Overview
Project status: In progress
This project draws on cultural, disability and performance theory to develop a new theoretical framework for analysing the performativity of spectatorship, and longstanding assumptions about live performance's power to prompt spectators to reflect critically on cultural norms.
- Research leader
- Organisational unit
- Lead unit Creative Industries Faculty
- Start date
- 1st January 2009
- End date
- 1st January 2011
- Research area
- Digital media, communication and culture
Details
Chick Lit - the genre of women's fiction typified and inspired by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City - is arguably one of the fastest growing and most popular forms of contemporary fiction; with the worst reputation. Under-examined in recent academic enquiry and frequently dismissed as an updated incarnation of the likewise-derided romance novel, it remains critically disdained as a frothy and lightweight literature of feminist failings.
This project takes a contrary view. A female-centric fiction providing a platform from which women can both read and write about the comedic chaos of contemporary womanhood, chick lit may well perform a consciousness-raising function of individual women identifying and sharing their stories, communicating an empathy-driven feminism under a banner of entertainment that reaches where 'official' or 'intellectual' feminism may not.
In doing so, the genre may yet transcend the triviality of its trademark 'shopping and shoes' brand of comedy, and might be more accurately considered as a space for contemporary feminist expressions - a site of Sex and Sensibility.
This study seeks to test this hypothesis in two ways: firstly, by taking the question of chick lit's feminism to focus groups comprised of chick lit readers, and secondly, by the production of a novel-length work in the genre as an example of chick lit's feminism in action - one that speaks back to issues raised in focus groups, while functioning as a testing ground for the validity of both reader responses and my own claims.
Project description
Mapping extant debates surrounding the question of chick lit's feminism; evaluating these debates in focus groups comprised of chick lit readers; presenting the findings generated by these approaches as a discourse that my creative writing (a novel-length chick lit work) might then interact with.
