­Konichiwa,
­Chinese princess” (3). Disinterested in “Hoarders of all things Asian”
and equally turned off by the Chinese American men with whom her
Pau Pau sets her up (she thinks they are old-fashioned, uncool, and phys-
ically unattractive), Lindsey is drawn to Michael’s coy flirtations. The
relationship is complicated by Lindsey’s own racial insecurity; she fears
that Pau Pau will prohibit her from dating Michael and that Michael
will be repulsed by markers of her Chinese culture, like the smell of tiger
balm and bitter herbs that fills her shared apartment. Lindsey’s concerns
are for naught. Pau Pau simply wants her granddaughter to be happy
and, after a few months of casual dating, Michael reveals to her that he
is a quarter Chinese and that he hopes she will be his “cultural guide”
(205). Initially bristling at this suggestion and incredulous at Michael’s
admission at all (“She searched his face for any Chinese detail: a slanted
eye, a yellow undertone in his skin, or a certain shape of nose. She saw
 Against Asianness  75
nothing…” (205)), Lindsey eventually acquiesces and uses her native-­
informant role and Michael’s ethnic insecurity and desire for a guide to
further their relationship.
Finally, Caroline Hwang’s In Full Bloom follows a single protago-
nist, Ginger Lee, as she balances her career at a fashion magazine in
New York with her Korean mother’s “relentless drive to get her to the
alter” (4). But nothing is simple. Ginger must overcome her disdain for
her work (as an English graduate school dropout, she is much older than
the other women working as assistants at À la Mode and is overqualified
for the personal assistant work she is assigned) and the man upon whom
Mrs. Lee has set her sights as her future son-in-law. Bobby Oh, Ginger’s
unsuitable suitor, is not only engaged to another woman but is getting
married to conceal the fact that he is gay. Ginger’s mother and Mrs. Oh
conspire for Ginger to break up the engagement because Bobby’s fiancé
is white—and it works until Bobby suggests that he and Ginger work
out a compromise: he will marry a woman and she will marry a Korean
American man—something she never envisioned for herself. Wanting
to “have it all,” Ginger declines but remains friends with Bobby and
keeps his secret. The arranged marriage plot devised by the mothers
only furthers Ginger’s impression of the Korean American community
as insular, old-fashioned, and foreign (though she claims to celebrate it,
her only affection seems to be for the food), and at the end of the novel,
she comes to a troubling post-racial conclusion that fosters a liberal ide-
ology of choice and self-invention. Ginger justifies her “wanting to be
with non-Koreans” as “a distinct, a distinguished, identity [she] had to
choose” and one that “wasn’t a compromise of the self” but rather a “tri-
umph of the self” (287). Her conclusion that rejecting Korean people is
an emboldened one, a choice that will boost her into a chick lit American
dream state of self-awareness and fulfillment, is troubling and reduces
the complex hybrid experiences of 1.5- and second-generation Asian/
Americans to a solution far too simplistic and nonchalantly assimilative
to be either realistic or satisfying.
In fact, the theme of claiming America, or the carving out of a space
for Asian/Americans where their Americanness is at the forefront of
their identities at the expense of their Asianness, is not represented as
a compromise at all in these novels but is an indicator of how current
and contemporary the protagonists are. Like Helen Fielding’s Brid-
get Jones, who insists upon the importance of “becoming a modern
woman,” the five protagonists in these Asian/American chick lit novels
deliberately present themselves as contemporary, twenty-first-century
women. For Bridget Jones, to be a “modern woman” is to have it all:
the financial independence that comes from having a successful job,
an aesthetic reflective of current fashions, a relationship with someone
whom others approve of, and most of all the appearance of effortless
coolness. The same is true of the Asian/American heroines in these
76  Jenny Heijun Wills
chick lit novels. They want to be independent, loved, and appreciated.
Yet here, their deep concern with fitting in and their coolness—that
is, their effortless access to and ability to navigate cultural relevance
that makes them seem youthful but independent, in control but
­nonchalant—is manifested via a binary that posits assimilation as the
primary mode for modernization. The protagonists’ progressiveness
that we see in mainstream chick lit novels, couched in the “illusion” of
postfeminism and made explicit in the fixation with current consumer
and popular culture in fact rehashes the dated Orientalist paradigm of
modern Westernization versus antiquated Eastern cultural behavior. It
is an illusion because, as Stephanie Genz and Benajmin Brabon point
out in Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (2009), these “pro-
gressive feminist beliefs” are at odds with the heteronormative and
capital-driven goals of these works (89). In In Full Bloom, this irony
is made explicit. Ginger recites, “Marriage is an outdated relic of a
patriarchal past. It’s just a property contract now made palatable by
some grand, romantic notion of love” (123), but the reader recognizes
that this is part of Ginger’s version of progressive feminism and that
she, too, is looking for heteronormative stability. This illusion is made
apparent in the opening lines as well of The Dim Sum of All Things,
when the narrator emphatically notes that Lindsey is a progressive
American who just happens to have Chinese ancestry. The novel tells
us, “She was third-generation San Franciscan of Chinese descent who
could not quote a single Han Dynasty proverb, but she could recite
entire dialogues from numerous Brady Bunch episodes” (1). We learn
later that Lindsey, despite living in a Chinatown apartment, “avoid[s]
talking about her own Chinese background” as much as possible (51).
Lindsey’s objective of being a modern Asian/American woman is as
much about refusing her Chinese origins as it is highlighting of her
American tastes and values. Relying on a familiar binary that envi-
sions China as foreign and antiquated, Lindsey reflects what Eva Chen
­argues in “Shanghai(ed) Babies,” is a simplistic reading of East v. West.
Chen contends that “global chick lit”

generally feature young urban women who pursue Western-style

individualistic pleasure and greater degrees of sexual freedom in
an expanding urban commodity culture, often against a more con-
straining local tradition. More than just the Western brand-name
commodities and Western-defined and locally endorsed values of
beauty and femininity, these global chick lit novels also propagate
the idea of a neoliberal, global sisterhood of chic, empowered, con-
sumerist and individualistically minded women who find freedom
through consumption and progress in following Western commod-
ities and values.
(215)
 Against Asianness  77
In a global theatre, images of a forward West that celebrates individu-
alism and progressive gender politics versus a backward “Orient” are
explicitly linked to (neo)colonial ideologies and, as Chen suggests, the
only viable chick lit heroine is progressive, modern, and subscribes to
Western value systems. In the American context, novels like The Dim
Sum of All Things mimic this Orientalist paradigm. Thus, by claiming
America and articulating themselves as non-foreign and Western, the
figures in all three novels addressed in this chapter become acceptable
chick lit heroines. “Look,” Ginger tells Bobby, “I am not Korean-y…
Korean Americans who are more Korean than American” (64).
This point is made each time one of the heroines dismisses their par-
ents’ tactics in arranging intra-racial relationships but even more ex-
plicitly through the secondary Asian/American female characters who
appear as contrasts to our progressive protagonists. In all three novels,
the primary characters markedly differentiate themselves from the ste-
reotype of the submissive, exotic Asian woman and do so by celebrating
themselves as Western and modern and dissimilar from other characters
who are foreign and old-fashioned. Moreover, the novels do little to sat-
irize or challenge these heroines’ beliefs and behaviors, implying that
the texts as a whole also perpetuate these binaries. In China Dolls, for
instance, Alex’s romantic rival for Josh’s affection is “the stereotypically
perfect little Asian woman” (116). We become privy to Alex’s memories:

The only thing that Alex could discern was that Christine really,
deeply, truly needed Josh. She clung to him like an appendage, her
arm always linked through his—her eyes constantly searching for
potential threats. What really drove Alex mad, though, was the way
Christine completely deferred to and depended on Josh. It wasn’t
that Alex didn’t agree with him—in fact, most of the time she did.
But Christine’s deference was more akin to slavish devotion. She
never told Josh he was wrong, never expressed an opinion that could
in any way conflict with his. She told him how smart he was, baked
him cookies with smiley faces, and followed him like a puppy dog
panting after its master…In short, Christine was everything Alex
most definitely was not.
(116)

The implication here is that all of the postfeminist illusions celebrated

in chick lit—independence, agency, confidence, and an ironic take-
them-or-leave-them attitude about men—are encapsulated by Alex
whom we are to understand is the ideal match for All-American Josh.
Christine’s submissive characteristics are maligned as not-confident and
not-­independent, and these features, in the third-person subjective nar-
rator’s words, make her the “stereotypically perfect little Asian woman”
(116). We see the same gestures of making-foreign (and making “Asian”)
78  Jenny Heijun Wills
the undesirable qualities of unmodern Asian/American womanhood in
The Dim Sum of All Things when Lindsey observes her brother’s new
­girlfriend. “She watched her,” we are told, “noticing how Chinesey she
was. Karen was so meek and deferential that Lindsey disliked her imme-
diately, abhorring how she personified such a stereotype of female ser-
vitude” (196). That is not to say that we should embrace these limiting
stereotypes of the china doll or submissive Madame Butterfly; however,
by framing these female characters’ submissiveness as evidence of their
foreignness—of them being “Chinesey” or “Korean-y”—the authors of
these novels paradoxically destabilize negative stereotypes while simul-
taneously harboring them.
That said, the motives behind these protagonists’ desires to distance
themselves from stereotypes of Asian women’s submissiveness are not
without reason. As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, and perhaps
unique to Asian/American chick lit, the archetypal unsuitable suitor
in these novels often appears as an Orientalist, as an abject foil whom
the heroines must recognize and reject. These “yellow fever” predators,
those who in the words of Celine Parreñas Shimizu have a “chronic pref-
erence for Asian women dating partners” (93), are both the targets of
ridicule in these novels and the sources of deep concern. Lindsey iden-
tifies these villains in the opening paragraphs of Wong Keltner’s novel.
These “white men who were obsessed with Asian women,” she con-
cludes, are “shy, Caucasian beta-males, with dirty blond hair and sallow
complexions” (2). The narrator explains,

She had a theory that these neat’n’tidy nerds were disguised as

“good guys” but were actually stealthy predators who feigned in-
terest in Asian cuisine, history, and customs in hopes of attracting
an exotic porcelain doll like those portrayed so fetchingly in pop
culture movies and advertisements. These Hoarders of All Things
Asian sought the erotic, hassle-free companionship they believed to
be the specialty of lily-footed celestials, geishas, fan-tan dancers,
and singsong girlies. They were unable to distinguish these fantasy
ideals from modern women.
(3)

Striking here is the way that once again what is at stake in this situation
is the possibility that the Asian/American chick lit protagonist’s current-
ness might be called into question. In other words, Lindsey has to avoid
these “Hoarders” because to fall victim to their Orientalist fantasy is
to also become the opposite of a “modern [Asian/American] woman,”
not just because they are a distraction from more suitable partners who
will contribute to Lindsey’s coolness factor but more importantly be-
cause they are looking for submissive, old-fashioned, traditional “Ori-
ental” objects of affection—a hyperbolized and fetishized version of the
 Against Asianness  79
antiquated Asian imagine Lindsey is trying to avoid for herself. As a
result, these particular unsuitable suitors threaten to impede Lindsey’s
status as a successfully partnered chick lit heroine, but because they
want to designate her as foreign and objectified, they also run the risk of
compromising her claim to Americanness.
In the previous pages, I described what I see as these three chick lit nov-
els’ attempts to present modern, progressive Asian/American h ­ eroines—
attempts that are hinged upon a celebration of assimilating into white
American hegemony that takes place against an Orientalist ideology
that posits Asian cultural practices as antiquated and undesirable. In
other words, these heroines’ acts of claiming America see them partic-
ipating in a kind of paradoxical version of Asian/American ethnic na-
tionalism like that described by David Leiwei Li’s critique of Frank Chin
and company’s notorious manifesto in Aiiieeeee! These heroines simul-
taneously ascribe to the ethnic nationalists’ distinction between Asian/
Americans and other Americanized Asians (typically immigrants who
“succeed in becoming ‘Chinese-American’ in the stereotypical sense of
the good, loyal, obedient”; Chin et al., x) and to the exact opposite of the
“anti-­assimilation” and “ethnic self erasure” (Li 26, 27) Chin and oth-
ers promoted. In the novels, this distinction between Asian/­A mericans
and Americanized Asians is reflected in the protagonists’ efforts to dis-
tinguish themselves from Americanized Asian women whom they feel
are submissive and exotic stereotypes of “Oriental” and their deliberate
rejection of the white and Asian men who seek those kinds of partners.
The difficulty here, suggested by many who have challenged this Asian/
American ethnic nationalist model, is that in claiming an idealized
Asian/American identity the goal of which is to dismantle Orientalist
stereotypes, these heroines rely on an inflexible image of “Americanized
Asians” that uncomfortably rests on notions of forever foreignness and
incompatibility. Li explains that this kind of ethnic nationalist thinking
is “locked in.… a binary framework” that “hardly entertains the muta-
bility of culture, the multiplicity of identity, and the fluidity of experi-
ence” insofar as the Asian/American is devoid of Asian culture and the
Americanized Asian “is believed to be miraculously unaffected by the
dominant American culture” (32). Put another way, this kind of eth-
nic nationalism insists upon a static binary that emphasizes the gap be-
tween Americans and foreigners—a framework that undergirds nearly
all of the romance plots in the three novels discussed in this chapter.
As I mentioned earlier, the Asian/American protagonists in these novels
overwhelmingly choose white American men as their partners and con-
sider Asian/American men unsuitable suitors in their quests to become
modern, American women. Therefore, I want to conclude my chapter
by thinking through the ways that Asian/American men are rendered
unattractive in these novels and the ways that their perceived foreignness
problematically becomes justification for rejecting them.
80  Jenny Heijun Wills
Although it is most apparent in Hwang’s novel, all three books are
peppered with comedic episodes that come in the form of arranged meet-
ings set up by the women’s parents who are insistent that they date (and
eventually marry) Asian/American men. The setups inevitably fail as the
protagonists rebel against their parents’ intrusions. In Hwang’s novel,
Ginger repeatedly declares her disdain for Korean men. In the opening
pages of the book, Ginger explains, “I had never met an Asian man I
wanted to date, let alone spend my life with” (4). We are meant to side
with Ginger, aligning her mother’s anti-feminist claims that her thirty-
year-old daughter’s “bloom is fading” (15)—what Ginger equates with
Jane Austen-era romantic politics (15)—with the mother’s insistence that
Ginger marry a Korean American man. As a result, we dismiss Ginger’s
prejudice as a symptom of her feminist revolt against arranged marriages,
ignoring the racial elements of her protests. But when Ginger’s rejection
of her sexual constraints is expressed through xenophobia and then later
racial generalizations, we need to critique the ways that feminism in
these works is sometimes manifested through anti-Asian racism. While
this is not a new phenomenon, and proponents of white feminism have
a long history of either ignoring or oppressing BIPOC in their pursuit
for gender equity, these chick lit novels are meant to represent BIPOC
readers and so these kinds of expressions are unsettling. For example,
at Bobby’s father’s sixtieth birthday party, Ginger garners the interest of
a number of eligible Korean American bachelors. “For my mother,” she
explains, “I walked over to them and introduced myself.” She describes,

They both bowed, almost knocking heads. One of them greeted

me in Korean and said their names. Bum-young and Dung-hae, I
thought I heard.
“How do you know Dr. Oh? Are you his students?”
They looked at each other and then at me. The one who had spo-
ken cleared his throat. “You student?”
“No, I’m not. Are you?”
“You Dr. Oh?”
“Never mind. It was nice meeting you.” I waved and pushed
on past more men speaking Korean…Someone tapped me on the
shoulder.
“Are you Dr. Oh’s niece?” Finally, someone with American
manners.
“No, I’m just a friend of the family.”
“Could you get me a plate of ribs?”
I smiled and stepped on his foot as I continued breast-stroking
through the crowd. Even Americanized Korean men couldn’t undo
years of having their mothers and sisters wait on them….It was no
wonder their mothers had to arrange their marriages.
(92)
 Against Asianness  81
Let us first consider the two students whom Ginger quickly dismisses.
Despite the fact that they try to communicate with her in English after
it becomes clear that Ginger cannot understand Korean, she shows little
patience for their efforts and quickly ends their conversation with a surly
“never mind.” Moreover, her jeering observation that the two men nearly
bump heads bowing at her renders this gesture alien, abnormal, and com-
ically outlandish. The scene portrays contemporary, Anglophone, and
non-bowing Ginger dismissing unmodern, bowing, and broken-­English-
speaking Korean men with foreign names, who are indeterminate from
one another since Ginger does not bother to learn who is Bum-young and
who is Dung-hae. Ginger’s displeasure at their foreignness is emphasized
when she expresses relief when a man with “American manners” ap-
proaches her, but even this repose is short-lived because even he does not
live up to her standards. On the one hand, Ginger rejects Korean Amer-
ican men because they are too foreign; on the other hand, even those
whom she applauds as sufficiently Westernized perpetuate a non-modern
sexism—something she also blames on their Korean upbringing. Jux-
taposed with her interaction with the two students, Ginger’s feminist
declarations are actually a scapegoat for her xenophobia and anti-Asian
outlook on romance and point to larger issues of internalized racism in
this novel. China Dolls’ Lin prescribes to a similar xenophobia when she
rejects a man as a “fresh-off-the-boat blind date” (227), and in The Dim
Sum of All Things, the narrator’s attempt at witty imagery comes off as
glib and even discriminatory. Lindsey daydreams,

Perhaps someday a well-mannered boy, fresh off the boat from

China, would bring over a roasted pig and a bag of money in ex-
change for the simple honor of asking her to the movies. But she
was well aware that no hottie would be unlocking the chink in her
chastity belt anytime soon.
(10)

In China Dolls, authors Yu and Kan justify their protagonists’ xenopho-

bia and anti-Asian prejudices by linking Asian/American men’s misogy-
nistic behavior to their race and culture. The narrator explains why M.J.
would never consider an Asian/American man a suitable suitor:

Her entire life, all the Asian men she knew had told her what to do.
Her father was in the military and he lived to lecture M.J. on the
dos and don’ts of life. Ditto for her male cousins and other assorted
relatives. M.J. hated it all.
(20)

In this passage, we see the direct consequences dating an Asian man

would have on M.J.’s status as a chick lit heroine; she would lose the
82  Jenny Heijun Wills
independence and agency that are central to that role. Soapboxing, M.J.
announces that Asian/American men as sexist: “That’s exactly my prob-
lem with Asian guys!…They just want some quiet, meek little woman
who will stay home and slave away for them” (135). We see the same
apprehension from Lindsey in The Dim Sum of All Things: “One thing is
for sure,” Lindsey declares, “I’m not going out with a traditional Asian
guy who wants a subservient, house-cleaning concubine” (26). Lind-
sey, like M.J., expresses her progressive feminist beliefs but does so via
­racial prejudices and assumptions. When Eva Chen reminds us that the
“aspirations of a new generation of young Chinese women” are bound
to their abilities to be “single, independent… active, enterprising, self-­
sufficient, free from traditional culture or familiar pressure, and work-
ing to maximize her own capital and pleasure” (219), we see similar
goals for Asian/American chick lit heroines as well. Unfortunately, in
both instances, these feminist ideologies seem to perpetuate problematic
racial stereotypes.
Representations of masculinity have been central to conversations
about Asian/American intersectionality for decades. Discussions have
ranged from the problematic and reductive understanding of gender put
forth by Frank Chin and the cultural nationalists to the more diverse
and fluid approaches undertaken by David Eng in Racial Castration
and Richard Fung’s exploration of Asian/American masculinity in queer
­visual media. Scholars have pointed at white American writers as well
as Asian/American women writers as culpable for the stereotype of the
desexualized and romantically unfulfilled Asian/American man. In the
case of the former, there is no shortage of white-authored texts that por-
tray Asian/American men as asexual, work-focused model minorities, or
undesirably foreign. Texts of this nature also infer the sexual availability
of Asian/American women—but only to white, male heroes who objec-
tify and abandon those women once they meet a suitable wife. Related
to these conversations, Asian/American women writers (e.g., Amy Tan
and Maxine Hong Kingston) have been accused of perpetuating negative
images of Asian/American men; their novels supposedly feature cruel
patriarchs, incompetent (and impotent) male sidekicks, and undesirable
spouses who have been settled upon because of time and circumstance.
I would like to conclude by noting that these Asian/American chick
lit novels are not anomalous in the issues they bring up but are actually
part of a decades-long conversation about racial and cultural identity,
representations of gender, and topics of sexuality in Asian/American
studies—particularly in terms of how Asian/American women w ­ riters
represent Asian/American male characters. This chapter brings ­together
several of these central discussions from Asian/American literary criti-
cism with a reading of three chick lit novels. My initial hope had been
to find that Wong Keltner, Hwang, and Yu and Kan’s novels challenged
the ways that chick lit is often dismissed as anti-feminist, classist,
 Against Asianness  83
heteronormative pulp fiction—and, in some ways, I think they do. In-
deed, by featuring Asian/American protagonists in the chick lit genre,
these authors do in fact defy certain elements—particularly the over-
whelming whiteness—of this form. But when these novels are exam-
ined within the broader oeuvre of Asian/American literature, and when
some of the conventions of chick lit—­particularly in terms of heroines’
necessary modernness—­are analyzed more closely, we run up against
the ­reality that that obligatory progressiveness is built upon ethnic na-
tionalist binaries and Orientalist stereotypes that reinforce problematic
images of other Asian/American characters. In some ways, this reminds
me of the ironic “progressive” inclusion of gay characters in mainstream
chick lit who are depicted through reductive and heteronormalizing
stereotypes. In the instances examined in this chapter, the collateral
damages are Asian/American men and the Asian/American women the
protagonists deem too “Korean-y” or too “Chinesey.” I hope that as this
genre continues to expand as more writers participate in this form and as
we see more Asian and Asian/American chick lit novels gain popularity
(as we have witnessed with the rise of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians
series and upcoming film), these works will offer characters that refuse
both white supremacy and colonial and Orientalist ideologies, will resist
­racial oppression through uplift as opposed to oppression, and will cele-
brate race wholeheartedly and reject stereotypes like the model minority
and forever foreigner that perpetuate inequity and have real material
consequences for us all.

Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. William Dean Howells. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918. Print.
Butler, Pamela and Jigna Desai. “Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras: Chick-Lit
Criticism and Transnational Feminism.” Meridians 8.2 (2008): 1–31. Print.
Chen, Eva. “Shanghai(ed) Babies.” Feminist Media Studies 12.2 (2011):
­214–228. Print.
Cheung, King-Kok. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.
Chin, Frank, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Inada and Shawn Wong eds. Aiiieeeee!:
An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Washington: Howard UP, 1974.
Print.
Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America.
Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.
Genz, Stephanie and Benjamin Brabon. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and
­Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Print.
Harzewski, Stephanie. “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Man-
ners.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Eds. Suzanne Ferriss and Mal-
lory Young. New York: Routledge, 2006. 29–48. Print.
Hwang, Caroline. In Full Bloom. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.
84  Jenny Heijun Wills
Kim, Elaine. “Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature.” Cultural
Critique 6 (1987): 87–111. Print.
Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cul-
tural Consent. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1998. Print.
Parreñas Shimizu, Celine. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/
American Women on Screen and Scene. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.
Tan, Ming. How to Attracted Asian Women: An Asian Woman Reveals It All.
New York: Bridgegap, 2001. Print.
Wong Keltner, Kim. The Dim Sum of All Things. New York: HarperCollins,
2004. Print.
Wong, Sau-Ling C. and Jeffrey Santa Ana. “Gender and Sexuality in Asian
American Literature.” Signs 25.1 (1999): 171–229. Print.
Yu, Michelle and Blossom Kan. China Dolls. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2007. Print.
Section II

Texts and Tropes

3 Narratives of Latina
Girlhood in Malín Alegría’s
Estrella’s Quinceañera and
Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to
Getting Lost in Mexico
Felicia Salinas-Moniz

Quinceañeras, high school dramas, and traveling back “home.” These

are some of the themes found in a strand of chica lit that focuses on teen
readers.1 Generally falling within the category of Latina young adult
(YA) fiction, or Latina YA, this subset of chica lit revolves around Latina
teenage girl protagonists growing up within twenty-first-century US cul-
ture. 2 These books offer new representations of Latina girlhood within
both the Latinx literary tradition and popularly published teen fiction.
A growing interest in Latinx teens as a marketable group likely influ-
enced the publication of Latina YA novels in the early-2000s. 3 Many of
these novels focus on stories of Latina heroines working through ques-
tions of identity and belonging through the lens of both ethnicity and
class, which is often absent in popular commercial YA fiction featuring
white protagonists. At the same time, the chick lit genre form and upper-­
middle-class status of these Latina YA protagonists makes these novels
different from their Latina/o YA predecessors.4 Further, Latina YA does
not simply repackage adult chica lit for younger readers nor does it op-
erate within commercial publishing in the same way. Latina YA exists
simultaneously within the realm of commercial girl fiction and Latinx
literature, and these novels allow for a discussion of the growing com-
mercialization of Latinx youth culture and an analysis of acculturation
and Latina girlhood, specifically.
Latina YA differs in narrative strategy from Latinx YA literary fiction
and contrasts thematically from mainstream commercial girl fiction.
Malín Alegría’s Estrella’s Quinceañera (2006) and Sofi ­Mendoza’s Guide
to Getting Lost in Mexico (2007) explore the themes of border crossings,
quinceañeras, and acculturation in the lives of Latina teenagers. As close
readings of Alegría’s work will show, these novels offer not only entertain-
ment but also commentary on issues of class differences, ethnic diversity,
and border politics (broadly defined).

Latina Girlhood, Quinceañeras, and Consumption

In Estrella’s Quinceañera, Alegría employs the quinceañera celebra-
tion as both a cultural symbol and a device for propelling the narrative
88  Felicia Salinas-Moniz
forward and positioning it as Latina-specific. 5 This coming-of-age tra-
dition is a prominent symbol of Latina girlhood and has been repre-
sented in television, film, and Latina YA novels.6 The novel centers on
the life of teenager Estrella Alvarez, who is navigating between life in her
­working-class neighborhood and her high school experience at an upper-­
class private school. Family expectations dictate that she celebrates her
fifteenth birthday with a traditional quinceañera, which Estrella is ini-
tially resistant to and which offers one of the central conflicts in the
novel. The quinceañera provides an ideal construct for representing
Estrella’s ­coming-of-age, where she must navigate complicated relation-
ships between her family, friends, and first crushes all over the course of
planning this celebration and coming into her own sense of self in the
process. While themes associated with growing up and navigating rela-
tionships are not new in YA fiction, Alegría’s book uses the quinceañera
to address how intersecting identities, with particular attention to class
and ethnicity, shape Latina girlhood experiences.
In centering the novel on the quinceañera, the reader learns that this
tradition is more than just a sweet fifteen party. From the outset, the
quinceañera is clearly an antagonizing element for Estrella, whose neg-
ative attitude toward the celebration contradicts its significant cultural
and familial meaning. The novel begins with Estrella’s definition for the
celebration:

quinceañera (keen-see-ah-’nyair-ah) n., Spanish, formal (quince

[‘keen-say] for short): 1. traditional party (one that I refuse to have).
According to my mom, a girl’s fifteenth birthday is supposed to be
the biggest day in her life. The quinceañera is like a huge flashing
neon sign for womanhood. Back in olden times, it meant that a
woman was ready to get married and have babies. 2. The way I see
it, it’s just a lame party with cheesy music and puffy princess dresses.
(1)

By presenting the quinceañera in this manner, Alegría touches upon the

generational divide that exists between Latina teens and their mothers
as well as the loss of cultural tradition that comes with assimilation.
In addition, the language that Estrella uses, such as “lame party” and
“cheesy music,” reveals her distaste for the celebration but also mimics a
teenage vernacular. For Estrella, a quince is tied to “olden times,” a past
that does not speak directly to her (1).
After her mother pressures her into having a quinceañera celebration,
Estrella must face the challenge of having to reconcile her life at home
with her new life outside of the barrio. Since she began attending a pri-
vate high school by way of a scholarship, Estrella has lost contact with
her neighborhood school friends Tere and Izzy, instead making new
friends with her affluent white classmates Christie and Sheila (8–9), who
 Narratives of Latina Girlhood  89
call her “Star” (English translation for “Estrella”). This renaming helps
to affirm the new persona that Estrella attempts to adopt, which in-
cludes shedding any ties to her life at home and to her Latina identity. At
the same time that Estrella’s mom plans the quinceañera, Christie and
Sheila make arrangements to throw Estrella a fifteenth birthday party
as well. Estrella describes her quinceañera as being for the “old Estrella”
and the one that her friends are throwing her as a party “for the Estrella
I was trying to become” (24).
In Alegría’s novels, friendships and first romances take center stage in
the narrative as do relationships with family and the growth of the main
character. In this way, her work fits perfectly within the parameters of
teen chick lit. In “Chickalicious,” a teen chick lit review featured in the
School Library Journal, Christine Meloni describes the genre as follows:
“These fun books can be about boys, friendship, family, fitting in, or
vacations, but the stories almost always involve self-discovery, offer an
uplifting ending, and spotlight characters that are easy for girls to relate
to” (32). In addition to the defining themes of teen chick lit, Meloni situ-
ates teen chick lit novels in one of two categories: “humorous” and “priv-
ileged,” with the former “featur[ing] real girls teens can relate to” and
the latter “exclusively about wealthy beautiful girls who live in exciting
places, wear trendy clothes, and date hot guys” (“Teen Chick Lit” 16).7
Alegría’s novel straddles both categories but allows for an interrogation
of privilege as it connects with the main protagonist’s ability to be true
to herself.
Alegría’s nuanced attention to issues of class, and how it interacts with
race, complicates friendships within the novel, which play a significant
role in the primary character’s development. Class status for her protag-
onist is something that is in a state of transformation and influenced by
friendships with more affluent white characters. For example, when ad-
dressing the relationship between Estrella and her private school friends,
the novel focuses on the everyday interactions between the girls and how
these relate to Estrella’s sense of her own class position and thus her
perception of belonging. One of the first scenes with the three friends
revolves around their ritual “Swap Night,” whereby each girl brings
clothing to trade with one another (18–19). Estrella, however, does not
bring any clothes since she does not have the same sort of designer attire
as her friends do (18). The following passage illustrates Estrella’s take on
the matter:

The whole process reminded me how different we were, too––I

could never borrow Sheila’s makeup, because her foundation was
ivory and I needed deep bronze; I could never throw on a pair of
Christie’s jeans, because she had the flattest butt and mine was large
and in charge. Sometimes this seemed like some sort of save-the-
poor-kids charity drive and I was essentially the human version of
90  Felicia Salinas-Moniz
the Salvation Army. It baffled me how being with Sheila and Christie
made me feel so adored and ashamed, all at the same time.
(19–20)

Almost every aspect of Estrella’s relationship with her new friends elic-
its comparisons between herself and them, with particular attention to
socioeconomic and ethnic distinctions. Whereas Sheila and Christie can
afford to purchase expensive designer clothes, Estrella gets their “B-list
clothes” and hand-me-downs (18). Sheila and Christie live in large
houses in wealthy neighborhoods, while Estrella lives in a small house
in a working-class neighborhood where “[t]here was barely any room to
breathe” (81). Estrella’s mom drives a rundown Dodge minivan, whereas
Sheila’s mom drives a BMW (12, 110). Ultimately, these disparities cause
Estrella to feel embarrassed by her home life, where she does not even
want Sheila or Christie to meet her family or attend her quinceañera
because she fears they will no longer accept her. These differences shape
Estrella’s beliefs about her own community and ideas about success,
which for her is based on the accumulation of material goods. In addi-
tion, Estrella’s ideas about success and aspirations for ­upper-class sta-
tus create tension with her childhood friendships and lead to further
self-reflection.
Estrella’s fraught relationship with her childhood friends, Tere and
Izzy, represents her internal conflict between being true to herself and
wanting a different (upper-class) life. After her mom asks Tere and Izzy
to be damas for Estrella’s quinceañera, the reader comes to find why
Estella has chosen to abandon her childhood friends:

Yes, we’d been friends, but that was before I met Sheila and ­Christie.
Before I started doing classy stuff like going out for expensive su-
shi lunches, lounging around in giant fancy houses, and going to
pool parties that didn’t have the phrase ‘community pool’ on the
invitation.
(71–72)

Clouded by her desire to fit in, Estrella puts more stock into her new
connections with Christie and Sheila as this offers her genuine friend-
ship and helps fulfill her own internal desire for upward mobility. While
Alegría does present friendships among girls from different ethnic and
socioeconomic backgrounds, she does not position Sheila or Chris-
tie as the prototypical “mean girls” that are found in other YA novels
and is careful not to conflate elevated social status and whiteness with
automatic “mean girl” tendencies.8 On the contrary, she allows these
characters to shine through as true friends for Estrella, who is the one
that ultimately incubates her own feelings of insecurity. According to
­Estrella, “…Christie wasn’t stuck-up or conceited in the least. She was
 Narratives of Latina Girlhood  91
the real deal––down-to-earth and friendly. Everyone felt like they knew
her and that she was their friend” (17). Even so, the differences between
Estrella’s old and new friends emphasize her internal conflict with know-
ing who she really is. After Estrella learns the real reasons that Tere and
Izzy agree to be in her quinceañera (Tere is “doing it as a favor” for
Estrella’s mom and Izzy’s mom is paying her to attend rehearsals), she
has a moment of clarity whereby she realizes how much socioeconomic
pressures have been detrimental to her own identity development (106).
It is here where she begins to understand how much she has lost her sense
of self since changing schools and friends:

The school me wore makeup, styled hair, and had a cool disposi-
tion. The home me wore her favorite fleece sweats (with the hole just
slightly below the crotch), a white tee, and her old dirty sneakers.
The old me didn’t have to try to impress her friends. Tere and Izzy
had liked me just the way I was. I’d thought that when I started Sa-
cred Heart the old me would disappear. In fact, I’d done everything
I could to try and get rid of her. But maybe I’d done too good a job
of it. Maybe she was gone forever.
(106)

These realizations lead Estrella to begin to unpack how issues of class

have impacted how she presents herself at her new affluent school, which
extends to her friendships and directly connects with her own self-worth.
At the height of this realization, her relationship with Sheila and Christie
also becomes strained as they are unaware of the quinceañera plans,
which Estrella has purposely kept from them in an effort to hide her
home life and, ultimately, her true self (109). The connections Estrella
makes between her own identity and the friendships that she has also
extend to her romantic interests, who also differ across ethnic identity
and class status.
In addition to a focus on female friendships, budding romances in
Latina YA play a significant role in the young heroine’s personal and
emotional growth.9 True to form, Estrella’s Quinceañera also includes
a romantic arc that leads to the heroine coming into her own identity as
she navigates across racial and class boundaries. In “The Lit of Chick
Lit,” Patty Campbell suggests that “boyfriends are primarily useful as
indicators of status––at least until our girl has had her epiphany” (489).
In both adult and teen chick lit, the protagonist will often be presented
with two possible options for romance, with one clearly being the ob-
vious choice even if the protagonist does not know it yet. As Meloni
explains, “It is the reader who is rooting for the girl to realize that the
boy of her dreams is right under her nose,” which further contributes to
the reader’s connection with the text and investment with the plight of
the heroine (Teen Chick Lit 1).
92  Felicia Salinas-Moniz
Alegría writes two potential love interests for Estrella—Kevin
­ cDonough, who is within Christie and Sheila’s social circle, and
M
Agapito Padilla (aka Speedy), who lives in Estrella’s neighborhood. In
addition, an impending love interest signifies a girl’s ascendance into
young adulthood, as she explores the world of dating and first loves
(whereas adult chica lit heroines are often navigating the world of fourth
and fifth loves, finding Mr. Right, or just having a good time). Speedy
fits the mold of the prototypical “cholo,” illustrated in his first appear-
ance. Estrella describes him as follows:

He had a shaved head and wore an Aztec warrior T-shirt and dark,
baggy jeans. He definitely had this pretty-boy/bad-boy kind of way
about him, like a Latino Brad Pitt. There was also a confidence in
the way he walked that I recognized. It was that tough-boy exterior
that I saw in all the cholos in my neighborhood. They drove me
crazy! They were always hanging out on the street all day, picking
fights, drinking, or getting arrested. But this guy was grinning from
ear to ear, like someone with a secret.
(27)

As Estrella becomes more acquainted with Speedy, she comes to find

that he is a compassionate and sensitive young man who takes pride
in his community. In fact, when Estrella talks to him about wanting to
move out of their neighborhood because of the poor living conditions
and dirty streets, he educates her on social inequalities that shape the
neighborhood and Estrella’s limited perception (145). After she com-
pares her rich friend’s pristine neighborhood to the cluttered streets of
her own, Speedy explains that the reason that her friend’s street is clean
is because the wealthier neighborhoods receive more attention from city
street sweepers (146). As the novel progresses, and as Estrella becomes
more involved with Speedy, she begins to change her values and to ques-
tion if what she originally deemed as important is actually superficial.
On the other hand, Estrella never really develops a relationship with
Kevin, who only serves to represent someone within her new social circle
and outside her Latinx community. At the birthday party that Sheila and
Christie plan for Estrella, she realizes that she wants to be with Speedy
instead of Kevin, who ends up valuing her only for physical appearances
and inappropriately groping her on the dance floor (169–170). In choos-
ing Speedy, Estrella discovers the importance of cultivating romantic
relationships that prioritize respect and a deeper intimacy beyond the
physical.
In typical chick lit fashion, the novel concludes with a neat wrap up
of the various conflicts that have plagued the heroine (arguments with
her friends, with her parents, and with Speedy). After quinceañera plans
nearly bankrupt the family and incite arguments between her mother
 Narratives of Latina Girlhood  93
and father (196–200), Estrella decides to take control of the situation
and plan her own birthday celebration, thus contributing to the chick
lit narrative arc where the heroine makes moves to change her current
circumstances. Determined not to spend beyond her budget, she enlists
the help of her childhood friends and community members to create a
memorable quinceañera.10 Thus, the quinceañera serves as the conduit
whereby Estrella asserts herself and learns the true value of family and
community. As she explains to Tía Lucky, “I need to bring everyone to-
gether and show them how much they mean to me. And I need to show
myself that I can be me—the real me” (207). With the help of Tía Lucky,
even the formerly ill-fitting quinceañera dress is altered into a “glamor-
ous gown” that complements Estrella’s outward features and simulta-
neously signifies her own internal personal transformation (204). Since
Estrella takes charge of planning her party and eliminates the costly ex-
pectations for the affair, the novel works to give an alternative represen-
tation of the commercialized version of the quinceañera celebration so
often represented within popular culture. However, as a narrative device
in a story geared for Latina teens, the quinceañera party still retains a
prominent position in the novel and serves as a valuable mass-marketing
strategy.11 In fact, with quinceañeras celebrating a Latina girl’s coming-
of-age, it is predictable that this would become a prominent theme in
Latina YA literature, which also targets readers around this age group.12
Estrella’s Quinceañera effectively uses the celebration to highlight the
young protagonist’s growth as she navigates teen life.

YA Border Crossings and Ancestral Homeland

While several Latina YA heroines wear quinceañera dresses, illustrating
the permanence of Latina/o cultural tradition and serving as a tangible
marker of ethnic identity, others travel to ancestral homelands and are
forced to remain there for some period of time. The central focus in
these travel narratives is the journey that the young heroine takes, one
that usually leads to her personal development and a discovery of roots.
In teen chick lit, travel is one of several themes common in these novels
leading to the creation of its own subgenre (Alderdice 24; Meloni, Teen
Chick Lit 103). For Latina YA, in particular, travel becomes a salient
point for the protagonist’s self-identification and connection to her eth-
nic identity. In Alegría’s second novel, Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to Getting
Lost in Mexico, the author takes up the theme of travel by focusing on
the main heroine’s journey to Mexico and her evolving Latina identity.
In Sofi Mendoza’s Guide, Alegría infuses a social consciousness into
her writing, offering substance to a genre that, like adult chick lit, is
often trivialized as being purely superficial. What is most notable in her
style of writing is how she accomplishes this task while always keeping
in mind her audience and the parameters of the genre that she is working
94  Felicia Salinas-Moniz
within. This story revolves around Sofi’s desire to be independent while
engaging in more adult choices and addresses a slightly older Latina
teen at the point of graduating high school and, therefore, closer to
adulthood. In writing about teen chick lit, Joanna Webb Johnson aptly
describes the main heroines as “typically in a borderland between child-
hood and adulthood” (142). In addition to this figurative borderland that
Johnson refers to, Sofi Mendoza’s Guide looks at geographical borders.
As such, the underlying focus of the novel centers on the timely issue of
immigration and border politics and how these issues can impact Latinx
youth. Alegría makes this a point of reference by prefacing her novel
with a vignette about two teenage girls who were unable to reenter the
US after a short day trip to Mexico. She provides the following account:

Martha and Carmelia had come to the United States when they were
still children and had lived in California for sixteen years with work
permits. They were CSU college students and were looking for-
ward to completing their degrees. However, by visiting Mexico that
day, they had voluntarily deported themselves without knowing it.
­Martha and Carmelia’s story is not unusual on the border. However,
their voices have been ignored, dismissed by mainstream media, and
overlooked in the U.S. immigration debate. Unlike the characters in
this work of fiction, these girls will not be allowed to petition for
reentry for another ten years.
(vii)

By beginning the novel in this way, Alegría consciously addresses the

questions of citizenship and belonging that have fueled debates around
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the
Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act,
affecting the status and opportunities for undocumented Latinx youth
currently living in the US. In Sofi Mendoza’s Guide, the main heroine
finds herself trapped in Mexico after deceiving her parents and sneak-
ing away with her friends to Rosarito for a weekend of partying. While
crossing the border back into the US, Sofi and her friends are detained
when the border agents discover that Sofi’s green card is fake, much to
her surprise. Sofi is forced to stay with her aunt and uncle, whom she has
never met, in Rancho Escondido until her parents can figure out a way
to bring her home.
In contrast to Estrella’s Quinceañera, Alegría writes Sofi Mendoza’s
Guide in third-person narration. While the use of first-person narration
in Estrella’s Quinceañera follows a more classic chick lit form, by allow-
ing the heroine to narrate her own story and speak directly to the reader,
the third-person narration in Sofi Mendoza’s Guide works effectively
in presenting the heroine in unfamiliar territory. By using third-person
narration, Alegría can write beyond the realm of what the main heroine
 Narratives of Latina Girlhood  95
knows and the narrator essentially serves as a guide for both the reader
and Sofi. The narration still prioritizes Sofi’s point of view, with frequent
glimpses into her thoughts, as she encounters the culture shock of living
away from her American home life.
Similar to the development of her character Estrella, Alegría writes
of Sofi as an assimilated Latina teen who wants to distance herself from
parental expectations, curfews, and household responsibilities. Sofi feels
pressure from her parents to succeed, which to them means doing well in
school and going to college (4–6) and, in terms of identity, she considers
herself “…infinitely more American than she was Mexican” (92). In fact,
she prioritizes her American identity over her Mexican identity, which
she likens more to her parents who she describes as “very old-school
typical Mexican immigrants” (4). As for her trip to Mexico, she crosses
the border not to affirm her heritage or trace family roots. Rather, she
and her friends venture to Rosarito for the sole purpose of socializing
and conducting “Operation Papi Chulo”—Sofi’s plan to attract her se-
cret crush Nick Hoffman (3). The following passage summarizes Sofi’s
priorities at the beginning of the novel:

Sofi refused to be like them [her parents]. She was just as Ameri-
can as her friends and once she went to college, she could stuff her
parents’ issues in a closet. No one there would care whether she
cleaned her room or not! Once she got to the dorms, she would call
the shots. Sofi would go out whenever she felt like it….Then, after
she graduated, she’d be sure to make tons of money so she and Nick
could hire a maid to clean the beautiful house they would buy to-
gether. She couldn’t wait. Nick was going to make all her American
dreams come true.
(6)

In this passage, Sofi offers her definition of an American dream as one

dependent on a relationship with her crush and a neoliberal fantasy
of having enough wealth to be able to afford home ownership and a
housekeeper.
The novel begins in much the same way as any other YA chick lit
book, reflecting the self-absorbed attitude of its teenage protagonist.
The desire for independence and a boyfriend reflects common themes
in YA chick lit, and by starting the novel with these expectations, the
seasoned chick lit reader can predict that this fairy tale ending will
not turn out as the heroine expects.13 In fact, the overly optimistic
view of her secret crush practically spells out that he will end up
falling short of her expectations (which Nick certainly does when he
calls her “Latina caliente” and says “I told Steve I’d tap dat hot Latin
ass by Monday” (55)). This revelation of her crush’s true character
deals a terrible blow to Sofi. It, however, pales in comparison to the
96  Felicia Salinas-Moniz
discovery of her undocumented status and the fact that she cannot
return home. Thus, the novel’s focal point shifts from the realm of
everyday teenage drama to a more serious predicament that extends
beyond Sofi’s present worldview and serves as the catalyst for her
personal development.
By being trapped in Mexico, Sofi begins to develop an appreciation for
her Mexican heritage. Initially, her adjustment to her new environment
starts off slowly as she fixates on her Mexican family’s lack of resources
and different way of living. Far removed from the comforts and privi-
leges that she is accustomed to, she balks at the fact that there is “No
Tivo! No Internet! No electricity!” (90). The preoccupation that Sofi has
with technology speaks to the importance that teenagers place on having
readily accessible forms of entertainment and social networking.14 Thus,
by incorporating these elements into the novel, Alegría effectively writes
for a teenage audience who can’t imagine a world without computers,
cell phones, or television.
While Alegría does well in writing with a youthful voice by honing in
on the matters that concern many teens, she still is able to focus on larger
cultural and class issues seen through the eyes of her young protagonist.
For example, a moment of awakening for Sofi happens on a trip to a
migrant camp, where she observes immense poverty and draws compar-
isons with her own life:

Sofi realized that this was another world, one she never knew ex-
isted. Was this how the rest of the world lived? Sofi thought about
her family’s town house and the immaculately kept yard, her state-
of-the art school, and her comfortable bedroom. Why do I live there
and have everything and more? Why do some children go hungry
while others pick and choose what they want on a whim?
(152)

In Johnson’s analysis of YA chick lit, she explains, “Popular writers for

young adults know that contemporary young readers have no use for
preachy stories that point to parents always being right and suggest that
all will end well regardless of circumstance” (146). Instead of lecturing
to her readers about the political and economic underpinnings of issues
like immigration and US involvement in Mexico, Alegría incorporates
short vignettes that deal with these issues through the voices of other
characters, both primary and secondary. For example, when Sofi asks
about the significance of the black ribbon hanging on the door in Lalo
Jiménez’s store, he tells her that it is a tradition for memorializing family
who have died crossing the border and that the ribbon is for his brother
who was killed by the Minute Men (124). At the same time that Sofi
becomes familiar with Mexican tradition and customs from her travels,
the reader can also learn the stark reality of life on the border.
 Narratives of Latina Girlhood  97
Another moment within the text where Alegría inserts a political
statement is in Sofi’s relationship with her potential love interest, An-
dres. Similar to the character Speedy in Estrella’s Quinceañera, An-
dres plays an integral role in helping Sofi navigate through Mexico
and teaching her about the culture and history. Like some of the her-
oines in adult chica lit, Sofi also struggles with her identity, which is
a major theme in the novel. In addition to not knowing Spanish or
who Emiliano Zapata is, Sofi feels that her previous experiences with
­Mexican culture are not connected to her experience in Mexico, as
illustrated in the following passage: “It was hard for her to deal with
the fact that she didn’t feel Mexican enough. Taco Bell, margaritas,
and Cinco de Mayo celebrations seemed so superficial and bland in
comparison to all that she’d experienced in Rosarito” (180). Thus, Sofi
views her experiences living in Mexico as more culturally authentic
than what she experiences living in the US, which sets the stage for
her eventual self-affirmation as a bicultural young woman. In offering
a list of Americanized ­“Mexican” items to compare her experience in
­Rosarito, Sofi also points to the ways that cultural commodification
often leads to a stripping of authenticity.
Ultimately, Sofi is able to return home after she meets her estranged
grandmother in Mexico, whose revelation of her own American citizen-
ship helps Sofi to be able to return to the US. While the novel provides
an idealistic ending, where Sofi is able to easily regain her citizenship
status, Alegría maintains a strong point of view in writing about border
politics and concludes the novel with a thoughtful interpretation of how
the border influences her young heroine: “Sofi was a border girl. Not
fully American or Mexican. She was both, a bridge between cultures,
the best of both worlds….Her life was now tied to the imaginary line
that separated two nations” (276). Sofi Mendoza’s Guide thus fulfills all
of the tenets of YA chick lit, while keeping the novel grounded within a
Latina sensibility and allowing for a discussion of contemporary politi-
cal and cultural issues.
Latina YA novels, such as Alegría’s Estrella’s Quinceañera and Sofi
Mendoza’s Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico, offer new representa-
tions of Latina girlhood in both contemporary YA fiction and Latinx
literature.15 In these stories, the Latina protagonists navigate issues of
class, ethnicity, and living across borders (nationally and metaphori-
cally), within and outside of conventional chick lit story lines. As with
chica lit novelists who write with adult women in mind, Latina YA
novelists are also invested in telling stories with which teenage girls,
and Latina teens in particular, can connect. Her work can be read
alongside earlier Latina YA fiction and more recent works by Latinx
YA authors, who continue to push the boundaries of the literary form
to reveal diverse and more inclusive coming-of-age experiences for
readers.16
98  Felicia Salinas-Moniz
Notes
1 Chica lit is a subgenre of chick lit that focuses on Latina protagonists and is
generally written by Latina authors. The term emerged with the publication
of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s Dirty Girls Social Club (2003). For this essay, I
use “Latina” as an identifier when speaking about these novels as the central
protagonists are cis-gendered girls of Mexican American ancestry. I chose
not to use “Chicana” as an identifier as these novels are part of a larger YA
canon that feature protagonists with different Latina nationalities.
2 “YA” is the commonly recognized abbreviation for mass-marketed “young
adult fiction.” I borrow the term “Latina YA” from Kelly Parra, author of
Graffiti Girl (2007). Parra had created an online blog with the same title,
focusing on books for Latina teens, which unfortunately is now defunct.
Within this essay, I will refer to chica lit books written for Latina teen read-
ers as “Latina YA” and do not include other works of “literary” Latina
young adult fiction in this label. By using the abbreviated YA label, I am also
making connections with other commercially published YA novels for girls.
3 According to a 2006 market report on the Latino teen population, “One in
five teens in the U.S. is Hispanic and they are growing six times faster than
other market segments. By 2020, they will account for 24% of the popula-
tion aged five to 19 years” (Cheskin Added Value 7). During the same years
of publication for the two books discussed in this essay, the following Latina
YA titles were also published: Caridad Ferrer’s Adiós to My Old Life (2006)
and It’s Not About the Accent (2007), Kelly Parra’s Graffiti Girl (2007),
Michele Serros’s Honey Blonde Chica (2006) and¡Scandalosa! (2007), and
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s Haters (2006).
4 The themes of identity and belonging are at the heart of Latinx young adult
fiction; however, commercialized chica lit offers a new way to address these
topics. Thus, the barrios and schools where the beloved characters Esper-
anza, Nilda, and the García girls lived and learned have been replaced with
upper crust suburbia and private education. See Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda
(1973), Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street (1984), and Julia Alva-
rez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991).
5 Much like adult chica lit, Latina YA tends to emphasize the ethnic and cul-
tural identities of its heroines through readily recognizable aspects of Latino
culture. In addition to the quinceañera, an emphasis on Spanish language
and the Mexican American family plays a central role in giving Estrella’s
Quinceañera its Latina identity. Each chapter begins with a Spanish word
or phrase that introduces the theme that will be addressed. As commercially
published works of young adult fiction, Latina YA has the ability to attract
both Latina and non-Latina teen readers by addressing common issues that
many teenage girls face. However, by focusing on the lives of Latina teens
in the context of their ethnic and cultural identities, these novels provide an
additional layer of connectivity for the young Latina reader.
6 In addition to the YA novels discussed, the quinceañera is a central theme
in MTVtr3s’ television series Quiero Mis Quinces and Sony Picture’s film
Quinceañera (2006).
7 Furthermore, Meloni points out a lack of diversity in the genre, with most
narratives revolving around white female protagonists and a scarcity of ones
that center black youth (“Teen Chick Lit” 18). In her review, she mentions
two Latina teen chick lit titles, Nancy Osa’s Cuba 15 (2003) and Gaby Tri-
ana’s Cubanita (2005), which focus on the lives of Cuban American girls.
Her article was published during the same year as Malín Alegría’s E ­ strella’s
Quinceañera, which may explain why this title was not mentioned.
 Narratives of Latina Girlhood  99
According to a 2006 Publishers Weekly article, Harlequin was slated the
following year to launch Kimani TRU, an imprint focused on black girls
(“Harlequin’s First YA Line” 19). In recent years, there appears to be an
increase in diverse representations across all young adult fiction; however,
those titles that tend to gain best-seller status generally center around white
protagonists.
8 During the height of teen chick lit in the mid-2000s, a popular trend in-
cluded what some described as “mean girl books,” in which the central con-
flict revolved around teenage girl rivalries, popularity, and class status.
9 Most Latina YA novels focus predominantly on heterosexual relationships,
although there is a growing body of books that focuses on the lives of Lat-
inx LGBTQ teens. See Alex Sanchez’s Rainbow Boys (2001), Rigoberto
González’s The Mariposa Club (2009), and Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a
Breath (2016).
10 The reader comes to find that Estrella’s Tía Lucky still owes eighteen thou-
sand dollars for her cousin Marta’s quinceañera (131). The value that Estrel-
la’s mother and Tía Lucky place on quinceañeras stem from their not being
able to have quinces of their own, because their families could not afford
them (204).
11 In her book Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (2007),
Julia Alvarez presents an ethnographic study of this tradition by talking
to girls who are making their quinceañera and also to those involved with
the industry that surrounds the celebration. As Alvarez illustrates, the
quinceañera celebration has become a commodified symbol of Latina teen
girlhood within popular media, at the same time that the quinceañera cel-
ebration itself is becoming highly commodified. Her attendance at the San
Antonio Quinceañera Expo, in particular, offers some of the most salient
details of the quince market, which includes services for attire, catering,
decorations, music, and other items needed for the festivities (59–64). As Al-
varez discovers, this celebration has become a profitable venture for vendors
of quinceañera goods and services, who are working in tandem to transform
this tradition into a marketable symbol of Latina identity (60). Alvarez even
makes mention of a few YA novels that take on the quinceañera tradition,
one of which is Estrella’s Quinceañera, and draws comparisons between
Latina YA heroines who seemingly hate their quinceañera dresses with the
girls in her study who find joy in selecting a beautiful dress to wear on their
special day (42–44).
12 However, with the popularity of this celebration, the quinceañera is in dan-
ger of becoming an overused theme within Latina YA. In fact, an article
about Latina/o young adult fiction within libraries questions why many of
the books featured on a Young Adult Library Services Association list focus
heavily on cultural traditions such as “the Mexican quinceañera (sweet fif-
teen)” (Ramos-McDermott 19).
13 A common plot device in chick lit is to introduce the too-good-to-be-true
love interest or romance scenario, which ultimately disappoints the heroine.
In Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel (2006), Cathy
Yardley identifies this common theme in adult chick lit as “The cheating
lover” (12–13).
14 This attention to technology is highlighted in a 2006 video profile study
about Latina/o teens created by Cheskin Added Value, a strategic consulting
and market research group (see Cheskin Added Value website http://www.
cheskin.com). According to the report that connects with this video profile,
Latina/o teens emphasize the use of technology just as much as other teens
in their age group (Cheskin Added Value 16).
100  Felicia Salinas-Moniz
15 Continuing with the themes she writes in Estrella’s Quinceañera and Sofi
Mendoza’s Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico, Alegría published a four-book
Latina YA series through Scholastic entitled Border Town. She compares
this project to the popular 1980s Sweet Valley High series; however, these
novels focus on the lives of Latina/o teens (Kurwa).
16 See Jenny Torres Sanchez’s Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of
Frenchie Garcia (2013), Cindy L. Rodriguez’s When Reason Breaks (2015),
Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016), Celia C. Pérez’s The First Rule
of Punk (2017), and Lilliam Rivera’s The Education of Margot Sanchez
(2017).

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———. Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA. New York:
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4 “I live a fabulous Asian-
American life—ask me
how!” Kim Wong Keltner
Unpacks Contemporary
Asian American Female
Identity in The Dim Sum
of All Things and Buddha
Baby1
Jennifer Woolston

In her dissertation “Funny Asians”: Comedy and Humor in Asian

American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, Caroline Kyung Hong
states, “Asian American Chick Lit… is a rapidly growing subset of ‘eth-
nic’ Chick Lit” (127). 2 Specifically, these chick lit texts move beyond the
conventions of the more mainstreamed white pieces of the genre because
the novels “demonstrate an awareness of stereotypes of Asian and Asian
American women as exotic, hypersexual, passive, silently suffering, and
they feature Asian American heroines who struggle simultaneously with
issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and home” (Hong 127). 3 Chantal
Moore asserts,

Chick Lit is usually written in the first person, permitting for much
introspection by the female protagonist. This self-analysis may be
beneficial to the reader in that it gives the feeling that someone else
may have the same unspoken thoughts as her and, consequently, she
feels marginally less alone with her thoughts.
(n. pag)

Asian American chick lit, in effect, becomes a haven for readers who
may not otherwise have outlets for the expression of their fears, con-
cerns, and/or desires. Kim Wong Keltner’s novels, The Dim Sum of All
Things and Buddha Baby, both of which feature the same protagonist
Lindsey Owyang align the reader with the authorial voice and experi-
ence of an Asian American author, thereby using traditional elements
of the genre (such as a focus on self-identity, romance, career) while
simultaneously intertwining these elements with those concerns faced by
a Chinese American protagonist.
 Asian American Female Identity  103
Throughout The Dim Sum of All Things and Buddha Baby, Lindsey
Owyang is bullied, ostracized, and sexualized in ways specific to her race
and gender. She views being Chinese American as the cause of the racial-
ized and sexualized oppression she experiences and, as a result, distances
herself from Chinese and Chinese American culture and history as a cop-
ing mechanism. As Lindsey matures, she eventually develops a curiosity
to learn more about the history of her people and gradually uncovers
a deeper understanding of the oppression her grandparents faced. This
chapter explores how these two novels depicts the racist and sexist bully-
ing that Lindsey faces, how this bullying leads her to reject her Chinese
American identity, and how learning more about her family’s history
allows her to finally become more comfortable with her own hyphenated
sense of self. Lindsey’s trajectory over these two novels, from a distanced
perspective to a more knowledgeable one, illustrates the arguments that
Dim Sum and Buddha Baby make: knowing one’s history matters.
Both The Dim Sum of All Things and Buddha Baby begin by intro-
ducing readers to the protagonist, and they emphasize Lindsey’s Chinese
appearance but also her rootedness in American, as opposed to ­Chinese,
culture. Lindsey is described as a twenty-eight-year-old who works part-
time running errands at her former grammar school and clerking in a mu-
seum gift shop (Buddha 2, 13–14), and dates a man named ­Michael who
appears to be white but who is actually one-quarter Chinese (­Buddha 4).
The text describes her physically as a diminutive woman with long dark
hair and light porcelain skin, and the text emphasizes that both her nose
and “single-lidded eyes” announce her Chinese heritage to the world
(­Buddha 2). However, we also learn that Lindsey is a “a third-­generation
San Franciscan of Chinese descent” whose familiarity with ­American
popular culture far outweighs any knowledge she possesses about ances-
tral proverbs, exemplified by her ability to remember entire Brady Bunch
episodes but few of the Han Dynasty’s pithy sayings (Dim Sum 1). She
grew up reading Western literary classics rather than Chinese tomes, and
she learned to speak French rather than Cantonese or Mandarin (The
Dim 1). While an educated woman, Lindsey knows little, at least initially,
about the Chinese immigrant experience in the US.
Lindsey’s relationship to her ethnicity is conflicted as a result of the
various forms of bullying she experiences throughout her life due to being
Chinese American. She experiences schoolyard teasing at an early age,
fueled by both racism and sexism. On the grammar school playground,
kids would mock Lindsey’s last name and more. Keltner writes, “Kids
used their index fingers to stretch their eyelids into slants and they’d
sing, ‘Chinese, Japanese, knobby knees, look at these!’ Sticking out their
flat chests, they’d shimmy around the playground like seductive Suzy
Wongs” (The Dim 7). This juvenile rhyme not only lumps all Asians into
one homogenized category, but it also reinforces the notion that Asian
American women are, de facto, objects of sexual objectification. In the
104  Jennifer Woolston
second grade, Lindsey was one of two Chinese students. This ethnic
isolation was compounded when her peers began teasing her, calling
the other pupil, Nelson Fong, her significant other due solely to the fact
that he was also Chinese (Buddha 96). Here, Lindsey is an outcast due
to her Chinese features, and because of her gender, she is connected to
another Asian boy as part of a heterosexual union. Rather than being
viewed as an individual, Lindsey becomes defined by her race, gender,
and presumed heterosexuality.
Lindsey tells readers that she also experienced racial prejudice and sex-
ism during her college years. Back then, Lindsey aspired to be a painter in
the vein of Georgia O’Keefe. Rather than directing her efforts, Lindsey
narrates how her instructor refused to support her dreams. Convinced
that a woman of Lindsey’s ethnicity should only be producing “Orien-
tal paintings” (The Dim 189), he encouraged her to stick to decorative
works “suggested she sit cross-legged on a lotus meditation pillow or
tatami mat” (The Dim 188). Determined to defy the instructor, Lindsey
painted what she wished. She tells readers that her efforts were promis-
ing, but her teacher failed to reward her talent when she was focusing on
still life paintings or other average subjects (The Dim 189). Since Lindsey
endeavored to be a successful student, she painted a delicate piece with
calligraphy to appease her teachers’ views. Keltner writes that “He’d [the
instructor] had no idea that, in reality, her string of delicate calligra-
phy strokes had described the $3.99 lunch special at Kung Pao Express”
(The Dim 189). Rather than continuing to paint, “Lindsey got her A and
learned that people see what they want to see about Chinese people and
culture” (The Dim 190). This male instructor’s mindset exhibits myopic
beliefs about Chinese American women.
By giving voice to this racist and sexist experience, Keltner’s text
speaks to Sumi K. Cho’s point that “Asian Pacific women are partic-
ularly valued in a sexist society because they provide the antidote to
visions of liberated career women who challenge the objectification of
women” (Cho 351). By viewing Lindsey as mainly an “Oriental girl”
(The Dim 189), her male instructor categorizes her as a woman thought
to be too gentle and passive to resist his domineering authority. Rather
than support Lindsey’s own artistic inclinations, the teacher only sup-
ports her efforts when she produces the art that he finds fitting for a
young Asian American woman. This double bind of sexism and racial-
ized oppression speaks to the intersectional focus of Asian American
Chick Lit texts, which explore gender dichotomies as they intersect with
ethnic prejudice.
Along these same lines, Lindsey experiences sexual objectification due
to her race via white men whom she calls “Hoarders.” She tells readers,

These Hoarders of All Things Asian sought the erotic, hassle-free

companionship they believed to be the specialty of lily-footed
 Asian American Female Identity  105
celestials, geishas, fan-tan dancers, and singsong girlies. They were
unable to distinguish these fantasy ideals from modern women.
(The Dim 3)

These men sexually desire Asian women, a fantasy long aided by the
pervasive stereotypes in popular culture of Asian American women as
either a “Lotus Blossom” or “Dragon Lady” and which serve to “erot-
icize Chinese women as exotic ‘dolls’ available for white male domi-
nance” (Benson Tong 211). Lindsey feels revulsion at being viewed as a
piece of chattel for sexual fantasy (The Dim 3) and wants to be valued
and respected as a full person rather than one who is chiefly coveted
for her ethnicity and sexual organs. Scholar Nina Zhang writes, “The
use of ‘Asian fetish’ objectifies Asian women as an exotic ‘other,’ even
though Asians have been settling in the United States since the mid-19th
century. It is another misinterpretation of Asians as weak, docile, and
submissive” (n. pag).4 Similarly, Sumi Cho writes, “Asian Pacific Ameri-
can women are at particular risk of being racially and sexually harassed
because of the synergism that results when sexualized racial stereotypes
combine with racialized gender stereotypes” (350). Through these mo-
ments, the novels share with readers what the double bind of eroticized
racial oppression with outright sexual objectification looks like for many
Asian American women.
In addition to those mentioned earlier, Lindsey faces many more mo-
ments of discrimination and marginalization. Whether it is a classmate’s
claim that she eats rates, a male customer in line at the grocery store
who assumes from her purchase of string beans that she must work at a
Chinese restaurant (The Dim 116), or a white woman quoting Chinese
proverbs to her (The Dim 117), random women and men alike primarily
view Lindsey as an immigrant or “exotic” Asian female throughout both
of Keltner’s novels. Lindsey is often mistaken for a foreigner, and scholar
Jennifer Ho writes, “It is not taken for granted that someone with Asian
physical features is native to the United States” (3–4). When Lindsey
fails to respond to a random American man’s pickup line, he continues
to address her with “Speak Eng-lish?” (The Dim 17). The collective ex-
perience of these many moments of explicit racism and microaggressions
leads Lindsey to turn away from her heritage and culture.
Lindsey initially distances herself from anything Chinese or Chinese
American as a response to her racialized and sexualized oppression.
One way that we see this dynamic is through the friendships Lindsey
does and does not cultivate with other Asian Americans while in school.
Lindsey has one close Asian American friend named Mimi, whom she
has known since childhood up through the present. Lindsey and Mimi
have never discussed any shared experiences of being Asian American
and instead confine their discussions to outfits and crushes. The text ex-
plains that Lindsey and Mimi “mentally compartmentalized their Asian
106  Jennifer Woolston
identities, associating them only with their parents and family. Despite
their closeness …, they kept their Asian selves separate from each other”
(The Dim 51). Aside from Mimi, Lindsey never became close to other
Asians nor dated any while at school. This same dynamic appears when
Lindsey is in grade school, where she is one of only a handful of Asian
American students. Lindsey explains that all of them chose to distance
themselves from the others, telling readers, “Instead of banding together
in solidarity, we all stayed away from one another. We never acknowl-
edged our Asianness to one another” (Buddha 101). Lindsey concludes,
“We each had our hands full trying to fit in and dared not risk do-
ing anything that would further exclude us from the J. Crew world”
­(Buddha  101). For Lindsey, the decision not to acknowledge shared
Asian identities, along with to consciously avoid forming any kind of
community around their ethnicity, stems from an effort to conform to
white society but also to avoid drawing attention to their nonwhite sta-
tus. In these instances, distancing herself helps Lindsey both to fit in and
to hopefully minimize further discriminatory treatment.
Another way that Lindsey alienates herself from her family and her
Chinese American culture is through language. As a third-generation
Chinese American female, Lindsey does not endeavor to learn the lan-
guage of her ancestors. Often, Chinese American children are expected to
attend Chinese lessons after their regular school day in order to learn not
only the language but also about culturally relevant information. Lind-
sey’s family expects her to attend this type of training, but Lindsey tells
readers that she did not relish the idea of attending another school for
several more hours once the normal day was done (The Dim 93). Lindsey
and her peers pretended to attend Chinese school, but rather than enter-
ing the classroom, the children frequent a nearby restaurant to indulge
in fast food delights (The Dim 93). By skipping Chinese school lessons,
Lindsey grew into adulthood without a solid knowledge base concern-
ing Cantonese and Mandarin. Lindsey’s lack of experience with Chinese
school mirrors that of real-world Asian Americans. Faung Jean Lee notes,

by the second and third generation, the dominant and in many in-
stances only language spoken at home is English. Asian Americans
tend to lose the ability to understand, write, and read in the language
of their immigrant grandparents unless there is a deliberate effort to
maintain it (either by schooling, or speaking it at home). This has
created gaps in the ability of American-born Asians to communicate
with elders who cannot speak English.
(x)

Having reached adulthood with little training in either of these lan-

guages, Lindsey often finds herself frustrated and embarrassed by her
deficient communication skills.
 Asian American Female Identity  107
There are several moments in Keltner’s novels when Lindsey’s in-
ability to communicate results in her feeling apart from her family. In
one instance, Lindsey attempts to ask for her grandfather at a mah-
jong parlor, but the Chinese man she communicates with only speaks
in Cantonese. At a family celebration for her uncle, Lindsey is unable
to participate. As others laud her uncle’s achievements in a language she
cannot understand, she can only watch in silence as distant relations
who she cannot verbally reach chat with each other. In that moment,
Lindsey experiences a sense of embarrassment, “as if her ignorance of
Chinese grammar might be discovered at any moment” (The Dim 62).
Lindsey’s grandmother does not approve of her granddaughter’s mono-
lingual skills and often chooses to speak in Chinese rather than English
to Lindsey in order to convey her displeasure (Buddha 16). Memoirist
Sam Sue elaborates on how this language barrier affects his sense of
belonging. Sue states,

I can’t speak the language, and you feel intimidated by it when you
go into restaurants. Like you keep ordering the same dishes because
those are the only dishes you can order. You feel that since you are
Chinese, you should be able to speak to other people that look like
you. Sometimes they have mistaken me for a juk-kok (foreign-born
Chinese) and started talking to me; I can’t understand a word.
(8)

The gap Lee describes between elders and younger generations, and the
expectations and intimidation that Sue recounts, are mirrored back to
readers via Lindsey’s fictional feelings of alienation from her kin. Rather
than serving to merely entertain readers, Keltner provides a window via
her narrator’s struggles into the marginalization felt by Asian American
women. Her novels express real-life trials that these women frequently
encounter outside of the pages of chick lit novels.
The consequences of Lindsey’s conscious decisions to distance herself
from cultural practices such as learning her family’s language, or from
any manner of Asian American communities or friendships, result in a
strong sense of not seeing herself as Chinese. In The Dim Sum of All
Things, the text explains that Lindsey believes “her Chinese heritage
was not one of the main components of her identity but was simply a
superfluous detail” (The Dim 4). The experience of this self-imposed
mental compartmentalization is not unique to Keltner’s novels but is an
experience other Asian Americans share. In his memoir, Sue states, “I
don’t feel Chinese, and I’m not. I identify myself as Asian American. I
feel Chinese to some extent, but not necessarily to the extent of knowing
much about Chinese culture or tradition” (8). Like Sue, Lindsey often
feels like an outsider within her community, even though her status as
such comes from her own actions and decisions.
108  Jennifer Woolston
Although Lindsey stubbornly did not learn to speak Chinese as a girl,
she expresses regret for her lacuna of knowledge. Andrea, a white friend,
tells Lindsey that she seems more white than Asian, and Lindsey’s um-
brage to this remark is linked to her lack of language skills. Since Lindsey
never learned Cantonese, she finds Andrea’s remark difficult to counter,
and she views herself as an “accomplice in her own whitewashing” (The
Dim 121). Rather than fully matriculating into white culture, Lindsey
begins to develop a desire to learn more about her family’s history.
Instead of succumbing to the pressures to distance herself from her
culture, Lindsey moves in the opposite direction and embraces a desire
to learn more about her family’s history, and through this learning she
becomes more comfortable with her Asian American identity. As ­Lindsey
pieces together information about her family’s background, the novel
exposes readers to the Chinese American experience in San  F ­ rancisco
by modeling the family’s experiences on actual historical circumstances
for Chinese immigrants. Buddha Baby begins by having Lindsey reflect
on the lack of communal history that many third-generation Chinese
Americans ignore or miss learning about. Keltner writes,

[Lindsey] sometimes thought about how so many Chinese families

had pulled themselves up from poverty by sheer ingenuity and thrift,
building laundry, restaurant, or real-estate empires from practically
nothing. They went from sweatshop workers to engineers and sur-
geons in one generation, but for Lindsey and third-generation spawn
like her, their forefathers’ struggles seemed like ancient history.
(Buddha 14)

Lindsey is removed from both her family’s history and communal sto-
ries of Asian immigrant experiences, though she eventually works to
remedy this by learning more about herself and her family’s past. This is
not an uncommon phenomenon in Asian American literature, as author
Reshmi Hebbar explains:

Many female protagonists of Asian American fiction are potential

victims of seemingly mysterious forces that are not exactly super-
natural, but are instead complex webs of secrets; the goal of the
narrative recollection and report in these stories and novels involves
the heroine’s ability to solve a mystery of her past.
(54–55)

While Hebbar speaks to Asian American fiction more generally, Keltner’s

novel does contain several family secrets that Lindsey begins to uncover
as she seeks information about her own grandparents. Readers can see
the resistance to open communication when Lindsey asks her mother for
details about her family’s background and is met with little in the way
 Asian American Female Identity  109
of answers. When questioned, Lindsey’s mother tells her, “Been driving
me crazy ever since we first got married. No one wants to talk about
anything [in the family], so I stopped asking” (Buddha 139). Rather
than accept the silence at face value, she begins to consider her own past
and the bits and pieces of information that she can collect from relatives.
Lindsey seems surprised to learn that there was once a time in
­A merican history when Chinese immigrants were tormented and hurt
if they left their neighborhood. In fact, Lindsey’s Uncle Bill recounts
a time when “Chinese not safe outside Chinatown,” where the immi-
grants would be beaten up if they left the confines of the local area (The
Dim 98). Her uncle’s experience matches historical accounts about that
time period. Takaki writes that in the 1930s and 1940s, Chinese and
Chinese Americans knew that if they left San Francisco’s Chinatown,
there was a high likelihood that whites would throw rocks at them or
otherwise injure them (255). Elaine Kim shares her personal experience
as an Asian American living in the US in the 1960s when she states, “my
brother was taunted and beaten by gangs of white boys on a daily basis.
I was harassed from primary school through high school by people hold-
ing the corners of their eyes up and calling me ‘Chink’ and ‘Jap’” (233).
Chinese Americans were not safe, for a large part of history, outside of
their own homes. This information startles Lindsey—as does what she
learns about her family’s connection to prostitution.
As Lindsey comes to learn, her grandparents’ relationship is in part
the result of discriminatory social and cultural forces that brought them
together. She comes to understand how their lives were literally shaped
by the history that she learns. When a teacher at the grammar school
gives Lindsey a historical photograph featuring her grandmother as a
student, Lindsey wonders, “If St. Maude’s had previously been a res-
cue mission, where had Yun Yun been rescued from?” (Buddha 165;
emphasis in original). Lindsey’s grandfather states, “I didn’t meet your
grandma until she was older. I was cook in a big house and she was
the upstairs cleaning girl” (Buddha 174). Lindsey knows little about the
“big house” that her grandparents worked in, but she begins to piece
the story together when speaking to a neighbor named Mrs. Clemens.
Mrs. Clemens owns a large, pink, former brothel and asks Lindsey,
“Did you know there used to be upwards of five hundred whorehouses
in the San Francisco city limits?” (Buddha 195). While the neighbor
does not immediately allude to the fact that Lindsey’s family worked in
the brothel, Yeh Yeh himself gives away the mystery when he clings to
a stuffed jackalope that his son attempts to throw away. Yeh Yeh states
that the animal was a present from the time he spent working in a large
pink home that doubled as a menagerie (Buddha 227).
When Lindsey becomes aware of this piece of history, she reflects,
“Some girls were given away by their own families, or kidnapped from
China and sent to San Francisco on boats. Others had been promised
110  Jennifer Woolston
prosperous lives only to be sold on arrival as slaves” (Buddha 123–124).
In Images of Asian American Women by Asian American Women Writ-
ers, Esther Mikyung Ghymn writes, “Prostitutes are an important part
of Asian American women’s history as they were the first Asian women
to come to the United States” (133). It is important to note that these
women did not enter into prostitution by choice. Ghymn points out,

As the Chinese Civil Wars in the 1850s and 1860s brought about
starvations and mass evacuations, many Chinese women were sold
by starving parents or kidnapped into prostitution. They led misera-
ble lives in the United States as slaves and prostitutes.
(133)5

These Asian women found their way into San Francisco, where they
were forced into sexual slavery. Little is known about these women’s
lives because “prostitution has not been a proud occupation, and there is
very little written about a prostitute’s life” (Ghymn 136). Interestingly,
Keltner replicates this historical moment in her novel, as Lindsey learns
that her grandparents once worked inside of a San Franciscan brothel.
Once Lindsey learns definitively of her family’s connection with Mae’s
Menagerie, she returns to the big house to ask Mrs. Clemens to share
some history. Mrs. Clemens says, “Time was, every house had a John
Chinaman” (Keltner Buddha 233). Historically, in the nineteenth cen-
tury, Chinese workers were often referred to in media and society as
“coolies” or “John Chinamen,” with both terms being derogatory in
nature (Ho 26). Mrs. Clemens explains, “Just like the John Chinamans,
we called all the girls China Mary. She [Lindsey’s grandmother] cleaned
and changed the beds” (Keltner Buddha 234). Even though Lindsey ex-
presses discomfort about learning family history from a white source,
she continues to listen to her neighbor’s explanation.6 Mrs. Clemens
tells Lindsey that her relatives likely paired off due to little more than
their biological sexes and their race. She muses, “both Chinese, work-
ing in the house all day, bound to get together sooner or later” (­ Keltner
­Buddha 234). When Mrs. Clemens points out that a shared racial back-
ground partially united Lindsey’s grandparents, she was alluding to
anti-­miscegenation laws, which prohibited Chinese people from marry-
ing outside their race.
Keltner cleverly introduces an allusion to these laws when Mrs. ­Clemens
mentions the policy to Lindsey. Mrs. Clemens informs Lindsey that folks
couldn’t just marry whoever they pleased back then. She says, “There
was laws to make sure a Chinese only wed another Chinese. Not re-
pealed until the 1960s or something another” (Keltner Buddha 234). Her
comments offer another example of where Keltner’s novel links the fic-
tional family’s experience to another historical moment. In What Comes
­Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America,
 Asian American Female Identity  111
Peggy Pascoe notes, “in 1880, the California legislature amended the
state’s 1850 law prohibiting marriage between ‘whites’ and ‘negroes’ or
‘mulattoes’ by adding a provision forbidding the issuance of marriage
licenses to ‘whites’ and ‘Mongolians’” (Pascoe 85). Rather than state-­
specific racial groups, Pascoe explains, “Most California lawmakers
seemed to have considered the term ‘Mongolian’ roughly synonymous
with ‘Chinese’” (85). According to Maxine Hong Kingston, in 1924, the
“Immigration Act passed by Congress… [stated] any ­A merican who mar-
ried a Chinese woman lost his citizenship; any Chinese man who married
an American woman caused her to lose her citizenship” (156). With the
aid of the National Association for the Advancement of ­Colored People
(NAACP), California repealed its miscegenation laws in 1959 (Pascoe
242). Mrs. Clemens alludes to these laws in the dialogue of the novel
and, therein, connects contemporary readers to Chinese American his-
tory. By including this passing reference to historical events and beliefs,
Keltner provides readers with a place to both learn and ask questions.
Takaki notes, “very little is known about Asian Americans and their
­history,” and he adds, “Many existing [American] history books give
Asian Americans only passing notice or overlook them all together” (6).
This fictional chick lit novel offers a remedy to this silence by bring his-
torical knowledge into the text and sharing it with readers. Since Asian
experiences are not often discussed at length in American high school
classrooms, this information may be intriguing to readers and could pos-
sibly teach them something about the Asian American immigrant expe-
rience in San Francisco. Keltner’s novels offer readers the chance to learn
not only about Chinese American culture and history alongside Lindsey
but also about Keltner herself.
Through Lindsey, Keltner draws upon her own experiences as a
­Chinese American female living and working in the US. Author Edward
Guthmann notes that “For years, Keltner says, she searched bookstores
for a Chinese American novel that would speak to her experience and
make her laugh, but found instead that most of the stories emphasized
hardship, discrimination and sadness” (n. pag). For example, Keltner
is educated in the same vein as Lindsey and similarly “fell into a series
of wage-slave jobs, including one as a museum bookstore clerk and
another as a preschool teacher” (“Kim Wong” n. pag). Additionally,
Keltner “became the office manager and de facto ringleader of the
social super-clique at Mother Jones magazine,” which likely became
an inspiration for Lindsey’s fictional job as a receptionist for Vegan
Warrior magazine (“Kim Wong” n. pag). While readers cannot expect
every aspect of the novels to be based in truth, the fact remains that
some of Keltner’s real-life work experiences match those of her her-
oine, who herself reflects the lived experiences found in histories of
Asian American women and men’s lives in the US. Fong-Torres writes,
“With The Dim Sum of All Things, Kim, who is 36, made her mark as
112  Jennifer Woolston
a refreshing new writer with a younger POV on the whole growing-up-
Asian-­A merican experience” (n. pag). Keltner’s desire to create a pro-
tagonist who looked like her produced a new representation of Asian
American womanhood.
In the essay Theorizing Asian America: On Asian American and Post-
colonial Asian Diasporic Women Intellectuals, Lingyan Yang writes, “I
define Asian American Feminism as paying particularly [sic] attention
to Asian American women’s voices, texts, experiences, literature, arts,
­visual arts, histories, geography, theory, epistemology, pedagogy, sexual-
ity, and life” (141). By examining the ways in which Kim Wong Keltner’s
novels include references to the Asian American female lived experience,
and by appreciating it as a distinct branch on the tree of Chick Lit,
readers can fully appreciate the ways in which Keltner gives a voice to
the often-ignored contemporary Asian American woman’s lived experi-
ence. Elaine Showalter comments that Asian Chick Lit, along with Sista
Lit and Latina Chick Lit, “[represents] the specific concerns and pres-
sures facing young women from those ethnic, racial, and religious sub-
groups, along with their common identities as Americans” (499). Rather
than supporting racist or patriarchal power structures, Asian American
Chick Lit such as Kim Wong Keltner’s reflects women’s experiences back
to readers in a thoughtful, challenging, and complex way. Indeed, by
examining Keltner’s novels, readers are exposed to an Asian American
heroine who balances work, relationships, and family life with unique
insight into cultural challenges and identity formation. These novels give
us an American-born Chinese protagonist who struggles to understand
her hyphenated identity, who negotiates the discrimination and igno-
rance she experiences as a result, and who eventually shows readers that
to embrace one’s culture one must first learn about it. Through The Dim
Sum of All Things and Buddha Baby, Keltner adds meaningful experi-
ences and differences to the realm of the chick lit genre—therein provid-
ing readers with an inception point that may inspire them to learn more
about Asian American women’s experiences, culture, and history.

Notes
1 The title of this chapter comes from Kim Wong Keltner’s Buddha Baby when
Lindsey Owyang reflects on the way she is marginalized by whites due to her
racial status (35).
2 Examples of Asian American Chick Lit novels include Cara Lockwood’s
Dixieland Sushi (2005), Wendy Tokunaga’s Midori by Moonlight (2007),
and Michelle Yu and Blossom Kan’s China Dolls (2007).
3 In this chapter, the terms “Asian,” “Asian American,” and “Chinese Amer-
ican” are used interchangeably, as Kim Wong Keltner uses them herself in
the two main novels which will be analyzed here. Keltner uses the hyphen at
times between Asian American and Chinese American, but she also refers
to Lindsey as simply Chinese. Unless it is a quote, I have omitted the hyphen
between the terms, as most critics also choose to do so. Historically, these
 Asian American Female Identity  113
terms shifted during the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, when Asian col-
lege students who were born in the US decided to spearhead a movement to
shun the term “Oriental” and adopt “Asian American” as a means of ethnic
political enfranchisement (Kibria 15). Additionally, it is noted that many
modern Asian Americans feel that the broad term itself is “weak” and prefer
instead to use monikers that are more ethnically and nationally specific,
such as “Chinese American” and “Korean American” (Kibria 122).
4 Sumi Cho also comments upon this oppression by stating, “Asian Pacific
women suffer greater harassment exposure due to racialized ascriptions (ex-
otic, hyper-eroticized, masochistic, desirous of sexual domination) that set
them up as ideal-typical gratifiers of western neocolonial libidinal forma-
tions” (351).
5 Helena Grice agrees with this assertion when she posits, “early Chinese
American women immigrants were either indentured prostitutes or ‘paper
brides’ who did not or could not write” (85).

Works Cited
Cho, Sumi K. “Converging Stereotypes in Racialized Sexual Harassment:
Where the Model Minority Meets Suzie Wong.” Critical Race Feminism:
A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Adrien Katherine Wing. New York: New York UP,
2003. 349–66. Print.
Faung Jean Lee, Joanne. “Introduction.” Asian American Experiences in the
United States: Oral Histories of First to Fourth Generation Americans from
China, the Philippines, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam and Cam-
bodia. Ed. Joann Faung Jean Lee. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991. vii–xii.
Print.
Fong-Torres, Ben. “Whacking Moles with ‘Buddha Baby’ Kim Wong Keltner.”
AsianConnections.com. Asian Connections, n.d. Web. 13 Aug. 2012.
Ghymn, Esther Mikyung. Images of Asian American Women by Asian
­A merican Women Writers. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Print.
Grice, Helena. Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American
Women’s Writing. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Print.
Hebbar, Reshmi J. Modeling Minority Women: Heroines in African and Asian
American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Ho, Jennifer Ann. Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-
Age Novels. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Keltner, Kim Wong. Buddha Baby. New York: Avon Trade, 2005. Print.
———. The Dim Sum of All Things. New York: Avon Trade, 2004. Print.
Kibria, Nazli. Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and
­Korean American Identities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Print.
Kim, Elaine H. “Finding My Voice.” Yell-Oh Girls. Ed. Vickie Nam. New York:
Quill, 2001. 231–34. Print.
“Kim Wong Keltner: About the Author Biography.” HarperCollins.com. Harper
Collins Publishers, n.d. Web. 13 Aug. 2012.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. New York: Knopf, 1980. Print.
Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of
Race in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers
from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. New York: Vintage, 2009. Print.
114  Jennifer Woolston
Sue, Sam. “Growing Up in Mississippi.” Asian American Experiences in the
United States: Oral Histories of First to Fourth Generation Americans
from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam and
­C ambodia. Ed. Joann Faung Jean Lee. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991. 3–9.
Print.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian
­A mericans. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1989. Print.
Tong, Benson. The Chinese Americans. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2003. Print.
Yang, Lingyan. “Theorizing Asian America: On Asian American and Postcolo-
nial Asian Diasporic Women Intellectuals.” Journal of Asian American Stud-
ies 5.2 (2002): 139–78. Print.
5 The “Aha Moment”
Representing Transformation
and Black Women’s Trauma
in the Chick Lit Genre
Cherise Pollard

K.L. Brady’s The Bum Magnet, 2009, is an example of black women’s

popular fiction that fits unabashedly into the chick lit category. Pub-
lished in what might be called the second generation of chick lit, The
Bum Magnet is a hybrid text; its form and content echo what many
critics describe as the foundational texts of the black and white chick lit
genres (Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, 1992, and Helen Fielding’s
Bridget Jones’s Diary, 1996, respectively), while embracing the raunchy
sexuality and conspicuous consumption that are hallmarks of highly
popular urban literature such as Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter
Ever, 1999. In the novel, Brady’s protagonist, Charisse Tyson, expe-
riences an Oprah Winfrey-inspired “Aha Moment” that opens up the
possibility for articulating contemporary black women’s healing from
traumas through personal transformation. This essay explores how
Brady’s novel represents trauma and healing in a chick lit context. While
both themes were commonly taken up by previous twentieth-century
writing by black women, the influence of the conventions of the chick
lit genre on the tropes of trauma narratives results in representations of
healing and the healing process as not only commodified and consum-
able but also achievable. As with earlier popular black women’s fiction,
which exhibit a didactic element, these novels convey a lesson within the
arc of the narrative, arguing that consumption, sex, and romance cannot
fix women’s problems, but only with the excavation of trauma can Cha-
risse finally find the right kind of man.
In The Bum Magnet, Charisse Tyson works as an aspiring real es-
tate agent in affluent Prince George’s County, a black community in the
Washington, D.C. suburbs. Careerist but not overly successful, material-
istic yet broke, and chronically single, Charisse realizes at the beginning
of the novel that she attracts the wrong type of man, whom she refers to
as a bum, and she sees herself as a bum magnet. Once she realizes that
she needs to make a radical change in her dating practices, she begins a
process of unearthing and revealing her present and past behavior with
men by reading back through her diaries. Over the course of the novel,
readers not only become privy to her painful yet hilarious dating his-
tory, but we also watch as Charisse undergoes a healing transformation.
116  Cherise Pollard
The key to her healing is confronting and transcending past trauma.
Throughout the novel, Charisse becomes increasingly aware that there
may be a connection between the past trauma that she suffered in high
school—abandonment by her cousin Lee at a party where one of his
football teammates attempted to rape her—and her present behavior.
By the novel’s end, Charisse has found love and achieved healing. She
has broken her old relationship patterns and is no longer a bum magnet.
Oprah Winfrey, and her emphasis on self-actualization and self-­
healing, is central to Brady’s novel and also to Brady herself. One cannot
even begin to conceptualize black female experience in the context of
late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century popular culture without
considering Oprah’s influence. It is not just her staggering importance
as a popular cultural figure who, in her own way, branded the black
female spiritual experience, in effect making it understandable and con-
sumable not just for Americans but for the global community. Oprah
made sharing one’s trauma acceptable, and she made healing accessible
and ­possible—healing became about excavation, and was something
one could do by oneself. The host used her show as a platform that
made the acknowledgment of trauma, the naming of abuse dynamics,
the treatment of addiction, and every other particular phase of recov-
ery something one could own. In an essay Oprah wrote for an issue of
O Magazine, she admits to readers,

Nature has an easier time with transformation than we earthly be-

ings do. I know this because I’m in the midst of trying to transform
myself from a compulsive emotional eater who submerges her feel-
ings in food into a person who actually feels the feelings, deals with
them, and doesn’t repress it all with offerings from the fridge. … The
real excavation process—digging deep to uncover the underlying
issues—feels a lot like trying to shovel through Kilimanjaro. … Ig-
noring problems is easier, for sure, but if we take even tiny steps to
address them, those steps eventually become giant leaps on the jour-
ney to self-actualization. Reaching your potential as a human being
is more than an ideal. It’s the ultimate goal. (“What Oprah Knows
For Sure About Transformation.”)

We gain through Oprah’s words a sense of her ideology and worldview.

Our goal in life is to vanquish, to uncover and chip away at the obstacles
that weigh us down and hold us back, that facing difficult experiences
and feelings will allow us to become who we really are, and that freeing
ourselves in this way should be our ultimate aspiration.
This sense of moving past obstacles, and not letting challenges im-
pede one’s progress, shows up not only in Brady’s novel but in the nar-
rative she tells about herself and the novel’s publication. In “My ‘Aha’
­Moment: How The Bum Magnet Came to Be,” Brady gives her readers
 Transformation and Black Women’s Trauma  117
some insight into the factors that influenced her to become a writer. Her
use of Winfrey’s signal phrase, “Aha Moment,” reveals the strong con-
nection that the novelist felt to Winfrey’s message and brand. In 2008,
facing a milestone fortieth birthday and feeling as though she had not
yet lived to her full potential, Brady decided to take Oprah’s “Live Your
Best Life” challenge. She tells us, “I’d always wanted to be a writer….
Although I have two degrees, I’d always let the fact that I didn’t have a
degree in E­ nglish or any fiction writing experience keep me from start-
ing” (“My Aha Moment”). Inspired by Winfrey’s slogan, Brady decided
that she would move forward despite her age and lack of formal training
in fiction writing. Framing her inspiration as divine, she says,

I pushed those negative thoughts out of my head and decided to

honor this gift God gave me and write a book about a woman who
took stock of her life. I wrote the book in four months and edited
four [sic] or five months.
(Brady, “My Aha Moment”)

At first, Brady’s dreams of imminent success were dashed by multiple

rejections from publishing houses and literary agents: “I wanted a six-­
figure book deal. I wanted to be on Oprah…I wanted to blow kisses
to my adoring fans” (“My Aha Moment”). When she realized that her
work was not going to be acquired in any traditional manner, she de-
cided to self-publish The Bum Magnet:

I had a come-to-Jesus moment and I had to decide who I was writ-

ing for. Was I writing for the publishing industry? Was I writing for
other authors? Or was I writing because I loved writing and had a
story to share?
(“My Aha Moment”)

Self-published in 2009, over the course of the next year, The Bum Mag-
net garnered the attention of popular audiences and critics, winning the
2010 Next Generation Indie Award for Multicultural Fiction while also
a finalist in the fiction category. The Midwest Book Club readers de-
clared it a “Top Read” as an OOOSA Book Club Reviewer’s Choice
recommendation (Brady, The Bum Magnet, 2009, frontispiece). Eventu-
ally, the novel’s success in the independent book publisher’s market and
in book clubs did capture the attention of a literary agent and Simon &
Schuster’s Pocket Books (Brady, “My Aha Moment”). Brady ended up
with a two-book deal for The Bum Magnet and its sequel, Got a Right
to be Wrong (Brady, “About Me”).
Like many other chick lit novels, The Bum Magnet relies on first-­
person narration, interior monologue, and a protagonist who is funny,
uncannily insightful, and willing to confide her innermost thoughts
118  Cherise Pollard
(including Charisse’s most embarrassingly sad observations about her
life) to create a strong connection between readers and the protagonist.
The novel gives the reader a sense of an intimate relationship to the pro-
tagonist through its first-person, gossipy tone. As Lisa Guerrero, author
of “‘Sistahs are Doing it for Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black and White,”
notes,

The appeal, and the power of these genres was, and is, the remark-
able ability to make the reading experience nearly indistinguishable
from a conversation with our best girlfriends. It isn’t fiction as much
as it is the comfort of community.
(91)

While almost all chick lit uses this storytelling dynamic to establish a
close relationship between reader and characters, The Bum Magnet uses
this bond to bring readers along on Charisse’s healing journey.
Before showing us how Charisse heals herself, the novel first shows
us how the standard chick lit tropes—consumerism and relationships—
promise happiness but in Charisse’s case, never deliver. This novel re-
veals how the tropes of chick lit are actually flawed mechanisms—ways
to seemingly find happiness, but in actuality, Charisse does not achieve
contentment while she is making these bad financial and emotional deci-
sions. One way that Charisse tries to find happiness is through men who
seem to be successful. Her status as a bum magnet, however, is because
she keeps reaching for the wrong kind of men. Charisse chooses men
who seem to be successful: they drive the right car, live in McMansions,
wear the right labels, work out, smell good, are sexually confident, and
are tall enough, but something is missing. While they look the part, they
often treat Charisse badly, engage in affairs, or are simply emotionally
unavailable. Charisse tells us, “Seemed a little scary when I looked back
on my past relationships. I’d dated five versions of the same man, and
married one…all bums” (22). There’s Lamar, who had “as many as six
kids, a second ex-wife, and a possible down low partner” (63). Then
there is Sean Grey, the downtown D.C. coffee shop manager who didn’t
reveal his status as a married man until Charisse and Sean had been
seeing each other for six months. Jason is a younger man who ended up
being her ex-husband as a result of his infidelity during his deployment
to Iraq. Charisse sees romance as a solution to her problems in part be-
cause society tells her that coupling is the answer. This is doubly true for
black women, for whom marriage post-slavery functioned as the desired
foundation of black families, primarily because it heals the wounds of
slavery through legality as it theoretically protects black women’s virtue.
The novel argues that Charisse engages in these behaviors in part be-
cause she is not fully aware of the meaning of her actions, nor does she
see the ways in which her interactions with men and her management of
 Transformation and Black Women’s Trauma  119
her finances actually impede her goals of finding a good man and being
financially stable. We see her lack of awareness early in the text during
a moment when she explains the qualities that make her a good girl-
friend: “I bought home the bacon, served it up, and washed the dishes;
spread eagled faster than a hooker on countdown and licked the “lolli-
pop’ on-demand; … left the toilet seat up; watched more football than
John Madden; and quoted The Godfather. I was a man’s dream” (21).
According to Charisse, being a “man’s dream” necessitates anticipat-
ing and fulfilling their every desire from food and sex to football and
films. However, we readers can see that she has been programmed by
friends, family, and popular culture to give of herself without asking for
anything of substance in return, not love, trust, or understanding. She
does not pick the right men, the ones who are whole and healed. She is
focused on appearances, not substance.
Consumerism is another trope of the genre, and one that Charisse
­attempts to use to—unsuccessfully—find happiness. Charisse attempts
to buy respectability as she attempts to look the part of an upper-­middle-
class black woman, though doing so means adding to her substantial
personal debt. Charisse explains, “My wardrobe, mostly close-out buys
from Knock-Off World, consisted of bona fide Channelle (a la ghetto),
Dolcie and Gabbie, Marc Jacobson, and Tada!—a reflection of my hefty
mortgage, Beemer payments, and nonexistent benefactors” (20). There
are other moments in the text where Charisse makes it clear that she has
an eye for fashion and home decor that she cannot afford, but she makes
do. Furthermore, Charisse’s debt is connected to her single status. Her
friend Denise is a real estate agent in PG County who is “broke” but
flosses products bearing the true labels, not the knockoffs that Charisse
is forced to buy; Denise is able to do so because “fifty percent of her
inventory was guilt gifts from her boyfriends, lovers, and sugar daddies;
she calls them sponsors” (20). Of course, Charisse sees this dynamic
and wants some of that seemingly good life for herself; she simply has
a difficult time achieving it as a single woman with no male benefactor.
We see the interconnected nature of consumption and marriage in one
especially poignant moment, when Charisse reflects on her biggest ex-
penditure, her home, the “large, four-bedroom colonial in Woodmont,
one of the more well-to-do subdivisions just outside DC” (23). She tells
the reader that her friends and family do not understand why she bought
a home that is so big for just herself. But she thought that if she had the
house, then the man she wanted wouldn’t be far behind: if she bought
it, they would come. But she has yet to figure out that true emotional
connections cannot be bought. She can buy what she needs to fit in with
her peers, but she has not achieved complete financial success. Charisse
wants to be married but not for the right reason: she is looking for some-
one to ease the financial burden of her upper-middle-class life and to
make her feel complete.
120  Cherise Pollard
Brady’s novel argues that true emotional connections and personal
happiness can only take place once a person understands who she really
is by understanding her behavior patterns; in effect, by excavating and
processing one’s trauma, including the ways past experiences have led to
behavior patterns—in Charisse’s case, by being a bum magnet. But what
this novel does differently is twofold: it both brings trauma and healing
into the space of the chick lit genre and offers a contemporary version of
the healing narrative found in earlier twentieth-century black women’s
fiction. This new version uses chick lit conventions to frame healing as
a kind of commodity that can be consumed, it uses the straightforward,
direct style of chick lit to depict the protagonist’s trauma and effects,
and it also suggests that healing can be accomplished by taking certain
steps and gaining self-knowledge.
The novel’s focus on healing connects Brady’s novel with earlier black
women’s writing. As Tamika L. Carey’s Rhetorical Healing: The Re-
education of Contemporary Black Womanhood points out, there is
a strong tradition of depicting healers/the process of healing within
­A frican American women’s literary traditions. The cultural heritage of
healing is strong: spiritual healers and conjurers emerge in works by
Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara,
among others. This is not necessarily the case in contemporary black
popular fiction because mainstream readers might resist this supernat-
ural element. Continuing these practices on the popular front, in terms
of this particular genre, means enacting processes of healing that echo
a Winfrey-esque commodified version. While there are no conjurers or
faith healers and no communal sense of practice in The Bum Magnet, in
this novel and in popular black women’s fiction, there is an awareness of
characters whose dysfunction/disease was formed by trauma and whose
journey within the narrative is toward wholeness, yet this journey is
depicted differently.
The protagonist’s movement toward personal transformation is not
stylized as it might be in canonical literary works. While some authors
of literary and popular fiction may be driven by a similar interest in ar-
ticulating the psychological impact that trauma may have on individuals,
their approach to engaging in these stories is quite different. In The Bum
Magnet, Brady writes a popular version of what Laurie Vickeroy would
deem a “trauma narrative” but without the canonical postmodernist ap-
proach to storytelling. In Trauma and Survival, Vickeroy explores the
ways in which trauma emerges in canonical works by writers such as
Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras. In her work, she defines trauma
narratives as engaging in political, social, and cultural commentary that
has personal, global, and national implications (x).
Vickeroy argues that “trauma narratives” developed as a result of a
developing understanding of the psychic implications of interpersonal,
national, and international acts of violence (x). Many of these works
 Transformation and Black Women’s Trauma  121
offer their readers fictive interrogations of abusive power dynamics that
lay bare the inner workings of societal dysfunction. The authors of these
texts often seek to recover lost historical figures or moments and/or give
voice to those who have been silenced (x). They also seek to both engage
readers in the dynamics of suffering while employing “innovative uses
of narrative” to defamiliarize their readerly experience (x–xi). In these
complex, highly celebrated literary works, the protagonists’ trauma is
often highly stylized, that is, the authors attempt to use a variety of
representational strategies that immerse readers in the dynamics of their
characters’ suffering and eventual healing (3).
In texts like The Bum Magnet, the symptoms of disease are capital-
ist materialism, greed, extreme promiscuity, anger/fear/rage, isolation,
and manipulation. Because it is popular, and not literary fiction, there
is no experimentation in the novel. The traumas that Charisse endures
are framed as though they are factors in her everyday life—not unusual
events that she must reflect upon or understand. She is not obsessed with
them, and although these experiences do affect the way that she sees the
world, they do not change the way that the story is conveyed—that is,
Charisse’s pain is not textualized or translated visually on the page. She
enacts post-traumatic stress behavior, but it is not stylized. Brady takes
the emotional and spiritual work of the trauma narrative and makes it
accessible to readers of popular fiction as she depicts Charisse’s healing
process: the excavation of trauma and the adoption of healthy attitudes
toward romance and consumerism.
We see Charisse begin her healing journey when, out of desperation
and unhappiness, she turns to an Oprah-esque magazine for momen-
tary relief. Instead, Charisse finds inside the solution to her unhappiness
and bad choices. Deciding to avoid love songs and to forego the usual
tear-jerker romantic holiday movies which she says would be “suicide
inducing,” Tyson picks up a copy of “Z: The Zaina Humphrey Maga-
zine, published by talk-show hostess Zaina Humphrey….I kept her show
on TiVo for occasions when I needed my fix, though” (2). With this
veiled reference to Oprah Winfrey’s multimedia empire, especially the
inclusion of the discourse of self-help into her brand, the novel is tap-
ping into a sense of familiarity it assumes readers possess with a show
that had become a fixture in American popular culture for twenty-five
years. Before it ended in May 2011, many American women had turned
on Oprah for advice and had paged through O: The Oprah Magazine
seeking some sort of enlightenment, albeit watered down. Charisse tells
us, now that she is almost forty, that she realizes she needs more emo-
tional sustenance from her reading material than traditional man-crazy
women’s magazines offered, and she sees her fictionalized O as offering
it: “I craved pithy, spirit-lifting, soul-feeding, personal growth induc-
ing, psychotherapeutic edutainment …. Zaina delivered” (2). Charisse’s
sarcastic description of the content of Zaina Humphey’s shows and
122  Cherise Pollard
magazine has the reader believing that Charisse does not truly think the
prescription for healing offered actually works. But these texts are easily
consumed, as Charisse proclaims, “in less than sixty minutes or less
than five bucks an issue” (2).
Despite her early resistance to change, the self-help magazine and its
all-important quiz and advice column become the impetus for, and then
the key texts, that Charisse repeatedly returns to on her journey toward
healing. Glancing through the magazine, she finds an article that seems
to be written just for her entitled, “Stop Attracting Toxic Men: Five
Steps to Unpacking Your Emotional Baggage” (3). Reading the article,
she realizes that she has every sign of emotional baggage: she does not
share feelings, she tests loyalty, she assumes all men lie and cheat, she
does not take responsibility for her mistakes, and she has a “lingering
ghost from [her] past history that [she’s] tried to forget, but never put to
rest” (3). As she is reading through the list, her sarcasm turns into de-
fensiveness, as if she will truly not let herself understand what it is that
she needs to do to foster more satisfying romantic relationships. Perusing
the article, Charisse reads through the list of recommended actions one
should take if one has, in a sense, failed the quiz and wants to change
their patterns of behavior. By reading the article, she learns that she must

1. Closely examine every failed relationship you’ve ever had and fo-
cus on your role…. 2. Acknowledge your faults too…. 3. Take a
break from dating to allow yourself some time to heal…. 4. Avoid
comparing your new man with your ex-boyfriend, and don’t share
sob stories…. 5. Give your man a chance….
(4)

The article gives her the framework that she needs to change her patterns
of behavior in her romantic relationships.
Carey explores the connection between Winfrey’s commodification
of her journey toward spiritual enlightenment and the healing/wellness
campaigns that she launched via The Oprah Winfrey Show. Carey argues
that Oprah’s endeavors—such as those books chosen for her national
book discussion group written by black women, the projects centered
on spiritual awakening and self-help, and even promoting Tyler Perry’s
films—rely upon what she has termed a “rhetorics of healing”: “a set of
persuasive discourses and performances writers wield to convince their
readers that redressing or preventing a crisis requires them to follow the
steps to ideological, communicative, or behavioral transformation the
writer considers essential to wellness”(5–6). These texts, Carey argues,
are didactic in nature; they are designed to teach their readers about
the processes and benefits of psychological and spiritual healing. Within
the black community, but also for Oprah’s viewers who were not black,
Winfrey popularized and proceduralized the work of healing. According
 Transformation and Black Women’s Trauma  123
to Carey, those discourses of self-help empower audiences to engage in
spiritual transformation ultimately set a road map for personal growth
and healing. Further articulating her definition, Carey contends,

As arguments about individual processes such as revision, trans-

formation, or return, and corresponding curricula, these rhetorics
transcribe problems into lessons by invoking messages of personal
affirmation, notions of familial belonging, institutional responsibil-
ity, or broader racial uplift. More often than not, the effects of these
discourses are potent
(6)

What begins as consumerism, a sort of cynical purchasing of culturally

sanctioned emotional respectability, begins to evolve into Charisse’s re-
luctant journey to personal transformation. The novel charts this jour-
ney, the ebb and flow of Charisse’s progress, as she moves slowly toward
her goal. In an attempt to self-diagnose her relationship problems, decide
to read decades worth of her journals. The audience gets to read them
over her shoulder and is again exposed to her private thoughts. In each
of the journal chapters, there is an italicized passage, as if it is being
quoted verbatim from an original, handwritten text, followed by the
protagonist’s reflection on the meaning of that experience. This reading
is a pattern of self-help therapy. If done correctly, the character is able
to assess her trauma, change her behavior, and move forward positively.
Charisse’s movement toward personal growth is quietly didactic.
She never announces her own progress; we see it happen as she makes
different choices and begins to get different results. As The Bum Mag-
net unfolds, we watch as Charisse does the work and then begins to
change. One way the reader witnesses Charisse’s progress is through
her actions toward other characters, particularly her connection with
her former lovers and her best friend. As we read her journal over her
shoulder, we see that throughout her dating life, Charisse has learned
incrementally and acted accordingly when she figured out that relation-
ships were not going well. As she heals, she is able to help her friend
Denise by giving her practical, hard won advice. Given her own expe-
riences dating married men, Charisse counsels Denise to leave Robert,
who is married, because he has made a decision to stay with his wife,
explaining, “Listen. Each day Robert stays with his wife is a day he
has recommitted himself not to be with you. Period. Trust me, run
fast, run far, and never look back” (96). This is an important moment
because we see that Charisse is beginning to be able to help others by
giving advice gleaned from her own experiences. In that same chapter,
Charisse tells her ex-lover, Marcus, that their relationship is finally
over after he confesses that he wishes he could have another chance
for the mistakes that he made with her. She says, “Unfortunately, life
124  Cherise Pollard
doesn’t always present us with chances for do-overs. Someday I may
get past this but I can’t right now” (94). As he leaves, she thinks, “My
heart hurt, but the reality was that we had nothing if I couldn’t trust
him; it was that simple. Letting go had to be the right thing to do” (95).
Releasing herself from that connection with Marcus is a tremendous
step toward healing that helps her to move forward with facing her
past. The advice that Charisse gives Denise and the boundaries that
she puts down with Marcus are clear indicators of the progress that
she has made.
As Charisse begins to revisit the past as found in her diaries, she is
repeatedly presented with opportunities in the present that give her
the chance to act differently or to bring closure. Her current relation-
ship, with a man named Dwayne, is one such opportunity. Just when
she thinks that Dwayne might actually be a good man, she overhears a
woman leaving a message on his answering machine with the news that
she is pregnant. He says later that woman was his sister, so Charisse
takes him back. As the romance seems to be progressing in the right
direction, Charisse is unpacking her emotional baggage by reading her
journals and realizing that she did know when the men were good or
bad but that she chose the bad ones, like Lamar, Sean, and Marcus, on
purpose. More importantly, she comes to understand that she learned
certain lessons along the way about her value that, in some ways, su-
persede her seeming desire for physical intimacy. As a result, she shuts
down the sexual relationship with Dwayne because she realizes that sex
is clouding her ability to truly get to know him.
As Charisse examines previous relationships and learns from them,
she begins to overcome some of her relationship issues. This work also
paves the way for her to acknowledge and confront deeper traumas. As
the novel progresses, and Charisse’s transformation continues, she even-
tually reaches the crux of the trauma: abandonment and attempted sex-
ual assault. The novel implies that these events shape her behaviors and
influence her attraction to bums. The novel reveals that she suffered an
attempted gang rape by her cousin Lee’s football team members when
she visited him as a teenager. In the absence of her father, Charisse con-
sidered her Lee to be her protector—a brother figure. Throughout the
novel, she avoids any conversation with Lee or his mother, who is a psy-
chologist. Charisse cannot accept the impact of her sexualized trauma
until she has worked through her behavioral issues by reading her jour-
nals, doing the critical work of reflecting on them in relation to the ar-
ticle she read in Z: The Zaina Humphrey Magazine. However, once
she is able to reveal it to her family and her friends, once she is able to
forgive Lee, and once she is able to understand the role that she played in
her romantic relationships, Charisse finds herself in a position to finally
appreciate the kind of man that she has always wanted but never truly
believed existed: a good man.
 Transformation and Black Women’s Trauma  125
The good man emerges in these novels as a contemporary version of
the Knight in Shining Armor, the ideal partner that the protagonist has
been searching for. In The Bum Magnet, the fruits of healing from sex-
ual and dating trauma are not liberating singlehood but instead a man
who is protective, who has a strong moral center but is not overly reli-
gious, who is not superficial, and who desires emotional intimacy before
physical interaction. At the beginning of the novel, Charisse remembers
her mother saying, “Charisse, a good man is like Santa Claus. Believing
in him feels real good until you find out he doesn’t really exist” (1). Her
mother’s influence, combined with her experiences with men, shape her
belief that there is no such thing as a good man. But then she meets
Kevin Douglass, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who saves
her from the criminal that he’s investigating, who happens to be Cha-
risse’s current boyfriend and client Dwayne. Perhaps more instrumental
to her healing transformation, Kevin was also present at the party, and
he saved her from that sexual assault. Near the end of the novel, he tells
her, “I was the one who burst in the room and threw him off of you. I
sat with you and took you home … you were a little too distraught to
remember, but I never forgot you” (273). At this point, he becomes her
double Knight in Shining Armor. Shocked by this news, she thinks, “My
knight in shining armor…what he did for me all those years ago; what he
did for me yesterday without even knowing…or did he?” (274). Knowing
that he meant to save her both times helps Charisse to foster a sense of
self-worth and a desire to trust at least one man: Kevin Douglass. Kevin’s
recognition of her trauma, and his acceptance of her regardless of her
shameful past, is the final step in Charisse’s healing transformation—her
“Aha!” moment. Her willingness to excavate her trauma has changed
her and so, when Kevin appears and accepts her, she is ready to recog-
nize his superior qualities. Kevin provides the final experience needed
for her to completely heal by functioning as her reward for her reaching
this enlightened state. In many ways, this fits the chick lit formula: the
good man as the reward for personal transformation, or the good man
as the prize at the end of an arduous search. The first evening that they
are together, New Year’s Eve, takes place one year after she began the
healing process. Charisse invites Kevin up to her bedroom. The reader
assumes that she is going to have sex with him immediately—as she did
with Dwayne. Instead, we realize that they have played Monopoly and
eaten ice cream sundaes all night long. The narrative’s message, then,
is that a relationship with a good man is driven by emotional intimacy.
Charisse breaks her pattern by connecting with him emotionally rather
than physically. While Brady’s novel tells this healing narrative in a new
way, it also ultimately capitulates to the standard chick lit convention of
the Happily Ever After. As she thinks at the end of the novel, “Well, as it
turned out, my mom was right. Good men are like Santa Claus. Believ-
ing in them feels really good, and once you relax and stop watching for
126  Cherise Pollard
them, they appear when you least expect it” (278). Charisse’s journey
provides readers with a road map toward their own emotional growth
through awareness, reflection, and positive action.
In The Bum Magnet, K.L. Brady offers readers a witty, yet emotion-
ally complex set of lessons that may help readers to negotiate the dif-
ficult terrain of personal healing in the twenty-first century. Charisse
Tyson’s path to wholeness is riddled with challenges that resonate with
the tropes and themes of the chick lit genre as well as those of trauma
narratives. As she overcomes these adversities, she makes peace with
herself and with her past. In doing so, this narrative gives readers hope
that they can experience similar success. This matches the practical im-
plications that Carey describes for “rhetorical healing”:

Readers feel they have taken away valuable coping strategies, while
the most popular proponents of these projects feel that writing texts
that pursue a goal of healing is something of an activist endeavor.
Teaching individuals the ways of knowing, being, and acting that
enable them to reread their pasts, revise their sense of self, and
resume progress towards their life goals becomes a way to help
ensure individual and community survival. Ideally, reeducation
becomes a learning cure.
(6)

Using the chick lit genre to tell Charisse’s trauma narrative encourages
readers to immerse themselves in a fun but also familiar story and end
up receiving a message, survival strategies, and a good man. By closing
the space between reader and protagonist, Brady’s chick lit trauma nar-
rative shifts the bounds of representation in both genres.
Chick lit is known in many ways for skirting trauma and heavy sub-
jects, especially politically intense topics or poverty. But this novel makes
space for trauma within the genre. The emotional and spiritual work in-
herent in healing narratives and trauma literature is difficult to convey
in popular fiction, and it seems to work against the grain of romance
or even chick lit genres. The Bum Magnet, however, offers readers a
healing plot from within the structure of the chick lit genre. Trauma is
depicted differently, not in terms of abstract form or patterns of repre-
sentation, as it might be in literary fiction, but in approaches to depict-
ing emotionally complex situations in a straightforward fashion, just as
someone might tell you about a bad situation they experienced. While
their approaches differ, both the literary and the popular narratives’ rep-
resentations of trauma expose readers to emotional complexities that
may prompt them to reflect upon their own experiences. On some level,
this kind of didacticism is disconcerting, but if one looks at this dynamic
with an eye toward the process of healing, and sees the general outline
of the personal change that Brady advances in the novel, one can see that
 Transformation and Black Women’s Trauma  127
Charisse’s fictive experience is not meant to be proscriptive or easy. Even
as Charisse snickers to herself through the process, it is clear, as they say,
that the struggle is real.

Works Cited
Brady, K.L. “About Me.” K.L. Brady Author Website, klbradyauthor.com/who-
is-k-l/. Accessed 22 May 2018.
———. The Bum Magnet. K.L. Brady, USA: LadyLit Press. 2009. Reprint 2014.
———. The Bum Magnet, New York: Gallery Books. 2011.
———. “My ‘Aha’ Moment: How The Bum Magnet Came To Be.” Simon
and Schuster, 30 Nov. 2011. www.simonandschuster.com/authors/K-L-
Brady/76764023/voices/576. Accessed 22 May 2018.
Carey, Tamika L. Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation of Contemporary
Black Womanhood. Albany: State U of New York P, 2016.
Guerrerro, Lisa A. “‘Sistahs Are Doing It for Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black
and White.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Susan Ferriss
and Mallory Young, New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 87–102.
Vickeroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottes-
ville: U of Virginia P, 2002.
Winfrey, Oprah. “What Oprah Knows for Sure about Transformation.” Oprah,
Sept. 2010, www.oprah.com/spirit/oprah-what-i-know-for-sure_1. Accessed 22
May 2018.
Section III

Decentering Whiteness
6 Neoliberal Fantasies
Erica Kennedy’s Feminista
(2009)
Heike Mißler

Feminista is the second novel of African American chick-lit author, fash-

ion journalist, and blogger Erica Kennedy, who died in 2012.1 ­Kennedy’s
first novel Bling (2004), a rehash of the Cinderella story in the guise of
a satire about the lifestyle of hip-hop celebrities, was a New York Times
best seller. The novel is a rewrite of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the
Shrew. As a nod to the play-pretext, the three parts of the novel are
called Act I, Act II, and Act III, even though Shakespeare’s comedy has
been given a five-act structure, if not by Shakespeare himself. Kennedy’s
shrew is the thirty-something Afro-Cuban journalist Sydney Zamora,
who embraces the label “bitch” and is somewhat reluctantly on the look-
out for a partner because she, rather suddenly, wants to settle down
and have a baby. The man who manages to “tame” her is Max Cooper,
whose father, Harvey Cooper, owns the luxury department store Har-
vey’s, a fictionalized version of Barneys New York. Max Cooper is the
postmodern equivalent of the fairy-tale prince – not only does he ooze
money, but his family background epitomizes retail heaven. The tam-
ing of the twenty-first-century shrew is achieved when Sydney admits to
herself that she wants a man who can take care of her financially and
emotionally and that she is willing to relinquish part of her indepen-
dence to embrace a more traditional ideal of femininity. At first glance,
the shrew in this twenty-first century Shakespeare spin-off is an angry
feminist who needs to let go of her political convictions in order to find
fulfillment in a relationship. However, even a cursory second glance re-
veals that matters are much more complicated.
The title itself already points to the fact that the novel plays with a
multitude of female identities the readers can choose from – or mix and
match as they see fit. For a Spanish-speaking audience, a novel entitled
Feminista might make a bold statement, “feminista” being Spanish for
“feminist”. The interpretation of the title as a Spanish word may also
already hint at the ethnic background of the protagonist and thus ap-
peal to a specific target audience. For a non-Hispanic readership, the
first association is somewhat different. The term feminista is a blend
of “feminist” and “fashionista”, an attempt to redefine feminism in
the context of twenty-first-century Manhattan, a world of conspicuous
132  Heike Mißler
consumption. The term entered the Urban Dictionary in 2005, desig-
nating “a modern feminist” and has also been adopted by a feminist
organization called UK Feminista, which was founded in 2010. In an
interview with Rebecca Walker for The Root, Erica Kennedy explained
why she chose the term:

I never felt comfortable calling myself a feminist because that word

has so many negative connotations. The stereotype of the hairy,
man-hating woman is just that—a stereotype, a caricature that no
longer exists. And there’s a reason that woman no longer exists.
Because we’ve proven ourselves. We know we can play with the big
boys. We don’t need to beat the drum anymore. Feminista is … the
modern woman who is making her own choices, whether it’s wear-
ing a short skirt and red lipstick to the office (perhaps one that she
runs) or staying home to raise babies. Being a feminista is about
tapping into our unique female attributes and living authentically
instead of defining ourselves by male standards of success.
(n. pag.)

The feminista in Kennedy’s definition is clearly a postfeminist iden-

tity. She is a self-assertive young woman who is immersed in popular
consumer culture and fashion-savvy but also aware of feminist strug-
gles. Assuming that most battles are won, the feminista is, as Kennedy
stressed, above all a woman who makes her own choices. Kennedy’s
definition is, of course, far from unproblematic as it is based on the
two assumptions that are the cruxes in the debate about postfeminism
as anti-feminism: first, Kennedy claims that feminism has successfully
reached its aims, and second, she revives essentialist notions of female-
ness and femininity (“our unique female attributes”). Apart from these
issues, the term feminista is, of course, also highly class conscious as its
“fashionista” root is very much a construct of a woman from the privi-
leged middle-to-upper class.
The term “fashionista” is evidently gendered and usually has nega-
tive connotations, implying a certain superficiality, if not foolishness. 2
­A ngela McRobbie discusses the figure of the fashionista as embodying a
“post-feminist masquerade” (Aftermath 67). This masquerade, accord-
ing to McRobbie, is one of the tools by which postfeminism tries to
dismantle the achievements of feminism; under postfeminism, the old
patriarchal institutions are increasingly replaced by consumer culture as
a means which perpetuates existing power structures. Since women in
the Western world have nearly reached at least legal equality, consumer
culture has become a decisive battleground for feminism over the nego-
tiation and dissemination of representations of femininity. McRobbie
states, “The visual (and verbal) discourses of public femininity come
to occupy an increasingly spectacular space as sites, events, narratives
 Neoliberal Fantasies  133
and occasions within the cultural milieu” (Aftermath 60). As a result,
McRobbie argues, young women are drawn into a “you’re doing it for
yourself” logic, which leads them to embrace discourses of desirable fem-
ininity as promulgated by consumer culture and even to claim that they
do so out of their own free choice. The postfeminist masquerade, then,
is the complicity with these “self-imposed feminine cultural norms”
(­Aftermath 63), i.e., a self-stylization that is highly feminine so as to ap-
pear unthreatening to men, especially in the workplace (Aftermath 67).
McRobbie’s idea of a masquerade links back to Rosalind Gill’s concept
of the “choice biography” and, of course, the Foucauldian notion of
self-monitoring as an internalized form of surveillance; the fashionista
chooses to be glamorous, unashamedly consumerist, and ultrafeminine
because she believes that she benefits from these self-stylizations and is
empowered by them. McRobbie would argue that this self-­fashioning
has nothing to do with empowerment since it can only be enjoyed within
the constraints of a patriarchal system. Therefore, she positions the fash-
ionista as a counterexample to a feminist identity. Other feminist schol-
ars might read the fashionista as a version of the power feminist. Power
feminism is a strand of feminism which is “free-thinking, pleasure-­loving
and self-assertive” and is thus pitted against a “severe, morally supe-
rior, and self-denying” victim feminism (Wolf qtd. in Genz/­Brabon 68).
Naomi Wolf argues that power feminism celebrates, and is built on,
women’s “shared pleasures and strengths, rather than shared vulnera-
bility and pain” (Genz/Brabon 69). Many critics have pointed out that
Wolf’s concept of the power feminist is fundamentally flawed as it can
only be directed at those women who feel they are in a position to take
over power, a small and privileged group of people. No matter in which
feminist discourse the fashionista is positioned, she is a gender construct
that reflects normative femininity at the turn of the twenty-first century
and as such represents a counterfigure to more traditional definitions of
the politically engaged feminist.
The ambiguity of the novel’s title is shadowed by the choice of the
cover blurbs for Feminista, which includes words of praise from Rebecca
Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker and author of one of the found-
ing texts of the third wave of feminism, To be Real: Telling the Truth
and Changing the Face of Feminism (1996). Tellingly, however, Walker
is not identified as the author of a key feminist text but as the author
of Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence
(2007), a largely autobiographical account of her desire to have a baby
and thus not a text as straightforwardly associated with feminism as
To Be Real. Nevertheless, the reference to third wave icon Walker on
the front cover mirrors the novel’s premise, which seeks to unite two
identities that are often seen as antagonistic: that of a feminist and that
of a (house)wife and mother. The other front cover blurb calls Feminista
“chick lit’s naughty stepsister – bitch lit” and so adds another dimension
134  Heike Mißler
to the paratexts of the novel. First, “bitch” is a former abusive term that
has been reclaimed by women,3 and second, it links the text to hip-hop
culture. Many female rap artists, such as Missy Elliot, have used and use
the term positively to designate a strong-minded and outspoken woman,
often as part of a female collective or a sisterhood. Like other terms for-
merly marked as African American vernacular, “bitch” has gained cur-
rency outside the African American community. It has been popularized
by countless TV series, music videos, and films, and it has been adopted
into white slang, especially in the context of the girl-power movement.
The “bitch”, in the empowered sense of the word, could be considered
the modern equivalent of the shrew – an outspoken and aggressive
woman whom many people, mostly men, find disagreeable because she
makes them uncomfortable. The paratexts of the novel certainly draw
the prospective reader’s attention to the text’s feminism and its ethnic
background. Apart from the prominently displayed title of the novel, its
first blurb comes from a famous feminist of color, the second references
a term associated with African American vernacular (“bitch”), and there
is an author photo of Erica Kennedy prominently displayed on the back
cover – all of these marketing choices situate the novel as an example of
African American chick lit. The cover design, however, shows a white
woman in front of a shop window looking at the male mannequins be-
hind the window pane, while another white man walks his dog past
her on the pavement. The white woman has long, light-colored, straight
hair; wears a short, pink dress and black high-heels with a red sole (the
signature style of high-end designer Christian Louboutin); and clutches a
handbag. She is clearly reminiscent of Carrie Bradshaw, the most famous
chick-lit heroine from Manhattan.
Kennedy claimed in an interview with The Frisky, a women’s lifestyle
website, that she wrote large parts of the script without assigning a race
to Sydney and only later decided to make her biracial “so anyone could
see what they wanted to see in her” and so Sydney would be allowed
“to choose how she identifies” (n. pag.). While the cover design may be
an attempt on behalf of the publishers to “whiten” the novel so that it
appeals to a larger segment of chick lit’s traditional readership, it also
encapsulates the conflict at the heart of the novel: namely, that the hero-
ine’s quest is not just the classic third wave struggle between a political/
feminist identity and a consumerist/feminine one. It gains complexity
from the fact that Sydney is a woman of color striving for an ideal which
the novel constructs as white. The feminista can thus also be interpreted
as uniting two racial stereotypes: the radical feminist of color who makes
people uncomfortable and the white woman whose allegiance to the
fashion and beauty system marks her femininity as unthreatening and
at least seemingly complicit with the patriarchal system. This is interest-
ing with respect to the contested genealogy of chick lit as a genre. One
of the authors who is frequently named in line with Candace Bushnell,
 Neoliberal Fantasies  135
Helen Fielding, and Marian Keyes as a godmother of chick lit is Afri-
can American author Terry McMillan, whose successful novel Waiting
to Exhale (1992) predates the works of Bushnell, Fielding, and Keyes.
Her “brand” of chick lit has been called “sistah lit”, and Lisa Guerrero
claims that, though it is today often subsumed as a subgenre under the
overarching moniker chick lit, the “sistah” is in many ways distinct from
the default white “chick”. Guerrero compared Bridget Jones’s Diary to
McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale and found that the novels differ in their
representation of the male hero and masculinity in general, the impor-
tance of friends and family, love, sex, marriage and domesticity, and,
finally, the heroine’s self-esteem. One important aspect Guerrero raises
is the representation of happiness in chick lit, which is, as I have stressed,
inherently tied to a successful heterosexual union. Guerrero adds that
whereas the chicks seem to seek comfort in this union and the domestic
bliss it promises, the sistahs usually seek a relationship “that will give
them the opportunity to define their womanhood beyond domesticity”
(92), because domesticity and the home never had the same ideological
implications for black women as they did for the “angels in the house”,
the white women. The results of Guerrero’s analysis support her claim
that sistah lit is not just a black version of chick lit but a significant vari-
ation from the chick lit formula as a function of the different histories of
white and black womanhood. Guerrero summarizes her findings:

Though the woman of both [these] races have ‘come a long way,
baby’, black women have had to come farther. They have had to
fight for the recognition of their womanhood after long histories of
the United States denying their affiliation with the feminine gender
through systematic violence and exploitation of their bodies, and
the ideological distortion of their image and worth in the national
imagination. White women never had to convince society of their
womanhood, though they have had to convince it of their equality.
It is these differences in social battles that have made the resulting
perspectives of each of these groups of women on domestic institu-
tions significantly separate, and so too, the literature that caters to
them and their desires.
(101)

Nonetheless, toward the end of her analysis, Guerrero mentions that the
early to mid-2000s have sparked a wave of publications by female au-
thors of color which have assimilated the more glamorous single-girl-in-
the-city formula à la Sex and the City; examples include Cosmopolitan
Girls by Lyah Beth LeFlore and Charlotte Burley; The Accidental Diva
by Tia Williams; and Bling, Erica Kennedy’s first novel – all three novels
were published in 2004. As Lola Ogunnaike writes in the New York
Times, while the authors of these new novels all admire McMillan’s
136  Heike Mißler
work, they claim that their own writings are telling a different story of
black womanhood. Tia Williams explains that a perceived link between
misery and blackness does not resonate with her own experiences:

Recent black fiction has been full of whiny, suffering-from-hair-­

politics, my-man-done-me-wrong women. Sounds pat, but many
people still think you need to be downtrodden to be truly black.
(qtd. in Ogunnaike n. pag)

Novels like these but also, for instance, the novels of Alisa Valdes-­
Rodriquez, who has been cast as the godmother of “chica lit” or Latina
chick lit, have quickly been ascribed an “ethnic chic” aesthetic by their
publishers, selling Sex and the City-style entertainment in different
shades. Amanda Maria Morrison argues that this glamorization of eth-
nicity is often constructed to the detriment of the respective ethnic back-
ground, because it frequently taps into the (s)exoticization of the black
or Latina characters in order to also appeal to white audiences and not
just to the limited market segment of black or Latina/o readerships (324).
In Valdes-Rodriguez’s case specifically, Morrison claims, Latinidad is
turned into a “market-friendly” consumer good, “predicated upon
the effacement or defacement of Chicana/os and Mexicana/os” (313).
­Valdes-Rodriguez, however, responded to this criticism in a manner sim-
ilar to Tia Williams and her colleagues, stating that she had difficulties
relating to the literary traditions associated with her ethnic background:

Since you were Latina, everyone wanted you to write magical real-
ism, they thought that if you had a Hispanic name, you had some
sort of dead person in the closet that spoke to you and I can’t relate
to those books. I relate to Bridget Jones’s Diary.
(qtd. in A.M. Morrison, 326)

Representations of women of color in chick lit vary greatly. Some might

present an experience of womanhood that differs from the white main-
stream and confirms the expectations of one’s ethnic background, some
might pursue a more assimilationist approach and show that their ex-
periences are similar to that of the white heroines of Sex and the City
and Bridget Jones’s Diary. bell hooks is critical of the latter because
“[assimilation] does not require the dominant groups to give up or alter
its cultural norms” (qtd. in Squires 27). While this may be the case, rep-
resentations of race in chick lit can also complicate the binary between
assimilation and difference and instead express a spectrum of experi-
ences. In fact, ethnic chick-lit novels can not only disrupt unified visions
of the ethnic identities of their African American, Latina, Chicana, or
(South) Asian American characters4 but also teach white readerships that
these identities are more heterogeneous than they might have expected.
 Neoliberal Fantasies  137
Valdes-Rodriguez’s novel The Dirty Girls Social Club frequently and ex-
plicitly addresses its non-Hispanic readers, for instance, when the narra-
tor introduces one of the main characters as an “upstanding member of
the Brookline Jewish community” and then adds in parentheses, “(Yes,
we Latinas come in ‘Jew’, too - shame on you for being surprised)” (em-
phasis in original 19).
Feminista, too, plays with its readerships’ expectations about the her-
oine’s background and complicates the representation of ethnicity, as its
protagonist never clearly identifies as belonging to one of the two sides
of a racial binary. Her quest is equally ambiguous: on the one hand, she
wants to have a partner and a family of her own, but on the other, she is
unwilling to commit herself to and become dependent on someone else.
While the desire to settle down is marked as white in the novel, the strug-
gle to stay independent is marked as a feature of Sydney’s ethnic back-
ground. As mentioned earlier, Sydney is biracial, having a white mother
who divorced Sydney’s Afro-Cuban father. While Sydney’s ­sister has fair
skin and hair like their mother, Sydney has a darker complexion and
dark hair, resembling her deceased father, who was a civil rights attor-
ney. Rejecting both her mother’s and her sister’s lifestyles as unemployed
trophy wives, Sydney stylizes herself as following in her father’s foot-
steps, “a childless, more tastefully dressed Erin Brockovich”, although
her career has nothing to do with civil rights nor any other ­humanitarian
causes (4). Comparing herself to a white woman and flaunting a fake
affiliation with the disenfranchised – by which, it is implied, she means
her father’s clients, thus people of color – Sydney constructs a conflicting
identity for herself in which class, ethnicity, gender, and the privileges or
discrimination tied to these categories all play crucial roles. As a success-
ful middle-class journalist, Sydney firmly belongs to the canon of privi-
leged chick-lit heroines. Still, she comments dismissively on the status of
chick lit/chick flicks as genres dominated by white, well-off, middle-to-
upper-class heroines:

Please! Sex and the City had its time, but we’ve moved on. […] We
have a biracial, multicultural president who is the embodiment of
everything we, as a nation, and we, as its citizens, should strive to
be. And a First Lady who shops online at J. Crew! The whole ‘hap-
piness means being rich and fabulous and wearing Manolos’ thing
is waaaaaaay over.
(240)

Although she hypocritically dissociates herself from the white consum-

erism of Sex and the City, except for her ethnic background, Sydney cor-
responds in all aspects to the stereotype embodied by Carrie ­Bradshaw;
she is a fashionista, if a tomboyish one, and writes for a celebrity and
lifestyle magazine. Hence, she is well acquainted with Manhattan’s
138  Heike Mißler
fashion scene and its socialites, and though she officially repudiates their
wealthy lifestyle, she secretly covets it for herself. Moreover, her praise
of Barack and Michelle Obama evokes an image of a much-discussed
post-ethnic America5 in which the end of the fight for racial equality is
near because the head of state is biracial and as such embodies the ideal
of a multicultural society. However, Sydney’s proclamation of posteth-
nicity is contradicted by her own racial awareness throughout the novel.
For instance, her job as a celebrity journalist is the result of a law suit
against her company, of whose staff less than three percent were people
of color (117). Sydney understands that she got her job because of her sex
and racial background (117) – she is clearly conscious of her race and of
how it pits her against a white mainstream. Feminista’s narrative pres-
ents whiteness as the unmarked category, where it is understood that a
character is white “because nobody says so” (Toni Morrison 72). White-
ness, as Dyer defines it in his seminal study White, is predicated on the
same power dynamics as heteronormativity: it is an invisible norm and
structuring ideology which postulates the supremacy of white people. As
Ruth Frankenberg puts it,

Whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most

clearly to those it definitely excludes and those to whom it does vio-
lence. Those who are securely housed within its borders usually do
not examine it.
(229)

The reason why “those within its borders” rarely examine it is that
whiteness is based on the belief that being white has nothing to do with
race:

As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as

long as white people are not racially seen or named, they/we function
as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people. There
is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The
claim to power is to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced
people can’t do that - they can only speak for their race.
(Dyer, White 1–2)

Feminista plays with the notion of whiteness as a human norm. On the

one hand, the third-person omniscient narrator (who mostly takes on
either Sydney’s or Max’s perspective) only refers to a character’s eth-
nic identity if it is nonwhite or if the readers see a stock character, like
the “white-trash stripper” (355), through Sydney’s eyes. Consequently,
although the novel is more diverse than most chick-lit texts, through
adoption of rhetorically and ideologically predominant chick-lit conven-
tions, it enforces whiteness “as a cultural dominant within the field of
 Neoliberal Fantasies  139
the fashion and beauty complex” (McRobbie, Aftermath 69). But on
the other hand, the plot evens out this imbalance by marking Sydney’s
struggle as raced. Every one of the novel’s fashionable and wealthy elite
is white, and Sydney can only join them when she has renounced the one
character trait that still defines her as incompatible with the cultural
norms of white femininity – her shrewishness.
Although the figure of the shrew in Shakespeare’s play is a white
woman, Feminista constructs Sydney’s shrewishness as a consequence
of her ethnic background and stylizes Sydney as an angry black woman
who is a challenge for any man. As mentioned earlier, the ideal of do-
mesticity is clearly raced. Whereas in mainstream chick lit, domesticity
is synonymous with happiness, sistah lit often has its “heroines running
from domesticity in an attempt to assert an identity that is unconnected
to histories of forced compliance with the roles of caretaker, breeder,
and sexualised object” (Guerrero 90). When Sydney tells her sister about
her goal to find a husband and settle down, the latter reminds her that
even at the age of seven, Sydney had clearly said that she never wanted to
be a housewife (52). Sydney’s desires are posited as ambiguous from the
outset of the novel. She strives for the prospect of settling down yet at
the same time despises it; it seems to promise happiness, yet she cannot
combine it with her political convictions. Sydney thus finds herself in a
dilemma, and the novel opens with her realization of this. The readers
are introduced to her at a restaurant, where her current “accessory”, the
good-looking but penniless Kyle, cannot afford to foot the bill of her
birthday dinner. The passage is set at a trendy restaurant in New York,
where most of the women present are white, blond, and emaciated.
­Sydney is described as standing out from the crowd as she is tanned and
healthy looking, with dark brown hair, setting her off positively from
the rest of the customers. Yet at the same time, her exceptional position
makes her feel self-conscious and uncomfortable, as if she did not belong
there (3). Consumed by her anger, Sydney storms out of the restaurant,
leaving a perplexed Kyle behind. She recapitulates her situation:

She grew up believing she’d have it all. A Career with a capital C.

A husband. Babies! She’d be the Enjoli woman, bringing home the
bacon, frying it up in a pan, never never letting him forget that he
was the man! […] FUCK YOU, GLORIA STEINEM!
(5)

This comment clearly shows that Sydney’s visions of her future have
been profoundly shaped by pop culture. Her dream of being the Enjoli
woman reveals that she has internalized an image of successful wom-
anhood as presented in a 1980s TV advertisement. The Enjoli woman
is a thin, tall, blond model who sings a few lines adapted from Peggy
Lee’s 1963 hit “I’m a woman”: “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up
140  Heike Mißler
in a pan and never let you forget you’re a man!” (n. pag.), and spritzes
herself with Enjoli perfume, whose slogan is “the 8-hour perfume for
the 24-hour woman”. Sydney’s dream version of herself is thus modeled
on a beautiful white actress who embodies the mythical figure of the
woman who can “have it all” – the husband; the career; and the sexy,
feminine body. There are several more instances in the novel which show
that Sydney’s ideal of womanhood is shaped by the television shows and
advertisements of her childhood and youth, such as Wonder Woman
and Charlie’s Angels (106), or the women in the “women for president”
advertisement campaign for Donna Karan (118) – all of which are con-
structs of a decidedly white femininity.
This is perhaps not so surprising given that the conflict between
motherhood and career is, of course, one that has historically pertained
largely to privileged white women.6 Work within the home has had a dif-
ferent meaning for black women, as bell hooks asserted in her Feminist
Theory: From Margin to Center (1984):

Historically, black women have identified work in the context of

family as humanizing labor, work that affirms their identity as
women, as human beings showing love and care, the very gestures
of humanity white supremacist ideology claimed black people were
incapable of expressing. In contrast to labor done in a caring envi-
ronment inside the home, labor outside the home was most often
seen as stressful, degrading, and dehumanizing. […] Early feminist
attacks on motherhood alienated masses of women from the move-
ment, especially poor and/or non-white women, who find parenting
one of the few interpersonal relationships where they are affirmed
and appreciated.
(133–134)

Consequently, the fight for the right to “have it all”, to have a career
and not be limited to motherhood, has never been the same for women
of color or women of the lower classes as they have always had to work
and were never given the choice to “have it all” – they had to have it all,
whether they wanted to or not. Despite her racial awareness, Sydney
does not seem to make that distinction. Her only reference to a black
female icon (also one anchored in pop culture) is equally accusatory and
revealing since she associates the discourse of having-it-all and yet be-
ing an independent woman with successful African American TV host
Oprah, whom she curses for instilling these ideas in her (6). Sydney has
clearly been disappointed by the women, real or fictional, who have de-
fined her idea of femininity. Her cursing of Gloria Steinem is a reference
to the epigraph of Act I, a quote by Steinem which claims, “The truth
will set you free, but first it will piss you off” (1). Said “truth” is Sydney’s
sudden realization that something is amiss in her life. Since she has a
 Neoliberal Fantasies  141
successful career, she blames her unhappiness on the lack of a suitable
partner, the acquisition of whom has proven tiresome so far:

Now that her clock was officially ticking, dateable didn’t even cut it
anymore. She needed to find a meaningful relationship, a marriaga-
ble mate, a genetically healthy provider with motile sperm. It was a
complete fucking drag.
(5, italics in original)

Sydney takes no joy in her quest, yet she knows which criteria to obey:
a “meaningful relationship” translates into a monogamous one. More-
over, the partner must be suitable, whatever list of characteristics that
entails, and fit to reproduce. Although none of these prospects – ­dating,
­marrying, or reproducing – seem particularly enticing to Sydney, she
suspects them to be the key to happiness. In the course of the novel, it
­becomes increasingly clear that Sydney’s quest for marriage and children
is not motivated by romantic desires but by neoliberal strategic thinking.
Sydney deconstructs all ideals of romantic love and heterosexual couple-
dom, and reveals them to be based on one power alone – capitalism.
The ideals of femininity, marriage, and domesticity Sydney aspires
to against her will hinge not only on whiteness but prominently also on
economic power. Sydney’s quest follows strictly neoliberal logics. The
preconditions for a successful husband hunt are already planned; Sydney
has a nutritionist who has helped her to shape her body and she has a
psychologist who prescribes Xanax for her anxieties so that she appears
more balanced and can cope with her fits of anger. Her job provides the
necessary network of people worth knowing, and the money to fit in with
them. In terms of her appearance and self-fashioning, Sydney has been
fully assimilated into the ideal of femininity as proffered by the fashion
and beauty complex. By and by, the narrative reveals that ­Sydney’s wish
to settle down is tied to economic necessities or to what she refers to as
her “shopping-bag-lady syndrome”: namely, the irrational fear of being
poor (74). While Sydney used to think that once she would earn enough
money, she would automatically be satisfied (77), her Manhattan life
and contact with the upper classes have made her fear that she will never
reach enough to keep up with them. Her carefully devised life plan is in
danger, so she needs to reconsider domesticity, as it seems to be the only
promise of financial stability for her.
Given that the novel’s backdrop is the economic recession, her fears
seem to reflect the zeitgeist of the late 2000s, which has led more than
one reviewer to dub the novel “recessionista lit”.7 Since the 2007/2008
recession, many chick-lit narratives have taken up economic issues,
blending the love plot with story lines about female entrepreneurial skills
and/or the need to be creative in a post-recession job market. In an in-
terview with the Independent, commissioning editor Keshini Naidoo at
142  Heike Mißler
Avon, an imprint of HarperCollins which largely publishes chick lit and
romance novels, said that recessionista lit “perfectly fits the mood of the
times” and that

[a]fter the downturn in the economic climate, blockbusters that

glorified excessive, conspicuous consumption threatened to look
both in poor taste and deeply out of touch with what readers are
experiencing.
(qtd. in Mesure n. pag.)

The heroines of these recession novels usually find themselves in precari-

ous situations, either losing their jobs or suffering severe financial distress
for other reasons. They must then pluck up the courage to embark on
new career paths, often as small business owners – the cupcake ­bakery/
café being a ubiquitous plot device – and mostly in positions which are
recognized as safely feminine, such as owner of a cooking school or
sweetshop. Marian Keyes’s protagonist who works as a private eye is a
notable exception in this respect, even if the hard-boiled female inves-
tigator is certainly another stock character often used in pop culture.
Recession heroines must learn to adjust to a new life and must be daring
professionally in order to be rewarded romantically. This turn in chick
lit makes abundantly clear that love and work are closely intertwined
in the twenty-first century, especially in times of economic hardship.
Feminista is no exception to this acumen in that the protagonist’s career
almost takes up as much space as her quest for Mr Right. For Sydney,
however, it is the risk she is willing to take for her relationship which
is eventually rewarded with a professional upgrade. The novel’s ending
explicitly combines the heroine’s happily-ever-after with a job offer she
cannot resist, underlining once more that Sydney’s reasons to seek a sta-
ble relationship are avowedly financial.
Like many chick-lit novels, Feminista shows some parallels to the
nineteenth-century novel of manners in its portrait of femininity, mar-
riage, and domesticity. Economic power and the promise of financial
security are the two main factors which structure gender relations in the
text. Consequently, femininity is constructed as a strictly regimented
performance which women on the lookout for a husband must follow.
In Feminista, it is largely defined by one character, Mitzi Berman, pro-
fessional matchmaker. When Sydney decides that she can no longer wait
around and must act, her sister Liz hires Mitzi Berman, whose business
is described as “[s]trictly high-end” (69). Employed by the richest of the
rich who are used to getting (or buying) what they want, including con-
jugal partners, Mitzi’s services are costly, and whoever wants to accept
them must be prepared to be commodified, men and women alike. Her
clients are “[h]igh-net-worth individuals”, her goods are “sexy and fem-
inine” women (95ff). Mitzi’s advice to Sydney is thus to supply what the
 Neoliberal Fantasies  143
market demands, i.e., a sexy and glamorous femininity. Her catalog of
dos and don’ts satirizes the style of self-help books (and, of course, Mitzi
has written one herself) and dispenses the most clichéd and sexist advice
on dating.
Although Mitzi’s rules stand for everything Sydney despises, she suc-
cumbs to her advice and tries to embrace a pleasant and unthreatening
version of femininity. Before her first arranged date, Sydney is given a
makeover by her gay best friend Jeffrey and her neighbor, a friendly
“white-trash stripper” (355) named Candi, whose standard accoutre-
ments include pink feather boas and four-inch heels. With her hair and
makeup done by Jeffrey and equipped with sexy underwear and dating
advice from Candi, Sydney is nearing the ideal of femininity that Mitzi
Berman advocates as the ultimate strategy to attract a husband. Femi-
ninity is literally turned into a masquerade devised by a gay man and
a white stripper because Sydney understands that a homosexual and a
dancer would probably know what men wanted in a woman. Sydney’s
arranged dates all fail; her performance of femininity is not convincing
enough because she fundamentally rejects a highly sexualized perfor-
mance of femininity as much as she rejects a highly dependent form of
domesticity. Sydney’s wish to get married is “purely perfunctory” (133),
in that she needs a man to recreate. She discards other options because
they would be too time-consuming, costly, and stressful. Neither does
Sydney hold romanticized ideas of her wedding – she even questions the
institution of marriage and concludes that she is looking for “a hus-
friend” rather than a husband (133, emphasis in original).
Next to the framing financial considerations, Sydney’s quest is mo-
tivated by her practicality, to the point where the “husfriend” becomes
an ultimately exchangeable good, even if he must fulfill a list of crite-
ria. Sydney does not romanticize marriages or tap into the heterosex-
ual imaginary. For her, relationships represent havens of well-being
because they project convenience and security. So, not unlike many a
nineteenth-century novel, Feminista puts romantic love second to so-
cial obligations and sheer financial necessities. Another challenge to the
sanctity of the marriage as a trope in chick lit is Sydney’s remark about
its exclusivity (134). Although this political awareness comes coupled
with the consideration of marriage as a lifestyle decision – the question
whether marriage is still cool – it shows that the chick-lit formula is
flexible and is able to reflect changing social realities. However, Sydney’s
greatest problem with marriage is its possible aftereffect, i.e., domes-
ticity. One reason she rejects it is that her circle of girlfriends has been
greatly decimated because of it. When her female friends get engaged,
Sydney pretends they have caught a terminal illness, and when they get
pregnant, they symbolically pass away, i.e., disappear from her circle of
friends because Sydney can no longer relate to them (75). Since her asso-
ciations with domesticity are mostly negative, the only positive way that
144  Heike Mißler
Sydney can make sense of motherhood is to see it as a new career oppor-
tunity. Sydney relates to the image of the mompreneur, the mother who
uses her newly gained baby-knowledge as a start-up for a company (53).
Motherhood, just like marriage, is equally posited as desirable because,
as a business opportunity, it may yield financial improvements.
Feminista does not only present femininity, marriage, and mother-
hood as shaped by neoliberal and capitalist structures, its narrative even
hints at alternatives to a quest for heteronormativity. Sydney often uses
rhetorical questions and/or question tags to illustrate that, in fact, there
may be alternative ways to happiness, and domesticity may not be the
solution to all her problems. When she wonders, “But if she wanted to
have children the traditional way, she did need a man, didn’t she?” (6),
the dialogic question tag invites the readers to come up with an answer
to the question for her. By doing so, the narrative opens up more than
one gap for the readers to fill in. The question is not only if Sydney needs
a man to procreate but also if this is all she needs a man for. Other
uncomfortable and unanswered questions are: Why does she want to
procreate so badly at all? Why is she not considering an adoption? Why
does she not aim at remaining independent if that is what she really
wants? Sydney’s erratic behavior and her rhetorical questions trigger a
range of other enquiries, which all show that domesticity as a normative
ideal is no longer strong enough to preclude all other viable alternatives.
At the same time, Sydney’s refusal to pursue other options illustrates
what Berlant has called a relation of “cruel optimism” (1). The rhetori-
cal question thus exposes the power of the norm; it shows a heroine who
feels helpless against it. However, it also shows that there are possible
alternatives, even if they are not spelled out. In another passage, Sydney
ruminates about marriage and a family as promises of happiness and
wonders whether it is true that they are the ultimate solution for eter-
nal joy: “How could [they] not?” (120). Here again, Sydney’s rhetorical
question invites the readers to imagine answers, and it clearly opens up
the narrative to contrary thoughts and ideologies, not only because there
are evidently other ways to reach happiness, but also because the novel
does not contain a single married couple (with or without children) that
is portrayed as happy and functional. The narrative thus encourages a
reading of Sydney’s desires against the grain, indirectly pointing out
that there are indeed other means to achieving happiness than getting
married and having a family. The mere asking of these questions, which
in fact question the normative ideal, serves to expose this very ideal
as an ideological construct – which can be analyzed, questioned, and
changed.
The narrative goes even further in deconstructing Sydney’s desires
when it presents Sydney’s frequent daydreams and fantasies in which she
imagines alternatives to her present or visions of her future. As Judith
 Neoliberal Fantasies  145
Butler has pointed out, fantasies also have a critical touch, because they
push the limits of reality:

Fantasy is not the opposite of reality, it is what reality forecloses, and,

as a result, it defies the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitu-
tive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists,
is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called
reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others
otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points
elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.
(29)

One of Sydney’s frequent fantasies is to leave the economically challeng-

ing climate of Manhattan for an inexpensive and stress-free life in New
Mexico. She imagines that the men would be masculine but also helpful
and caring and that she could afford to own a house, a garden, and a car
(75) – as opposed to the few things she can afford in the high mainte-
nance lifestyle of Manhattan. This escape to another state, in both senses
of the word, would allow her at least to fulfill her economic desires, and
it would oust the necessity of marrying. At another point, she fantasizes
about changing her sexual orientation, reasoning that she would have
been “a fantastic power lesbian” because of her androgynous name, her
tomboyishness, and her strident feminism (44). But eventually Sydney
concludes that she must accept her heterosexuality because she unfor-
tunately likes men better than women. Homosexuality or bisexuality is
thus positioned as a visible and valid alternative, and although they are
dismissed by Sydney, they are not obscured by a heteronormative default
narrative. In another dream, Sydney has found her perfect match and has
the perfect heterosexual sex and heteronormative life with him – thus
fulfilling all normative ideals (299). The man she dreams about, whom
she has met through Mitzi Berman’s services, has, however, just cut
all chords and told Mitzi to find him a white woman because Sydney’s
shrewishness is a threat to his masculinity. So the partner of her fantasies
has become just unattainable and with him, her ideal of normativity.
His reasons for rejecting her confirm the (too) high price Sydney would
have to pay to enter married never-neverland. Finally, Sydney imagines
what her life would be like if she were a man – a sex change would obvi-
ously free her from all perceived pressures of femininity – she could have
children and a wife who takes care of them so that she could pursue a
demanding career without feeling guilty about neglecting her motherly
and conjugal duties (318).8 This half-ironic dream reveals a number of
the double standards Sydney suffers from in the novel, and so, like all
her fantasies, expresses her discontent with her present situation and her
longing for alternatives. She either fantasizes a life in which she can fulfil
146  Heike Mißler
the ideals of femininity and domesticity or one in which she believes she
would not have to worry about them because she would be a lesbian
or a man. Sydney’s unwillingness to comply with the domestic ideal is
mirrored by her fantasies, and inevitably it leads to the life-­implosion
moment so often found in chick-lit narratives. Her quest, her life plan,
seemingly fails when all her dating attempts end in disasters. At that
point, she is also fired from her job and loses her apartment. Sydney’s
deepest fear has come true as she finds herself without apartment, job,
and boyfriend. Renouncing her former lifestyle and all her worldly be-
longings, Sydney turns her back on Manhattan and moves to a commune
in New Jersey, where she takes up work in a thrift shop and tries to adapt
to her new anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist environment. However,
her catharsis does not last long. When Max decides to rescue Sydney
from the economic lowliness of communal living, she does not require
too much persuading. The “taming” of the shrew is, therefore, Sydney’s
realization that Max loves her and that she is now willing to relinquish
a part of her independence in order to enter a functional relationship but
also to escape from the commune. Sydney finally admits that she wants
to be a damsel in distress for once and accepts being rescued.
The final chapter finds Max and Sydney happily reunited; however,
not as bride and groom. Sydney’s taming has not led her into her dreaded
version of domestic life. Rather, it has given her a new career. She is now
co-creative director at Harvey’s, and her professional happiness almost
overshadows her personal one. Although Sydney initially has qualms
about joining Harvey’s staff, she is easily convinced that the only way
to change “The Establishment” (354) is from within, which she immedi-
ately does by adding new young designers of color to Harvey’s line and
by promoting a woman-friendly workplace with a flex-time program
(355). Now that Sydney has secured her financial future, she has even
fewer reasons to enter domestic life. She declares that having children
can wait another five years. Max receives her ultimate approval as a pro-
spective husband when the feminist news website Jezebel ranks him high
on their “DILF (Dudes I’d Like to Fuck) list” (357), effectively turning
him into a kind of “trophy husband”.
The neoliberal fantasy that Feminista’s “happy” ending represents
contends that happiness is not secured by a heterosexual relationship
but rather by the career opportunity and the lifestyle upgrade that comes
with finding the right match. Feminista thus regresses into gender re-
lations similar to those of the nineteenth-century novel, but it rewrites
them for a twenty-first-century late capitalist context. A husband is still
very desirable, since he is considered a good investment in one’s personal
and professional happiness and success. In the twenty-first century, how-
ever, the symbolic power of romantic love and the promise of a domestic
routine are no longer enough to satisfy this novel’s heroine. Feminista
shows that all ideals of femininity, domesticity, and marriage as they are
presented in its Manhattan setting are steeped in a neoliberal ideology
 Neoliberal Fantasies  147
and related to a capitalist economy. Moreover, it exposes these ideals
as raced, since its heroine has to abjure the one character trait that still
marks her as ostensibly different, her fierce belief in female indepen-
dence, in order to be admitted into the social sphere of Manhattan’s up-
per classes. The ending shows her as a woman who has found happiness
beyond domesticity by retaining a powerful position in the very indus-
try which shapes and promulgates the ideal of femininity that the novel
tries to deconstruct. Sydney’s final project of changing the system from
within is certainly a heavily constructed twist, which, on a meta-level,
could be read as a metaphor for Kennedy’s own endeavors. Ultimately,
Feminista maintains the same paradox that all the other novels also ig-
nore for the sake of genre conventions. The quest narrative heavily criti-
cizes normativity and its neoliberal origins, points to gendered and raced
double standards, celebrates the possibility of failure, and even hints at
alternatives. The ending, however, is, at worst, a reinstatement of the
normative ideal, and at best, a way of making-do with the system which
chick-lit heroines seemingly cannot elude.

Notes
1 Kennedy was found dead at her home. The cause of her death was never
officially stated (Fox n. pag.).
2 Whereas Oxford Dictionaries Online describes a fashionista in rather neu-
tral terms as “a designer of haute couture” or “a devoted follower of fash-
ion”, Collins Dictionary Online’s definition is more derogatory: “(informal)
a person who follows trends in the fashion industry obsessively and strives
continually to adopt the latest fashions”.
3 The American feminist magazine Bitch Magazine (founded in 1996), e.g.,
uses the term in an empowering sense.
4 For examples and a discussion of (South) Asian chick lit, see Pamela Butler
and Jigna Desai “Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras Chick-Lit Criticism and
Transnational Feminism” in Meridians 8 (February 2008).
5 For a discussion of postethnicity in a US context, see Hollinger (1995).
6 For a discussion of the whiteness of motherhood in chick lit, see Katie
Arosteguy’s article “The Politics of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Contempo-
rary American Mommy Lit.” Women’s Studies 39 (2010): 409–429. Print.
7 Other examples of chick-lit novels that deal with economic hardships and/or
the recession include Amy Silver’s Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista
(2009), Alexandra Lebenthal’s The Recessionistas (2010), Wendy Walker’s
Social Lives (2009), Karen Weinreb’s The Summer Kitchen (2009), Mar-
ian Keyes’s The Mystery of Mercy Close (2012), Melissa Senate’s The Love
Goddess’ Cooking School (2010), Jenny Colgan’s Meet Me at the Cupcake
Café (2011) and Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams (2012),
and their respective sequels. For an in-depth discussion of recessionista lit,
see Jennifer Scanlon’s article “What’s an Aquisitive Girl to Do? Chick Lit
and the Great Recession” (2013).
8 The reason why Sydney has this outburst is that she has to conduct an
interview with an eccentric celebrity who underwent a sex change (male
to female). The novel’s very brief dealings with transgender identities is
heavily stereotyped, almost hostile, and unfortunately lacks any kind of
contextualization.
148  Heike Mißler
Works Cited
Arosteguy, Katie. “The Politics of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Contemporary
American Mommy Lit.” Women’s Studies, vol. 39, 2010, pp. 409–429.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
Bussel, Rachel K. “Frisky Q&A: Erica Kennedy, Author of ‘Bitch Lit’ Novel
Feminista.” TheFrisky.com. The Frisky, 03 Dec. 2009. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.
Butler, Pamela and Jigna Desai. “Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras: Chick-Lit
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 Neoliberal Fantasies  149
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7 The White Terry McMillan
Centering Black Women
Within Chick Lit’s Genealogy
Erin Hurt

When we consider the origins of chick lit, a single urtext clearly

presents itself: Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996). The
entire chick lit phenomenon is traced back to this single novel. But
as in other cases in which a many-branched genre appears to grow
from a single stalk, the genesis of chick lit may not be so simple.
(Ferriss and Young 4)

Indeed, African American, as ethnic chick lit in general, is more

often considered as a sub-genre or a variation of the formula instead
of another possible starting point.
(Mißler 15)

In the introduction to their 2006 edited collection, Chick Lit: The New
Woman’s Fiction, the first book-length work to analyze the burgeon-
ing genre, Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young sought to record in
broad strokes the conventions of these novels, the categories within this
genre, its literary predecessors, and the various themes and tropes that
seemed to be emerging from the numerous publications. While many
scholars have defined this genre, their definitions consistently name
similar qualities and conventions, including twenty or thirty-something
middle-class or upper-middle-class protagonists who seek success in
the areas of romantic relationships, careers, friendships, and cultural
identity; who narrate their story in first-person, using self-deprecating
humor and expository language; and who celebrate consumption and
material goods. This collection was very much at the forefront of chick
lit criticism; ­several of its chapters have become foundational to later
scholarship, such as Lisa Guerrero’s piece on ethnicity and womanhood
or Cris ­Mazza’s essay on the origins of the term “chick lit.” Stephanie
­Harzewski’s ­chapter on the romance as a literary foremother grew, five
years later, into Chick Lit and Postfeminism (2011), the first monograph
on chick lit. Yet, even as these essays wrestled to pin down the scope of
this literary phenomenon, additional chick lit novels were being pub-
lished. In the mid- to late 2000s, new titles, especially those featuring
 Centering Black  151
African American, Latina, and South Asian protagonists, proliferated.1
Yet, as Ferris and Young were attempting to catalog and analyze what
they saw happening around them, most of these women of color, indige-
nous, and diasporic chick lit narratives did not yet exist.
So, when Ferriss and Young pinpoint chick lit as originating with a
1996 British novel by Helen Fielding, writing, “However we choose
to judge its literary merit, the phenomenon now referred to as chick lit
clearly does flow—albeit in numerous directions—from the original
source of Bridget Jones [the protagonist of the novel]” (5)—they were
not incorrect. The commercial publishing industry’s appropriation of the
term “chick lit,” and the ensuing steps they took to construct a coherent
genre bearing this name, happened as a result of the financial success
Bridget Jones achieved. The creation of chick lit imprints by these pub-
lishing houses, and their willingness to solicit manuscripts from authors
of color, was made possible by the initial success of a novel featuring a
white protagonist. Thus, positing Bridget as the start of this genre made
sense, a white beginning for what seemed at the time to be a mostly
white genre.
This origin narrative has continued to be used unquestionably in much
of the scholarship on chick lit that followed Ferriss and Young’s collec-
tion, including my own work on chica lit (Latina chick lit). In the in-
troduction to her monograph Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism
in Chick Lit (2008), Caroline Smith describes Bridget Jones’s Diary as
“arguably the übertext of the genre” (16), a claim echoed in many other
scholarly works. Other examples illustrate not only this shared sentiment
but also how the novel’s protagonist thus leads to a particular version
of who “everywoman” includes. Stéphanie Genz, in her chapter on the
trope of the postfeminist singleton, describes Fielding’s novel as “catch-
ing the mood of the period or summoning the zeitgeist” (136), and she
augments her claims with Fielding’s description of Bridget as “no mere
fictional character, she’s the Spirit of the Age” and Whelehan’s claim that
“[Bridget] is ‘a kind of ‘everywoman’ of the 1990s’” (Whelehan qtd. in
Genz 136). Harzewski illustrates the stakes of selecting Bridget when
she writes, “Bridget’s average body weight, middle-class background,
professional rank, and certainly her surname, qualify her as a modern
everywoman and a departure from the beautiful heroine of historical
romances” (59). Whiteness, white bodies, and expectations that apply
to white womanhood are threaded through these constructions of who
counts as an “everywoman.” While these examples are but some of many,
they illustrate how critics’ centering of Bridget Jones skews our ability to
perceive other bodies, other versions, and other women’s experiences.
Though few in number, other scholars have looked to a different au-
thor, one whose commercially successful novel Waiting to Exhale (1992)
charted on the best-seller list several years before Fielding’s 1996 novel,
152  Erin Hurt
as a possible originary point. Guerrero, in her influential piece that jux-
taposes black and white chick lit fiction, reads Terry McMillan as the
literary wellspring of black chick lit. Cecilia Konchar Farr notes in her
piece on chick lit and literary history that the absence of McMillan from
discussions about chick lit illustrates how critics of the genre cling to a
particular narrative about what chick lit is and where it came from, one
rooted in the work of authors such as Jane Austen and which results in
a “whitening” of the genre and implicitly positions “[chick lit] novels
by women of color as ‘variations’ on [white] chick lit” (203). In order
to force a reconsidering of the narrative we tell about chick lit, one that
marginalizes chick lit featuring protagonists of color, this essay builds
on Guerrero and Farr’s work and adopts a consciously provocative yet
exploratory stance that claims Terry McMillan, and Waiting to Exhale,
as a simultaneous originary text—one that does not necessarily supplant
Bridget Jones in terms of primacy but that forms a second point of emer-
gence for this genre—thereby disrupting the notion that white chick lit
should be used to shape what we understand this genre to be and to do.
With this claim, the chapter playfully splits the genesis of this genre,
allowing both Bridget Jones’s Diary and McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale
to be seen as originary sites for the genre that followed. This move opens
up a space where we can imagine a more intersectional literary lineage,
one that names a more inclusive selection of textual influences. When
we use the protagonists of Waiting to Exhale—Savannah, Bernadine,
Robin, and Gloria—as touchstones rather than Bridget, we read differ-
ently the cultural work of the genre and the novels that constitute it.

Reconsidering the Sociocultural Context of Chick Lit

Similar to other chick lit titles, Waiting to Exhale focuses on the lives of
four 30-something women—Savannah, Bernadine, Gloria, and Robin—
who have achieved professional success but not the romantic love they
crave. As Savannah promises herself (and readers) in the opening pages,
“On the top of my list is finding a husband. I promise myself that in
1990 I will not spend another birthday by myself” (11 [2011]). The
novel follows the four characters as they navigate the unreliable and
unavailable men in their lives but also their own standards for a ro-
mantic relationship and for a good life. By the novel’s end, Savannah
has broken off her relationship with her married lover, and Bernadine
receives a divorce settlement from her husband while embarking on
a sweet, stable relationship with a new man. Newly single Robin de-
cides to continue with her unplanned pregnancy. Gloria recovers from a
stress- and weight-induced heart attack with the help of her friends and
her ­neighbor-turned-boyfriend. Each woman feels more confident with
herself and her romantic situation by the novel’s end; though they each
desire a relationship, the absence of one does not limit their happiness.
 Centering Black  153
They are no longer “waiting to exhale,” a metaphor the characters use
to mean finding and landing “the right man” (17 [2011]).
The publication of this novel has come to be seen as a turning point
in commercial publishing’s relationship with women writers, especially
those of color, but it was also recognized as such by many at the mo-
ment. In Carolyn See’s 1992 review for the Los Angeles Times, she de-
scribes McMillan’s third novel as “part of another genre entirely, so new
it doesn’t really have a name yet,” having to do with “women, triumph,
revenge, comradeship,” arguing that Waiting to Exhale did something
very different from either black women writers such as Alice Walker,
Toni Morrison, or Bebe Moore Campbell, or black male authors such
as Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson. In his review a few months later,
Daniel Max explains why McMillan’s novel differs so greatly from its
predecessors and peers, writing:

black authors have been a fixture on the literary landscape for de-
cades, but the majority of their books have been consciously literary
efforts, or novels in which ideology is at least as important as char-
acter development and plot. Readers of these books have been—
or were thought to have been—whites and a small group of black
intellectuals. McMillan, by contrast, writes about the lives of es-
sentially conventional blacks, who have up to now received little at-
tention. Her success has opened publishers’ eyes to a growing black
­middle-class readership.

Max’s and See’s comments together illustrate that with the publication
of Waiting to Exhale, representations of black women were shifting.
McMillan’s publication, and success, also signaled an expanding com-
munity of readers, one whose purchasing power was beginning to com-
mand the attention of the commercial publishing industry as they saw an
opportunity for new markets and more profits.
That this novel ushered in changes both representational and com-
mercial is an idea that most scholars already accept. What is more con-
tentious is the claim that McMillan should be read alongside Fielding
as a godmother of chick lit. What this chapter hopes to demonstrate by
taking up this claim is that when scholars take McMillan’s novel as one
inception point for chick lit, scholars gain the opportunity to reexamine
the various assumptions we have taken as true about the nature of the
genre, its origins, and its literary history, especially in terms of race and
ethnicity. Bridget Jones’s whiteness has lead critics, albeit unintention-
ally, to turn toward those social conditions affecting white women and
as a result accounts of the genre’s emergence but also its genealogy fail
to reflect the lived experience and the voices of black women and other
women of color. This essay, then, seeks to demonstrate how we might
rewrite our analysis in a more intersectional way so as to include the
154  Erin Hurt
conditions that gave rise to, and are reflected in, not only Bridget Jones’s
Diary but also Waiting to Exhale.
Heike Mißler and others read the emergence of the chick lit genre
through the concepts of postfeminism and the third wave, and this
scholarship offers a good starting point for reading considerations of
race into these concepts. Work by Mißler, Yvonne Tasker and Diane
Negra, Angela McRobbie, Stéphanie Genz, and others offers perceptive
definitions of postfeminism, a slippery term that Mißler defines as “a
condition of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century” rather
than a movement (25). Postfeminism is a term that describes what it
was like for women to navigate their lives—their careers, finding love,
marriage, raising kids, simply existing—in a world where feminism’s ex-
istence was acknowledge and accepted but whose precepts were still so
far out of reach. These scholars point out the ways in which postfemi-
nism takes whiteness and white women as the norm. 2 Tasker and Negra
write, “postfeminism is white and middle class by default, anchored in
consumption as a strategy” (2), and Mißler adds that even “non-white
postfeminist postergirls” such as Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez “often rep-
resent a supposedly universal female experience allowing identification
for the largest possible audience” (154). A handful of scholars, includ-
ing Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kimberly Springer, analyze postfeminism
through a racial lens. 3
Chick lit is often read as a literary embodiment of this postfeminist
condition because it illustrates this complicated balancing act of being
aware of feminism and expectations of equality while also inhabiting a
society that perpetuates many different forms of oppression and inequal-
ity. Mißler describes this as

a time when several important and partly conflicting developments

were taking place…in which well-established political beliefs of
­second-wave feminism overlapped with newer approaches to femi-
nism as developed by ‘younger’ feminists, most of them born during
or after the heydays of the second wave … [and] The mainstream-
ing of feminist ideas in the Western world, e.g. taking for granted
­women’s right to work, to equal pay, or their right to their own bodies
reached a whole new level of acceptance and validation in the 1990s.
(17–18)

In a scene where Bridget readies herself for a date with Daniel Cleaver,
she lists the many activities she must do to make herself acceptable for
Daniel. Mißler’s reading of this scene explains Bridget’s awareness of
existing within this postfeminism moment:

Bridget is aware that her excessive preparation for a date is not ‘nor-
mal’, but an attempt at reaching an ideal of normative femininity …
 Centering Black  155
Moreover, she knows that all her prepping should not be necessary,
but she does not trust her love interest Daniel Cleaver to be as en-
lightened [or concerned) about the pressures of contemporary wom-
anhood as she is.
(169)

Guerrero’s reading of Bridget Jones echoes this ideological conflict that

exists for white women, whom she terms “chicks,” in this moment of
postfeminism:

Part of the chick’s appeal [to her readers], both comically and trag-
ically, is her paradoxical existence of being successful and indepen-
dent in society while simultaneously being rendered “less than” by
that same society through media images and popular ideologies…
They wanted careers, economic stability, and self-determination
because those were the things they were taught they had a right
to claim. But they also wanted to have husbands and children, to
be taken care of, and to be the caretaker, because those were the
things they had been socialized to recognize as characterizing real
womanhood.
(89)

But this complicated undertaking of trying to meet both the feminist and
social definitions of real (white) womanhood was even more complicated
for African American women in this same moment. While Bridget wor-
ries about her weight and body hair and reading up on current events,
black women must struggle with first being recognized as women by
the Daniel Cleavers of the world. Those models of black womanhood
available to them up to this point in the work of Walker, Morrison, and
others were often powerful but also abstract and politicized. The work
of McMillan offered something different: her writing was part of a “a
group of series and authors that spoke to the modern condition of being
female, independent, single, and black” (Guerrero 89) and “the emer-
gence of this new model of [a black, professional middle-class woman]
onto the popular stage posed a nearly herculean move toward natural-
izing a distinctly different vision of black womanhood” (Guerrero 90).
Chick lit illustrates this postfeminist moment of living in a world where
expectations have changed but the conditions and structures have not.
While Bridget Jones illuminates the complicated shape this takes for
white women, Waiting to Exhale shows that love and success, for black
women, are further complicated by additional layers of oppression and
marginalization.
To better understand the third wave, or rather, how whiteness domi-
nates the way we read it, we have to understand the key roles that feminists
of color played in creating and laying the foundation for this movement.
156  Erin Hurt
Theorists view the third wave as responding both to the second wave
and patriarchal culture at large, what Mißler describes as “continua-
tion and simultaneous renewal” (Mißler 17). In large part, third wave
feminists sought to differentiate this newer wave from the limitations
they saw with the second wave, especially limitations involving identity
and personal choices. The second wave had focused on workplace issues
including pay equity and gender and racial discrimination, as well as
access to abortions, the attempted passage of the Equal Rights Amend-
ment, debates over the perils of sex and pornography, and more. The
second wave also included Betty Friedan’s call for women to have the
opportunity to be more than housewives as well as the use of the term
patriarchy to describe the systemic nature of sexism. Gloria Steinem was
one of the leading spokespersons of the movement. The term third wave
was coined by Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker, in her 1992
essay in Ms. Magazine, as she called for her generation to find their
voices and their anger, her own having been stoked by the treatment of
Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings.
Rebecca Walker’s call to her peers for a resurgence of feminist activ-
ism stems directly from her experience as a result of both her femaleness
and her blackness while watching Anita Hill testify at Clarence Thom-
as’s confirmation hearing. She describes this intersectional experience,
explaining, “the whole thing was too painful. A black man grilled by a
panel of white men about his sexual deviance. A black woman claiming
harassment and being discredited by other women” (39). She describes
attempting to discuss the hearings with her partner, who worries that
Thomas will undermine “civil rights and opportunities for people of
color,” causing Walker to retort, “When will progressive black men pri-
oritize my rights and well-being? When will they stop talking so damn
much about ‘the race’ as if it resolved exclusively around them” (40). Her
experience here can only be understood through an intersectional lens,
one that allows for the specific forms of oppression that take place at the
conjunction of being black and a woman. Walker’s call for a third wave
stems from and centers the oppression of black women. She says, “Let
Thomas’ confirmation serve to remind you, as it did me, that the fight is
far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to
anger. Turn that outrage into political power” (41). Walker’s comments
embody a shift seen throughout foundational third wave literature an-
thologies such as To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of
Feminism (1995) and Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Genera-
tion (1995), where the term “women” becomes more expansive in terms
of race, ability, sexuality, and more.
These calls for more inclusivity, alongside critique of the discourses
about womanhood that these authors perceive and associate with the
second wave, are rooted, at least partially, in Gloria Anzaldúa and
Cherríe Moraga’s edited collection This Bridge Called My Back (1981).
 Centering Black  157
Anzaldúa and Moraga’s edited collection, published more than a de-
cade before Walker’s essay, offered essays, poems, and letters that cri-
tiqued white feminism but also shared experiences of being feminists of
color. Pieces such as the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Femi-
nist Statement,” Audre Lorde’s “A Letter to Mary Daly,” Anzaldúa’s
“Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women,” Kate Rushin’s
“The Bridge Poem,” or Mitsuye Yamada’s “Asian Pacific Women and
Feminism” exemplify the way these authors responded to the exclusivity
of the Women’s Movement. In many ways, these kinds of critiques laid
the foundation for the third wave, which sought to make feminism more
inclusive, by exploding what they saw as monolithic understandings of
women and womanhood.
When we posit the rise of third wave as part of the context for the
emergence of the chick lit genre, we must envision a third wave that,
rather than existing within a white vacuum, was made possible by writ-
ing of feminists of color; we should also see the third wave as part of a
larger feminist moment, set against the backdrop of the postfeminist
condition Mißler describes, during which black feminist theory con-
tinued to come into its own. In 1990, Patricia Hill Collins published
her groundbreaking work Black Feminist Thought, in which she wrote
about the subjectivity of black women and the value of their particular
subject position. Kimberlé Crenshaw had just published articles in 1989
and 1990 introducing and applying the concept of intersectionality to
explain how the multiple layers of discrimination faced by black women,
including Anita Hill’s treatment by white, male US senators, were the
result of intersecting racial and gender oppression. When we re-center
the voices of feminists of color in the rise of the third wave, the idea
of a black chick lit novel as an originator of the genre—with chick lit
often read as a literary equivalent of these third wave ideas mixed with
postfeminism—being the natural product of these times, and representa-
tive of feminist and women’s concerns and anxieties, seems much more
plausible.
Mißler, in the introduction to her excellent monograph on the chick
lit genre, calls for scholars to focus their attention on “the sociocultural
contexts that enabled [chick lit’s] rise to prominence” (16) as a means of
understanding the genre’s importance and popularity. She argues that
chick lit functioned as a site that depicted the very anxieties and cultural
sea changes facing women in the 1990s, explaining,

chick-lit texts themselves in their reflections of popular culture al-

ways include issues that they may not openly refer to as feminist,
but that do indeed belong to the very core of feminist politics; body
images, financial and emotional independence from men, workplace
equality, combining career and motherhood, to name just a few,
(18)
158  Erin Hurt
alongside the Riot Grrl Movement, the Spice Girls, and the phenomenon
of Girl Power as features of the cultural landscape to which Bridget
Jones and other chick lit responded (18, 16). This reconstructed list of
feminist issues is not only accurate but is also incomplete since it primar-
ily describes those issues taken up by white feminists.
When we begin with Waiting to Exhale, a text that centers black
women’s lived experience, this brings into high relief concerns, anxiet-
ies, and significant historical events of the early 1990s and late 1980s
that remain invisible when using Fielding’s novel to focus our gaze and
leads critics to find connections to previously ignored cultural moments.
During the earlier nineties, black women faced what Daphne A. Brooks
describes as “extreme contrasts between progressive [b]lack class mo-
bilization and increasing [b]lack poverty, drug abuse, and severe health
obstacles,” citing higher numbers of black women receiving a college
education alongside rising incarceration rates for black men and women
(43). Brooks argues that black popular culture of this period reflected
the growing material and socioeconomic disparity between middle-class
and working-class black communities (43). Further, this disjuncture
was taking place against a backdrop of social problems facing the black
community: the criminal justice system’s incarceration of black men,
the devastating results of the Clinton administration’s welfare-to-work
program, the spread of AIDS and crack cocaine, Anita Hill’s testimony
against Clarence Thomas, and the emergence of anti-affirmative action
campaigns (Brooks 43–44; Bragg 45). Current explanations of chick lit’s
emergence often offer an overview of issues facing women but without
an intersectional focus, thereby reducing many of these discussions to
issues faced by white women. To understand the emergence of Waiting
to Exhale, scholars must consider both gender and race. When we in-
clude a consideration of the social problems faced by black women faced
during this time, we better understand that readers enjoyed McMillan’s
novel because, like other chick lit to follow, it too mirrored the social
conditions at this particular moment in US culture but did so in an inter-
sectional rather than a white-centric way.
Small moments throughout the novel directly engage a range of social
issues that affect the protagonists, bringing them to the reader’s atten-
tion. While celebrating together for Gloria’s birthday, the women list
reasons why so many single black men are unavailable—“‘They’re ugly.’
‘Stupid.’ ‘In prison.’ ‘Unemployed.’ ‘Crackheads’” (373 [2011])—and
some of their answers reflect the larger societal problems faced by the
black community. Elsewhere in the novel, Phillip, one of the stylists that
Gloria employs, reveals that he has been HIV positive for the past three
years and must stop working at her shop as his disease progresses (421
[2011]). Later in the novel, as Gloria tells Savannah about Phillip, Savan-
nah replies, “That disease is ruthless, isn’t it? There’s so many folks get-
ting it, and not just gay people, either” (426 [2011]). On the novel’s final
 Centering Black  159
page, Bernadine mentions that James, her new boyfriend, who is moving
to Phoenix to be near her, hopes to “see what he could do to help get the
King referendum passed in this racist state” (456 [2011]). This quote re-
fers specifically to Arizona’s refusal to officially recognize and celebrate
the Martin Luther King holiday, but it also alludes more generally to the
structural racism experienced by the black community in Arizona and
the wider US. While this novel focuses on the lives of these four women,
and their heartbreaks and successes, it reminds readers in small ways
that they exist within a larger cultural landscape that includes a range of
black lived experiences.
McMillan’s novel was one of many popular culture texts during this
time period working to deconstruct stereotypes lodged in the cultural
imaginary that defined black womanhood in demeaning ways by offer-
ing representations of black professional success. Beauty Bragg argues
that McMillan’s novels, as well as other black women’s popular fiction
from the nineties which she terms “Girlfriend fiction,” help readers to
negotiate between the images of black women that emerged during this
time period as part of anti-affirmative action campaigns, including the
female Buppie and the crack mother (45). McMillan’s novels, and their
film adaptations, provided readers with representations that pushed back
against some of these lower class representations and which showed pro-
tagonists who struggled with but also triumphed in certain ways in spite
of these larger structural social issues. Barbara Edmondson, in her work
on popular black romantic films, in which she includes adaptations of
McMillan’s, writes,

These films target African American women as viewers, and what

they collectively suggest about black women’s desires must be under-
stood in the context of the black women’s erasure, and black ­people’s
erasure, from the erotic sphere: black men as romantic leads, black
women as sexually desirable.
(202–203)

She goes on to explain that the romantic films she examines celebrate
“the black professional success, and the accoutrements of that suc-
cess” (203), later emphasizing, “Black women enjoy seeing images of
themselves that are prosperous” (Edmondson 206). She explains that
“black romances showcase black social mobility—in particular, black
female mobility—in a way that white romances do not” (206). Indeed,
­McMillan’s four protagonists exemplify this success—Savannah is a
powerful television producer and Gloria owns her own beauty salon.
Bernadine lives in a large mansion, owns beautiful clothes, and drives a
luxury car. To understand chick lit, then, means understanding that this
genre, via McMillan’s novel, was one text of many that worked to in-
troduce depictions of middle-class femininity to the general public, and
160  Erin Hurt
these representations were met with enthusiasm by readers of all races
but carried special meaning for black women readers.
One last shift this chapter will consider that occurs when we center
McMillan’s novel is that we interpret McMillan’s success of her fiction
as more instrumental to the genre than we had previously, especially in
terms of how her commercial blockbusters paved the way for later chick
lit categories featuring protagonists of color. Historical context about
best sellers more generally emphasizes the importance of a black fic-
tion author, much less a woman writer, becoming a best seller.4 While a
handful of titles appeared on nonfiction best-seller lists, such as Richard
Wright’s Black Boy in 1945, Alex Haley’s Roots in 1976 and 1977, Bill
Cosby and Michael Jackson during the 1980s, it wasn’t until 1992 that
McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale became the first fictional work by a black
author to land on the Publisher’s Weekly best-seller list and again in
1996 with How Stella Got Her Groove Back (“Review: Black Authors”
129–130). After the commercial success of Waiting to Exhale—­thirty-
eight weeks on the NY Times best-seller list, almost four million copies
sold (“Black Literary” 64)—McMillan received six million dollars in
for her next novel. McMillan’s profits convinced the publishing industry
that black women writers were, and could, produce commercially suc-
cessful literature (“Black Literary Agents” 64).
McMillan’s success meant that publishing houses became more will-
ing to fund additional black writers. Indeed, one publication refers to
McMillan as “the Michael Jordan of black writers,” referring to the way
Jordan’s enormous salary led to an increase for other players (“White
Publishers” 53). This evidence signals that, for many reasons, ­McMillan’s
success not only signaled a change in how black women were being rep-
resented but also led to structural change within the commercial publish-
ing industry/system. We could see the large advances that followed for
other writers—such as Sapphire’s $500,000 advance for her novel Push
(later adapted into the 2009 film Precious)—as, in part, the publishing
industry seeking to capitalize on, and reproduce, the commercial suc-
cess (and profits) that they saw with McMillan. I would argue, too, that
McMillan’s success not only opened publishers’ minds to later chick lit
featuring women of color protagonists5 but might also have primed pub-
lishers for the arrival of Bridget Jones. When we take Waiting to ­Exhale
as our starting point, the forces and events and ideas that we piece to-
gether to explain how conditions gave rise to this novel—the social and
institutional forces that shaped the lives of black women; the continuing
development of black feminist thought and the rise of a new feminist
movement that sought to critique and include, inspired by the previous
decade’s feminists of color; and the leverage commercial success brought
to black women writers as long as they could connect to large numbers
of readers—look very different than what we see in current descriptions
found in chick lit scholarship.
 Centering Black  161
Rewriting the Genealogy of Chick Lit
When we look at the cultural and ideological landscape, with the pur-
pose of explaining what elements matter and how they came together
to create the conditions for McMillan’s novel, and the birth of a genre,
we notice features and connections that we previously had not. This
change in our scholarly vision affords us an opportunity to not only
reevaluate the genre’s moment of emergence but also gaze backward to-
ward those texts and frameworks that scholars claim as literary precur-
sors to the genre. The current literary lineage used by scholars, rooted
in Bridget Jones, shapes how we define chick lit and what we count as
its qualities and tropes. Changing the originary text thus changes what
literary predecessors we see when we begin to construct a genealogy
for the genre. Scholars’ analyses, including Ferriss and Young, Harze-
wski, Heike Mißler, and my own, as well as many others, have been
limited by a focus on those historical cultural conditions or tropes that
easily connect to the white protagonist in Bridget Jones or those in the
other white chick lit that closely followed Fielding’s, such as Candace
Bushnell’s novel Sex and The City (1997), which was quickly adapted
the following year into a popular American television series. Chick lit
scholars have named many predecessors to chick lit, reaching back to
authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Edith Wharton, Rona
Jaffe, Erica Jong, Marilyn French, or even Margaret Atwood, and to
styles and genres including the novel of manners, women’s confessional
writing, feminist consciousness-raising novels, the romance novel, and
women’s advice manuals.6 When scholars describe the origins of chick
lit as beginning with Fielding’s Bridget Jones, a novel featuring a white
British protagonist, this implicitly centers and treats as universal a white
literary tradition, which limits which previous works, styles, social con-
ditions, or other influences might be considered as predecessors. The
task of disengaging what we understand to be the cultural work of the
genre from that cultural work done by white chick lit novels requires
not only reenvisioning the cultural context but also the literary history.
When explaining the differences between the two categories of chick lit,
Guerrero writes, “In life and in literature—white chick and black sis-
tahs were traveling different paths toward fulfillment, characterized by
racial and cultural specificities, histories, and expectations” (91). This
next section seeks to model what accounting for racial and cultural
specificity in the construction of this genre’s literary genealogy could
look like when we move beyond those texts linked to Bridget Jones and
include texts that form a literary lineage for Waiting to Exhale.
Looking from a fresh vantage point at this literary lineage, and ana-
lyzing not the novels but rather the scholarly arguments about the genre’s
genealogy, impels us as scholars to recognize our own blind spots and
see how the perspectives and assumptions we make over the course of
162  Erin Hurt
our own work on chick lit have excluded other readings of these novels
and of this genre. As Sandra Ponzanesi explains in her chapter on post-
colonial chick lit, categories of chick lit (such as South Asian chick lit,
chica lit, or black chick lit) that feature non-Western and/or nonwhite
protagonists connect to multiple literary traditions which include those
white Western foremothers as well as a novel’s ethnic literary tradition(s)
(215–217). A fully developed genealogy for chick lit, then, should ac-
count for these multiple literary traditions for all ethnic categories of
chick lit. When we emphasize race in chick lit’s genealogy, we must ­begin
to include race in our analysis of the genre itself, forcing us to adopt
more effective frameworks for evaluating representations of women in
ways that include race, ethnicity, and nationality.
To conduct this exploratory analysis, this essay will read two literary
reference points alongside, and into, the existing genealogy as it has been
constructed by existing scholarship. These additions evince the tropes,
themes, and plot points that we find in Waiting to Exhale and other
chick lit but also draw a connection between McMillan’s novel and the
tradition of black women’s writing. Consumption and romance are oft
cited as tropes in many chick lit genres spanning different ethnicities.
This essay will focus on earlier texts that engage with consumption and
romance but which do so in provocative ways that highlight the anxiet-
ies and sociohistorical contexts specific to black women’s lived experi-
ences. The first reference point is Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl, written in 1861, which I will read alongside scholarly
claims that link chick lit to nineteenth-century marriage plots found in
the work of Jane Austen and other British women writers. The second
reference point is black women’s magazines published at the end of the
nineteenth and during the first half of the twentieth centuries. These
magazines, owned and edited by black women, offer a counterpoint to
the focus in existing scholarship on the relationship between Bridget
Jones and white women’s beauty magazines. These two works, added
to the existing genealogy for this genre, help to illustrate the evolving
nature of black womanhood, especially in relation to marriage and ro-
mance. Current understandings of concepts such as marriage, romance,
and having it all—as well as our understanding of “womanhood”—
are impoverished in current scholarship, but the addition of these texts
brings a more intersectional, nuanced insight into these tropes.

Something Akin to Freedom: Harriet Jacobs and the

Romance Trope
Though the plot of most chick lit novels focuses on more than just ro-
mance, with characters often seeking professional success and/or or
self-satisfaction, the heart of the genre lies with the search for a success-
ful relationship. For the four protagonists in Waiting to Exhale, only
 Centering Black  163
with the successful completion of this quest will they feel happy and
complete. Savannah’s mother echoes this sentiment when she tells her
daughter, “Every woman needs a man, and you ain’t no exception” (239
[2011]). But, as Guerrero argues, cultural, social, and historical forces
shape these women’s opportunities for finding and getting a man. In the
current genealogy of the chick lit genre, oft-named antecedents of Brid-
get Jones come from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women’s
writing, such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, selected because their
plots center on marriage, romance, and the procuring of suitable mates.
In her essay “Mothers of Chick Lit? Women Writers, Readers, and Lit-
erary History,” Juliette Wells constructs a literary history for (white)
chick lit, presenting a range of chick lit tropes and the historical pre-
decessors that prefigure these tropes. In subsections labeled “The Love
Plot,” “The Heroine’s Maturation,” “The Heroine at Work,” “Beauty,”
or “Shopping and Consumption,” Wells presents how earlier women’s
writing addresses these topics in similar but also different ways. In the
section of her article that explores marriage plots, Wells argues that
Samuel ­R ichardson’s Pamela (1741), Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778),
and the novels of Jane Austen share the same focus as (white) chick lit:
“The story of a heroine finding her proper mate in the face of obstacles
and misunderstandings” (Wells 51). In Austen’s novels, marriage is oft
presented as a choice made for love, wealth, and sometimes both, but
the social and financial limitations some characters face force them to
marry for money and stability, such as Pride and Prejudice’s Charlotte
Lucas who marries the fawning and sycophantic Mr. Collins, as she
has no other marriage prospects and must seek a financially stable sit-
uation, which Mr. Collins offers. Elizabeth Bennett, the protagonist of
the novel, refused Mr. ­Collins because she did not love him. Though her
actions put her future at risk financially, she does eventually marry for
love to, as it happens, one of the richest characters in the novel.
Like other chick lit predecessors, Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical
Incidents is concerned with marriage and love. While Jacobs’s autobiog-
raphy is most often categorized as a slave narrative, I include it here as
a predecessor to McMillan specifically and chick lit more generally be-
cause this text’s handling of these tropes demands that we consider how
Jacobs’s identity as a black woman results in a different kind of marriage
plot from those of the white protagonists created by her peers. Harriet
Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813, the year that Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice was published in England. Jacobs lived as a slave in North
Carolina until she was able to escape to New York in 1842. During the
1850s, Jacobs wrote her narrative, describing her life up to this point,
and she was able to publish it in 1861. In her work, she chronicles her
experiences of black womanhood—falling in love, avoiding marriage,
raising children—and the way these events were shaped by her enslave-
ment. As Jacobs tells readers, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far
164  Erin Hurt
more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they
have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own”
(54). A key part of being a slave, for Jacobs, is the sexual violence that
female slaves experienced and negotiated; Incidents highlights not only
the situations Jacobs had to navigate but the strategies she used and the
resilience she had in the face of seemingly limited choices.
Early in her narrative, Jacobs describes her experience with love and,
in doing so, illustrates the ways that her position as a slave limits the
forms of intimacy that she can access. She explains that she falls in love
with “a young colored carpenter; a free born man” whom she loves
“with all the ardor of a young girl’s first love” and he offers to buy
her freedom so they can marry (26). Her “love-dream,” as she calls it,
becomes impossible when her master Dr. Flint, intent on thwarting her
plans, refuses to sell her and instead berates her and beats her. When he
offers instead to let Jacobs marry one of his other slaves, she responds,
“Don’t you suppose, sir, that a slave can have some preference about
marrying? Do you suppose that all men are alike to her?” (28). Flint, en-
raged at her honest answers, asks her, “Do you know that I have a right
to do as I like with you,—that I can kill you, if I please?” (28). In these
moments, we understand the precarity of Jacobs’s love and of her abil-
ity to choose a partner for herself. While Austen’s characters struggled
with their own set of limitations, Jacobs’s pursuit of marriage becomes a
possible life-and-death situation, extremely common for those living in
slavery. Even though her carpenter has his freedom, she can only obtain
hers from Dr. Flint; her ability to act in this situation depends entirely on
the man who owns her and is intent on controlling her. She eventually
ends the relationship, convinced that she can have no future with the
carpenter as long as she is enslaved, telling readers later in the narrative,
“If slavery had been abolished, I, also, could have married the man of
my choice” (38).
It is in the following chapters that Jacobs illustrates for her readers
the kind of romantic intimacy that she is able to obtain from within
the confines of slavery. In order to avoid Dr. Flint’s increasingly aggres-
sive sexual advances, Jacobs cultivates a relationship with Mr. Sands, “a
white unmarried gentleman” (38) who shows interest in her. Yet Jacobs
takes pain to convey the nuances of her predicament and of her deci-
sion. Though she describes Mr. Sands’s attention as “flattering” and his
interest as “agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave,” even writing
that, eventually, a “more tender feeling crept into my heart” (39), she
also uses language to affirm that her feelings toward Mr. Sands differ
from those of her earlier love for her fiancée. Of her relationship with
Mr.  Sands, with whom she would eventually have two children, she
writes, “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to com-
pulsion,” adding, “There is something akin to freedom in having a lover
who has no control over you except that which he gains by kindness and
 Centering Black  165
attachment” (39 my emphasis). Her careful language here tells readers
that her willingness to be with Mr. Sands is a choice, and that while
she may not love Mr. Sands, she does have warm feelings for him. At
the same time, in describing her choice to have sex with Mr. Sands, she
writes, “Seeing no other way of escaping the doom I so much dreaded,
I made a headlong plunge” (39). Her descriptions convey to us that she
makes the best decision she can with the circumstances and agency that
she has available to her. She later writes, “O virtuous reader! You never
knew what it is to be a slave; You never exhausted your ingenuity in
avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant” (39). For
Jacobs, the intimacy she is able to experience is composed of the ten-
der feelings she has for Mr. Sands enmeshed with the protection from
Dr. Flint that his company makes possible for her.
Love, marriage, romance—Jacobs’s narrative illustrates how these
concepts bear the weight of their histories. Franny Nudelman explains,
“When [Jacobs] wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, [she] had
to cope with the already canonized figure of the suffering slave, par-
ticularly the sexually degraded woman,” as this figure was central to
abolitionist discourse that sought to portray the horrors of slavery (941).
Positioning Jacobs as an antecedent to Waiting to Exhale helps draw out
for scholars a different history for the concept of womanhood, one that
forces us to see the choices available to black women, and the forces and
limitations they had to contend with, with regard to love and romance.
While Austen’s white protagonists faced their own set of constraints, the
inclusion of Jacobs’s narrative alongside Austen’s novels offers a richer
history of women’s experience with romance and love, one that attends
to the intersection of gender and race.

Black Women’s Magazines and Black Womanhood

In Fielding’s Bridget Jones or Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series, char-
acters consume and respond to white women’s magazines, and scholars
often mention these moments when noting how often chick lit novels ref-
erence popular culture. This is true of Waiting to Exhale as well. During
a conversation with Savannah about the experience of dating and find-
ing a suitable partner, Robin says, “From what I hear, girl, it’s rough
everywhere. All you see on the cover of women’s magazines every single
month is how bad it is. For white women too. They change the titles,
but it’s always the same stuff. I know most of ‘em by heart: ‘The New
Dating Game.’ ‘Will I Ever Meet a Decent Guy?’ ‘The Ideal Man: Is He
Out There?’” (222). Robin’s comment not only indicates a double con-
sciousness missing from white protagonists but also reveals that these
publications offer guidance and truths. Savannah, who works as the
producer for a television show, is more critical; she responds by telling
Robin that the media purposefully exaggerates in these stories, in order
166  Erin Hurt
to sell more magazines (222). The characters in chick lit often have a
complicated relationship to women’s magazines. While they know these
magazines’ messages come from the media and are suspect, they also see
magazines as the source of advice for performing femininity properly. In
chick lit novels, protagonists’ interactions with these magazines, and the
messages they receive about romance, illustrate the centrality of these
popular publications to women’s sense of romance, relationships, and
being single in the larger US culture.
In her analysis of how Bridget Jones satirizes women’s magazines,
­Caroline J. Smith offers a brief history of women’s magazines more gen-
erally (34).7 Smith explains that women’s magazines were revamped in
the 1960s as magazine publishers sought to reach the growing number of
white single women in the workforce. Helen Gurley Brown was hired to
be the editor for Cosmopolitan in 1965. Just like Brown’s best seller Sex
and the Single Girl (1962), Cosmopolitan constructed a new identity for
single women. Smith reads the interplay between Bridget and publications
such as Cosmopolitan or Marie Clare, noting how novels’ portrayals of
protagonists’ devotion to these women’s magazines allows readers to see
the problematic nature of the content of these magazines (Smith 37).
When Smith writes about women’s magazines, what she means are
white women’s magazines. This use of “women” to signal white women
happens throughout Smith’s chapter but also in much of chick lit schol-
arship more broadly. Statements such as “Women’s magazines encourage
readers to consistently alter their consumption patterns” (22), “Fielding
and Kinsella’s use of women’s magazines in their novels is not the first
time that fiction and women’s magazines have been paired” (23), or “To-
day, women’s magazines continue to prosper” (25) are missing a racial
qualifier to indicate that the magazines Smith cites feature white women
and are aimed toward a white female audience. Both the historical and
contemporary examples that Smith assembles reflect this white-centric
perspective, even though some of the research Smith draws on, including
Mary Ellen Zuckerman’s A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in
the United States, 1792–1995 (1998) and Ellen McCracken’s Decoding
Women’s Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. (1993), devote space to
analyzing African American women’s magazines. In part, this exclusion
is a result of the novels themselves; the magazines mentioned in Fielding
and Kinsella’s novels are those designed for a white audience. What we
see here, where Smith’s history of women’s magazines becomes a history
of white women’s magazines, is how the originary text determines the
scope of the literary lineage, thus collapsing chick lit into white chick lit.
To disrupt reading the entire genre through the lens of whiteness, we
can complicate the white chick lit genealogy by turning toward mag-
azines that feature and are aimed at women of color. In this essay, we
will turn specifically to the history and concerns of African American
women’s magazines from this same time period. In searching for other
 Centering Black  167
literary predecessors that anticipate the genre of chick lit but also speak
to more than just white women’s literary tradition, this chapter will ex-
amine not Glamour and Cosmopolitan but women’s magazines that
were edited, owned, and written by black women for black women, and
whose function was to teach black women how to recover their respect-
ability through marriage and consumption. This allows scholars to see,
as part of chick lit’s literary history, how versions of black womanhood,
constructed by black women in magazines meant for black female read-
ers, prefigure the more apolitical, professional success focus that we
see in Terry McMillan’s work and later black chick lit. Furthermore,
reading these earlier magazines “authored, edited, and read by African
American women” (Rooks 21) disrupt arguments by those scholars,
such as Thulani Davis and Daphne A. Brooks, who view McMillan’s
apolitical fiction as derailing an unbroken line of political, oppositional
literature produced by black women, be demonstrating the existence of
earlier texts that presented financial success and consumption of goods
as the avenue for cultural belonging and success.
Noliwe M. Rooks explores magazines owned, edited, and read by
­African American women at the end of the nineteenth and throughout the
twentieth centuries, explaining, “While a majority of African A ­ merican
women’s magazines published before Essence’s appearance in May 1970
are largely unknown, they have existed in the United States for well over
one hundred years” (3). These magazines replaced the African American
newspaper, which had flourished after the end of the Civil War but de-
clined toward the end of the century (Rooks 6–7). Rooks traces how, in
spite of covering a variety of issues, these magazines at heart sought to
provide readers with strategies for rewriting negative cultural perceptions
of African American women following slavery. Rooks writes,

Sensationalistic sexual narratives about African American women

had circulated freely during the antebellum period and were firmly
imbedded in both the African American and white popular cultural
imagination until at least the end of the nineteenth century. When
Ringwood’s Journal began publication, repositioning such narra-
tives became an overwhelming concern for that magazine; it would
continue to be a theme as late as the1920s, when Half-Century
Magazine put similar discussions in the context of African Ameri-
can urbanization and consumerism. Despite both magazines’ asking
readers to think about subjects as varied as fashion, domesticity, and
product consumption within the context of racial progress and turn-
of-the-century possibilities for a modern future, the writers and edi-
tors of these early publications repeatedly gazed back at an enslaved
past to battle stereotypes and cultural constructions of their charac-
ters relative to sex, sexuality, and slavery.
(8–9)
168  Erin Hurt
Thus, from the turn of the nineteenth century through the 1950s,
­magazines—through short stories and articles—functioned as advice
manuals for ways in which black women could use domesticity, espe-
cially cultivating domesticity through the consumption of goods, to recu-
perate black womanhood that had been stained by slavery. Specifically,
these magazines promoted “the acquisition of what they believed to be
redemptive skills, demeanor, clothing, behaviors, and attitudes that could
denote distance from a debased and embarrassing sexual history and sig-
nal an embrace of dominant cultural understandings of womanhood and
gentility” (Rooks 9). As Rooks points out, “This formulation of domes-
tic work and its relation to femininity and womanhood is significantly
different from that found in turn-of-the-century women’s magazines for
either urban middle-class or rural white women” (106). Attention to
both white and African American women’s magazines allows for a com-
parison of the visions of womanhood and domesticity they each pushed.
Unlike black women, white women were never encouraged to cultivate
domesticity in someone else’s house as a domestic servant. In fact, Ladies
Home Journal, a magazine aimed at white middle-class women, told its
readers that women who did not take care of their own households were
unfit to be wives and mothers (Rooks 108). Implicit in these publications’
approach was an understanding that others were responsible for these
notions about black women, but the burden of rewriting these percep-
tions lay with these women themselves.
An analysis of these magazines illustrates that these publications, like
Jacobs’s narrative before them, bore the responsibility of rewriting them-
selves so as to gain some measure of cultural belonging and acceptance.
However, it also allows us to see that, in magazines published as early
as 1917, many of the same themes can be found as appear in McMillan
and other black chick lit:

The stories the editors chose for publication [in Half-Century Mag-
azine] overwhelmingly focused on the difficulties of finding and
maintaining urban love relationships and centered on women who
were attempting to grow, change, and fully inhabit the cities to
which they had recently moved. As the characters define themselves,
they desire the opportunity to shop, dress, entertain themselves, and
explore freely without the sanction of male approval or support. At
the same time, in what was undoubtedly an acknowledgment of the
function of romance stories, as well as of the high numbers of un-
married African American women flocking to urban areas, many of
the stories end with a happy marriage.
(Rooks 114)

The existence and popularity of these stories, which were told in a “con-
fessional format” (126), served a similar advisory function as earlier
 Centering Black  169
publications; they showed readers that women’s sexual desires would
find the most fulfillment within marriage, which would also give them
happiness and economic stability (Rooks 123–124). Further, the stories
in Tan Confessions, a magazine that ran from 1950 to 1952, “equated
racial success and advancement with the possession of material goods”
(Rooks 115) and, in fact, consumption of goods became even more
important than other redemptive behaviors championed in the earlier
stories and articles published by these magazines (Rooks 123). Like
­McMillan’s four protagonists, this earlier short fiction presented the
consumption of goods as a tool for achieving cultural acceptance.
Adding these magazines to the genealogy offers several shifts in how
we read black chick lit. First, it brings depth to the contemporary obses-
sion with consumption that we see in black and white chick lit but also
reads race into the consumption of goods by recognizing that for black
women readers in the 1950s, consumption was presented as a means of
“ensuring political advancement” (Rooks 123). When scholars such as
Davis and Brooks criticize McMillan and other contemporary authors
for celebrating aspects of mainstream neoliberal normativity such as
consumption and heterosexual marriage, and for seeking respectability
and belonging in mainstream society through professional success, no
matter how limited, they do so in relation to the political, radical lit-
erature written by black women in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Toni
Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and others. Yet, while Davis and
Brooks’s critiques assume that black women’s writing must be political
and engage with structural oppression, reading these magazines into the
chick lit genealogy instead shows decades of thematic precedent for the
representations found in McMillan’s novels. This analysis also demon-
strates that multiple forms of black female identity have been present
throughout the twentieth century, more politically resistant alongside
the more apolitical. We can see, beginning with Jacobs and continu-
ing through this discussion of African American women’s magazines
in the twentieth century, how publications published, edited, written,
and geared toward black women have functioned as a site where repre-
sentations of black women fabricated by dominant culture, embedded
within the US cultural imaginary, can be contended with and rewritten.
Chick lit, then, becomes a site that deploys representations of profession-
ally successful middle-class black women against those images of black
women found in 1990s cultural imaginary, such as the crack mother and
the welfare queen. Understanding the representations found in the pages
of black chick lit involves a literary history that helps scholars call to
mind those representations that these novels are written to dispel.
These additions to the genealogy of chick lit points are but two of
many possible texts that might be included in this lineage. Jacobs’s nar-
rative and these twentieth-century magazines are presented here in ser-
vice to the larger goal of this chapter, which is to model how we might
170  Erin Hurt
construct a genealogy for this genre that is responsive to concerns of race
and ethnicity and diaspora, a project which itself is part of an even larger
one—to demonstrate that race and ethnicity, nationality, and cultural
citizenship are central to the genre of chick lit. Other possible nodal
points might, for instance, include Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892),
making a connection to a black novel of manners, or Ann Petry’s The
Street (1946). But these additions still lie within the realm of black wom-
en’s writing—other entries might expand outward to link the genre to
other ethnic literary traditions. This chapter launches the first of what
could be a series of investigations that construct a chick lit genealogy
that, more expansively than the current version, accounts for the wide
range of literary influences, beyond the white women’s literary tradition,
for the many novels that constitute the genre. This exploratory reenvi-
sioning of chick lit’s genealogy will demonstrate how the genre’s history
could look when critics take a wider view that is attentive to multiple
ethnic literary traditions and sociocultural contexts.
This new genealogy asks scholars to reconsider how we understand
older, foundational texts that occupy positions within Latinx and Afri-
can American literary traditions, when read as a part of the chick lit’s
literary history. For example, what might critics learn if in addition to
white urban fiction like Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (1958) we
looked at Gloria Naylor’s 1982 urban novel The Women of Brewster
Place? Stéphanie Genz, in her book Postfemininities in Popular Cul-
ture (2009), explores the trope of the singleton in Bridget Jones. What
if we explored the trope of the singleton across all of chick lit, with
attention to the ways the concept of the singleton is shaped by race,
gender, and nationality? There are endless ways to contribute to this
literary history.
Centering McMillan’s text allows us to notice new features within
chick lit novels and allows for new critical avenues and paradigms:
namely, to center race as a framework and to understand explorations
of cultural belonging as an essential convention of this genre. When we
see this genre as a collection of ethnic categories that include protago-
nists who identify as black, Latina, South Asian/American, East Asian/
American, Indigenous, and white, this perspective becomes easier to
grasp. The exploration undertaken in this chapter asks us to extricate
our scholarship’s allegiance to white womanhood, and, if we hesitate
to think of white chick lit as emerging in part from the black literary
tradition, we must ask ourselves why we struggle to see white novels as
emerging from a other ethnic literary traditions.
This shift also changes the way we read Bridget Jones. Bridget’s con-
cerns become raced once we identify them as centered on whiteness
rather than a universal woman’s experiences. For example, Bridget tells
readers, “We women are only vulnerable because we are a pioneer gen-
eration, daring to refuse compromise in love and relying on our own
 Centering Black  171
economic power” (qtd. in Mißler 10). While black chick lit protagonists
might also feel this pressure, or might also see themselves as being en-
dowed with this economic capacity (but twelve percent less than white
women),8 the path they take to get there is very different. We can look
back at existing scholarship on chick lit and see the degree to which
this writing is not about women and feminism but about white women
and white feminism. We can analyze how our critical approaches shore
up white supremacy even as we attempt to theorize ways in which (white)
women are oppressed in the condition of postfeminism. Above all, this
experiment aims to model how we might begin to create a literary his-
tory, and a way of reading, that accounts for all of chick lit’s ethnic cat-
egories and in doing so create many new scholarly conversations about
chick lit that attend to the many different novels that constitute this
genre.

Notes
Special thanks to Cherise Pollard for her support and feedback in numerous
phone conversations, and texts, and for the helping me find the heart of this
piece—McMillan and her work. Thanks to Beth Womack and Brooke Hunter
for countless readings, and to Pia Deas for reminding me about the joy we find
in writing.
1 For a list of chick lit titles, see the Selected Bibliography of Chick Lit Fiction
at the end of this collection.
2 Angela McRobbie 2009 Aftermath, Tasker and Negra in their Introduction
to Interrogating Postfeminism.
3 Kimberly Springer explains that “much of feminist theory recognizes the
contributions of women of color, particularly 1980s and 1990s demands for
attention to intersectionality as fundamental to social, political, economic,
and cultural transformation” but points out that when it comes theorizing
postfeminism, “[studies] have studiously noted that many of its icons are
white and cited the absence of women of color, but the analysis seems to stop
there” (249).
4 For further reading about the history of the best seller, see Michael Korda’s
Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900–1999
(2001), which is a history of the best-selling list, since the first list was pub-
lished in 1895, focusing on the list put out each year by Publisher’s Weekly.
5 For further reading about the connection between McMillan’s commercial
success and the publishing industry’s embrace of chica lit, see Erin Hurt’s
“Trading Cultural Baggage for Gucci Luggage: The Ambivalent Latinidad of
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s The Dirty Girls Social Club” in MELUS, vol. 34,
no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 133–153.
6 Heike Missler’s “That’s Me! – Enter Everywoman” in The Cultural Politics
of Chick Lit (2017) offers a review of scholarly origin arguments, as does
Caroline J. Smith’s introduction in her monograph Cosmopolitan Culture
and Consumerism in Chick Lit (2008). Chapters by Stephanie Harzewski
and Juliette Wells in Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young’s Chick Lit: The
New Woman’s Fiction (2006) focus on specific origin elements, as does Tace
Hedrick’s introduction in her monograph Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction
and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century (2016).
172  Erin Hurt
7 For other considerations of women’s magazines and white chick lit, see Natalie
Fuehrer Taylor’s “The Personal is Political: Women’s Magazines for he ‘I’m-
Not-a-Feminist-But’ Generation” in Lilly J. Goren’s edited collection You’ve
Come a Long Way Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture (2009).
8 For more information about the wage gap black women experience in rela-
tion to white men and white women, see “The Pay Gap is Even Worse for
Black Women, and That’s Everyone’s Problem.” www.aauw.org/2015/07/21/
black-women-pay-gap/ Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.

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Section IV

Authorial Voices
8 Writing Chica Lit
Linda Chávez Doyle

I read hungrily as a child, and reading is a habit that has stayed with
me throughout my life. At some point in my youth, I began to dream of
someday writing a novel and making a career as an author, but it wasn’t
until many years later that I actually undertook the effort.
I’ve read a lot of fiction, including classic, literary, mystery, horror, ro-
mance, historical, and chick lit. But when I took up the pen, I didn’t have
any idea what type of novel to write. Eventually, I attempted a mystery
but didn’t get very far; next, I tried a horror story but again abandoned
the project after a few pages. In both cases, I feared I lacked the skill to
create an intriguing story line with intriguing characters. Then, I consid-
ered writing a memoir. But because my life had never been tumultuous
or highly unusual, I felt there wasn’t suitable dramatic material to create
a memoir that would be distinctive and irresistible to readers. However,
I realized that life has taught me lessons that might serve to create an in-
spirational fictional story for young Mexican American women. During
my childhood, I was bullied and teased by classmates because of my
dark skin color and quiet nature, and because I ate burritos for lunch
instead of sandwiches. Partly as a result of the bullying, I developed a
sense of insecurity that I struggled with into adulthood. I lacked self-­
confidence well into my twenties, but this didn’t keep me from attaining
an advanced college degree and a successful career as a librarian, then
later as a library administrator who managed a large team. I wanted to
write a novel that might give hope to young Latinas, or young women in
general, who are dealing with a similar struggle.
There are not enough good Latina and, specifically, Mexican Amer-
ican role models in commercially successful English-language fiction
written by Americans, and there are not enough stories that depict their
life situations to satisfy my reading interests. My personal definition of
a positive fictional Latina role model is a law-abiding citizen, a good
person with a strong value system, a well-developed character (not a
stereotype), and someone who is representative of the culture in which
she has been raised—she is proud of her heritage, and she might under-
stand Spanish, even if she can’t speak it. It is important to have positive
fictional representatives for ethnic groups because the reader might not
178  Linda Chávez Doyle
have exposure to such individuals in her real life. If a reader is intro-
duced to a character of a different culture through fiction, she can gain
a more realistic view of that person’s life. And Latinas who read about
positive Latina characters can be exposed to fictional women who have
similar backgrounds, families, and upbringings, and they can relate to
someone who is overcoming obstacles in career or romance, perhaps like
those they have faced.
I am accustomed to fiction that features non-Latina white women in
various socioeconomic circumstances. Though I can usually connect to
the trials and tribulations that these characters are undergoing, it’s not
the same as reading about an individual who shares experiences unique
to my cultural background. I find it especially satisfying to read a story
set in a Latino household, or community, where both Spanish and En-
glish are spoken, and certain cultural traditions are observed, for exam-
ple, the preparation of tamales for Christmas. Latino characters also can
have unique struggles with issues of bigotry, language, assimilation, and
family obligations. I appreciate novels with Latina protagonists, written
in English by Americans, particularly those of Mexican descent, for the
adult reader. I seek out these books at the library, the bookstore, and
online but never find an abundant selection. There are novels featuring
Latinas struggling with the immigrant experience, or gangs, but theirs is
not my world. A quote from the late Michele Serros, who wrote chick lit
for young adults, points to exactly what I was considering in creating a
story with Latina characters. She spoke of her desire to write about her
experience as a Mexican American growing up in Southern California
and reading young adult books that shared a similar theme: “It was
always about barrios, borders and bodegas, and I wanted to present a
different type of life, a life that truly goes on that we don’t always see in
the mainstream media” (Chawkins).
Following my failed efforts at other genres, I decided to write a chick
lit novel, or chica lit, as those stories by Latina authors are often called.
My decision was based on a couple of factors: it is a style of writing that
is not literary or challenging to read, so for a first-time novelist, a chick
lit story seemed a reasonable project to undertake; additionally, because
my intention was to write a story that conveys life lessons for young
women, I felt this genre would provide the perfect platform.
I started reading chick lit in the early 2000s. My introductory book
was In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner, one of the most popular authors
in the field. This story of the relationship between two sisters and their
grandmother is an interesting look at family dynamics, and this plot
point intrigued me. The sisters, Rose and Maggie, couldn’t be more dif-
ferent. I related more to Rose, who is overweight and a hardworking
attorney. Maggie is gorgeous and fashionable but irresponsible, consis-
tently in need of being bailed out financially. The two finally settle their
differences, thanks in part to the rekindling of the relationship with their
 Writing Chica Lit  179
grandmother. I also found Rose’s romance touching because she falls for
a man with whom she was not originally looking to make a connection.
Love arrives unexpectedly. I enjoyed the book very much, read others by
Weiner, and then sampled other writers in the genre, including Lauren
Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada) and Emily Giffin (Something Bor-
rowed). The heroines in these two books are working women who have
feelings of insecurity, one because of her office environment and boss
(the so-called Devil), and the other because of the relationship she has
with her beautiful best friend’s fiancé.
Reading chick lit is fun because it is often humorous and there is an em-
phasis on female friendships. Though the heroines often suffer feelings of
rejection and dejection, the endings are happy and hopeful. These books
are attractive to women who have searched for true love. I searched for
Mr. Right well into my thirties, and I understand how these books can
give young women a sense of camaraderie, a sense that they are not alone
in their pursuit of love and happiness. As an older woman, I delight in
reading these stories that bring back memories of the friendships and rela-
tionships of my single days, when I often sat for hours over a cup of coffee
with a friend, discussing our broken hearts or the new men in our lives
who were presenting the possibility of happy, romantic unions. Or we
would chat about our work situations and the terrible bosses or coworkers
we suffered. Today, these books also offer me a pleasant escape from the
occasional stresses of everyday life. As a chick lit reader, there are elements
I have come to expect from these novels: an overall humorous tone, a hero-
ine who is frustrated by her search for a suitable romantic connection, and
a happy ending, usually one where the protagonist finds true love.
Though it is entertaining to read about that familiar world, I am not
familiar with the cultural milieu depicted in these books. The typical
heroine is surrounded by friends who, like herself, are non-Latina whites
and, often, wealthy. The Devil Wears Prada, in particular, is set in New
York City, in the world of high fashion, where the working girl heroine
gets a peek at the lives of those at the top. There are few, if any, ethnic
characters in the chick lit books I read. But then why would I expect
any? The diversity of the US population is not usually reflected in its
mainstream fiction, TV shows, and movies.
It was not until I stumbled upon Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s The Dirty
Girls Social Club that I met characters that resemble me, who reflect
some of my cultural traits. They encounter issues with which I am fa-
miliar. The six women (including a columnist, a television anchor, a
magazine publisher, and a wife and mother) live in the big city (Boston)
and have unique personalities, personal dramas, marital problems, ro-
mances, and difficult job situations. They represent a spectrum of Lati-
nas, including Mexican American, Colombian, Cuban, Puerto Rican,
and Dominican. I specifically related to Amber, a Mexican American
from the San Fernando Valley in the Los Angeles area, who becomes a
180  Linda Chávez Doyle
huge rock en española star, though she wasn’t raised speaking Spanish.
She becomes indoctrinated to the Mexica culture and changes her name
from Amber to Cuicatl, she says, “to embrace my true self… my beau-
tiful Mexican self” (Valdes-Rodriguez 129). Though she undertakes a
radical change in regard to her culture, I understood her sense of want-
ing to embrace her ethnic origins. The women Valdes-Rodriguez writes
about are not cookie-cutter, stereotyped Latinas. They are real women
with real goals, problems, and life challenges, including problems spe-
cifically related to being Latina. For example, microaggressions are a
recurring theme. Lauren, a columnist, complains about being confused
for “the millionth time” with the only other Latina in the office, who
is older and physically larger than she is (105). This reminded me of an
experience I had as a college student in a French-language class. The
professor consistently confused me with a male who was the only other
Latino in the class. Later in this novel, one editor asks Lauren what the
“Latina” community thinks about protests occurring outside the office
of another newspaper that published an offensive statement about Puerto
Ricans. Lauren (who is of Cuban heritage) observes that this editor “not
only believed that all Latinos think the same, but that we all get on the
phone with each other every day to plot our next swarthy, mysterious,
and magical move” (303–304). Kerry Lengel’s article, “‘Chica-lit’ fills
a Niche for Latinas,” touts Valdes-Rodriguez as having opened doors
for other Latina chick lit authors: “The book sold more than 350,000
copies, earning Valdes-Rodriguez the title ‘godmother of chica lit’ from
Time magazine in a list of the nation’s 25 most influential Hispanics last
year.”
Though certainly there has been an increase in chick lit novels writ-
ten by Latinas, the numbers are still relatively small when compared to
those written by non-Latina white authors. Carmen Rita’s Never Too
Real is a more recent title, similar to The Dirty Girls Social Club in
style. Most of the four Latina friends are career women (including a TV
personality and a therapist), most are wealthy, and they deal with issues
of marriage, romance, job, and family. Like the characters in The Dirty
Girls Social Club, they represent various Latino groups. They also expe-
rience microaggressions. Cat, a second-generation Mexican American,
works for a TV network, where the employers make the assumption she
will also appear on their sister network in Spanish. She refuses: “I don’t
speak Spanish on air.” Her boss responds, “What do you meeeeean you
don’t speak Spanish on air?” Another coworker interjects, “But—but
you’re Hispanic!” Lauren then says, “We don’t all speak Spanish that
well, you know. More than half of us don’t. I was born here, just like
you” (Rita 11–12). I found this plot device relevant to my own personal
experience. During my career as a librarian, I was occasionally asked
to do S­ panish-language interviews on television and radio. I only did
these interviews a couple of times because I felt I did not have the strong
 Writing Chica Lit  181
command of the language necessary to positively represent the organiza-
tion for which I worked. I love how both of these books focus on issues
that are personal for Latinas.
Kathy Cano-Murillo’s hilarious Waking Up in the Land of Glitter
(which I happily discovered in the bargain bin at the bookstore) features
a flighty Star Esteban, who endangers her family’s business by commit-
ting a careless, juvenile act. To get back in her parents’ good graces,
she enters a crafting contest that requires her to use her creativity in a
disciplined manner. In the process, she gains a measure of maturity and
is able to commit to the young man who loves her. I related to Star, who
is surrounded by a close-knit family she deeply loves and respects. Star’s
attitude toward her culture is interesting:

as a second-generation Mexican-American, it irked her that peo-

ple assumed she spoke Spanish, knew how to make tamales, and
smashed piñatas at all her birthday parties. She didn’t want to be
lumped into those stereotypes. So she rebelled by distancing herself
from her culture.
(Cano-Murillo 13–14)

Yet Star is clearly proud of her culture: “She loved that her dad… was the
classic Mexican-American machismo father figure—with a twist” (59).
And later, she admonishes a friend who confuses Day of the Dead with
Halloween and gives him a brief cultural lesson (209).
Better with You Here, by Gwendolyn Zepeda, is a chick lit story that
varies from the usual formulas for the genre. It focuses on a single mom,
Natasha, who is struggling to support herself and her children while
fighting a nasty custody battle with her ex. In the meantime, she is in-
volved in a casual affair with a man with whom she later commits to a
more serious relationship. I was less able to relate to this protagonist’s
specific struggles, but I empathized with her devotion to her child and
to her friends. Early on, we’re aware of Natasha’s heritage when she
shops for the headgear of a Mexican wrestler for her son: “Not because
I wanted to honor our Hispanic heritage or anything noble like that,
but because Alex was temporarily obsessed with this Saturday-morning
cartoon about luchadores” (Zepeda 2). The author never puts a spotlight
on the Mexican American culture, but she creates a warm environment
where she describes meals with tortillas, enchiladas, beans, and rice. In
one particular scene, she describes a group of boys speaking Spanish and
English while playing basketball near a playground (93). It is a familiar
environment that I appreciate.
I had the life experience, I had read enough chick lit books to under-
stand the style and formulas that appeal to readers, and I wanted to
write something original that would attract a broad audience. The works
by Latina authors had fed my desire to write a novel with a Mexican
182  Linda Chávez Doyle
American protagonist. But all things considered, would such a book ap-
peal to a general audience of chick lit readers, or would it be seen as an
ethnic title with a limited fan base? Perhaps it would, but I could not and
would not let that be my primary concern. There was no reason why I
couldn’t write a book that would capture the interest of devoted readers
of the genre, regardless of the protagonist’s ethnicity. My main character
would be Mexican American, and a unique individual, not a stereotype
or caricature but someone to whom readers of any ethnicity could relate.
It was a given that she would be Mexican American because I wanted to
write what I know, which is advice commonly shared with new writers.
Cathy Yardley’s Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel
outlines some basic elements that go into the creation of this style of
fiction, including an urban location, the bad boss, the unfaithful lover,
and bad dating experiences. Eventually, I would include each of these in
my book. But some others (such as the gay best friend, high fashion, and
glamorous jobs) would not be included. In fact, Yardley advises writers to
use these elements carefully, to give each a unique twist in order to avoid
boring the reader who is familiar with the chick lit formula (10–16). But
I did not intentionally exclude certain elements; I was not even aware of
Yardley’s book until after I had completed my novel. The writing was a
more natural process for me, based on my reading experiences.
Though I wanted my book to appeal to young women, I am no longer
in that demographic so was unsure how to give the story a current vibe
or even convey an understanding of the social environment that millen-
nials partake in today. Rather than trying to fake it, I set the book in
the 1980s, when I was a young woman. There would be no doubt that
the young characters would reflect the reality of that decade. Besides, the
characters would experience issues that cross generations: yearning for a
satisfying career and searching for a lasting relationship.
Alba Vázquez is the protagonist of my chica lit novel, My Doormat
Days, the story of her transformation from mousy young woman to a
confident professional seeking success in career and romance. She is
twenty-seven years old, single, college educated, has a good job as a
human resources specialist, and shares an apartment with her child-
hood friend, Sue Ann Miller. Alba was born and raised in Pasadena,
­California. Her father was born in Mexico, and her mother, of ­Mexican
descent, is a natural-born US citizen. Alba was raised to speak both
Spanish and English but gradually has lost her ability to converse in the
former with any confidence. Her parents don’t want her to live outside
the family home, at least not until she marries, but she wants to be
independent, so she moves to an apartment on her own. Her mother
pressures her to marry and have a family, and though that is something
Alba desires as well, she hasn’t yet met Mr. Right. Plus, she yearns for
a better job, one that is fulfilling and makes the best use of her talents
and abilities. One day she meets Joe Candelaria and believes he is the
 Writing Chica Lit  183
one meant for her. But then, Joe meets and falls for Sue Ann. Alba con-
tinues to seek true love, but instead, it eludes her as she suffers a string
of bad dates. Then her job becomes unbearable under the supervision
of her tyrannical boss. She comes to reflect on events of her childhood
and teen years and realizes that she’s been a doormat and needs to
change if she wants a chance at happiness. In the end, she confronts
both her supervisor and her bossy friend, Belén, which gives her a new
sense of confidence. She quits her job to return to school and pursue a
teaching credential. She also finds true love when and where she least
expects to.
There is nothing about Alba’s situation that should alienate the typical
chick lit reader, who is, I imagine, not restricted to one ethnic group but
perhaps is more likely to be white. Yes, Alba is Mexican American, but
her quandary as a single searching for love is no different from that of
the typical chick lit heroine. But where Alba’s Mexican background is
especially emphasized is through the scattered use of Spanish words and
phrases throughout the book. As a young reader of English-­language
classic fiction, I was frustrated by the occasional French words and
phrases that I encountered and could not understand. Because I did not
want to alienate the reader who might not be able to read Spanish, I
chose to include English-language translations within parentheses fol-
lowing the Spanish words and phrases. (I will avoid doing this in my
future novels, though. I feel the translations interrupt the flow of the
narrative.) Alba’s Mexican heritage is also evident in her strong ties to
family. She is close to her older brother, and she hopes to please her par-
ents, though she cannot live the life they want for her.
So that the reader will understand where Alba is coming from, I made
the decision to trace back to her early years and reveal the factors that
led to her becoming the woman she is, because being raised in a family
of Mexican heritage impacted her self-esteem to a degree. Rather than
take the reader from the character’s childhood years to the present day
in chronological fashion, certain chapters are narrated as flashbacks in-
terspersed throughout to provide some clarity as to why Alba behaves
as she does in the current day. For example, as a child, Alba feels infe-
rior because of her dark skin, which she has inherited from her mother,
who, in turn, does not like her own coloring and chides her daughter
for spending too much time in the sun. As an adult, Alba feels inferior
to her friend Sue Ann, who is a beautiful blonde, her complete oppo-
site. She feels even worse when her crush, Joe, becomes attracted to Sue
Ann and asks her to go on a date with him: “Though at first I’d hated
it, long ago I’d come to accept my dark skin and realize its benefits…
But now it occurred to me that maybe Joe preferred Sue Ann because
she was prettier, light-skinned, and blond” (Doyle 57). This is an issue
common among women of color, not unlike the protagonist’s feelings of
inferiority in Weiner’s In Her Shoes, who bemoans the fact that she is
184  Linda Chávez Doyle
not thinner (62). Of course not all chick lit heroines are overweight or
dark-skinned, but many suffer feelings of inferiority about one trait
or another, whether it is devastating shyness, irregular facial features, or
unruly hair. It is a common complaint of the chick lit heroine that she is
far less than perfect, surrounded by women she feels have a great deal
more to offer than she does.
Once I had created a heroine challenged by hang ups and insecurities, I
needed a theme for the book, a hook to hang the story on, something that
would appeal to readers of all backgrounds. I returned to my first idea
about sharing life lessons. I settled on the theme of self-esteem and how
to avoid being a doormat, a challenge with which I had personally dealt,
and perhaps one that many young women face. Since childhood, Alba has
learned to be submissive and obedient, and her best friend, Belén, accuses
her of being mousy. As an adult, she struggles to overcome her feelings of
inferiority, as I did in my own life as a child and young woman. Another
theme addressed in the book is friendship and how those we choose to
befriend can affect our lives both positively and negatively. Readers in
general might relate to one or, perhaps, both themes.
Alba’s Mexican heritage influences her self-esteem and her friendships.
As a child, Alba develops feelings of inferiority because of her skin color.
She feels even worse when she is in junior high and is bullied for her
dark skin, her shyness, and her style of dress. Alba and Sue Ann, though
close friends prior to high school, drift apart as they gravitate to differ-
ent social sets. Sue Ann begins to hang out with a couple of girls with
whom she appears to have more in common. In Spanish-language class,
Alba is befriended by Belén Torres, a Mexican who speaks English with
a Spanish accent. Though at first Alba feels superior, because she speaks
English without an accent, she realizes that her new friend is fluent in
both languages. Belén is also bullied but for a different reason. She is not
shy nor does she dress oddly, but her strong accent sets her apart from
most of the other students. When she is bullied by a Mexican American
classmate who uses a racial slur, she defends herself; she is proud of her
roots and is not a doormat:

Of course, I let him have it. He won’t be bothering me again. Just be-
cause some of these kids have been here for a generation or two and
don’t know a word of Spanish, they think they’re gringos. Too bad
for them. At least I’m not ashamed of myself or where I came from.
(Doyle 33)

Alba comes to admire her friend’s self-confidence and ability to stand up

for herself, yet cannot emulate her behavior.
Not only does this passage convey Belén’s experience as a victim of
bullying—it underlines the attitudes of intolerance that can exist be-
tween Mexicans and Mexican Americans, despite sharing many common
 Writing Chica Lit  185
cultural traits. I made an effort to show the difficulties that Alba faces as
a Mexican American woman, not necessarily similar to those encoun-
tered by her Mexican friend, Belén. They have some things in common:
parents who expect them to marry and bear children, and language
issues. However, even with language, there is a difference. Alba feels
insecure about her ability to speak Spanish. Though Belén has no such
qualm, she does worry about using too much Spanglish. Later in the
story when they are adults, she explains to Alba why she is attempting
to use less Spanglish: “I need to set a good example for my students to
teach them proper Spanish, not Spanglish…. It’s one of my New Year’s
resolutions” (113)
As an adult, Belén has to deal with her traditional Mexican family
that is even more demanding than Alba’s. She is expected to remain at
home until she marries. She rebels against this expectation and moves
to another state without letting her family know where she is staying
because she fears they might try to pull her back. Though Alba’s parents
would likewise prefer she remain at home until marriage, she is able to
grasp at independence and moves out on her own, something that I did
in my twenties despite my parents’ wishes that I live with them.
After I’d chosen the themes of the book, it was necessary to give Alba
some specific personal hurdles that would make her a sympathetic char-
acter, so that the reader could root for her to succeed in overcoming her
weaknesses. I did not want Alba to be a mirror image of myself, but I
did want her to be someone I understand, a protagonist who has some
of the weaknesses that I suffered as a young woman. I wanted to write
what I know, a person to whom I can closely relate. So Alba is shy, timid,
and afraid to speak up for herself, as I was in my youth. Alba is stuck in
a tedious job with a tyrannical boss. Because she is a timid person, she
allows her supervisor to belittle her, and she lacks the gumption to con-
front him, as she was unable to stand up to bullies in school. She begins
to use alcohol as a crutch in an effort to bury her troubles rather than
take action to improve her unhappy situation. I had considered various
weaknesses she might suffer that could get her in trouble—for instance,
a serious drug addiction—but at the same time did not think the battle
with an addiction should become the major focus of a story that empha-
sizes the search for Mr. Right and career success. Thus, she is not yet an
alcoholic but is headed in that direction if she doesn’t change her ways.
She enjoys happy hours with her friends and starts to imbibe to excess,
until she finds herself in a precarious situation.
Struggling with a drinking problem and an unfulfilling career are not
experiences unique to Mexican Americans, of course, but when Alba
considers consulting a therapist to help her cope with her troubles, her
background impacts her decision. She admits that Mexican families dis-
approve of therapy, because an individual is expected to resolve personal
problems without outside intervention. Even though Alba decides to see
186  Linda Chávez Doyle
a therapist, actually a smart move and a show of strength of character
on her part, she feels she is exhibiting weakness by doing something that
would certainly earn her parents’ disapproval (155). But I felt that by
having Alba take this action she would finally recognize she has a core
of strength to tap into, and she can end the self-recrimination she has
indulged in. After all, Alba is not mentally ill; she is a young woman who
is seeking help to overcome her lack of self-esteem.
After the major themes were chosen and the main character was given
some challenges to overcome, I began the more intricate work of plotting
and outlining the story. Meanwhile, I was ever diligent about accurately
portraying my Mexican American character’s culture. I wanted to con-
vey that she is a young woman who is connected to her culture; her heri-
tage is not a thing she can shed or pretend isn’t part of her life. This is the
way I have experienced my own life. For example, Spanish and Spanglish
dialogue (along with the translations so the non-Spanish speaking reader
can understand) appear throughout the text because it was a part of my
daily life in my younger days. But at the same time, I did not want cul-
ture to become the main focus of the book. Her desire to become a con-
fident and accomplished person is what drives the story. I wanted Alba’s
social experiences to reflect those of singles in general, so that any chick
lit reader could relate to her. A number of scenes were written with this
goal in mind. In one chapter, Alba serves as a bridesmaid in her cousin
Ruthie’s wedding, which is described as a traditional Mexican celebra-
tion with music, dancing, and the extended family in attendance. Of
course Alba’s single status is called into question by well-meaning family
members; this uncomfortable situation is a common one faced by singles
at family gatherings (70–71). It illustrates how young women are often
pressured by family to marry. I felt that a wedding scene would offer the
perfect opportunity for the question, When are you getting married?
Another chapter deals with Alba’s dating experiences, uncomfortable
days and evenings spent with men whom she quickly realizes are not
suitable marriage partners or even good casual dating material. One is a
poor conversationalist, another, to her chagrin, is illiterate, and another
stands her up (114–123). The young, single woman who is dating has
more than likely had a sour date or two. I reached back into my memory
to recall the most unpleasant dates I had suffered and also borrowed a
couple of friends’ bad dating experiences to use as material for this story.
During one long night, after she is stood up by a date, Alba, who is
a chronic insomniac, reflects on her life. She admits to feeling that she
has disappointed her parents, albeit she has a good job and is indepen-
dent, because she has not met their expectations and become a wife and
mother:

Why was marriage so important to me? I knew several unhappily

married couples. A number of my cousins had married and then
 Writing Chica Lit  187
divorced in quick succession. But most of them had already remar-
ried, a second or third time, the way movie stars seemed to marry
as often as they signed autographs. Sue Ann and I shared a romantic
view of marriage: it was Nirvana, the Holy Grail, Aladdin’s Magic
Lamp, or whatever brings about happiness and makes wishes come
true.
If I had Aladdin’s Magic Lamp, my wish would be to fade away. It
would be comforting to go into a coma and forget about my circum-
stances indefinitely. I touched my face and found tears had appeared
on my cheeks like condensation on a glass. I didn’t want to break
my mother’s heart by offing myself like a tragic Shakespearean her-
oine, but I also didn’t want to continue to be a disappointment as a
daughter. What to do?
(123–124)

Because Alba is of a culture that considers marriage and family of par-

amount importance, she feels like a complete failure, reaches a point
of desperation, and begins to consider suicide. This is not to say that
Alba’s feelings are common to Mexican American single women. She is
uniquely desolate, but her culture definitely has impacted her so that she
feels unfulfilled despite being a relatively successful career woman. By
the end of the novel, Alba bounces back from her depressed state, and
the story comes to a satisfying conclusion for the reader. And though
Alba’s private miseries, particularly her suicidal thoughts, could have
made the tale depressing, I added humor throughout to remain faithful
to the chick lit style of upbeat storytelling.
It is disheartening to read any book that stereotypes a racial group,
and I was determined not to make that mistake in creating a bicultural
protagonist. Not long ago I read How to be Single by Liz Tuccillo, who
at one time was an executive story editor for the television series Sex
and the City. The plot has an intriguing premise. The protagonist, fed
up with her single life, travels around the world to gather material for a
book that will focus on single women in various countries and how they
deal with dating and romance. Though Tuccillo notes in the acknowl-
edgments that she interviewed women in other countries as research for
this book (355), the plot obviously goes for laughs and entertainment
rather than for any serious discourse, which is certainly the author’s
prerogative, but it allows for the tired device of using stereotypes to
generate comedy. In fact, her main character calls attention to the issue
of stereotyping when she makes the following observation about Italian
women:

In their conversations about their relationships, Italian women often

mentioned slapping… It seems these timid women weren’t so retir-
ing when it came to a little bit of physical abuse. Of course, I only
188  Linda Chávez Doyle
spoke to a few Italian women, and I normally don’t like to general-
ize, but what would stories about a trip around the world be without
generalizing? Even so, I don’t want to perpetuate a stereotype. But
it was of note.
(96)

And she does generalize. About French women she writes, “These perfect
ladies were obviously disgusted about something. Which is so French”
(34). In Rio de Janeiro, one of the characters has a brief conversation
with a young saleswoman. She asks, “Women in Rio love their bodies,
right? They are proud of their bodies and like showing them off, right?”
The saleswoman replies, “In Rio we worship our bodies” (107). The
author employs stereotypes to serve the plot.
In my novel, I wanted to present characters of my own culture as
full-blooded, breathing human beings who are not the stock images to
which society at large might be accustomed, for example, the hot, sexy
Latina, or the heavily accented man who is laughed at while routinely
butchering the English language. And these are only two stereotypes. A
video distributed online in 2013 describes ten common Latino stereo-
types: lovers, maids, drug dealers, loud characters, crazy moms, and the
idea that all Latinos are Mexican, Catholic, from big families, poor, and
speak Spanish (Benedetti). To this list, I would add characters that are
gang members or relegated to menial jobs (Latinos are rarely portrayed
as doctors, lawyers, or other professionals).
In my efforts to avoid stereotypes, I felt confident that I would steer
clear of depicting Latinos in a negative light. Hence, it came as a surprise
when one of the beta readers of an early draft of my novel, a Latino,
commented that a particular scene contained an unflattering depiction
of Belén. As originally written, she loses her temper and mouths off at
Alba in Spanish. Alba narrates that angry Belén sounds like an overly
excited Spanish-language sportscaster. The beta reader opined that this
was a stereotype of the fiery Latina. I removed the description. Later,
the same beta reader perused an almost final version of the novel, where
the character Joe cheats on his girlfriend. The beta reader complained
that this was a blatant stereotype of the Latin lover. At first, I took a de-
fensive attitude because I believed the ending was perfect for the novel:
Joe proved to be a lothario by leaving Sue Ann for Belén, then, in turn,
leaving her for another woman. I felt that it gave two of the characters
the comeuppance they deserved, and my opinion was backed by another
beta reader of the draft. I agreed that the Latin lover is a stereotype, but
I had personally known such types. Yet I was appalled at being accused
of writing a stereotyped Latino character into my book.
After a cooling off period and giving it more thought, I realized the
beta reader was correct. Thanks to mainstream media portrayals of eth-
nic groups, are stereotypes so ingrained in our minds that I was not
 Writing Chica Lit  189
immune to their influence? After further consideration, it became clear
to me that if the character remained as written, it would perpetuate a
stereotype, exactly what I had intended to avoid. The ending was altered
to one that is more realistic and depicts the character as a flawed human
being rather than as a Casanova.
The decision to change the outcome for Joe’s character was not made
lightly. I had to decide if I wanted my book to provide a satisfying ending
for the reader, one that leaves her saying, Yes, she got what she deserves!
That guy was a rat after all! Or was it more important to avoid deni-
grating Latino males and to present the character with a more positive
image? My final decision was based on how the altered ending would
enhance the quality of the book. Stereotypes do not belong in a good
work of fiction (or any work of fiction) when writing about a culture that
is too often depicted negatively. Dr. Catherine S. Ramirez addresses this
issue in her “End of Chicanismo: Alida Valdes-Rodriguez’s Dirty Girls”
(Chicano Latino Research Report #2): “minority writers are also held
responsible for educating the majority and rectifying misperceptions of
us, even if they write in a genre with only a tenuous connection to real-
ism or reality” (22).
I was satisfied that my Latino characters would not be stereotypes,
but I took great care in creating the black, Asian, and white charac-
ters too. Ethnic characters should not be included in a novel if they
only appear as stereotypes. Here I Go Again is a chick lit novel by Jen
Lancaster. The protagonist, Lissy Ryder, a rude, shallow adult, travels
back in time to her high school days when she was a mean girl. This hu-
morous story is set in Chicago, and there are no Latinos in major roles.
However, early in the story, Lissy is in a garage where “The parking at-
tendant blathers something in Mexican about a tow truck” (Lancaster
11). Of course, I gathered that the individual blathering “Mexican” is
Latino. Thus, the only Latino in the book is cast in a tiny part and per-
forms a menial job. Likewise, it’s not a good idea to make the only eth-
nic or the only white character a bad guy with a bad attitude. It’s best
to avoid negative personalities unless the cultural group is otherwise
well represented. For example, Toady, the boss in My Doormat Days,
is a mean white guy. But he is not the only white person in the story;
there are two others who play major roles and are good human beings.
In fact, Alba falls in love with a white man. Mary Jane, Alba’s black
coworker, is bright, attractive, and ambitious. She is just as unhappy in
the workplace as Alba is, but she takes the necessary steps to move on to
a better opportunity, serving as an inspiration for the protagonist. The
one Asian woman (actually she is of both Mexican and Filipino descent)
in the novel doesn’t play a major role in the story, but she is a good
friend of one of the main players and becomes engaged to another. Sue
Ann, Alba’s friend and roommate, could have easily become a version
of the dumb blonde; she is beautiful, sexy, and desirable to men. But she
190  Linda Chávez Doyle
is also a real person with insecurities, compassion for others, and a life
goal, other than meeting Mr. Right, that she finally gains the courage
and confidence to pursue.
Initially, I was undecided about the conclusion to my novel. Though
I wanted the book to have a happy ending, I wasn’t at all certain that
Alba should become engaged to Mr. Right or even be involved with a
special man. That scenario would be suitable to the chick lit format,
but it wouldn’t support the primary message that I hoped to get across.
I wanted Alba to become a self-confident woman who is no longer shy
about pursuing her career goal. I toyed with the idea of having her
remain unattached romantically but content with a new job and in pur-
suit of a new career; even more importantly, she would no longer be
a doormat. I wanted to stress that she is a woman who does not need
a man in her life so that she can feel fulfilled. She does not have to be
headed to the altar. But would that be enough to meet the expectations
of the traditional chick lit reader? I feared it wouldn’t, and a compro-
mise was in order. In the end, Alba is in a good relationship, but she
makes it clear that she has goals that take priority over marriage. When
Sue Ann asks her if she and her boyfriend are planning to become en-
gaged, Alba replies, “Maybe. But I’d like to get my credential before
getting married, and that could take a couple of years” (Doyle 251). She
is putting her career goals first, despite the pressure from her mother,
and her cultural tradition, to marry. Her doormat days are behind her.
Likewise, Sue Ann chooses not to move in with her boyfriend, with
whom she owns and manages a gym, until their business venture is
financially secure (251–252). She, too, has put her doormat days be-
hind her. I was able to satisfy my goal to depict Alba as an independent
woman and to still adhere to the popular chick lit formula that includes
a good relationship with a special man. I determined that a happy end-
ing is a must but does not have to culminate in a marriage or even in a
permanent relationship. But it must underline a positive message that
inspires. Romance is important, but personal achievement is too. Most
significantly, the main character has to learn from her experiences and
change for the better.
I was halfway through the writing of this book before a title came to
mind. The first draft was called Tranquila. It was directly taken from
the dialogue Alba shares with her high school friend Belén, who advises
her to calm down and not be afraid of life—to be “tranquila” (41). But
I was advised against the use of this title because it might lead English-­
language readers to overlook the book if they believe it’s in Spanish. Re-
luctantly, I realized the suggestion had merit and understood why it was
necessary to make the change. I spent many hours considering various
titles before settling on My Doormat Days. There is no doubt about the
language of the book, but more importantly, the title sums up the theme
and hints at the humorous nature of the story.
 Writing Chica Lit  191
For the design of the book cover, I was against the use of pastels,
flowers, or anything that might convey a young, feminine touch. When I
purchased Better with You Here, I believed it was a frilly chick lit story
because of the pink tones on the cover but was surprised to find a novel
that is more serious and even a bit dark, notably in its depiction of diffi-
cult divorce proceedings. My Doormat Days cannot be called serious or
dark, but it is a story that can be enjoyed by individuals of both sexes.
Though the book is geared toward young women, I did not want the
cover to portray the image of a story exclusively for females. I did not
want to limit my audience. With that in mind, I chose neutral and dark
colors.
The feedback from readers of this book has been positive. I have been
pleasantly surprised by the comments from several male readers (not
exclusively Latinos) who have enjoyed the book, perhaps never realizing
that they have read a chick lit story. I was pleased by the reaction of a
white female reader from the Midwest who told me that she enjoyed
reading about a culture of which she is unfamiliar. This is all the more
reason to avoid stereotypes. If readers are only exposed to other cultures
through stereotypes depicted in the fiction they enjoy, how can they ever
come to appreciate the richness and variety of cultural groups other than
their own?
When My Doormat Days was finished, I felt a real sense of accom-
plishment at having achieved a dream. I’d had no formal training in
writing fiction before starting my novel. I’d never realized just how dif-
ficult it would be to create a work of fiction. I had assumed, naively,
that chick lit would be easy to write. The writer has to create characters
that are believable, dialogue that is realistic, and a compelling plot that
builds to a convincing conclusion. There can be no loose ends and no
mistakes in continuity. I found the entire process a challenge, but it was
a rewarding one.
I also realized that chick lit is an excellent vehicle to convey a mes-
sage about ethnicity. The chick lit heroine typically complains about her
shortcomings and inability to find true love. The Mexican American
heroine can do all of that and complain about the challenges of being
a minority in our society. It is a great way to connect with the ethnic
reader and to inform the non-ethnic reader.
What I enjoyed about writing chica lit is the ability to depict a famil-
iar cultural environment and possibly connect with Latina readers who
suffer microaggressions and others forms of discrimination that I have
personally experienced. I hope that my book serves as an inspiration for
Latinas who can read about a positive role model who has overcome
challenges perhaps similar to those they have encountered. In Will Write
for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel, Cathy Yardley, describes
how a reader found such comfort in one of her books that she read it re-
peatedly during a difficult period of her life. Yardley writes, “If you can
192  Linda Chávez Doyle
do that, entertain and comfort, and maybe even give some insight, then
you’ve done your job” (5). I believe that My Doormat Days does all of
that by providing insight to a Mexican American woman and her culture
and by spotlighting a character to which Latinas can relate.

Works Cited
Benedetti, Ana Maria. “10 Latino Stereotypes That Must Go (Video).” The
Huffington Post, 03 October 2013. Web. 13 April 2017.
Cano-Murillo, Kathy. Waking Up in the Land of Glitter: A Crafty Chica Novel.
New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010.
Chawkins, Steve. “Michele Serros, Who Wrote about Growing up Latina, Dies
at 48.” Los Angeles Times, 6 January 2015. Web. 9 June 2015.
Doyle, Linda Chávez. My Doormat Days. North Charleston, South Carolina:
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
Giffin, Emily. Something Borrowed. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2004.
Lancaster, Jen. Here I Go Again. New York: New American Library, 2013.
Ramirez, Catherine S., PhD. “End of Chicanismo: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Dirty Girls.” Santa Cruz: U of California, American Studies, 2009. Web. 14
June 2015.
Rita, Carmen. Never Too Real. New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 2016.
Tuccillo, Liz. How to be Single. New York: Atria Books, 2008.
Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. The Dirty Girls Social Club. New York: St. Martin’s
P, 2003.
Weiner, Jennifer. In Her Shoes. New York: Atria Books, 2002.
Weisberger, Lauren. The Devil Wears Prada. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Yardley, Cathy. Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel. New
York: Thomas Dunne Books.
Zepeda, Gwendolyn. Better with You Here. New York: Grand Central Publish-
ing, 2012.
9 Interview with Kavita
Daswani

Kavita Daswani is a journalist, novelist, and former fashion editor.

She has published eight novels and continues to cover fashion, beauty,
travel, and more for US and international publications. This interview
was conducted via e-mail.
What does the term “chick lit” mean to you?
Light, easy-to-read, not at all laborious. Usually with a pink cover.
Lots of references to name brands, pop culture, shoes, and wine. Fun,
entertaining—although at some point in the narrative I do hope to be
moved…
Your work is sometimes classified by scholars as “desi lit.” Does that
phrase resonate with you? Do you see yourself as a chick lit writer? Or
as a South Asian writer? Or as simply a writer?
Firstly, I’m amazed that scholars are even aware of my work… But
given that they are—then probably all of the above. Although when
­people ask me what I do, I tend to respond that I am “a journalist and a
novelist.” In that order. I started as a journalist, the novel writing came
later, and these days while I do both, most of my time is still spent as
a newspaper/magazine journalist. Then, when I’m asked what kind of
novels I write, I like to say, “cross-cultural women’s fiction.” So, yes,
“desi lit” sounds about right.
Can you describe how you create your protagonists and plots? In
other words, what decisions (the plot, the protagonists, the genre, style)
were not conscious or intentional when you wrote your novels? What
decisions did seem conscious and/or intentional?
So far, almost without exception, the impetus for all my novels came
from something in my own life. I like to write in the first person—and
I do feel that the voices in which my protagonists speak are my own. I
know these women. I can completely connect with them. I have shared
their responses, know their pain, understand their longing. The plots
tend to evolve as I go: I wish I could say that I sit down and have it all
mapped out from the get-go—but nothing could be further from the
truth. I usually have no idea where it’s going, who will show up, what
they might do, and how it will end. I quite like the uncertainty of the
process.
194  Interview with Kavita Daswani
Some chick lit authors, such as Alisa Valdes and Sofia Quintero, have
explained that the impetus for writing their first novels came from a
desire to see protagonists like themselves in novels they found on the
shelves of the bookstore. Alisa Valdes, for example, wrote her Latina
chick lit novel because she didn’t identify with representations of Lati-
nas that she saw in existing fiction, which she found too serious and
downtrodden. Has the absence, or limited number of representations of,
South Asian or South Asian American female protagonists motivated
your writing at all?
Not at all. I wish I was that motivated, or disciplined. I wrote my
very first book, For Matrimonial Purposes, because I used to regale my
(Western) friends with tales of being set up with random Indian men by
my parents, of, literally, flying around the world to meet with “a good
boy” that one of my relatives would pick out for me. My friends would
say, “You need to write a book about this.” So I did.
In your work, your protagonists navigate their own cultural identities
as well as the expectations and assumptions that other characters have
about her ethnic identity and her gender. What material or experiences
did you draw on when you were writing these scenes?
I’ve been fortunate enough to have lived in a number of countries, and
to have experienced what it is like to be an Indian woman, in different
phases of her life, in those places. I am ethnically Indian, my ancestral
home is Bombay, but I was born in Hong Kong and speak with a British
accent. French is my second language. I am a practicing Hindu who mar-
ried an Indian Jew from Calcutta who lives in Los Angeles. A number of
people outside my culture have a generic idea of who an Indian woman
is, what she should be like. I had one American man who asked me if I
could find him a “domesticated” wife, which he presumed me to be. Out
with my kids when they were younger, on more than one occasion I was
mistaken as the nanny. I’ve had people talk to me very slowly because
they assume I can’t speak English. I am a very different type of Indian
when I am in India, compared to when I’m anywhere else—and I love
being able to mine those scenarios for book material.
What led you to move into writing a younger protagonist in Indie Girl
and Lovetorn? What were you able to do with these younger characters
that you couldn’t do with your adult protagonists?
For Indie Girl, I was approached by an editor at a publishing house
who had read my previous novels and asked if I’d be open to doing a teen
book. I hadn’t been, until she suggested it. By then, I was into my forties,
and I remember telling her that sixteen felt like a lifetime ago. But I en-
joyed the process enough to do it a second time with Lovetorn. In both
cases, I liked the process of being able to transplant a young and fiction-
alized version of myself to America. If I had been born and brought up
in America, as the protagonist in Indie Girl was, what would I be like? If
I came here as a teenager from India, as the girl in Lovetorn does: would
 Interview with Kavita Daswani  195
I enjoy it here? What would school be like? Would I resist being “Ameri-
canized”? I loved being able to explore those themes through the books.
What was your experience of writing Bombay Girl and Betrayed?
How did writing specifically for an Indian market differ from your ex-
periences writing your other novels?
My books have always done well in India, and my agent thought it
would be a good idea to do a series just for that market. That’s how
Bombay Girl, and its sequel, Betrayed, happened. It also gave me an
opportunity to zero in on a very intriguing subset of new Bombay—
the hugely, incredibly, massively wealthy—and how one girl strives to
be seen and heard in a controlling and manipulative family. The most
­glaring difference between writing specifically for that market and any
other was not having to explain anything: I could simply say, for exam-
ple, “…at the baby’s naming ceremony,” without necessarily having to
explain what that was.
How did you break into the publishing industry?
I’ve been a freelance journalist since I was seventeen. I dropped
out of school and started writing for a handful of local magazines in
Hong Kong. I’ve been doing the same job since then, even after I got
married, moved to Los Angeles, and had children. I’ve never done
anything else.
What was your experience navigating the publishing industry for
your first book, The For Matrimonial Purposes (2003)? Or for your
later works, such as The Village Bride of Beverly Hills (2005) or Salaam
Paris (2007)?
I hadn’t finished For Matrimonial Purposes when I submitted it to an
agent. I sent her ninety-nine pages, which was pretty much all I had. I
didn’t even include a phone number or e-mail, that’s how lax I was. She
sent me a postcard a couple of weeks later and said she wanted to repre-
sent me. I’ll never know how she did it, but in no time, the manuscript
was being bid on by the major publishing houses of London and New
York, eventually going to HarperCollins in the UK and Penguin in the
US. I was stunned at how easy it was. I felt undeserving of it. After that,
it was just a question of keeping the momentum going.
Did you experience any pressure or pushback from publishers who
wanted your book to do or be different than how you envisioned it?
Not at all. I’ve been fortunate in that my editors and I have always
been on pretty much the same page.
Different scholars, and authors, see the genre of chick lit as doing
different kinds of cultural work. Some argue that these novels reflect
contemporary women’s experiences, while others have argued that these
novels are superficial or fluff. Some authors, like Anita Heiss, have de-
liberately chosen this genre as a way to circulate ideas in a more popular
form. What are your thoughts about the genre of chick lit? It’s possibil-
ities or limitations?
196  Interview with Kavita Daswani
I do think that it’s possible to share meaningful ideas and poignant
stories within the context of “chick lit.” I’d like to think that my protag-
onists are more than cute girls with a great wardrobe or whatever. I want
them to be flawed and vulnerable and strong and self-sufficient. I want
readers to read about them and be divested of any preconceived notion
of what “ethnic”/South Asian women are.
One of the qualities that scholars often use to describe chick lit is
relatability. Furthermore, readers of chick lit often mention this same
characteristic and comment that they see themselves in these protago-
nists. Is this connection that readers have to the text something you’ve
felt or experienced when you’ve interacted with your readers? What
have been some of the most surprising, unexpected, or affecting mo-
ments that you’ve had with readers?
I like to think that my protagonists are highly relatable—and I’ve been
told that they are. I’ve had the loveliest notes from women of many cul-
tures and countries writing to tell me how moved they were by some-
thing I’d written, of how much they could connect with it. At that point,
I don’t even think that the social, cultural, or ethnic circumstances are
relevant any longer. I just want to tell women’s stories—women who are
seeking their place in the world, are looking for someone to share a life
with, are trying to find that balance between honoring the vision for
their own life and feeling responsible for the well-being of others. If I can
do that, then I’m happy.
10 Interview with Kim Wong
Keltner

Kim Wong Keltner has published three novels and recently published
her first work on nonfiction, Tiger Babies Strike Back. This interview
was conducted via e-mail.
What does the term “chick lit” mean to you?
The term, “chick lit,” isn’t something I think about very much. Maybe
my books rode a wave of popularity based on the trend, or conversely,
the books were taken less seriously because of the definition. At the end
of the day, the writing always has to be honest. “chick lit” is in the eye of
the  beholder. I love that women feel that my words resonate with their
experiences. As an added bonus, it has been scientifically proven that you
can have a penis and still enjoy my books.
Your work is often classified by scholars as “Asian American chick
lit.” Do any parts of that phrase resonate with you? Do you see yourself
as a chick lit writer? Or as an Asian American writer?
I’m Asian American, and I am a writer. I see myself as an individual,
and I have been fortunate enough to have had my experiences resonate
with a lot of Asian readers but also with other ethnicities, for which I
feel humble and grateful. To walk the line between representing an en-
tire group and expressing a singular point of view is a minefield of other
people’s expectations. I want to tell the truth through my own lens, and
if readers think, “Hey, that’s happened to me, too,” then I feel gratified.
But you can’t please everyone, and when others want to hold you up as a
representative, you can’t let it affect you too much.
I’m proud to be an Asian American writer. I aim to be true to my own
experiences, and to tell truths that don’t see the light of day very often.
The privilege of writing and having a voice in the community is some-
thing I take very seriously. So, how do I stay true to myself while also
knowing that people don’t want me to disappoint them? To paraphrase
the movie, Almost Famous, “If you want to be a true friend to them, you
need to be honest and unmerciful.”
In your interview with Deborah Kalb, you describe your writing pro-
cess for your first novel, saying, “I used to scribble words on my bus
transfers on the way to work. It delighted only me. And little by little,
those small words and phrases eventually became my first book, The
198  Interview with Kim Wong Keltner
Dim Sum of All Things.” Can you say more about how you create your
protagonists and plots? To ask this question another way, what deci-
sions (the plot, the protagonists, the genre, style) were not conscious
or intentional when you wrote your novels? What decisions did seem
conscious and/or intentional?
Making a character human and flawed is always intentional. In The
Dim Sum of All Things, Lindsey goes to visit her uncle at On Lok (a
retirement community) and is uncomfortable in his presence. She leaves
early to go meet her friend. Some readers didn’t like that Lindsey didn’t
know how to act. But I wanted to portray her that way. She is in her early
twenties and is learning how to be an adult. I wanted her to be real.
Sometimes I have scenes I know that I want to include, but I might
not have figured out which scenarios will lead up to that one. So I just
don’t worry about it and write the scene that I want first. It’s like taking
a multiple-choice test in school: do the ones you know first, then come
back and figure out the other answers. The plot and cadence will reveal
itself if you don’t hold on too tight. Sometimes the original paragraphs
that set you on the journey end up on the cutting room floor.
Some chick lit authors, such as Alisa Valdes and Sofia Quintero, have
explained that the impetus for writing their first novels came from a
desire to see protagonists like themselves in novels they found on the
shelves of the bookstore. Alisa Valdes, for example, wrote her Latina
chick lit novel because she didn’t identify with representations of Lati-
nas that she saw in existing fiction, which she found too serious and
downtrodden. Has the absence, or limited number of representations
of, Asian American female protagonists motivated your writing at all?
Each writer passes the baton to the next. I very much respected Iris
Chang and her abilities. She was very scholarly. But I wanted to relate
to readers in a different way. In Asian culture, there is a pressure to be
dutiful and serious, as if Asian people don’t have uncomfortable expe-
riences or awkward sexual awakenings. Lindsey Owyang has a slightly
deformed toe that looks like a cheese puff. She has a crappy office job
and rides the bus to work, and is always on the lookout for a clean bath-
room. Her friend, Mimi Madlangbayan, is captivated by her own hair.
Everyone they know lives on ramen. These are my people! I wanted to
tell things like they really are.
Your protagonist, Lindsey, navigates her own cultural identity as a
third-generation Chinese American, as well as the expectations and as-
sumptions that other characters have about her ethnic identity. What
material or experiences did you draw on when you were writing these
scenes?
My entire life, ha ha.
Another chick lit author of color has said, “You would be hard-pressed
to find a chick-lit novel by a woman of color that didn’t have a feminist
undercurrent. When you get past the tropes—the glamorous jobs, the
 Interview with Kim Wong Keltner  199
brand-name dropping, the romantic subplot—if an American woman is
also addressing race and culture in her novels, that in and of itself is po-
litical and probably gendered.” Would you agree with these statements?
Do you see your chick lit novels as doing feminist and/or political work?
The personal is political. Feminism to me is a synonym for equality. I
am writing about experiences of being treated differently, both in posi-
tive and negative ways, based on being female and Asian. So if you add
up all those details, yes my books are feminist and political. Writing
down one’s truth and hanging your own ass in the wind for anyone to
criticize is an act of bravery. Always.
If a writer writes down her truth, there will always be others, both
men and women, who will try to tell you that your experience isn’t au-
thentic because maybe it wasn’t their experience. Or they want what you
write to somehow be different. Screw that noise! Write your truth and let
the chips fall where they may. I write about the human experience, and
if someone doesn’t like it, that’s really none of my business. I am writing
for the person I will never meet who has taken the bus across town to
get my book, and is reading it by herself. I hope that by taking in my
words, she gains sustenance and feels that her own inner world has been
acknowledged. The invisible gratitude I feel from people who appreciate
my work is my psychic shield wall.
What led you to continue writing about Lindsey in Buddha Baby?
Did you feel “finished” with her by the end of your second novel, or is
there still more to say?
I had gotten to know Lindsey pretty well in the first book and wanted
to continue her story. I wanted to say more about working ridiculous
jobs and dating. There was also more Chinese history I wanted to tackle,
and particularly through the experience of a younger, Americanized per-
son trying to unravel it. That juxtaposition between generations was
still something I wanted to explore further, particularly the painstaking
efforts of extracting the past from older relatives who never want to look
back.
What led you to move into writing a younger protagonist in I Want
Candy? What were you able to do with Candace’s character that you
couldn’t do with Lindsey’s?
I tell people that I Want Candy is about all the scummy stuff that
happens to you when you are in eighth grade, but you don’t tell anyone
about it until you are forty years old. In a lot of ways, someone could
say that Lindsey, who is in her twenties, is a lot more innocent than
­fourteen-year-old Candace. I always think that Lindsey could possibly
have had experiences like Candace’s, but those weird incidents are part
of her buried past. Could they be the same person? In literature, probably
not. But in real life, absolutely. At the end of I Want Candy, Candace vows
to “never look back, walk tall, and act fine,” just like in the lyrics to David
Bowie’s “Golden Years.” Who knows what anyone has in their past?
200  Interview with Kim Wong Keltner
Lindsey and Candace are both parts of me at different times in my life,
except for the part about working in a Chinese restaurant. Seriously, it’s
amazing how many people assume that my parents owned a Chinese
restaurant. My dad was an engineer, and my mother was an executive
secretary. Actually, here’s a story: at an event for Buddha Baby, a girl
came up to me and said she liked my book. I asked her if she wanted to
write, and she replied, “What would I write about? No one wants to
read about a girl who grew up working in a Chinese restaurant.” I went
home and thought, “I want to read about that!” So, that’s how I came to
set I Want Candy in a Chinese restaurant. It was all because of a Chinese
American reader named Jenny who was wearing a red T-shirt that said,
“867–5309 Jenny,” after that Tommy Tutone song. Wherever you are,
Jenny, thanks!
How did you break into the publishing industry?
For any writer who thinks she has to know someone or have some
kind of “in,” it’s not true. I didn’t know anyone in publishing. I pur-
chased a book called A Guide to Literary Agents and wrote a lot of
cover letters. I was asked for ten-page samples, and then fifty pages or
more, then would get rejected. It was a slow process filled with anguish
that made me want to crawl into bed and hide. Agents in San Francisco
and even Chinese American agents who said they adored my manuscript
rejected me and said there was no market for my work. It was surreal
and nonsensical. I endured many disappointments. The best thing I ever
did for myself was that I never told anyone I was writing a book, nor
did I ever share that I was even trying to get published. So I never had
to battle other people’s discouragement. Of course, not everyone can
live life that way. My advice to other people would be to just finish your
book. Never leave the house. Your friends, and brunch, and going out,
can wait.
What was your experience navigating the publishing industry for
your first book, The Dim Sum of All Things? Or for your later works,
such as Buddha Baby (2005) or I Want Candy (2008)?
My first book was mostly complete before HarperCollins purchased
it. Every subsequent book had more pressure built into the situation be-
cause deadlines were always looming. With a first book, no one knows
who you are and there are no expectations, so in that sense you are very
free. All three of those books were with the same publisher, so for you to
ask me about navigating publishing is like asking me about dating when
I’ve only ever had one boyfriend.
Did you experience any pressure or pushback from publishers who
wanted your book to do or be different than how you envisioned it?
In I Want Candy, I had a very specific vision that required awkward
sexual situations and lots of swear words. I wanted to capture early
teenhood and early 1980s San Francisco. I was very uncomfortable
about some scenes, and that’s why I knew I couldn’t back down. I almost
 Interview with Kim Wong Keltner  201
lost my nerve. At the time I was writing that book, my daughter was
about four-years-old. No mother of a little girl wants to think about her
daughter growing up and getting thrown against a car by a would-be
child molester. No one wants to think about terrible things that happen
to girls on the brink of womanhood. And I had to go there. Some people
were horrified. Why? Because a girl’s life is horrifying. In the end, my
editor and publisher stood by me, for which I am grateful.
Different scholars, and authors, see the genre of chick lit as doing
different kinds of cultural work. Some argue that these novels reflect
contemporary women’s experiences, while others have argued that these
novels are superficial or fluff. Some authors, like Anita Heiss or Sofia
Quintero, have deliberately chosen this genre as a way to circulate ideas
in a more popular form. What are your thoughts about the genre of
chick lit? Its possibilities or limitations?
Regarding chick lit, all I can say is that a writer has a great oppor-
tunity to embed a rusty nail in the cupcake. If people want to see only
frosting, then fine. I always aim for substance, but readers can enjoy the
sprinkles and the gooey, smutty center too.
In your interview with Deborah Kalb, you mention that you prefer
writing nonfiction now, and part of that is because readers crave what’s
real. Do you think that chick lit offer its own kind of realness?
Yes, of course, all fiction offers the opportunity for realness. For me,
fiction has an extra layer, like a veil, between the writer and the reader.
The veil can either make you feel safe enough to tell the truth, or it can
be a slight barrier. I think the story often tells you what it needs. I wrote
the first eight drafts of I Want Candy before I realized it needed to be in
first person. So, I rewrote the whole thing and realized that third person
was its own built-in obstacle between the reader and the writer. I wanted
more intimacy, and for the reader to be inside Candace’s thoughts.
One of the qualities that scholars often describe chick lit is relatabil-
ity. Furthermore, readers of chick lit often mention this same character-
istic and comment that they see themselves in these protagonists. Is this
connection that readers have to the text something you’ve felt or experi-
enced when you’ve interacted with your readers? What have been some
of the most surprising, unexpected, or affecting moments that you’ve
had with readers?
I feel honored and humbled to have had both eighty-year-olds and
eight-year-olds tell me, “You exactly have described my experiences.
Thank you.” Then they walk away and I want to burst into tears. Read-
ing a book is so intimate in that someone is holding something within 18
inches of their face and they are taking in all the words with their eyes,
and the sentences are filtering through the brain and into the heart. I
guess I shouldn’t be surprised that readers feel like they know me, but it
is definitely mind-blowing when I realize that something no longer just
exists in my own head but has been disseminated through the miracle
202  Interview with Kim Wong Keltner
of books and lives inside readers’ brains as well. In The Dim Sum of All
Things, the character, Pau Pau, was based on my grandmother. I was
in awe any time someone told me they absolutely loved her. Everything
came full circle for me then because I had started writing that book be-
cause I wanted to remember her. In real life, she had just died, and I felt
I brought her to life for a lot of readers and not just myself.
Do you think you’ll ever return to writing fiction?
Sure, why not?!
11 Interview with Sofia
Quintero

Sofia Quintero is an author and cultural activist who has written many
novels and short stories writes across a variety a genres, including chica
lit, hip hop noir, erotica, and YA novels, and nonfiction essays. This
conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What do the terms “chick lit” and “chica lit” mean to you? Alisa
Valdes, another chica lit author, has said of her first novel that it is “a
book about diverse American women—like any others—who happen to
have Spanish surnames.” Does that description fit how you imagine your
chica lit novel, Divas Don’t Yield? Or your protagonists?
I don’t think any of the characters in Divas Don’t Yield would describe
themselves as American women who happen to have Spanish surnames.
While they indeed are American women who have Spanish surnames,
even the most conservative among them is too politically conscious to
present herself in such simplistic terms. Each of them is aware of her-
self to be at once an Americana with tremendous privilege compared to
women from other nations, including the country of her family’s origins,
and a Latina within the United States, with all the sociopolitical chal-
lenges that entails because of things like racism.
I suspect that Alisa has a more nuanced understanding than that
wording “just so happens” conveys and was simplifying things for her
audience so they could recognize that her book wasn’t just for Latina
readers, but speaking for myself, I never describe anything in that way.
Most people who use such language intend to downplay race and ethnic-
ity and do so usually to pander to white sensitivities. They’re buying into
a colorblindness that I neither believe is possible or even desirable. Nor
have I seen any evidence that ignoring race and ethnicity makes racism
fade away. So, no, Divas Don’t Yield is more than a book about diverse
American women with Spanish surnames. For better or worse, those
surnames are markers. They have meaning. Divas Don’t Yield is a novel
about diverse Latinas striving for the things we all desire while grappling
with the obstacles to those desires, personally and politically, and in that
place where the personal and political intersect.
As for the term “chick lit,” I myself use it to refer to a genre of writ-
ing that seeks to center the issues of contemporary women in a manner
204  Interview with Sofia Quintero
that is accessible to a broad readership with “chica lit” simply aiming to
identify the women in question as Latina. While it does tend to have its
tropes, chick lit can be as diverse as any other genre. Of course, it has
its share of mediocrity because every single genre does. When I hear
authors like Jennifer Egan trash chick lit, the first thing I presume is that
they’ve never read any of the work never mind books by women of color
who often interweave substantive issues with the genre’s tropes. For ex-
ample, in Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan deals not only with race
but also with abortion and Alzheimer’s, in addition to the common story
line of cishet women seeking romantic partnerships. Meanwhile, her sis-
ter Rosalyn McMillan has written several novels that center blue-collar
African American women and doesn’t shy away from class politics. So
when someone unilaterally accuses chick lit as being superficial, the first
thing I think is, “In other words, you don’t read women of color.”
This is not to say that you have to read or like the genre. Not every-
thing is for everyone, and that’s precisely the point. Just because it’s not
for you doesn’t mean it has no value. I don’t believe that people from any
marginalized community are obligated to like and support anything that
a member of that community has created. And I value knowledgeable
and compassionate critique. That kind of feedback is a type of support.
But don’t critique what you refuse to engage, leave it to those who have
bothered.
You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you “don’t feel any pressure
to ‘write Latina,’” but how do you construct your characters’ cultural
identity? During your writing and/or editing process, what awareness
do you have of your characters’ Latinidad? To ask this question another
way, what decisions (the plot, the protagonists, the genre, style) were not
conscious or intentional when you wrote your novels? What decisions
did seem conscious and/or intentional?
When I say that I don’t feel pressure to write Latina, I mean that I
naturally and willing center Latinas in the stories I write. I want to write
Latina with no regard to what agents and editors are seeking. I unapol-
ogetically write for myself, for women like me, and for the people who
love us.
That said, the ideas that come to me and compel me enough to invest
the time, energy, and emotion to realize them tend to do so with the
characters already attached, and they overwhelmingly tend to be Latina
or African American. I have never written protagonists of color because
of some market demand for them in the publishing industry, be it from
agents, editors, or readers, and this most likely comes from honoring
my unique voice, which is undoubtedly shaped by being a Generation-X
Afro-Latina from New York City.
The impulse to write Latina is natural. The decision to honor that
impulse is deliberate. That makes it at once an artistic and political
decision.
 Interview with Sofia Quintero  205
Where I find myself being more intentional is wanting to diversify
my depictions of Latinas to include those who don’t share the same
constellation of identity traits that I do. I could have written Divas
Don’t Yield with four Afro-Boricuas and Afro-Dominicanas from
New York City. I may still write something just like that one day, but
I feel compelled to make a diligent effort to be inclusive in my por-
trayals of Latinas. Not because it’s politically correct or commercially
savvy but because it’s honest. We’re not all the same race, ethnicity,
class, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
We don’t all speak Spanish or dance salsa or grow up in an inter-
generational household. Rendering invisible Latinos who don’t do the
things that white audiences associate with us again sometimes feels
like pandering.
Now I’d like to take a moment to parse out something here. White
audiences also associate some pernicious things with Latinos as well,
like drug dealing, welfare “dependency,” etc., and we have a right to
take issue with those associations. However, the answer is not to make
invisible Latinos who deal drugs, use public assistance and all the other
stereotypes in our depictions. The solution is not to erase single mothers
or maids or sex workers. Yes, we need representations of educated pro-
fessionals, but we also need humanizing depictions of the people we are
quick to label “negative” or “stereotypes.” And the way we do that is to
put them in sociopolitical context and call out the structural forces that
shape their choices even if we make different ones.
My first YA novel is about a boy who sells drugs, and I’m sure the
premise alone makes some readers, including some Latinos, very un-
comfortable. But those who bother to read it will discover Efrain’s Se-
cret embeds the title character in a world of institutionalized racism,
structural poverty, and patriarchal gender norms. So, Efrain doesn’t sell
drugs because he’s a Latino boy in the ‘hood, and that’s just what Latino
boys in the ‘hood do. He makes certain choices while living in the chasm
between ambition and possibility concocted for people of color in the
United States.
All this is to say that Latinos understandably have a preoccupation
with having “positive” images of ourselves, but when we equate “neg-
ative” with being working class or poor, undereducated, immigrant, or
urban, then we are capitulating to all those “isms” rather than resisting
them. Let me give you an example. A Latina editor passed on my first
novel Explicit Content because she said that the Latina character—a
Bronx-born Puerto Rican named Leila Aponte—didn’t “feel” Latina to
her because she had no family. Mind you, Leila’s backstory is about how
she wound up in foster care. From the time I was eleven until I turned
nineteen, my parents took in foster children and all of them save one
were Latinas. With so many Latino children in New York City’s foster
care system, how does Leila’s childhood circumstances render her any
206  Interview with Sofia Quintero
less Latina? It doesn’t. Leila has a very strong and proud Latinidad that
is palpable to all the other characters she encounters, so they don’t ques-
tion it either.
A positive image is a complex image. A humanizing image. An honest
image.
Scholarship on chick lit often offers specific definitions of the genre
that may or may not resonate with authors who actually write these
novels. Some authors of chick lit are familiar with this genre and might
agree with those same conventions mentioned by scholars, while other
authors see themselves as writers with no strong relationship or famil-
iarity to the genre or its conventions and whose works were labeled and
marketed as chick lit by publishers. From comments you’ve made else-
where, it seems as if you have a strong, perhaps intentional or purpose-
ful relationship to this genre. Would you agree? And if so, what initially
drew you to this particular commercial genre?
Yes, I have an intentional relationship to chick lit despite the enduring
notion that it’s not “serious” fiction. I very much like writing for a broad
readership. Even as I center women of color in all my stories, I have no
doubts that anyone can read them and find something that resonates.
If I can read Good in Bed or The Devil Wears Prada and see myself in
those protagonists, why wouldn’t a non-Latina be able to see herself
in Dirty Girls Social Club or Divas Don’t Yield or Freestyle by Linda
Nieves-Powell? To say otherwise would be to question the fundamental
humanity of women of color.
For me, chick lit feels like a natural progression from the YA novels
that I enjoyed most as a young woman. Margaret Simon (of Judy Blume’s
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret), Mary Rose Ganz (of Marilyn
Sach’s Veronica Ganz), and Julie Ross (Ellen Conford’s The Alfred G.
Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations)
are the teenage forebears of your average chick lit heroines. Readers are
starting to understand that some of the best writing is in YA, and that
genre arguably more than others preoccupies itself with being relatable
to its readership, a broad readership because, if we’re fortunate, we live
to experience adolescence for all its trials and triumphs. I want to see
characters like Yaqui Delgado and Piddy Sanchez (from Meg Medina’s
Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass), Margot Sanchez (from Lilliam
Rivera’s The Education of Margot Sanchez), and Mariposa and her en-
tire crew (from Elisha Miranda aka E-Fierce’s The Sista Hood) as adults.
This may be why my first work of chica lit was actually also a new adult
novel.
Your entire body of work crosses genres, from chica lit to hip-hop lit
to erotica to YA lit. What takes place for you as a writer when you move
from writing in one genre to another? How do you prepare yourself to
write in a particular genre? What level of intentionality do you have as
you write with regard to the conventions of a particular genre?
 Interview with Sofia Quintero  207
I write in multiple genres because the stories that come to me are usu-
ally served best by a particular genre’s tone, conventions, and aesthetic,
and I give myself permission to follow those creative impulses. As much
as all my works have certain things in common, and while it may be
conceivable that a given story could be told well in more than one genre,
I find that there’s one specific genre that tells the story best. I give some
thought to what is the fundamental question that I’m exploring, and that
often determines the genre in which I should write. For example, when
the issue I’m grappling with is about complicating a moral issue that is
often discussed in simplistic terms of right or wrong, that kind of story
lends itself most to crime fiction of some kind. The age of the characters
as well as the tone is usually a factor too. If the humor of the situation
comes easily, then I’ll most likely choose chick lit.
One thing I do regardless of genre is a very particular kind of research;
I seek out the social science on the issues that I’m tackling. Take Efrain’s
Secret. I had several objectives when I wrote that young adult novel both
politically and philosophically. In preparing to write that story, I read
quite a few nonfiction books on not only the drug trade but also about
Black and Brown masculinities from feminist perspectives. I intended to
write a feminist novel with a young Afro-Latino male protagonist, and
I specifically desired to show how patriarchy harms Black and Brown
boys. Books I read included New Black Man by Mark Anthony Neal,
Hung by Scott Poulson-Bryant, and In Search of Respect by Phillipe
Bourgois.
Another thing I did with Efrain’s Secret that I wish I could do with
all my YA novels is I actually had a focus group with a group of African
American and Latino high school boys in the Bronx. They read a draft,
and I posed distinct questions about different elements of the novel. For
example, I asked what they thought of specific characters and events. We
had a lot of laughs talking about the slang. I drew from a similar kind of
research that I myself was heading when I wrote the transgender char-
acter in Burn. Many years prior to writing that novel, I was working for
a Latino AIDS organization, and one of my projects was a needs assess-
ment of Latinos living with or at risk of HIV/AIDS in Western Queens.
That lead to holding a few focus groups, and one of them was with
several trans Latinas in Jacksons Heights. This was back in the mid-90s,
and when I decided to write Burn, I wanted to include a trans Latina in
the story and in a way where she’s the most self-actualized person in the
novel. Felicidad is a model of transforming pain into power, and how
despite the multitude of challenges you face in life, you can and seize
the opportunities it does give you and ride them until the wheels fall off.
Some scholars see chick lit as aspirational—as representations that
appeal to readers because these novels represent reality or experiences
that readers desire. Other critics argue that this genre functions more
like a mirror—they would argue that the representations found in
208  Interview with Sofia Quintero
various categories of chick lit, including chica lit, reflect the lived expe-
rience of Latinas in contemporary US society, especially when informed
by authors’ experiences. How does your view of chica lit fit into either
or both of these perspectives?
The guiding principle behind the fiction I write is Meet them where
they are and take them someplace better so I generally attempt for the
stories I tell to be both relatable and aspirational.
I do want readers to see themselves and people they know and love in
the characters, and that’s precisely why it’s important to me (1) to place
the characters’ choices in a realistic sociopolitical context that is com-
passionate and (2) to show the characters healing and evolving, regard-
less of what happens to them in the story. While I aim for this even in my
hip-hop noir, it’s especially true of chica lit since the tone is lighter. This
is why, for example, in Divas Don’t Yield, we see the possibility of love
for Jackie, Hazel, and Irena, the Black character, the queer character,
and the character who’s a rape survivor. No matter what they have gone
through in the story and what remains unresolved by its end, I deliber-
ately include some kind of hope within the characters’ reach, ability, and
willingness to seize.
We also have to keep in mind that people define both relatable and
aspirational differently and from specific agendas. “Relatable but aspira-
tional” is a phrase you will often hear from Hollywood TV and film ex-
ecutives. What those folks mean by that is radically different from what
independent content producers mean. For someone whom the primary
concern is financial success, “aspirational” often translates into the use
of certain brands. For someone else for whom the story and its impact on
audiences is priority number one, “aspirational” simply may mean that
the characters survive with some sense of hope intact.
I personally don’t believe that they’re mutually exclusive. Rather I be-
lieve that the perception that something cannot be both profitable and
meaningful is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I also believe that the ability
to do both at the same time usually comes into question when the sto-
ries or creators reflect and center marginalized experiences, especially if
they challenge the dominant narrative as best or innocent. We have had
plenty of stories by cishet white men that have been commercially suc-
cessful and sociopolitically meaningful; they are allowed to do that be-
cause the assumption is that their stories are universal. Take any of those
constructs out of the equation—race, gender, and sexual o ­ rientation—
the “crossover” question comes into play. With the recent success of TV
shows such as Queen Sugar, Luke Cage, Insecure, Atlanta, and Jane the
Virgin, my hope is that this is starting to change. Whether publishing
catches up is harder to say. Meanwhile, publishing should be leading
the way. There are so many novels by Latinxs that would make great
television and films, but many of our adaptations are Americanized tele-
novelas from Latin America or reboots of old TV shows.
 Interview with Sofia Quintero  209
Chick lit readers often mention that one of the qualities they like the
most about the genre is how relatable the protagonists, and the nov-
els, are. Their comments indicate that they enjoy how much they can
see themselves in the characters of the novels they read. Is this connec-
tion that readers have to the text something you’ve felt or experienced
when you’ve interacted with your readers? What have been some of the
most surprising, unexpected, or affecting moments that you’ve had with
readers?
One of the most powerful moments I’ve had with Divas Don’t Yield
was when I happened across a blog by an Indian woman who had read
it and found a major mistake. I wrote a blog post about that experience
(“Hindi v. Hindu: Owning Up to My Cultural Ignorance”). I commented
on her blog fully owning and apologizing for my mistake. She was very
shocked not only that I had found out about her blog but that I re-
sponded to her with profound humility over the mistake and that I en-
couraged her wholeheartedly to write her own stories. Embarrassing as
it was, if my mistake inspired her to try her hand at chick lit, then it was
a worthwhile mistake. I also remember one time being invited to speak
at a college by a professor who had assigned my book to her class. After
I finished my talk and started signing books, one of the students just
asked if she could hug me. This isn’t unusual, and I’m a hugger so I was
game. She held me for a long time, and when we pulled apart, she had
tears in her eyes. She thanked me for writing the book and then walked
away. She never told me what it was about the book that affected her
so much. And one of my hand down favorite reviews was in Left Turn.
You think and write quite a bit about feminism and feminist issues,
and an intersectional feminist perspective saturates your fiction, non-
fiction, and social media posts. Your characters’ worldviews are also
informed by feminist ideas. What are some of the most exciting devel-
opments taking place in feminism or feminist communities currently?
What about one of the biggest gaps or failures?
Social media, social media, social media. There are so many opportu-
nities and pitfalls that I find it fascinating. Following younger feminists
on social media complicates my thinking all the time. They teach and
challenge me a lot, and I’m grateful for them. However, I don’t know
how much actual dialogue occurs especially between generations. The
intergenerational tension is palpable. Because social media is indeed me-
dia, and the impulse and pressure to be entertaining is so strong, perfor-
mance can trump understanding.
We’re in an interesting place with respect to feminism as commerce.
There are so many possibilities and pitfalls. On the one hand, feminist
content producers should be compensated for what they create. And we
need that content not only for those of who already identify as feminists
but for those who could become feminist by engaging that content. On
the other hand, there’s something incredibly unsettling about feminists
210  Interview with Sofia Quintero
being treated as a marketing demographic. Especially by individuals and
corporations that otherwise would not care about our concerns outside
of profit motives and don’t have policies and practices that reflect femi-
nist ideology.
While I understand that there are many feminisms and that one can
practice feminism without identifying as feminist, I often find myself
wishing we would draw some lines in the sand. I remember when Ri-
hanna dropped the Bitch Better Have My Money video, and folks seeing
all kinds of feminism in it that I did not. I found the video to have some
undeniably feminist elements but also to have deeply patriarchal mes-
sages. The tent of feminism cannot be so wide that it has no anchors in
the ground. That fifty-three percent of white women who voted for Don-
ald Trump, despite his unapologetic and blatant misogyny, makes that
clear. I don’t know how in the new millennium one claims to be a femi-
nist and still utter “what about all women” when a Black woman brings
up the racial divide that exists among women. I would like us to have
some nuanced and ongoing conversations about what feminism is, what
it could be, and what it could never or no longer be. We have to unapol-
ogetically decide that if a stance for gender equality isn’t intersectional
and serves all women including trans women, it is not feminism. Do you
but call it something else. As much as we fear being hampered by labels,
we cannot go to the other extreme where words no longer mean things.
While language is imperfect and fluid, it is what we have, and I rather we
rise to the occasion of striving for preciseness than allowing people with
limited political willingness dilute our meaning to serve their ends. This
is part of the struggle and movement as well. The goal is not perfection
but for evolution as a result of striving.
I personally find myself thinking more and more deeply about fem-
inism as spiritual praxis. Feminism possesses some promise here we
do not consider and cultivate with the same consistency and rigor we
do with political matters. Yet I don’t see how we as individuals and
communities heal and evolve without it. For example, much of the pain
women experience is because men fail to do their emotional labor. A
spiritual feminist praxis gives them incentive, permission, and tools for
doing so. (And I see a character like Irena in Divas Don’t Yield being
an example of someone cultivating and spreading this kind of praxis.)
Until they rise to the challenge, that same praxis enables women to
practice self-care as resistance both as individuals and in communities.
This is how we tend to internalize misogyny because we don’t stand a
chance against patriarchy “out there” if we do not examine and unroot
it from within emotionally and spiritually. It doesn’t work to just be
aware politically.
Conclusion
Reading Neoliberal Fairy Tales
Erin Hurt

I read my first chica lit (Latina chick lit) novel more than thirteen years
ago as a graduate student while taking a course on Latinx literature and
popular culture. In that moment, I was struck by what I could see this
novel trying to do—it sought to critique and push back against represen-
tations of Latinidad that the novel found intractable and oppressive, not
just those found within the white supremacist dominative cultural imag-
inary but also within the Latinx community, while offering protagonists
that exemplified new ways of being Latina that more closely reflected the
author’s own upper-middle class, college-educated, professional experi-
ence. Yet, in its effort to construct a new understanding of Latinidad,
this novel also marginalized other Latinas, especially those who were
poor, and not only distanced itself from foundational Chicanx writers
but did so with disdain. I knew I wanted to grapple with the complicated
ambivalence of this work and the questions it raised.
In one form or another, I have been reading, writing, and teaching
about chica lit for the past fourteen years. I did and continue to find
chica lit, with the complicated mix of cultural work its novels do, a com-
pelling site for study. As the field of chica lit has taken shape over time,
its novels have become places where protagonists seek to negotiate and
articulate many different ways to be both Latina and American. These
novels continually work to convey their protagonists’ experiences of oc-
cupying a space between assimilation, acculturation, and the complete
rejection of dominant culture, of finding oneself more familiar with, and
perhaps having a preference for, dominant culture while also strongly
identifying as Latina without necessarily knowing what that means. As
with all literature, these novels share their depictions with readers, an
act always both simple and profound. As Stuart Hall reminds us,

popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at

all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we re-
ally are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly
mythic. It is a theater of popular desires, a theater of popular fan-
tasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of
ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not
212  Erin Hurt
only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to
ourselves for the first time.
(113)

The cultural work of chica lit matters—these novels function as places

where authors and their protagonists mirror and shape cultural under-
standings of Latinidad as well as the ways that this identity is enacted
and enforced, and where readers, with all manner of interpretive frame-
works, consume these mythic depictions. The belief that chick lit novels
have something important and timely to tell us lies at the heart of this
collection.
These scholarly pieces have sought to describe the potential found in
chick lit, calling attention to the ways in which these novels do certain
kinds of cultural work that has been largely absent from commercial
popular fiction: centering middle-class professional protagonists of color,
engaging in consciousness-raising, making visible the varying configura-
tions of oppression and prejudice that protagonists face on a daily basis,
and showing women navigating the conflicts many face when straddling
multiple cultures and socioeconomic classes. In this vein, Pamela Butler
and Jigna Desai’s essay reflects on the delight they saw and continue to
see in chick lit and its many pop cultural offspring. Lauren O’Mahony
details how Anita Heiss’s protagonists break new ground by rewriting
Aboriginal women in Australia’s cultural imaginary. In her essay on Kim
Wong Keltner’s novels, Jennifer Woolston lauds these works’ ability to
depict the many different cultural and historical forces that shape the
protagonist’s relationship with her Asian American heritage. Some of
these essays explore how chick lit novels serve as a medium where tropes
and generic conventions transform and evolve, whether that be Cherise
Pollard’s exploration of how black chick lit commodifies the black femi-
nist trauma narratives or Felicia Salinas-Moniz’s look at how Latina YA
introduces issues of race and class into the larger field of young adult lit-
erature. However, not all work celebrates the genre. Jenny Heijun Wills’s
chapter argues that protagonists in Asian/American chick lit construct
their American identity using colonial and Orientalist ideologies. Work
by Heike Mißler’s and Erin Hurt both offer meta-critiques of chick lit.
Missler’s exploration of the neoliberal fantasy at the heart of Erica Ken-
nedy’s Feminista demonstrates how Kennedy’s novel self-reflexively cri-
tiques the white-centric focus of the genre’s conventions. Hurt’s critique
is directed not at the novels themselves but rather the critical framework
used to explain the genre’s emergence and its literary history. When
taken together as a collection, these essays become a conversation, with
voices that respond to and disagree with each other, that illustrates what
this genre can teach us.
While these new essays, and the pioneering work they build on, cover
considerable ground, there is one additional element of chick lit that
 Conclusion  213
deserves attention: the common thread of neoliberal rationality that
runs through many of the novels studied in these essays. This is be-
cause these novels, like contemporary women’s lived experiences, are
saturated with neoliberal ideology as the result of US and other national
cultures’ profound internalization of neoliberalism’s “widely and deeply
disseminated governing rationality” (Brown 9). Though several essays
in this collection make mention of neoliberalism and its place in the
chick lit genre, few aside from Missler’s explicitly focus on this school of
thought.1 However, these analyses show that, while one of the conven-
tions of the chick lit genre is highlighting oppression and discrimination
in women’s lived experiences, many of these novels and their protago-
nists deliver these cultural critiques from within a neoliberal framework.
This framework undermines and constrains, in insidious ways, the cul-
tural work that these novels seek to do by depicting structural obstacles,
such as racism, sexism, and poverty, as capable of being solved at the
individual level while also bringing protagonists’ actions in line with
the tenets of neoliberal rationality. This essay tells a story about the
pervasiveness of neoliberalism in the genre of chick lit. It begins by de-
scribing the forms that neoliberalism has taken, and then identifies how
various strands of neoliberal thought appear and reappear, beginning
with the discourse surrounding chick lit’s beginnings during the 1990s
and resurfacing in the current #metoo debate. It ends with a discussion
of the neoliberal fairy tale and an examination of the chick flick Girls
Trip (2017) to show how neoliberal rationality inhabits the genre as a
survival strategy. If neoliberalism is “entrenched at a very personal level
of existence” (Mirowski 90), this conclusion aims to show how neoliber-
alism’s colonization of chick lit helps to perpetuate the social conditions
in which we find ourselves.

Neoliberal Mutations
Neoliberalism can be understood as referring to a set of economic pol-
icies and principles that encourage a free market; under neoliberalism,
the state’s role shifts from being a “provider of public welfare” to “[pro-
moting] markets and competition” (Birch para 4). Wendy Brown argues
that the ideology of neoliberalism has affected nations and societies by
extending far beyond the economic sphere, as a “normative order of
reason” that effectively marketizes every area and aspect of our lives
(Brown 9, 17). 2 Our internalization of a neoliberal rationality does not
mean that every aspect of our lives suddenly relates to the market or to
money. Rather, our behaviors begin to mirror those behaviors that a
free market favors. Brown explains, “We may (and neoliberalism inter-
pellates us as subjects who do) think and act like contemporary market
subjects where monetary wealth generation is not the immediate issue,
for example, in approaching one’s education, health, fitness, family life,
214  Erin Hurt
or neighborhood” (30–31). As contemporary market subjects, we value
entrepreneurialism and see others as our competition (Duroy 606). To
succeed as market subjects, then we aim “to self invest in ways that
enhance [our] value” or that “attract investors,” and we are always con-
stantly monitoring our social status and seeking to boost it in every as-
pect of our lives (Brown 33). As Brown explains, this desire becomes
all-encompassing: the decisions we make about our education, our free
time, or even having kids, are always in service to the amplification of
our “self’s future value” (34). Because neoliberal rationality shifts the
onus for cultivating value to the individual, the inability to thrive or
even survive must always be seen as one’s own fault, thus “poverty … is
a result of entrepreneurial failure” (Duroy 606).
Neoliberal feminism is the result of marketplace principles seeping into
feminist beliefs, and empowerment, conventionally defined by feminism
as collective equality and power for women, becomes centered on indi-
vidual power and action as well as self-betterment and self-investment.
Though seemingly feminist, neoliberal feminism disconnects women’s
empowerment from a structural understanding of power and instead
frames women’s agency as individualistic and defined by “having choices”
(Grewal qtd. in Butler and Desai 8). A woman’s ability to achieve her own
aims, in spite of continued systemic oppression of women on a structural
level, becomes evidence of equal opportunity and power. At the moment
of chick lit’s inception during the 1990s, women wanted to feel in con-
trol and to have more agency, and once neoliberal rationality colonized
feminism, the message it sent to women was that you can be in control.

The Consequences of Neoliberal Feminism

We can observe neoliberal rationality at work in the early 1990s by turn-
ing to the writing of Cris Mazza. Mazza coined the term chick lit when
she coedited an anthology titled Chick Lit in 1995, though her defini-
tion of the moniker differed greatly from the current commercial genre.3
In a pair of essays published in 2000 and 2006, Mazza reflects on her
thoughts at the time of the collection’s publication, which took place just
a few years after McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale. In her writing, we see
the anxieties she has as a white woman with an ambivalent relationship
to feminism and the Women’s Movement, especially regarding the way
women were being positioned by US culture and the publishing industry.
We also see how these anxieties are soothed by the tenets of neoliberal
feminism and understand why Mazza and others could find this ideol-
ogy so appealing.
Mazza’s writing illuminates multiple, and at times conflicting, desires:
to acknowledge the specific challenges and traumas that women face
but also to see women as more than their victimhood and as sometimes
complicit in the challenges they face. Much of Mazza’s perspective about
 Conclusion  215
women’s agency comes from her perspective on trauma and victimhood.
She believes that women’s trauma has become the only aspect of wom-
en’s lives that commercial publishing deems marketable. She writes, “the
media, the publishing industry, and culture in general only give ­women’s
experiences attention when they are victims’ experiences” (“Editing
Postfeminist” 110). While Mazza names examples of the traumas the
publishing industry is willing to publish—such as sexual assault, the
glass ceiling, and sexual harassment, among others—she argues, “let’s
not let the media insinuate these experiences are the only ones women
have or can imagine!” (“Editing Postfeminist” 110). For Mazza, fiction
can and should represent women beyond the trauma they experience; it
should demonstrate the complexity of women’s lives.
Mazza negotiates women’s powerlessness in the face of structural
forces like sexism and systemic gendered violence by turning toward
a neoliberal version of women’s empowerment. To reclaim power for
herself and for other women, Mazza envisions a way to move beyond
trauma and an all-encompassing patriarchy. She argues that women
must take more responsibility for their behavior instead of positioning
themselves as victims of the patriarchy. She describes the characters in
her collection who embody this behavior as “[women] dealing with who
they’ve made themselves into rather than blaming the rest of the world”
(Mazza “Editing Postfeminist” 105). For Mazza, claiming ownership
of the problems women experience becomes a way to gain power. She
praises the authors in her collection as being “[liberated] [t]o admit we’re
part of the problem,” asking, “How empowering could it be to be part of
the problem instead of just a victim of it?” (“Who’s Laughing Now?”18).
This solution—to be part of the problem—demonstrates the attractive-
ness of neoliberal feminism. For Mazza, if women can be part of the
problem, then perhaps they are not at the mercy of a larger patriar-
chal system. Mazza accepts a version of empowerment that offers some
women a sense of agency but only in return for blaming women rather
than social systems for their trauma.
A contemporary corollary, one that demonstrates the longevity and
consequences of neoliberal feminist thinking, can be found in the back-
lash discourse to the #metoo movement. Tarana Burke created the “Me
Too” campaign in 2007, and Alyssa Milano boosted it into the main-
stream when she turned the phrase into a Twitter hashtag in October
2017 (Garcia). After notable high-profile Hollywood and media figures
such as Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and Matt Lauer were fired as
a result of sexual harassment claims, articles questioning the movement
began to appear. Moira Donegan describes this rift in feminism when
she writes,

#MeToo and its critics … disagree over where to locate responsi-

bility for sexual abuse: whether it is a woman’s responsibility to
216  Erin Hurt
navigate, withstand and overcome the misogyny that she encoun-
ters, or whether it is the shared responsibility of all of us to eliminate
sexism, so that she never encounters it in the first place.
(para 8)

In articles critical of the movement, we find a construction of agency

similar to in Mazza’s essays. One example of the anti-#metoo discourse
can be found in Daphne Merkin’s essay in The New York Times titled,
“Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.” She wor-
ries, “we seem to be returning to a victimology paradigm for young
women” where they see and others see them as weak and delicate (para
8). While Merkin does acknowledge, because of the continued frequency
and scope of sexual harassment complaints, that sexism exists and call
for larger cultural change as the solution to these issues, she also asks,

What happened to women’s agency? That’s what I find myself won-

dering as I hear story after story of adult women who helplessly acqui-
esce to sexual demands. … a majority of women I know have been in
situations in which men have come on to them — … They have rou-
tinely said, ‘I’m not interested’ or ‘Get your hands off me right now.’
(para 10)

Like Mazza, Merkin positions women as part of the problem. Sexual

harassment happens, in Merkin’s scenario, because women do not stand
up to their harassers. Jaclyn Friedman offers a critique of neoliberal fem-
inism, which she terms “Fauxpowerment,” explaining that it offers “the
idea that women can somehow just self-improve our way free,” with the
result that “if [women] don’t feel free, it’s our fault and we just have to
get stronger on our own” (@jaclynf). Friedman reminds her audience
that true feminism employs collective action to changes social and cul-
tural structures and systems rather than asking individual women to
weather or change their circumstances. These real-life instances show
how neoliberalism warps feminist ideology, but they also illustrate why
Mazza and others could see neoliberal feminism as a viable solution.
Neoliberalism depends on Mazza’s internalizing of its ideology. It en-
sures its own survival by embedding itself in every aspect of daily life,
so that it can then be circulated and distributed by people and texts.
Studying chick lit allows us to note how neoliberal rationality uses a
particular approach within this genre to normalize itself, one that I term
the neoliberal fairy tale.

Defining the Neoliberal Fairy Tale

We might define the neoliberal fairy tale as a narrative that conveys
the challenges that contemporary women face—to readers’ delight and
 Conclusion  217
pleasure—while also offering solutions to these challenges that are
rooted in neoliberal ideology. The neoliberal fairy tale attracts read-
ers because it acknowledges the specific challenges women face in the
­t wenty-first century, while also adding an aspirational twist to give read-
ers an optimistic and hopeful ending to those same problems and chal-
lenges. While neoliberal rationality has invaded every nook and cranny
of modern life, this ideology fits especially well within the chick lit genre
because, like the genre, it is designed to wrap the messiness of life up
into a tidy ending, to showcase clear arcs where characters push forward
through foibles and challenges, eventually reaching what they have been
seeking—happiness, success, financial stability, often a romantic rela-
tionship. While current novels, films, and other cultural texts offer con-
temporary examples of the fairy tale, the tenets of neoliberal rationality
and neoliberal feminism have been present in chick lit since its inception.
If we return to some of the genre’s earliest moments, we can see how that
neoliberalism had already been incorporated into novels as a panacea to
the very problems that chick lit sought to make visible. Women of var-
ious ethnicities found themselves living in a time in which they finally
had language to describe the ways in which their civil rights continued
to be ignored and their cultural status marginalized, and some so turned
to fantasies of individualism and meritocracy to imagine paths forward
from patriarchal oppression.
In Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992), one of the very first
chick lit novels published, we can see black women already embracing
neoliberalism’s solutions by turning away from the larger world and to
their own lives to gravitate toward change that they can impel as indi-
viduals rather than as part of a collective whole. The four protagonists,
Savannah, Bernadine, Robin, and Gloria, are all middle or upper-middle
class, have successful careers, and worry more about finding love than
calling out social injustice. E. Shelley Reid, writing of McMillan and
other 1990s black women writers, points out “the characters’ willing-
ness to replace concern about who they are with worries about how they
are perceived by others” (Reid 316), but she reads this “narcissism” as
a strategic move by black women who know that they will be judged by
“skeptical or bigoted outsiders” and thus perform respectability in order
to achieve their aspirations (Reid 317).
Scholars such as Thulani Davis argue that novels like Waiting to Ex-
hale display “an absence of protest” (Davis 26). Though Davis and oth-
ers read this text as turning away from women as political subjects, Reid
sees black women’s writing during this period as depicting a different
kind of power, writing,

the struggles in these texts are phrased in the economic terms of

who has “the paper”: dollar bills, to be sure, but also contracts,
leases, licenses, and resumes. Some of the references flirt with the
218  Erin Hurt
kind of general superficiality we have come to associate with the
economic views of many 1980s Americans … In these texts, money
keeps families together, moves children out of dangerous neighbor-
hoods, provides educations, aids ailing parents, boosts self-esteem
in a capitalist world, and helps those who have it to earn the respect
of surrounding whites in power.
(322)

Reid’s description of characters whom obtain power by focusing on wealth

attainment resonates with Brown and Mirowski’s examples of behaviors
that market subjects engage in as a result of adopting or internalizing a
neoliberal rationality. Because the nature of this genre is marked by its
ability to reflect women’s contemporaneous lived experiences, we might
see McMillan’s characters’ neoliberal thinking as a possible reflection
of middle-class black readers’ internalization of this same ideology. We
might understand that McMillan’s novel, and its protagonists who prior-
itize getting their paper, marks not a turn away from politics but rather
the surreptitious gains made by neoliberal rationality, with its offer of a
seemingly more accessible power. While Waiting to Exhale offers an early
example of neoliberalism within chick lit, a more contemporary example,
the film Girls Trip (2017), shows how this governing rationality continues
to represent itself in new and more cunning ways to continue its existence.

If I Will It, I Can Have It All: The Cunning of Neoliberal

Rationality
Girls Trip (2017) opens with a shot of a television interview of one of the
film’s four protagonists, Ryan Pierce. The interviewer tells Ryan, “You
write bestselling books, you cook on talk shows, you make appearances
all across the country. How do you have time for a life?” Ryan responds,
“As women, we’re told we have to choose between the personal and the
professional but I control my own destiny. I am strong, I am powerful, I
am beautiful. If I will it, I can have it all.” Her most recent best seller is,
in fact, titled You Can Have It All. Though Ryan’s statements repackage
the old canard that hard work leads to success, they are also incredibly
beguiling for women, especially black women, who still find themselves
fighting to be seen in the cultural imaginary as powerful, beautiful, and
agents of their own destiny. Ryan’s proclamation offers film viewers
an alluring, powerful, and seemingly feminist way to view oneself and
one’s place in the world—that, through individual strength, power, and
self-will, we can all become wealthy, successful professionals in happy
­marriages—in effect, a neoliberal fairy tale.
Though the plot of Girls Trip reveals that Ryan’s life—with her hus-
band’s infidelity, her fertility problems, and her private grief—is far from
perfect, it ultimately shows us that when Ryan draws on her strength
 Conclusion  219
and courage to confess to fans that her life is a mess, she can surmount
all the obstacles she faces and achieve success (in this case, by signing a
lucrative deal with a Costco-like company to offer her products). Girls
Trip demonstrates the unsettled position that many chick lit novels and
chick flicks, suffused with neoliberal rationality, tend to occupy. Even as
the text critiques neoliberal ideas, it cannot help but turn back toward,
embrace, and reinstate them. This self-protective behavior is itself the
result of neoliberalism, which Mirowski describes as “a living, mutating
entity” that colonizes our everyday lives (Mirowski 51). Girls Trip of-
fers a narrative that seemingly deconstructs and critiques the neoliberal
fantasy by showing Ryan’s inability to create a perfect life for herself but
ultimately reinforces neoliberal rationality by rewarding Ryan’s public
announcement of her failure with financial success.
Girls Trip tells the story of four best friends, Ryan (Regina Hall), Sasha
(Queen Latifah), Dina (Tiffany Haddish), and Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith),
who make up the Flossy Posse. The women reunite in New Orleans to
revive their neglected friendships with each other while also struggling
with their own personal difficulties, including infidelity, bankruptcy,
and inadvertent celibacy. This chick flick contains the same plot points
as its literary cousin. It explores the everyday life of its protagonists from
an up close point of view, and these women’s struggles are meant to
be familiar and relatable while also entertaining, humorous, and the
result of their own fallibility. Also in keeping with the generic conven-
tions of chick flicks, these women, while relatable, are just a little more
glamorous, funny, raunchy, and (Ryan and Sasha, at least) wealthy than
the average viewer. Further, their raunchiness breaks new representa-
tional ground by resisting long-held narratives about black women and
respectability, instead offering viewers’ characters who are elegant pro-
fessionals but also salacious and rowdy.4
We see their struggles too. Ryan, despite working to have it all, must
handle her husband’s frequent infidelities while maintaining a cheerful
public façade. Sasha struggles financially, unable to pay her bills and
facing foreclosure. Lisa has a happy family, raising her two children
while living with her mother, but has no romance or sexual encounters
in her life. Like other neoliberal fairy tales, the film comments on race
by drawing attention to the issue of cultural appropriation via that char-
acter of Liz Davelli, Ryan’s white agent.5 This neoliberal fairy tale, like
others, helps its audience to feel seen and represented by offering rep-
resentations both familiar but also new. Viewers take pleasure in these
moments and appreciate seeing themselves and their experiences—good
and bad—on the big screen, and this is part of what bonds readers and
viewers to these texts.
Part of the cunning of neoliberal rationality and neoliberal feminism
is how Girls Trip presents itself as a critique of neoliberal ideology by
demonstrating that Ryan’s slogan (“I can have it all”) is a lie. Early on,
220  Erin Hurt
the film indicates that Ryan’s success is the result of savvy self-promotion
and the careful management of her brand, meaning her public persona
and her happy marriage. Her success at promoting herself and her mar-
riage is rewarded in the film when Best Mart decides to sign Ryan and
Stuart. The CEO of Best Mart, when explaining in a business meet-
ing why she wants to give the couple a contract with her company, tells
Stewart and Ryan, “You two give people hope that they can have it all.”
However, viewers watching this know that this couple is barely holding
their relationship together. We learn that Ryan and Stuart’s romance is
far different than their media portrayal of it—Sasha receives a picture of
Stuart kissing another woman, and when the women break the news to
Ryan, viewers quickly realize that this has happened many times. When
Ryan confronts Stuart shortly after, she tells him, “This isn’t a marriage,
but we agreed to at least be a partnership, and you can’t hold up your
end of the bargain.” Stuart, in efforts to cajole her into staying with him,
tells her, “Our brand is who we are … It’s who you are. Giving all that
up because I was sloppy isn’t worth all that you have worked very hard to
accomplish … let’s just handle our business.” Ryan decides to stay with
Stuart in order to close a deal with Best Mart, a huge chain store. Indeed,
her brand depends on Stewart, since she defines “having it all” as having
a perfect marriage and a successful career. Thus, she has commodified
and capitalized on her personal life to achieve professional success but
now must maintain the illusion in order to reach her career goals.
The film mounts its strongest critique of neoliberal rationality when
Ryan reveals the truth about her marriage to the audience at Essence Fest.
Though she initially attempts to give her prepared speech to the crowd,
she instead decides to confess to them, admitting, “I’m not perfect. I do
not have it all. In fact, my life is all kinds of screwed up.” She reveals that
her fear of being alone led her to stay with Stuart, explaining,

I was willing to accept being treated as less than I am. And I know
I’m not alone in this. I know that there are a lot of us who stay in
bad relationships because we have convinced ourselves that being
disrespected is better than being alone. But we shouldn’t fear being
alone because there is power in discovering your own voice.

As she says this, an audience member calls out affirmatively. When Stew-
art tries to interrupt and quiet her, Ryan tells him to sit down, and the
crowd murmurs its support. Ryan ends her speech by telling the crowd,
“No one has the power to shatter your dreams unless you give it to them.
And I refuse to give anyone that power again. If anything, I hope that me
revealing my truth inspires you to realize your own.” The entire room
gives her a standing ovation and her friends embrace her in a group hug.
It is crucial to understand here that having it all depends on a woman’s
individual strength, power, and self-will; she must possess these qualities
 Conclusion  221
in order to achieve her dreams. This is how the film’s neoliberal rational-
ity reasserts itself. Ryan succeeds because she takes the right actions. The
final scenes of the film reward Ryan’s truth telling and strength with fi-
nancial success. Though the film acknowledges the limits of self-will and
personal power with regard to having it all, it instead replaces ­Ryan’s orig-
inal fantasy with another: if a woman simply tells the truth, her problems
will solve themselves, and she will find happiness and success. Mirowski
argues that neoliberalism hides its own role in the implementation and
internalization of its ideas by “offer[ing] more, better neoliberaliam as
the counter to a sputtering neoliberalism, all the while disguising any
acknowledgement of that fact,” and terms this “the Russian doll struc-
ture” (Mirowski 92). Earlier in the film, after watching Ryan struggling
to maintain her composure after meeting Stuart’s mistress, Sasha tells
her, “You don’t have to keep pretending like you have it all. … Maybe
you would help [people] more if you just tell ‘em the truth, that this shit is
hard.” Ryan does exactly this, and her revelation is rewarded as her agent
reveals to her that Best Mart still wants to ink a deal with her, primarily
because market research supports her decision. As her agent explains, “It
turns out single women are an even bigger market.”
The power of chick lit, and the allure of the neoliberal fairy tale, can
be seen in the film’s acknowledgment of the real obstacles Ryan (and
other characters) face when trying to “have it all,” and the reality that
these standards are not achievable, while also offering a false vision of
how this problem will be resolved. While Ryan speaks her truth, leaves
her husband, and receives monetary rewards, most women would in-
stead be facing the stress and anxiety of suddenly being a single-check
household. Girls Trip allows the characters, but also the viewers, to
position themselves beyond all of these real-world impediments. Neo-
liberalism even permeates the discourse about the film, especially with
regard to Tiffany Haddish, the film’s breakout star. Haddish left home at
thirteen because of parental abuse, lived in foster care for several years
until government funding ran out, and was then homeless on and off
during her teen years (Weaver). Her life experiences, the result of sys-
temic government failures as well as the absence of a social safety net,
have been spun by the media into a narrative that posits Haddish’s hard
work as the means by which she transcended her tough beginnings and
became wildly successful. These narratives encourage readers to imagine
themselves as transcending the social structure that they may not be able
to name but which nevertheless impedes their abilities to achieve their
desires. This is the story we want to hear.

Conclusion
The neoliberal fairy tale is radically different than the reality of living in
a neoliberal society. A recent publication by Michael Hobbes details how
222  Erin Hurt
the US’s embrace of neoliberal economic policies has led to a nightmar-
ish present and future for millennials, especially those who are black and
Latinx,6 by producing a society where people are increasingly unable to
meet their own basic needs as a result of policies that have weakened
existing social welfare programs, eliminated jobs and job security, and
increased the cost of basic self-care. “The rules have changed,” Hobbes
writes, “and we’re left playing a game that is impossible to win.” The
people Hobbes interviews recognize that they cannot seem to get ahead,
but they cannot articulate exactly what holds them back. Their con-
fusion epitomizes our culture’s internalizing of neoliberal rationality,
through these fairy tales and other means, and how this has clouded
our ability to clearly see the forces and policies that have led to social,
economic, and political disempowerment. While we can recognize the
problems we face, these fairy tales help to obscure the root as well as
the real solutions—usually collective action—to the problems we face.
The cunning of neoliberalism, and neoliberal rationality, is that we get
few glimpses of those who, unlike Haddish, do not or cannot find good
jobs. The very real issues faced by Haddish, Ryan, and the millennials
in Hobbes’s article are made more palatable by this rationality so as to
imply that wealth, hard work, individual action, or consciousness-raising
will be enough. Perhaps more insidiously, neoliberal fairy tales protect
neoliberalism by obscuring how its economic policies are to blame for
frequently dire outcomes, instead shifting blame to individuals (you didn’t
do enough) for the poverty, illness, and medical debt they face. This bait-
and-switch strategy undermines while appearing to aid and resist, and this
blunts our ability to recognize what is happening or to change the system.
Neoliberal reason erases collective action or collective power, and
coupled with the conventions of chick lit, short circuits any glimpse of
structural inequality in most of these fictional universes. As I’ve argued
elsewhere, the unreality of the fairy tale can only be revealed when the
novels themselves acknowledge that social forces such as racism shape
our actions and curtail our agency, and that social inequality can only
be fixed through collective action and large-scale culture change. The
consciousness-raising around race, ethnicity, and nationality in many
of the novels discussed in this collection invites readers to become more
aware of the realities that protagonists face. However, neoliberal ratio-
nality limits the power of consciousness-raising when it offers individual
agency as the solution to structural injustice. Only when novels present
discrimination as systemic and structural do they offer readers a realistic
understanding of the problems facing their protagonists. Just as chick
lit offers the ideal staging grounds for the post-Women’s Movement,
post-Civil Rights, and third wave moment, it also offers an ideal site at
which to observe neoliberalism at work and analyze the ways in which
neoliberal rationality shapes the worldviews of protagonists, novels, and
readers.
 Conclusion  223
Notes
1 For other mentions of neoliberalism and chick lit in this collection, see Pa-
mela Butler and Jigna Desai’s “Prologue—A Second Read: Further Reflec-
tions on Women of Color Chick Lit” and Erin Hurt’s “The White Terry
McMillan: Centering Black Women Within Chick Lit’s Genealogy.”
2 Philip Mirowski describes this process as “the accretion of neoliberal atti-
tudes, imaginaries, and practices that have come to inform everyday life”
(92).
3 Mazza sees the genre of chick lit, as defined by its current generic conven-
tions, as distinctly different than and inferior to what she was attempting
to do, and she dismissively describes the genre as being about “career girls
looking for love” (Mazza “Who’s Laughing Now” 21).
4 The film was written by a multiethnic group of writers featuring several
black women, including Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver. Oliver has explained
in interviews that “she wanted to break down the barriers of respectability
politics and portray black women being carefree and having fun just like
everybody else,” and she has said, “I think we need to show all aspects of
black lives. … It doesn’t have to always be so serious. We can just relax and
like hang out and have a good time too” (Washington).
5 When we first meet Liz, she uses several black colloquialisms during her
conversation with Ryan, until Ryan takes Liz aside, asks her to stop, and
reminds her that she will be a guest in a space meant to celebrate black
women.
6 Hobbes writes,
The wealth gap between white and non-white families is massive. …
The result is that millennials of color are even more exposed to disaster
than their peers. Many white millennials have an iceberg of accumulated
wealth from their parents and grandparents that they can draw on for
help with tuition, rent or a place to stay during an unpaid internship. …
And so, instead of receiving help from their families, millennials of color
are more likely to be called on to provide it.
These policies affect black and Latinx communities to a greater degree be-
cause institutional racism has prevented nonwhite families from accumulat-
ing much wealth that can later serve to offset emergencies or skyrocketing
debt, health-care costs, or other expenses.

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Aboriginal Australian Chick Lit (Koori Chick Lit)

Heiss, Anita. Avoiding Mr Right. Bantam, 2008.
———. Manhattan Dreaming. Bantam, 2010.
———. Not Meeting Mr Right. Bantam, 2007.
———. Paris Dreaming. Random House, 2011.
———. Tiddas. Simon and Schuster, 2014.

Arabic Chick Lit

Alsanea, Rajaa [Rajā’al-Sāni]. Girls of Riyadh [Banāt al-Riyāḍ]. Translated by
Marilyn Booth, Penguin, 2007.

Black Chick Lit (Sistah Lit, Girlfriend Lit, Sisterfriend Lit)

Brady, K.L. The Bum Magnet. LadyLit Press, 2011.
Briscoe, Connie. Can’t Get Enough. Harlem Moon, 2005.
Burks, Cris. SilkyDreamGirl. Harlem Moon, 2002.
Copeland, Sheila. A Chocolate Affair. Kimani Press Harlequin, 2001.
Hill, Donna. Divas, Inc. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004.
Kennedy, Erica. Bling: A Novel. Miramax Books, 2004.
———. Feminista. St. Martin’s, 2009.
Lee, Tonya Lewis and Crystal McCrary Anthony. Gotham Diaries. Hyperion,
2004.
LeFlore, Lyah Beth and Charlotte Burley. Cosmopolitan Girls. Broadway
Books, 2007.
Little, Benilde. Acting Out. Simon and Schuster, 2003.
———. Good Hair. Simon and Schuster, 1996.
———. The Itch. Simon and Schuster, 1998.
———. Who Does She Think She Is? Simon and Schuster, 2005.
McMillan, Terry. How Stella Got Her Groove Back. 1996. New American Li-
brary, 2004.
———. The Interruption of Everything. Viking, 2005.
———. Waiting to Exhale. 1992. Penguin Books, 2011.
Morrow, Kieran Batts et al. Fab. Harlem Moon, 2005.
Thomas, Trisha R. (2000–2014) Nappily, vols 1–8.
Williams, Tia. It Chicks. Hyperion, 2007.
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———. Sixteen Candles (An It Chicks Novel). Disney Book Group, 2008.
———. The Accidental Diva. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004.
———. The Perfect Find. Brown Girls Books, 2016.

East Asian and East Asian American

Chua, Noelle. Mrs. MisMarriage. Marschall Cavendish Corp., 2008.
Chun, Sue. Beijing Doll. Abacus, 2004.
Dam, Julie K.L. Some Like It Haute. Warner Books, 2006.
Guo, Xiaolu. First Anchor Books ed. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for
Lovers. Anchor Books, 2008.
Hui, Wei. Marrying Buddha. Robinson Publishing, 2005.
———. Shanghai Baby. English Language trans., Pocket Books, 2001.
Hwang, Caroline. In Full Bloom. Penguin, 2003.
Keltner, Kim Wong. Buddha Baby. Avon Trade, 2005.
———. The Dim Sum of All Things. HarperCollins, 2004.
King, Mia. Sweet Life. Berkley Books, 2008.
Lockwood, Cara. Dixieland Sushi. Downtown Press (Pocket Books), 2005.
Mian, Mian. Candy. Little, Brown and Company, 2003.
Pung, Alice. Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me. First
American Printing, Plume, 2009.
Sering, Tara F.T. Amazing Grace. Marshall Cavendish International (Asia),
2009.
Tokunaga, Wendy Nelson. Midori by Moonlight. St. Martin’s, 2007.
Utami, Ayu. Saman. Translated by Pamela Allen, PT Equinox Publishing, 2005.
Wang, Annie. The People’s Republic of Desire. HarperCollins, 2006.
Wye, Lum Kit. In Five Easy Steps. Marshall Cavendish International (Asia),
2010.
Young, Keshara. The Love of Her Life. Marshall Cavendish International, 2009.
Yu, Michelle and Blossom Kan. China Dolls. St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

Latina Chick Lit (Chica Lit)

Acosta, Belinda. Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz: A Quinceañera Club Novel.
Grand Central, 2009.
———. Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over: A Quinceañera Club Novel.
Grand Central, 2010.
Acosta, Marta. (2006–2010) Casa Dracula, vols 1–4.
Alegría, Malín. Estrella’s Quinceañera. Simon Pulse, 2006.
———. Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico. Simon and Schuster,
2008.
Candela, Margo. Life Over Easy. Kensington, 2007.
———. Underneath It All. Kensington, 2007.
Cano-Murillo, Kathy. Miss Scarlet’s School of Patternless Sewing: A Crafty
Chica Novel. Grand Central, 2011.
———. Waking Up in the Land of Glitter: A Crafty Chica Novel. Grand Cen-
tral, 2010.
Castillo, Mary et al. Friday Night Chicas: Sexy Stories from La Noche. St.
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 Bibliography  227
Castillo, Mary. Hot Tamara. HarperCollins, 2005.
———. In Between Men. HarperCollins, 2006.
———. Switchcraft. HarperCollins, 2007.
Chambers, Veronica. (2010–2011) Amigas, vols 1–6.
Doyle, Linda. My Doormat Days. Amazon CreateSpace: Linda Doyle, 2014.
Ferrer, Caridad. It’s Not about the Accent. Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster),
2007.
Lopez, Erika. Lap Dancing for Mommy: Tender Stories of Disgust, Blame and
Inspiration. Seal, 1997.
———. Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing. Simon &
Schuster, 1998.
———. They Call Me Mad Dog! A Story for Bitter, Lonely People. Simon &
Schuster, 1998.
Ostow, Micol. Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa. Razorbill (Penguin), 2007.
Piñeiro, Caridad. Sex and the South Beach Chicas. Downtown Press, 2006.
———. South Beach Chicas Catch Their Man. Downtown Press, 2007.
Platas, Berta. Cinderella Lopez. St. Martin’s, 2006.
———. Lucky Chica. St. Martin’s, 2008.
Quintero, Sofia. Divas Don’t Yield: A Novel. One World-Ballantine, 2006.
Rios, Lara. Becoming Americana. Berkley Books, 2006.
———. Becoming Latina in 10 Easy Steps. Berkley Books, 2006.
Rita, Carmen. Never Too Real. Kensington Publishing Corp., 2016.
Serros, Michele. Honey Blonde Chica. Simon Pulse, 2006.
———. Scandalosa: A Honey Blonde Chica Novel. Simon Pulse, 2007.
Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. Dirty Girls on Top. St. Martin’s, 2008.
———. Lauren’s Saints of Dirty Faith. Amazon CreateSpace: Alisa Valdes-­
Rodriguez, 2010.
———. Make Him Look Good. St. Martin’s, 2006.
———. Playing With Boys. St. Martin’s, 2004.
———. The Dirty Girls Social Club. St. Martin’s, 2003.
———. The Husband Habit. St. Martin’s, 2009.
Wixon, Lisa. Dirty Blond and Half Cuban. HarperCollins/Rayo, 2006.
Zepeda, Gwendolyn. Better With You Here. Grand Central, 2012.

Muslim Chick Lit

Imtiaz, Angleby Saba. Karachi You’re Killing Me. Penguin, 2010.
Phillips, Maha Khan. Beautiful from This Angle. Random House India, 2014.

South Asian and South Asian American (Desi Lit, Ladki-Lit)

Al Hakawati, Ameera. Desperate in Dubai. Random House, 2011.
Banerjee, Anjali. Imaginary Men. Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster), 2005.
———. Invisible Lives. Downtown Press (Pocket Books), 2006.
Bantwal, Shobhan. The Dowry Bride. Kensington, 2007.
———. The Forbidden Daughter. Kensington, 2008.
———. The Full Moon Bride. Kensington, 2015.
———. The Reluctant Matchmaker. Kensington, 2012.
———. The Sari Shop Widow. Kensington, 2009.
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Bhagat, Chetan. One Indian Girl. Rupa Publications India, 2016.
Bhattacharyya, Madhumita. Dead in a Mumbai Minute. 2014.
———. The Masala Murder. Pan India, 2012.
Chauhan, Anuja. Battle for Bittora. HarperCollins India, 2010.
———. Those Pricey Thakur Girls. HarperCollins, 2013.
———. Zoya Factor. HarperCollins India, 2008.
Cherian, Anne. A Good Indian Wife. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
Daswani, Kavita. For Matrimonial Purposes. Plume, 2003.
———. Salaam, Paris. Plume, 2006.
———. The Village Bride of Beverly Hills. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004.
Dhillon, Kanika. Bombay Duck is a Fish. Westland Books, 2011.
Farooki, Roopa. Bitter Sweets: A Novel. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007.
Gulab, Rupa. Chip of the Old Blockhead. Rupa and Co., 2006.
———. Girl Alone. Penguin Books India, 2005.
———. I Kissed a Frog. India: Pan MacMillan, 2013.
Hidler, Tanuja Desai. Bombay Blues. Scholastic Inc., 2014.
———. Born Confused. Scholastic, Inc., 2002.
Jain, Anita. Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India. Bloomsbury
USA, 2008.
Jain, Smita. Kkrishnaa’s Konfessions. Westland Limited, 2008.
Janmohamed, Shelina Zahra. Love in a Headscarf. Beacon Press, 2010.
Joseph, Anjali. Another Country. Fourth Estate, 2012.
Kala, Advaita. Almost Single. Bantam Dell, 2007.
Kalra, Shuchu Singh. Done With Men. Indireads, 2014.
Kalra, Shuchi Singh. I am Big. So What!? Prakash Books, 2016.
Kashwal, Swati. Piece of Cake. Penguin Books India, 2004.
Kazi, Tanima. How to Escape an Arranged Marriage in High Heels. T. Kactus
Publishing, 2015.
Malladi, Amulya. The Mango Season. Ballantine Books, 2004.
Manikandan, Sumeetha. The Perfect Groom. Indireads, 2013.
Manral, Kiran. The Reluctant Detective. Westland Limited, 2012.
Meer, Ameena. Bombay Talkie. Serpent’s Tail, 1994.
Minhas, Nisha. Bindis and Brides. Simon and Schuster, 2005.
———. Chapatti or Chips? Simon and Schuster, 2002.
———. Passion and Poppadoms. Pocket Books, 2004.
———. Saris and Sins. Simon and Schuster, 2003.
———. The Marriage Market. Pocket Books, 2006.
Nair, Preethi. 100 Shades of White. Harper Collins, 2003.
———. The Colour of Love. HarperCollins, 2009.
Pradhan, Monica. The Hindi-Bindi Club. Bantam Dell, 2007.
Rai, Bali. (Un)arranged Marriage. Corgi Books (Random House), 2001.
Rajashree. Trust Me. Rupa and Co., 2006.
Sharma, Parul. Tuki’s Grand Salon Chase. Westland Ltd., 2013.
Shetty, Smita. Untruly Yours. Frog Books, 2012.
Singh, Jazz. Against All Odds. Indireads, 2014.
Singh, Sonia. Bollywood Confidential. HarperCollins, 2005.
———. Goddess for Hire. Harper Collins. 2004.
Trivedi, Ira. What Would You Do to Save the World? Penguin Books, 2006.
Vaidya, Manasi. No Deadline for Love. Penguin, 2011.
 Bibliography  229
Waheed, Rekha. My Bollywood Wedding. Headline Book Publishing, 2011.
———. Saris and the City. Headline Book Publishing, 2010.
———. The A-to-Z Guide to Arranged Marriage. Monsoon Press, 2005.

White Chick Lit

Alderson, Maggie. Pants on Fire. Penguin, 2000.
Bank, Melissa. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Viking, 1999.
Bushnell, Candace. Four Blondes. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.
———. Sex and the City. Grand Central Publishing, 1996.
Cabot, Meg. Girls Night In. Red Dress Ink, 2004.
Colgan, Jenny. Meet Me at the Cupcake Café. Sphere, 2011.
———. Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams. Sphere, 2012.
Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Viking, 1999.
———. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Viking, 1996.
Fowler, Karen Joy. The Jane Austen Book Club. Penguin, 2004.
Green, Jane. Jemima J: A Novel about Ugly Ducklings and Swans. Broadway
Books, 2000.
———. Mr. Maybe. Broadway Books, 1999.
———. To Have and To Hold. Broadway Books, 2004.
Giffin, Emily. Something Borrowed. St. Martin’s Press, 2004.
Karmel, Pip. Me, Myself and I. Pocket Books, 2000.
Keyes, Marian. Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married. Morrow, 1999.
———. Sushi for Beginners. HarperCollins, 2003.
———. Watermelon. Poolbeg, 1995.
Kinsella, Sophie. (2000–2015) Shopaholic vols. 1–8.
Lancaster, Jen. Here I Go Again. New American Library, 2013.
Lockwood, Cara. I Did (But I Wouldn’t Now). Pocket Books, 2006.
Matthews, Carole. For Better or Worse. 2000. Avon, 2002.
———. The Sweetest Taboo. Avon Trade, 2004.
McLaughlin, Emma and Nicola Kraus. The Nanny Diaries. St. Martin’s, 2002.
Pearson, Allison. I Don’t Know How She Does It. Vintage, 2003.
Rushby, Allison. Allmenarebastards.com. Bantam, 2000.
Senate, Melissa. See Jane Date. Red Dress Ink, 2001.
Silver, Amy. Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista. Arrow, 2009.
Sykes, Plum. Bergdorf Blondes. Miramax, 2004.
Tuccillo, Liz. How to be Single. Atria Books, 2008.
Waggener, Andrea Rains. Alternate Beauty: A Novel. Bantam Dell, 2005.
Weiner, Jennifer. Good in Bed. Pocket, 2001.
———. In Her Shoes. Atria Books, 2002.
———. Little Earthquakes. Atria, 2004.
Weisberger, Lauren. The Devil Wears Prada. Doubleday, 2003.
Wolf, Laura. Diary of a Mad Bride. Delta, 2002.
Zigman, Laura. Animal Husbandry. Dial, 1998.
Index
Aboriginal: heroines 48; identity 5,
45, 49; issues 44
Adeyemi, Tomi 35, 36
“Aha Moment” 115, 117, 125
Alegría, Malín 19, 87–97
anti-miscegenation laws 110
assimilation 4, 5, 26, 70–73, 76, 79,
88, 136, 178, 212
Anzaldúa, Gloria 3, 156–67
Austen, Jane 10, 27, 69, 80, 152,
161–65
Australian history 45, 50–53, 54–57
belonging 2, 4, 6, 16, 32, 33, 71, 87,
89, 94, 107, 167, 168, 169, 170
Berlant, Lauren 6, 7, 144
bitch lit 133–34
book clubs 33–34, 58–61
A Bridge Called My Back 3
Bridget Jones 1, 9, 13, 14, 27, 47, 75,
151, 162, 153, 155
Bridget Jones’s Diary 7, 16, 21, 33,
41, 115, 135, 136, 151, 152, 154
border 95, 178; biopolitical 36;
politics 87, 94, 97
Brady, K.L. 20, 115–127
Brooks, Daphne A. 158, 167, 169
Brown, Wendy 4, 213–14, 218
Butler, Pamela 7, 10–11, 13–15, 20,
72–73, 212, 214
career plots 30, 54, 55, 142
Carey, Tamika L. 20, 120, 122–23, 126
Chen, Eva 17, 71, 76–77, 82
chica lit 6, 12, 14, 16, 19, 72, 87, 92,
97, 136, 162, 177, 178, 180, 182,
191, 203–04, 208, 211–12
chick lit; Aboriginal see Koori lit;
African American see black chick
lit; Asian/American 5, 70–72,
75, 78–79, 83, 170, 212; Asian
American 19, 102, 107, 112, 170,
194, 197; aspirational elements
4, 6, 25, 29, 207, 208, 217, black
chick lit 8, 10, 13, 14, 54, 70, 72,
115, 134, 135, 139, 152, 157,
168–69, 171; Chinese 9, 17, 19, 76,
102, 112, 198; conventions 2, 7, 8,
13, 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 46, 54, 83,
115, 120, 147, 150, 206–7, 212,
222; criticism 7–18, 27–28, 30–31,
73, 150; East Asian 9, 170; and
feminism 7–8, 9, 11 14–15, 16, 17,
25, 26, 27–30, 55, 76, 77, 82,
131–34, 154–58, 199, 207, 209;
Koori 9, 18, 42–47, 52–61; Latina
see chica lit; and pleasure 19,
25–27, 31, 74, 76, 82, 133, 217,
219; South Asian American 5, 9,
25–27, 72, 136, 151, 194; white
9–13, 25, 27–28; women of color
and diasporic 9, 11, 18, 26–27,
30–36, 151; and YA fiction 19, 28,
34–36, 87–88, 97, 206–7
China Mary 110
Cho, Sumi, K. 104–5
citizenship 5–6, 15, 26, 27,30, 32, 94,
97, 111, 170
class 88–94, 119, 132, 140–42,
158–59, 169
colonization 50
Combahee River Collective 157
commodification 11, 97, 122
community 33, 60, 90, 92–93, 118,
126, 197, 204
confidence 77, 177, 183–84, 190
consciousness-raising 51, 54,
161–212, 222
consumerism 12, 27, 28, 34, 118, 119,
121, 123
consumption 11–12, 17–18, 25,
29–30, 33, 119, 132, 142, 154, 162,
166–69
cruel optimism 6, 144
232 Index
Daswani, Kavita 10, 21, 25–26, 36,
193–196
dating 46–54, 72, 78, 81–82, 115,
125, 143–46, 199–200
Davis, Thulani 167, 169, 217
debt 119, 222
Desai, Jigna 7, 10–11, 13–15, 20,
72–73, 212, 214
didactic elements 115, 122–23, 126
discrimination 5, 19, 34, 105, 111,
147, 191, 213, 222
dystopic fiction 35–36
Edmondson, Barbara 22, 159
exotic other 48–49, 54, 105, 136
Farr, Cecilia Koncharr 12, 20, 152
feminism: neoliberal 4, 7, 14–16,
214–17; post-8, 11, 14, 26–27, 72,
76, 132, 154, 155, 157, 171; second
wave 8, 154, 156; third wave 3, 8,
16, 133, 134, 154–57; white 73, 80,
157, 171
feminista 131–34
Ferriss, Suzanne 1, 7, 8, 10, 13,
150–51, 161
Fielding, Helen 1, 7, 8, 21, 31, 47, 75,
115, 135, 150–51, 153, 158, 161,
165–66
forever foreigner 71–72, 79, 83
friendships 89–91, 105–7, 179, 184
Génz, Stephanie 76, 133, 151,
154, 170
girlhood 87–97
Girls Trip 33–34, 218–221
governmentality 29
Guerrero, Lisa A. 10, 12, 13–15, 16,
20, 48, 54, 118, 135, 139, 150, 152,
155, 161, 163
Haddish, Tiffany 219, 221–22
Hall, Stuart 33, 211
Happy Ending 146, 179, 190
Harzewski, Stephanie 8, 10–11, 12,
46, 54–55, 150, 151
healing narrative 20, 115, 120–21,
125–26, 208
Hedrick, Tace 4, 12, 15
Heiss, Anita 5, 17, 18, 41–62
heritage 5, 19, 25, 41, 95–96, 105,
107, 181, 183–84
heteronormativity 25, 76, 83, 145
Ho, Jennifer Ann 105, 110
Hobbes, Michael 221–22
hooks, bell 136, 140
Hwang, Caroline 19, 69–70, 75,
80, 82
immigration 3, 94–96
intercultural competence 45, 52
intercultural relationships 48, 52–53
intersectionality 16, 30, 82, 157
Ireland, Justina 35–36
Jacobs, Harriet 162–65
Jaffe, Rona 10, 161
Johnson, Joanna Webb 94, 96
Keltner, Kim Wong 4, 19, 21, 70, 74,
78, 82, 102–112, 197–202
Kennedy, Erika 20, 131–147, 212
Kingston, Maxine Hong 82, 111
Kinsella, Sophia 1, 165–66
Koori lit 18, 41–45, 46, 52–61
labor: reproductive 32; feminized 32
#metoo 213, 215–16
masculinity 69, 72–73, 82, 135, 145
materialism 121
Mazza, Cris 150, 214–16
McCracken, Ellen 16, 166
McRobbie, Angela 7, 9, 132–33,
139, 154
Meloni, Christine 89, 91, 93
Merrick, Elizabeth 7, 42, 48
metafiction 45, 58–59
microagressions 105, 180, 191
Mirowski, Philip 3, 213, 218–19, 221
Mißler, Heike 5, 8, 12–13, 20, 150,
154, 156–57, 161, 171, 212–13
model minority 72, 83
Montoro Rocío 46
Moraga, Cherrié 3, 156–57
Morrison, Amanda 15, 136
Morrison, Toni 20, 120, 138, 153, 169
Naylor, Gloria 20, 120, 169–70
Negra, Diane 7, 9, 11, 154
neoliberalism 3, 7, 9, 14–15, 26–27,
29, 32–36, 213, 216–19, 221–22
neoliberal 3, 7, 9, 14–15, 26–27, 29,
32–36, 213, 216, 217, 219, 221–22;
fairy tale 213, 216–18; feminism
see feminism, neoliberal; policies 3,
4, 17, 222; rationality 4, 213–14,
216–20, 222

Okarafor, Nnedi 35–36
Ommundsen, Wenche 16, 17
Oprah Winfrey 116–17, 121–22
Orientalist 19, 26, 31, 70–72, 76–79,
83, 212
personal transformation 93, 115, 120,
123, 125
Ponzanesi, Sandra 1, 8, 10,
14–16, 162
postcolonial 16, 29, 55, 58
postfeminism see feminism: post
Quintero, Sofia 16, 21, 194, 198, 201,
203–10
racial capitalism 31–32, 34
racism 6, 26, 47, 49, 51, 54,
80–81, 103, 105, 159, 203, 205,
213, 222
Ramirez, Catherine 16, 189
recessionista lit 141–42
Regis, Pamela 46–47
Reid, E. Shelley 217–18
rhetorics of healing 122–23
Riordan, Rick 26, 35
romance genre 1, 28, 34, 46, 54–55,
61, 126, 150–51, 161
Rooks, Noliwe M. 167–69
second wave feminism see Feminism:
second wave
self-esteem 11, 135, 183–84, 186, 218
self-help 8, 69, 121–23, 143
Séllei, Nóra 2, 10, 16, 17
Sex and the City 7, 29, 31, 33, 41, 45,
54, 135–37, 161, 187
sexuality 48, 53, 72–73, 82, 115, 145
sexual assault 124–25, 215
Singh, Sonia 26, 35, 36
sistah lit see black chick lit
Smith, Caroline J. 8, 42, 151, 166
spanglish 185–86
speculative fiction 36
spiritual 20, 49, 116, 120–123,
126, 210
Springer, Kimberly 11, 154
stereotypes 5, 44, 48, 71–73, 78–79,
82–83, 105, 134–35, 159, 187–89,
191, 205 see also discrimination
Takaki, Ronald 109, 111
Tan, Amy 28, 82
Tasker, Yvonne 7, 9, 11, 154
Index  233
third wave feminism see feminism:
third wave
Thoma, Pamela 32
Thomas, Clarence 35, 156, 158
trauma 20, 115–16, 120–21,
123–26
tropes 1, 8, 11, 15, 19, 20, 31, 69,
115, 118, 126, 150, 162–63, 198,
204, 212
upward mobility 29, 90
Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa 11, 15, 136–37,
179–80, 189, 194, 198, 203
Waiting to Exhale 1, 13, 21, 34, 115,
135, 151–55, 158–62, 165, 204,
214, 217–218
Walker, Alice 20, 120, 133, 153, 155,
156, 169
Walker, Rebecca 3, 132, 133,
156, 157
Weiner, Jennifer 1, 178–79, 183
Weisberger, Lauren 1, 179
Wells, Juliette 55, 163
Whelehan, Imelda 2, 7, 151
white-centric 11, 12, 14, 28, 31–32,
72, 158, 166, 212
whiteness 9–14, 20, 41, 72, 83, 90,
138, 141, 151, 153–55, 166, 170
white chick lit see Chick lit: white
wholeness 120, 126
Williams, Tia 135–36
Wolf, Naomi 133
womanhood 9, 12, 14, 18, 22, 41, 59,
135, 136, 140, 150, 155–57, 201;
Asian/American 78, 112; black 20,
135–36, 155, 159, 162–63, 165,
167–68; Latina 88; white 13, 16,
151, 170
women of color and diasporic chick
lit see chick lit: women of color and
diasporic
women’s magazines 8, 11, 121; black
165-; white 162, 165–69
xenophobia 80, 81
Yardley, Cathy 43, 182
Young, Mallory 1, 8, 10, 13,
150–51, 161
Yu, Michelle 19, 70, 73
Zepeda, Gwendolyn 181