Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre 9781138092525, 9781315107400

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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, Theorizing 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 University 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

20 Poetry Against the World Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain Magdalena Kay 21 Tim O’Brien The Things He Carries and the Stories He Tells Tobey C. Herzog 22 The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction A Paradoxical Quest Edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau 23 Women on the Move Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing Edited by Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Julia Tofantšuk 24 Gender and Short Fiction Women’s Tales in Contemporary Britain Edited by Jorge Sacido-Romero and Laura Mª Lojo-Rodríguez 25 Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction Edited by Armelle Parey 26 From the Delivered to the Dispatched Masculinity in Modern American Fiction (1969–1977) Harriet Stilley 27 Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre Edited by Erin Hurt

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge​.com

Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre Edited by Erin Hurt

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-09252-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10740-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments List of Contributors Introduction

vii ix 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 Index

225 231

Acknowledgments

This project could only reach fruition with the help of many of my colleagues. 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 Pennsylvania, 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 enthusiasm 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 Routledge 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 Entertainment 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 Division. 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 Sexuality Studies and the Asian American Studies Program at the University 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 forthcoming 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 University 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 Studies at the English Department of Saarland University, Germany. Her book The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation was published in 2017. Her main research interests include feminist theory, gender and queer studies, and popular 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, Communication Research and Practice, and Text Journal. Cherise Pollard,  PhD, is Professor of English at West Chester University 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 featured in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Studies in the Novel, Hispanic Culture Review, Persuasions Online, The Performance 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 featured 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 personal 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 approach 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 deserving 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 moment 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 articulates 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 attempting 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 salary 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 depictions 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 groundbreaking 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 experiences 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 feminists 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 continued 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 neoliberal 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 neoliberalism, the individual becomes the agent responsible for making change. While neoliberal economic policies had been in place since the previous 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 metrics to every dimension of human life” (Brown  30), including democracy, politics, and justice (Brown 22), in ways that generally undermined structural critique or a sense of collective action. The US cultural imaginary 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, telling readers, “here is the you that you could be” by offering up protagonists 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, acknowledgment, and wish fulfillment. A depiction that makes one feel seen but also offers a solution—this is a captivating and irresistible vision. 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 contemporary 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 participating, 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 particular 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 practices 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 experience 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 “walkabout” – the term used for Aboriginal people who travelled for business, 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 colonisation 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 characters 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 reconsider 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 include 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 meaning to citizenship as lived experience…. [and] attends to the different 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 experience 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, sometimes, if they understand who or what constitutes these limits. Furthermore, 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 attention 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 acknowledge inequality on a social and cultural level. When these novels do acknowledge the cultural logics that govern the US national imaginary, they do so only through a framework that presents individual 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 different 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 attachment to which prevents us from being able to live that good life. While not every chick lit novel traffics in these neoliberal feminist visions, 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 fantasies 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 contemporary US women in a way not seen before. While scholars have addressed the attraction chick lit held, and holds, for readers, this genre remains undertheorized in key ways, especially with regard to ethnicity 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 understandings of feminist subjects” (27). By turning our attention to the ignored 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 curious to disgusted. At this point, critics debated whether or not this new genre was actually feminist. Some saw chick lit as “advanc[ing] the political 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, actually 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 scholarly 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 variations 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 comedies, and other mediums. Much of the criticism that emerged at this time focused on investigations of chick lit as a postfeminist text and explored 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 complacent 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 feminist 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 Postfeminism: 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 feminism 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 narratives that exist about womanhood, femininity, race and ethnicity, cultural 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 scholarship 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 protagonists 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 scholarship 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 contrast 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 example, 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 naturalizes 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 Postfeminism. 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 implying 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 becomes 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 Hungarian 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 implication 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 categories 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 protagonists 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 experience 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 meaningful 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. Usnavys prizes these expensive items because her ownership of them, however 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 protagonists, 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 relationship 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 attitude 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 ethnicities, 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 attention 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 prioritize 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 offer intersectional readings of chick lit novels, and they produce thinking 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 beyond 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, several scholars have forged new scholarly pathways that modeled how the field of chick lit criticism could reorient itself toward more expansive 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 Criticism and Transnational Feminism” (2008) both demonstrate how scholarship 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 heroines 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 experience 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 characters, 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 success 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 hegemonically 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 theoretical 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 transnationalism, 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 categories 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 political 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] operates 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 scholars 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 theoretical 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 popular culture that participates in forming and providing insights into national 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 Hedrick 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 exploring common tropes, including the genre’s engagement with the culture 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 Valdes 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 protagonists’ 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 narratives; ­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, femininity, 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 economic order” (“From China” 333). Séllei’s “Bridget Jones and Hungarian 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 transformation” (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 transform 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: Coexistence 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 politics 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 diasporic 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, theorize 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 individualistically minded women who find freedom through consumption and progress in following Western commodities and values” (214), using 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 aspirational, and how these beliefs can be shaped by globalization, diaspora, colonialism, and capitalism. This review emphasizes that the aforementioned 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 negotiate 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 Indigenous 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 contemporary 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 assumptions about ‘Oriental’ non-modernity, non-civility, and backwardness.” Wills offers close readings of the novels to demonstrate the various forms these logics take, including framing Asian/American men as “conservative, 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 protagonists, personal metamorphosis requires a negotiation and reconciliation 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 intertwining 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 contemporary, 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 position in scholarship about this genre. Heike Mißler’s “Neoliberal Fantasies: 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 standard for assessing and understanding chick lit protagonists and instead excavates the particular version of womanhood experienced by this ­novel’s biracial protagonist Sydney Zamora. Mißler’s study illustrates 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 ambivalently, by relinquishing what makes her a “shrew” and, as Mißler explains, 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 answer the following question: what happens if we position Terry McMillan’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 intersectional 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 history 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 interviews, 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 identify 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 experiences 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 writing chica lit, the story she sought to tell, and her writing process. Kim Wong Keltner, Kavita Daswani, and Sofia Quintero explain their relationships 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 encourage 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 commercial mediums while mirroring back to us the ideologies about gender, womanhood, and agency which twenty-first century women must navigate.

Works Cited Abdullah, Muhammad and Safeer Awan. “Islamic Postfeminism and Muslim Chick-Lit: Coexistence of Conflicting Discourses.” Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2017, pp. 93–105. Aguiar, Marian. “Arranged Marriage: Cultural Regeneration in Transnational South Asian Popular Culture.” Cultural Critique, vol. 84, Spring 2013, pp. 181–213. Aldama, Frederick Luis. “New Latino/a Forms.” The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature. Routledge, 2012, pp. 127–147. Al-Ghadeer, Moneera. “Girls of Riyadh: A New Technology Writing or Chick Lit Defiance.” Review of Banāt al-Riyāḍ [Girls of Riyadh] by Rajā’al-Sāni. Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2006, pp. 296–302. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. “What’s Your Flava?: Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture.” Editors Yvonne Yvonne and Diane Negra. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2007, pp. 201–226. Berlant, Lauren. “Introduction: Affect in the Present.” Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011, pp. 1–21. Booth, Marilyn. “‘The Muslim Woman’ as Celebrity Author and the Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riyadh Go On the Road.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, Special Issue: Marketing Muslim Women, Fall 2010, pp. 149–182. Brown, Wendy. “Undoing Democracy: Neoliberalism’s Remaking of State and Subject.” Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. MIT Press, 2015, pp. 17–45. Butler, Pamela and Jigna Desai. “Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras: Chick-Lit Criticism and Transnational Feminism.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–31. Chen, Eva. “Shanghai(ed) Babies: Geopolitics, Biopolitics and the Global Chick Lit.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, pp. 214–228. Farr, Cecilia Konchar. “It Was Chick Lit All Along: The Gendering of a Genre.” Editor Lilly J. Goren. You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture. UP of Kentucky, 2009, pp. 201–214.

Introduction  23 Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young, editors. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006. Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young. “Introduction.” Editors Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006, pp. 1–13. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Viking, 1996. Ganser, Alexandra. “‘Lap Dancing for Mommy’: Queer Intermediality, Chick Lit, and Trans Generational Feminist Mediation in Erika Lopez’s Illustrated Narratives.” Amerikastudien/American Studies, vol. 56, no. 2, 2011, pp. 219–240. Guerrero, Lisa. “‘Sistahs Are Doin’ It for Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black and White.” Editors Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006, pp. 87–102. Harzewski, Stephanie. Chick Lit and Postfeminism. U of Virginia P, 2011. Hedrick, Tace. “Chica Lit.” Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, edited by Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio, Routledge, 2013, pp. 342–350. ———. Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-­ First Century. U of Pittsburgh, 2015. Heiss, Anita. “International Women’s Day speech – Shanghai.” Blogger, 5 March 2008, anitaheissblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/international-womens-day-speech. html. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018. Hurt, Erin. “Cultural Citizenship and Agency in the Genre of Chica Lit and Sofia Quintero’s Feminist Intervention.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 42, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 7–31. ———. “Trading Cultural Baggage for Gucci Luggage: The Ambivalent Latinidad of Alisa Valdes Rodriguez’s The Dirty Girls Social Club.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 34, no. 3, 2009, pp. 133–153. Keltner, Kim Wong. The Dim Sum of All Things. HarperCollins, 2004. Mathew, Imogen. “‘The Pretty and the Political Didn’t Seem to Blend Well’: Anita Heiss’s Chick Lit and the Destabilisation of a Genre.” JASAL: Journal for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1–11. Mazloomian, Raihanah M.M., Shahizah Ismail Hamdan, and Raihanah M.M. “Becoming Latina, Becoming Americana: Shifting Identities in Lara Rios’s Chick Lit.” 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, 2015, pp. 69–83. McCracken, Ellen. “The Postmodern Continuum of Canon and Kitsch: Narrative and Semiotic Strategies of Chicana High Culture and Chica Lit.” Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama. U of Texas P, 2011, pp. 165–181. McMillan, Terry. Waiting to Exhale. 1992. First New American Library Trade Paperback Printing (Updated Edition), Penguin Books, 2011. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. SAGE Publications, 2009. Meyer, Doug. “The Gentle Neoliberalism of Modern Anti-bullying Texts: Surveillance, Intervention, and Bystanders in Contemporary Bullying Discourse.” Sexuality Research & Social Policy, vol.13, no. 4, December 2016, pp. 356–370. Mirowski, Philip. “Everyday Neoliberalism.” Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013, pp. 89–156.

24  Erin Hurt Mißler, Heike. The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation. Taylor and Francis, 2017. Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color. 2nd ed. 3rd printing. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983. Morrison, Amanda. “Chicanas and ‘Chick Lit’: Contested Latinidad in the Novels of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 43, no. 2, 2010, pp. 309–329. Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. Routledge, 2009. Ommundsen, Wenche, “From China with Love: Chick Lit and The New Crossover Fiction.” China Fictions, English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story, edited by A. Robert Lee. Rodophi, 2008, pp. 327–346. ———. “Sex and the Global City: Chick Lit with a Difference.” Contemporary Women’s Writing. vol. 5, no. 2, July 2011, pp. 107–124. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Postcolonial Chick Lit: Postfeminism or Consumerism.” The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 189–271. Quintero, Sofia. Divas Don’t Yield: A Novel. One World Books, 2006. Séllei, Nóra. “Bridget Jones and the Hungarian Chick Lit.” Editors Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006, pp. 173–188. Siu, Lok C. “Diasporic Cultural Citizenship: Chineseness and Belonging in Central America.” Social Text, vol. 19, no. 4, 2001, pp. 7–28. Smith, Caroline J. “One Simple Step to Becoming a V.G. Consumer: Read Women’s Magazines.” Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit. Routledge, 2008, pp. 20–44. Springer, Kimberly. “Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil Rights Popular Culture.” Editors Yvonne Yvonne and Diane Negra. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2007, pp. 249–276. Tace, Hedrick. Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century. U of Pittsburgh P, 2015. ———. “Chica Lit.” Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, edited by Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio. Routledge, 2013, pp. 342–350. Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra, editors. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2007. Tse, Kelly Yin Nga. “Post/Feminist Impulses: Neoliberal Ideology and Class Politics in Annie Wang’s The People’s Republic of Desire (2006).” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, February 2017, pp. 66–79. Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. “Latina Like Me.” Waldenbooks 21 September 2004. Internet Archive Wayback Machine. web.archive.org/web/20040921211623/ http://www.bordersstores.com/walden/feature.jsp?file=valdesrodriguezw ­Accessed 19 April 2018. Whelehan, Imelda. “High Anxiety: Feminism, Chicklit and Women in the Noughties.” Diegesis: Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions, vol. 8, Winter 2004, pp. 4–10.

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 repetition and predictability, in its quick gratification, in consuming its consumption. 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 possibilities 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 racialized 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 becomes 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 reimagining the central themes of dominant white chick lit, these novels exceeded 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 political in writings by women of color that demonstrate a complex engagement 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, genealogies, and purpose of the genre and its semiotics, and more to elucidate what it makes possible. This is not to argue that feminist literary criticism 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 citizenships 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 representations within a US context, and we also put them in dialogue with texts resonant across national cultures, responding to recent calls for transnational 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 critical and scholarly literature debating the parameters, meaning, and significance 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 toward women-of-color subgenres, which much of the scholarly and critical 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 ­ cMillan’s Waitscholars rarely considered other ur-texts such as Terry M 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-booksand-literature warning appeared in reference to the emergence of hypertext 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 technologies 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 transform each other. Indeed, book publishing has continued to change as new technologies, such as e-books, have supplemented rather than replaced 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 cultural 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 popular, 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 relays, many critics understood chick lit as commodified feminism or simply 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 diversification of popular literary markets, of course, follows capital. We understand this well. But the emergence of feminine popular fiction genres such as chick lit within women-of-color and global-South markets cannot be easily dismissed. In fact, as sales of chick lit plateaued in the US and British markets, they continued to grow elsewhere, most significantly 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 example, English-language chick lit appeared as a cosmopolitan and transnational 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 postcolonial literature, however, they also make claims to postcolonial modernity 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 political and cultural landscape for representing working women’s lives. For more than a decade, dominant white chick lit had centered on women’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 fulfillment, and economic security. As publishing, fashion, and other creative 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, professional 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 desires 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 affluent 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 consumption 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, womenof-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 gender studies, and across the disciplines, as faculty and graduate students have transformed the field through engagement with anti-racist and decolonial 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 scholarship 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 intersectionality 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 undergraduate learning. Even at its least rigorous and radical, however, even nominally intersectional feminism shifts the framework for reading 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 operations 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 scholarly 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 characterized 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 exploits 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 racialized 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 dominant 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, negotiate, 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 neoliberalism, 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 womenof-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 flexibility, women-of-color chick lit offers a more profound analysis of how nonwhite and im/migrant women’s labor has always already been critical to racial capitalism. Because women-of-color and diasporic subgenres 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 anxieties 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 social 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, television, 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 fiction 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 capitalism and neoliberalism. While reading communities can further ethnic and cultural nationalism within neoliberal multiculturalism, Bhalla suggests 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 responded 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 damages 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 mobility within the structural contradictions of neoliberalism, we suggest that women-of-color and diasporic chick lit can provide acknowledgment, if not critique, of the structural and systemic violence of neoliberalism 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 instructive to better understand the aftershocks of the global recession and precarity under neoliberalism? Put another way, if we trace the genealogy of women-of-color chick lit to middlebrow literature such as Waiting 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 popularity of graphic novels and YA fiction has skyrocketed. Chick lit continues to thrive within YA fiction; for example, Teen Vogue’s recent recommendation 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 endings. Instead, however, we suggest that dystopic YA fiction runs parallel to chick lit, capturing the anxiety and fears surrounding neoliberalism’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 entrepreneurial self, then dystopic YA makes visible its necropolitics—the state violence, structural injustice, and targeted destruction that are neoliberalism’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 cinematic 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 fiction writers such as Nnedi Okarafor and Octavia Butler (see also adrienne 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 representation, 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. Today, 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 determine who will be targeted for neoliberalism’s management and optimization of life, health, freedom, and choice, and who will be marked for its technologies of social and biological death. As these cultural productions 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 communities, 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 Yellow 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-booksby-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 Austerity, edited by Diane Negra & Yvonne Tasker. Durham, NC: Duke University 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 Aboriginal 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 (alongside 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 representations 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 characteristics 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 prompting 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 considers what currently defines chick lit, especially if new works like Heiss’s Koori lit are incorporated. Academic definitions of chick lit often acknowledge the preoccupations and cultural origins of many protagonists while demonstrating shifts in the genre since its inception in the late 1990s. Merrick’s definition 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), however, 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 protagonists. 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). Numerous 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 redeploys 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 emergence 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, heterosexual, British and American.”6 The accusation of chick lit’s representational focus on “white women” is true of Australian novels only until 2007 when Anita Heiss published the first of five “Koori lit” novels featuring 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 commercial fiction due to the potential for a wider market reach. As she explained 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 circumstances: “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 insists 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, particularly “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 Indigenous 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, offer 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 ultimately redefine popular representations of Indigenous women and Indigenous 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 independent, professional heroines navigating the ebbs and flows of their careers, 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 compounded 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 urban adventures of a newspaper columnist and her friends, Heiss’s novels focus on professional Indigenous women working in education, government, 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 perspective, 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 issues 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 romantic 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 Guerrero 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 Australians. 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 constitutes “romance” is neither straightforward nor easy. Harzewski argues that chick lit “displaces” popular romance of the Harlequin kind, offering a “postfeminist alternative” that comprises more realism, different ways of representing the hero and a questioning of romantic ideals (Chick Lit and Postfeminism 18). Montoro (2012) argues that disentangling 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 narrative 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 Aboriginal 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 romance 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 defined,” “meeting,” and “betrothal.”14 Heiss’s five Koori lit novels conform 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 heroines 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 eventually secure a good man’s love. Regis’s “society defined” is useful for identifying the cultural and social forces in a romance’s fictional universe 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 History 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). Reading Heiss’s novels through the “society defined” illuminates the contemporary 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 Australian cultural context where racism and cultural ignorance is commonplace; often these become obstacles that heroines must surmount to find companionate love. Identifying the “society defined” where the romance occurs is especially 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 Perouse” (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, chauvinists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts” (Fielding 2). The difference 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 matchmaking 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 political 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” romantic suitors. Novels that centralize “white” experiences, particularly in romantic relationships, often do not examine interracial or intercultural 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 Aboriginal people by non-Aboriginal writers, Linda Miley (2006) argues that there is a danger in “[r]epresenting the black person as a stereotypical object of fantasy and desire”; for Miley, such representations may result 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 attitudinal 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 contemporary 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 heritage” (164). She asks when he has experienced racism and discrimination 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 infiltrate 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 “Aboriginality” in Australia.17 The novel positions readers to follow Alice’s interpretation of the situation that Simon is experiencing a “white Blackfella” 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 suitors. 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, National 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 stereotypes 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 encountered by their “white” counterparts. Heiss’s novels certainly show the dating woes of her Aboriginal heroines as they endure culturally insensitivity and ignorance. Although Avoiding Mr Right’s Peta encounters some men who are so culturally ignorant that they are not worth talking to, she ultimately finds love with Mike, a “white” policeman. Their relationship blossoms after much discussion and dialogue about a range of issues affecting Aboriginal Australians. 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 interesting 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 toward Mike relates to an internal fear that he may reproduce the conflicts that have tainted the relationship between Aboriginals and police in Australia historically. Moreover, Peta fears the potential social judgment 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 decides that Mike has exercised poor judgment in supporting the accused officer. However, she realizes that if he sincerely wants to know her better, there is an opportunity to encourage his critical engagement with examples 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 relationship 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 judgmental 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 “suckling 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 probably 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 readers to see that both Peta and Mike have made assumptions about each other as individuals. Mike demonstrates ignorance about police brutality 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 harmonious 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 feelings 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 competence and mutual treatment of each other. Peta and Mike’s relationship and growing cross-cultural awareness exemplifies Miley’s (2006) argument 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 intercultural 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 relationship 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 curatorial 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, Lauren 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 realize 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 punishes 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 relationship 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 discuss “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 representational significance of romantic relationships in her Koori lit. Indigenous peoples have historically been viewed as separate or outside the mainstream whereby, as King suggests, “[i]n the media Indigenous people are not represented as leading identifiably ‘ordinary’ lives” (King 14). King traces the increasing prevalence of media representations of Indigenous 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 prominently 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 cultural background, society is redefined: ignorance and cultural intolerance are challenged, false heroes are punished, and lovers engage in cultural negotiation or consciousness-raising and honestly speak about their feelings for each other. In Heiss’s case, romantic conventions are one way that readers 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 Guerrero 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, similarly to sistah lit, represents “black women who are upper class, couture 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 representations, as Mathew argues, Heiss’s novels serve a pedagogical function by educating readers about Indigenous issues (“Educating the Reader”). Ultimately, 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 cultural 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 romance, thus more deeply engaging with the professional lives of heroines. 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 working 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. Delaying the development and resolution of romance allows the narrative to refocus on the heroine’s career and sociocultural context. Koori lit’s career and travel focus allows the novels to deeply explore and sometimes critique aspects of colonialist Australia, including perspectives on history, 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 corrected 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 cultural 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 onsciousnessraise the reader about colonial and Indigenous histories. This is important 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 “history” 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 perspectives including violence and massacres that have occurred against Aboriginal 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 compassionate to all the white people I meet today” (279). On arrival, she discovers unsurprisingly “no brown faces in sight” (279) and soon begins a conversation 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 outright, 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, “Seriously, 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 situations 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 renegotiate 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 provides insight into Australian cultural policy and Aboriginal art with heroine Peta Tully working as a manager for a government department. In Heiss’s third and fourth novels, Manhattan Dreaming and Paris Dreaming, 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 inauguration. 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 victory speech. Lauren realizes that “what Cash and I shared was an understanding 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 African 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 argument 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 Australia” (214), Libby confides in the reader that she is not completely confident. 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 exploration of character viewpoints impresses upon readers the complexity of the issue and the need for intercultural empathy in understanding numerous 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 vicariously 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 heroines, 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 touchtone for discussing a range of topics including issues affecting Indigenous 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 interpreting fiction as well as inviting consideration about who writes fiction, 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 displays its conventionality, which explicitly and overtly lays bare its condition 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 representation, interrogate what it means to write a novel, or ask what the term “novel” means (5). This section asserts that Tiddas invites reflection 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 reading groups can “often show the characters both within and outside the book club, allowing their current and back-stories to be linked to and interwoven with the reading group meetings” (2). The Tiddas group read nine Australian novels that together deal with a range of cultural and social 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 native title claims. Boundary’s narrative present interconnects with the geographical “boundary” of the past that was used to prevent Aboriginals 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 connections 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 engagements: 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 interpretation 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 commitment to community” (109). Xanthe’s enjoyment of the novel is, therefore, 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 protagonist 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 appreciated 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 exploration of their own personalized readings of the novel and the pooling 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. Alternatively, 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 interpretive 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 important 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 history 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 relationships” 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 definitely 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 women’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 reformulation of chick lit proves that the genre generally and her own novels specifically 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 beyond 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 Aboriginal 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 others should read” for the 100th spot (Anitaheiss.wordpress.com). 30 Tiddas 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 culture 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 Australian, 23 August 2008. 2 Merrick’s definition exemplifies what Regis (2011) identifies as “hasty generalisations,” a common error in logic committed by romance novel critics. As Regis explains, hasty generalizations occur when critics make broad statements about romance novels without providing sufficient evidence to support 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 published in 1996. Australian chick lit novels emerged in 2000 with the publication 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, midlife 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 satirical 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 Aboriginal 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 different 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 fiction written from a self-consciously feminist perspective, consciously encoding an ideology which is in direct opposition to the dominant gender ideology of Western society, patriarchal ideology” (1). Just as feminist writers have reenvisioned and rewritten genre fiction toward a political objective, 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), departs 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 observed 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” “interchangeably” (11) to refer to a range of texts, including serialized Harlequin romances 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 memoir 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 attempted to “control all their contacts with the wider community, to enforce

64  Lauren O’Mahony

19 20

21

22

23

24

25

26

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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 information (83–89). In 1991, the final report into the Royal Commission into Aboriginal 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.” See Evans (1982) and Saunders and Evans (1992) for discussions of the intercultural relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. 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. Such representations in Heiss’s Koori lit counter those that have historically depicted “non-Anglo” peoples, including Aboriginals, negatively in the media. See Phillips (2009) and Phillips and Tapsall (2007) for results from their study of diversity reporting in the Australian news media. 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. 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 Indigenous 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. 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 explains why few did so. 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 examines “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. 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). “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 Elizabeth 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 textual artefact. 30 Heiss’s reading challenge provides resources for off-line reading and the opportunity to add blog posts to continue the discussion online.

Works Cited Alderson, Maggie. Pants on Fire. Penguin, 2000. Behrendt, Larissa. Legacy. University of Queensland Press, 2009. Brunt, Kasey. “Anita Delves Right into Modern Dating Scene.” Northern ­Territory News/Sunday Territorian, 24 June 2007. Butler, Pamela, and Jigna Desai. “Manolos, Marriage, and Mantras: Chick-Lit Criticism and Transnational Feminism.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–31. Chen, Eva. “Neoliberal Self-Governance and Popular Postfeminism in Contemporary Anglo-American Chick Lit.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural ­Studies vol. 36, no. 1, 2010, pp. 243–275. ———. “Shanghai (Ed) Babies: Geopolitics, Biopolitics and the Global Chick Lit.” Feminist Media Studies vol. 12, no. 2, 2012, pp. 214–228. “Chick-Lit: Beneath the Pastel-Pink Veneer.” ABC Australia, 2011. www.abc. net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/chick-lit/3701846 Accessed 14 August 2014. Cranny-Francis, Anne. Feminist Fiction. Polity Press, 1990. Djundjung, Jenny M. “The Construction of Urban Single Career Woman in Indonesian Chick Lit, Jodoh Monica.” K@ta vol. 6, no. 2, 2004, pp. 124–144. “Education Fact Sheet.” Reconciliation Network, 2015, http://reconciliaction. org.au/nsw/education-kit/education/. Evans, Raymond. “‘Don’t You Remember Black Alice, Sam Holt?’: Aboriginal Women in Queensland History.” Hecate vol. 8, no. 2, 1982, pp. 6–21. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Picador, 1996. Fowler, Karen Joy. The Jane Austen Book Club. Penguin, 2004. Fullerton, Anne. “From Big Merino to Big Apple.” Sun Herald, 8 August 2010, Extra, p. 13. Guerrero, Lisa A. “‘Sistahs Are Doin’ It for Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black and White.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, Routledge, 2006, pp. 87–101. Haebich, Anna. For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940. University of Western Australia Press, 1988. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Critical Readings: Media and Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale and Karen Ross, Open University Press, 2003, pp. 51–64. Harzewski, Stephanie. Chick Lit and Postfeminism. University of Viginia Press, 2011. ———. “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, Routledge, 2006, pp. 29–46.

66  Lauren O’Mahony Heiss, Anita. Am I Black Enough for You? Random House, 2012. ———. “Anita Heiss Blog.” https://anitaheiss.wordpress.com/. ———. “Anita Heiss Website.” www.anitaheiss.com. ———. Avoiding Mr Right. Bantam, 2008. ———. Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms. Simon and Schuster, 2016. ———. I’m Not Racist But…: A Collection of Social Observations. Salt, 2007. ———. Manhattan Dreaming. Bantam, 2010. ———. Not Meeting Mr Right. Bantam, 2007. ———. Paris Dreaming. Random House, 2011. ———. Sacred Cows. Magabala Books, 1996. ———. Tiddas. Simon and Schuster, 2014. ———. Token Koori. Curringa Communications, 1998. ———. Who Am I?: The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney, 1937. Scholastic, 2001. Heiss, Anita, and Peter Minter, eds. Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literaure. Allen and Unwin, 2008. Heiss, Anita, and The Students of La Perouse Public School. Yirra and Her Deadly Dog, Demon. ABC Books, 2007. Higson, Rosalie. “Wagging the Finger Wrongfoots Romance.” The Australian, 23 August 2008, All Round Review, p. 11. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981. ———. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. South End Press, 1984. Hyder, Eileen. Reading Groups, Libraries and Social Inclusion: Experiences of Blind and Partially Sighted People. Ashgate, 2014. Janke, Terri. Butterfly Song. Penguin, 2005. Karmel, Pip. Me, Myself and I. Allen and Unwin, 2000. Keenen, Catherine. “The Koori Carrie.” Sun Herald, 10 August 2008, ExtraBooks, p. 12. King, Andrew S. “Just Relations: Indigenous Families in Australian Lifestyle Media.” Australan Journal of Communication vol. 36, no.2, 2009, pp. 17–33. Lucashenko, Melissa. Mullumbimby. University of Queensland Press, 2013. Luckhurst, Simon. Eddie’s Country: Why Did Eddie Murray Die? Magabala Books, 2006. Maddison, Sarah. Black Politics: Inside the Complexity of Aboriginal Political Culture. Allen and Unwin, 2009. Mathew, Imogen. “Educating the Reader in Anita Heiss’s Chick Lit.” Contemporary Women’s Writing vol. 10, no. 3, 2016, pp. 334–353. ———. “Love in the Time of Racism: ‘Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms’ Explores the Politics of Romance.” The Conversation, September 7 2016, http://the conversation.com/love-in-the-time-of-racism-barbed-wire-and-cherry-­ blossoms-explores-the-politics-of-romance-64126. Accessed 10 December 2016. ———. “‘The Pretty and the Political Didn’t Seem to Blend Well’: Anita Heiss’s Chick Lit and the Destabilisation of a Genre.” JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1–11. Merrick, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Why Chick Lit Matters.” This Is Not Chick Lit, edited by Elizabeth Merrick, Random House, 2006, pp. vii–xi. Miley, Linda. White Writing Black: Issues of Authorship and Authenticity in Non Indigenous Representations of Australian Aboriginal Fictional

Anita Heiss’s Koori Lit  67 Characters. Masters Dissertation, Queensland Univeristy of Technology, 2006. Montoro, Rocío. The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2012. Newns, Lucinda. “Renegotiating Romantic Genres: Textual Resistance and Muslim Chick Lit.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 53, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1–17. Newton, P.M. The Old School. Penguin, 2011. Noble, Elizabeth. The Reading Group. William Morrow Paperbacks, 2005. O’Mahony, Lauren. “Australian Rural Romance as Feminist Romance?” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture vol. 3, no. 3, 2014, pp. 285–298. ———. In Search of Feminist Romance in Australian Chick Lit. Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch Univeristy, 2015. ———. “Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks?: Ethics, Human-Dog Relationships and Gender Inequality in a Rural Australian Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies vol. 4, no. 2, 2014, pp. 1–21. Ommundsen, Wenche. “From China with Love: Chick Lit and the New Crossover Fiction.” China Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story, edited by A. Lee, Rodopi, 2008, pp. 327–345. ———. “Sex and the Global City: Chick Lit with a Difference.” Contemporary Women’s Writing vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 107–124. Pearson, Allison. I Don’t Know How She Does It. Vintage, 2003. Phillips, Gail. “Ethnic Minorities in Australia’s Television News: A Second Snapshot.” Australian Journalism Review vol. 31, no. 1, 2009, pp. 19–32. Phillips, Gail, and Sue Tapsall. “Ethnic Diversity in Television News: An Australian Case Study.” Australian Journalism Review vol. 29, no. 2, 2007, pp. 15–33. Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. ———. “What Do Critics Owe the Romance? Keynote Address at the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies vol. 2, no 1, 2011, pp. 1–15. “Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody – Fact Sheet 112.” ­National Archives of Australia, 2013. www.naa.gov.au/collection/factsheets/fs112.aspx. Rushby, Allison. Allmenarebastards.com. Random House, 2000. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Penguin, 1985. Saunders, Kay and Raymond Evans. Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Séllei, Nóra. “Bridget Jones and Hungarian Chick Lit.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, Routledge, 2006, pp. 173–188. Smith, Caroline J. Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit. Routledge, 2008. Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. Pandora Press, 1980. Stretton, Pat. “Indigenous Australians and the Vote.” Australian Electoral Commission, www.aec.gov.au/indigenous/indigenous-vote.htm. Accessed 14 November 2013. Thoma, Pamela. “Romancing the Self and Negotiating Consumer Citizenship in Asian American Labor Lit.” Contemporary Women’s Writing vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 17–35.

68  Lauren O’Mahony Valentine, James. “Interview with Anita Heiss.” ABC Australia Radio, 2011, http://blogs.abc.net.au/files/anita-heiss-1.mp3. Watson, Nicole. The Boundary. University of Queensland Press, 2011. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. Methuen, 1984. Weiner, Jennifer. In Her Shoes. Pocket Books. 2002. Weisberger, Lauren. The Devil Wears Prada. Harper Collins, 2003. Wells, Juliette. “Mothers of Chick Lit? Women Writers, Readers, and Literary History.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, Routledge, 2006, pp. 47–70. Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 3, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008. Macleay Press, 2002. Yardley, Cathy. Will Write for Shoes. St Martin’s Press, 2006. Zigman, Laura. Someone Like You (Animal Husbandry). Arrow Books. 2001.

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 possession 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 presumably 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 opinions, 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 assertion 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 chapter 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 Pennsylvania Jack, Bob from California, Ken in Nevada, and many others) embodies a central trope in these Asian/Am chick lit books as protagonists 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 simultaneously. 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 behaviors of the previous generation. These goals come together in predictable 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 brandish a contemporary American identity, and given nearly every mainstream 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 thinking 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 collective 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 “Oriental” non-modernity, non-civility, and backwardness. This is more than accommodation or assimilation as a survival tactic; in its most pernicious 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 particular, 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 ideologies 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 showcase protagonists deliberately distancing themselves from what they consider 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 particular 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 conversation 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 analysis 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 Mantras 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 subgenres such as Chica Lit and Sistah Lit tell stories about young women’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 exposing the limitations of white feminism, this time when applied to the realm of chick lit criticism. In BIPOC chick lit, expressions of femininity 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, marginalized labor, and stereotypes bespeak the unique struggles faced by women of color, even in stories that promise happy endings and the universality 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 simultaneity of race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality” in Asian American literature (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 sexuality, prompting me to how chick lit scholarship and literary production 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 interrogate 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 personality, 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 approach. Protagonist Lindsey Owyang directly pursues her love ­interest—a ­ rancisco-based magawhite-passing writer at Vegan Warrior, the San F zine for which she is the office receptionist. Unlike the protagonists’ paths in China Dolls, Lindsey’s romantic evolution does not parallel her professional 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 physically 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 protagonist, 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 ideology 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 “triumph 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 Bridget 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 “progressive 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 envisions 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 constraining 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, consumerist and individualistically minded women who find freedom through consumption and progress in following Western commodities and values. (215)

Against Asianness  77 In a global theatre, images of a forward West that celebrates individualism 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 parents’ tactics in arranging intra-racial relationships but even more explicitly 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 stereotype 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 satirize 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 takethem-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 narrator’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 immediately, abhorring how she personified such a stereotype of female servitude” (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 simultaneously 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 preference for Asian women dating partners” (93), are both the targets of ridicule in these novels and the sources of deep concern. Lindsey identifies these villains in the opening paragraphs of Wong Keltner’s novel. These “white men who were obsessed with Asian women,” she concludes, 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 interest 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 currentness 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 because they are looking for submissive, old-fashioned, traditional “Oriental” 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 eroines— els’ attempts to present modern, progressive Asian/American h 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 participating in a kind of paradoxical version of Asian/American ethnic nationalism like that described by David Leiwei Li’s critique of Frank Chin and company’s notorious manifesto in Aiiieeeee! These heroines simultaneously 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 others promoted. In the novels, this distinction between Asian/­A mericans and Americanized Asians is reflected in the protagonists’ efforts to distinguish 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 mutability of culture, the multiplicity of identity, and the fluidity of experience” 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 ethnic nationalism insists upon a static binary that emphasizes the gap between 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 consider 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 meetings 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 thirtyyear-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 spoken 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 comically outlandish. The scene portrays contemporary, Anglophone, and non-bowing Ginger dismissing unmodern, bowing, and broken-­Englishspeaking 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” approaches 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 American 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. Juxtaposed 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 exchange 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’ xenophobia and anti-Asian prejudices by linking Asian/American men’s misogynistic 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 problem 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). Lindsey, 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 working 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 portray 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 objectify 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 ­ riters studies—particularly in terms of how Asian/American women w represent Asian/American male characters. This chapter brings ­together several of these central discussions from Asian/American literary criticism 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. Indeed, by featuring Asian/American protagonists in the chick lit genre, these authors do in fact defy certain elements—particularly the overwhelming whiteness—of this form. But when these novels are examined 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 nationalist 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 celebrate 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 Manners.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Eds. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory 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 Cultural 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 culture. 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 influenced the publication of Latina YA novels in the early-2000s. 3 Many of these novels focus on stories of Latina heroines working through questions 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 operate 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 commercialization 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 entertainment 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 celebration 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 tradition is a prominent symbol of Latina girlhood and has been represented 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 initially 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 relationships 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 relationships 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 negative 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 private 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 includes 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 situates teen chick lit novels in one of two categories: “humorous” and “privileged,” 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 protagonist is something that is in a state of transformation and influenced by friendships with more affluent white characters. For example, when addressing 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-thepoor-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 elicits 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 addition, Estrella’s ideas about success and aspirations for ­upper-class status 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 sushi 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 friendship 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 Christie 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 knowing 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 disposition. 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 Sacred 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 obvious 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 appearance. 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 compares 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 question 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 choosing 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 together 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 “glamorous gown” that complements Estrella’s outward features and simultaneously signifies her own internal personal transformation (204). Since Estrella takes charge of planning her party and eliminates the costly expectations for the affair, the novel works to give an alternative representation 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 comingof-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 ethnic 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 childhood 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 forward 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 sneaking 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 allowing 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 secret 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 American 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 together. 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 privileges 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 comparisons with her own life: Sofi realized that this was another world, one she never knew existed. Was this how the rest of the world lived? Sofi thought about her family’s town house and the immaculately kept yard, her stateof-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, Andres. Similar to the character Speedy in Estrella’s Quinceañera, Andres plays an integral role in helping Sofi navigate through Mexico and teaching her about the culture and history. Like some of the heroines 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 citizenship 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 political 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 representations 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 metaphorically), 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 readers 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 population 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 Esperanza, 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 Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). 5 Much like adult chica lit, Latina YA tends to emphasize the ethnic and cultural 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 Triana’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 included what some described as “mean girl books,” in which the central conflict 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 Latinx 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 thousand dollars for her cousin Marta’s quinceañera (131). The value that Estrella’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 celebration 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 Alvarez 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 danger 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 fifteen)” (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).

Works Cited Alderdice, Kit. “Chick Lit for Teens and Tweens.” Publishers Weekly 251.46 (2004): 24–26. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 Feb. 2012. Alegría, Malín. Estrella’s Quinceañera. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2006. Print. ———. Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2007. Print. Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991. Print. ———. Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA. New York: ­Viking, 2007. Print. Campbell, Patty. “The Lit of Chick Lit.” Horn Book Magazine 82.4 (2006): 487–491. Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. Cheskin Added Value. “Nuestro Futuro: Hispanic Teens in Their Own Words: Accompanying Report to the Video Lifestyle Profile 2006.” Cheskin (2006): 1–43. Web. 10 June 2009. www.cheskin.com. Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. 1984. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print. Ferrer, Caridad. Adiós to My Old Life. New York: MTV Books/Pocket Books, 2006. Print. ———. It’s Not about the Accent. New York: MTV Books/Pocket Books, 2007. Print. González, Rigoberto. The Mariposa Club. New York: Alyson Books, 2009. Print. “Harlequin’s First YA Line.” Publishers Weekly 253.41 (2006): 19. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 Feb. 2012. Johnson, Joanna Webb. “Chick Lit Jr.: More than Glitz and Glamour for Teens and Tweens.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Ed. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 2006. 141–157. Print. Kurwa, Nishat. “Author Malin Alegria Builds on ‘Estrella’s’ Star Power.” Morning Edition. National Public Radio, 18 Oct. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2012. Meloni, Christine. “Chickalicious.” School Library Journal 56.6 (2010): 32–35. Academic Search Premier. Web. 20 Feb. 2012. ———. Teen Chick Lit: A Guide to Reading Interests. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2010. Print. ———.“Teen Chick Lit.” Library Media Connection 25.2 (2006): 16–19. Business Source Complete. Web. 7 Mar. 2012.

Narratives of Latina Girlhood  101 Mohr, Nicholasa. Nilda. 1973. Albuquerque: Arte Público Press, 1985. Print. Osa, Nancy. Cuba 15. New York: Delacorte Press, 2003. Print. Parra, Kelly. Graffiti Girl. New York: Pocket Books/MTV Books, 2007. Print. Pérez, Celia C. The First Rule of Punk. New York: Viking, 2017. Print. “Quiero Mis Quinces.” MTV/Remote Productions. 2008. Television. “Quinceañera.” Dir. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Perf. Emily Rios, Jesse Garcia, Chalo González. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006 (Release date 2007). DVD. Ramos-McDermott, Alma. “REFORMA and YALSA: Working Together To Reach Latino Youth.” Young Adult Library Services 7.1 (2008): 19–42. ­Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 April 11. Rivera, Gabby. Juliet Takes a Breath. Riverdale: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016. Print. Rivera, Lilliam. The Education of Margot Sanchez. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2017. Print. Rodriguez, Cindy L. When Reason Breaks. New York: Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2015. Print. Sanchez, Alex. Rainbow Boys. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Print. Sanchez, Jenny Torres. Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of Frenchie Garcia. Philadelphia: Running Press Teens, 2013. Print. Serros, Michele. Honey Blonde Chica. New York: Simon Pulse, 2006. Print. ———. ¡Scandalosa!: A Honey Blonde Chica Novel. New York: Simon Pulse, 2007. Print. Triana, Gaby. Cubanita. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print. Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. The Dirty Girls Social Club. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. Print. ———. Haters. New York: Little, Brown, 2006. Print. Yardley, Cathy. Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006. Print.

4 “I live a fabulous AsianAmerican 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 ‘ethnic’ 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, concerns, 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 experience 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 racialized and sexualized oppression she experiences and, as a result, distances herself from Chinese and Chinese American culture and history as a coping 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 bullying 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 introducing 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 parttime running errands at her former grammar school and clerking in a museum 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 ancestral 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 sexism 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 “Oriental 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 promising, 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 calligraphy 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 particularly 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 supports her efforts when she produces the art that he finds fitting for a young Asian American woman. This double bind of sexism and racialized 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 “eroticize Chinese women as exotic ‘dolls’ available for white male dominance” (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 American 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 moments, 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 moments 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 experience 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 explains 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 acknowledged our Asianness to one another” (Buddha 101). Lindsey concludes, “We each had our hands full trying to fit in and dared not risk doing 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 status. 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 language 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. Lindsey’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 entering 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 concerning 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 instances 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 languages, 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 inability to communicate results in her feeling apart from her family. In one instance, Lindsey attempts to ask for her grandfather at a mahjong 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 monolingual 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 umbrage 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 surgeons 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 stories 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 supernatural, 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 immigrants 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 holding 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 rescue 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 Writers, 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 miserable 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 century, 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 expresses 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, working in the house all day, bound to get together sooner or later” (­ Keltner ­Buddha 234). When Mrs. Clemens points out that a shared racial background partially united Lindsey’s grandparents, she was alluding to anti-­miscegenation laws, which prohibited Chinese people from marrying 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 repealed until the 1960s or something another” (Keltner Buddha 234). Her comments offer another example of where Keltner’s novel links the fictional 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 married 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 history. 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 historical 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 possibly teach them something about the Asian American immigrant experience 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 heroine, 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-upAsian-­A merican experience” (n. pag). Keltner’s desire to create a protagonist who looked like her produced a new representation of Asian American womanhood. In the essay Theorizing Asian America: On Asian American and Postcolonial 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, sexuality, 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 experience. Elaine Showalter comments that Asian Chick Lit, along with Sista Lit and Latina Chick Lit, “[represents] the specific concerns and pressures facing young women from those ethnic, racial, and religious subgroups, 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 ignorance 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 experiences and differences to the realm of the chick lit genre—therein providing 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 American” 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 college 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 (exotic, hyper-eroticized, masochistic, desirous of sexual domination) that set them up as ideal-typical gratifiers of western neocolonial libidinal formations” (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 Cambodia. 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-ofAge 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 Postcolonial Asian Diasporic Women Intellectuals.” Journal of Asian American Studies 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. Published 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, experiences 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 consumable 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 Charisse finally find the right kind of man. In The Bum Magnet, Charisse Tyson works as an aspiring real estate agent in affluent Prince George’s County, a black community in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Careerist but not overly successful, materialistic 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 history, 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 consumable 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 recovery 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 beings do. I know this because I’m in the midst of trying to transform myself from a compulsive emotional eater who submerges her feelings 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. … Ignoring problems is easier, for sure, but if we take even tiny steps to address them, those steps eventually become giant leaps on the journey 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 impede one’s progress, shows up not only in Brady’s novel but in the narrative 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 connection 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 ­ nglish or any fiction writing experience keep me from startdegree in E 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 decided to self-publish The Bum Magnet: I had a come-to-Jesus moment and I had to decide who I was writing 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 Magnet 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 declared it a “Top Read” as an OOOSA Book Club Reviewer’s Choice recommendation (Brady, The Bum Magnet, 2009, frontispiece). Eventually, 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 protagonist 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 remarkable 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 reveals 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 decisions. 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 because 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 because 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 girlfriend: “I bought home the bacon, served it up, and washed the dishes; spread eagled faster than a hooker on countdown and licked the “lollipop’ 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 anticipating 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-­middleclass 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 expenditure, 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 someone 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 Reeducation 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 supernatural 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 articulating 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 approach 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 capitalist 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 momentary 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 Magazine, 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 tapping 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 emotional 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 inducing, 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 defensiveness, 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 focus 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, transformation, or return, and corresponding curricula, these rhetorics transcribe problems into lessons by invoking messages of personal affirmation, notions of familial belonging, institutional responsibility, 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 reluctant journey to personal transformation. The novel charts this journey, 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 Magnet 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 relationships 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 experiences 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 relationship, 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, supersede 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 eventually reaches the crux of the trauma: abandonment and attempted sexual 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 considered her Lee to be her protector—a brother figure. Throughout the novel, she avoids any conversation with Lee or his mother, who is a psychologist. Charisse cannot accept the impact of her sexualized trauma until she has worked through her behavioral issues by reading her journals, doing the critical work of reflecting on them in relation to the article 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 sexual and dating trauma are not liberating singlehood but instead a man who is protective, who has a strong moral center but is not overly religious, 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 Charisse’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 recognize 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. Believing 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 emotionally complex set of lessons that may help readers to negotiate the difficult 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 implications 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 narrative shifts the bounds of representation in both genres. Chick lit is known in many ways for skirting trauma and heavy subjects, especially politically intense topics or poverty. But this novel makes space for trauma within the genre. The emotional and spiritual work inherent 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 representation, as it might be in literary fiction, but in approaches to depicting 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’ representations 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/whois-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-LBrady/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. Charlottesville: 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, fashion 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 lookout 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 Harvey’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 taming 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 independence 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 reveals 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 appeal 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, designating “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 wearing 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 identity. She is a self-assertive young woman who is immersed in popular consumer culture and fashion-savvy but also aware of feminist struggles. 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 femaleness 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 privileged middle-to-upper class. The term “fashionista” is evidently gendered and usually has negative 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, according 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 negotiation 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 femininity 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 appear 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 fashionista as a counterexample to a feminist identity. Other feminist scholars 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 superior, 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 vulnerability 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 founding 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 formerly marked as African American vernacular, “bitch” has gained currency 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 behind 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 heroine’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 interesting 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 African 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 importance 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 variation 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 institutions 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 authors of color which have assimilated the more glamorous single-girl-inthe-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 ethnicity is often constructed to the detriment of the respective ethnic background, 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 similar 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 realism, 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 mainstream and confirms the expectations of one’s ethnic background, some might pursue a more assimilationist approach and show that their experiences 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, representations of race in chick lit can also complicate the binary between assimilation and difference and instead express a spectrum of experiences. 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 explicitly addresses its non-Hispanic readers, for instance, when the narrator 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)” (emphasis in original 19). Feminista, too, plays with its readerships’ expectations about the heroine’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 struggle to stay independent is marked as a feature of Sydney’s ethnic background. 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 attorney. Rejecting both her mother’s and her sister’s lifestyles as unemployed trophy wives, Sydney stylizes herself as following in her father’s footsteps, “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 successful middle-class journalist, Sydney firmly belongs to the canon of privileged chick-lit heroines. Still, she comments dismissively on the status of chick lit/chick flicks as genres dominated by white, well-off, middle-toupper-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 ‘happiness means being rich and fabulous and wearing Manolos’ thing is waaaaaaay over. (240) Although she hypocritically dissociates herself from the white consumerism of Sex and the City, except for her ethnic background, Sydney corresponds 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 postethnicity 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 presents whiteness as the unmarked category, where it is understood that a character is white “because nobody says so” (Toni Morrison 72). Whiteness, 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 violence. 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 ethnic 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 conventions, 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 domesticity 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 womanhood 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 constructs 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 different 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 environment 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 movement, 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 being 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 defined 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 marriagable 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. Moreover, 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 coupledom, 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 interview 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 precarious 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 investigator 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 stable 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, marriage, 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, professional 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 conjugal 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 feminine” 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 succumbs 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 accoutrements 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. Femininity 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 performance 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 husfriend” rather than a husband (133, emphasis in original). Next to the framing financial considerations, Sydney’s quest is motivated by her practicality, to the point where the “husfriend” becomes an ultimately exchangeable good, even if he must fulfill a list of criteria. Sydney does not romanticize marriages or tap into the heterosexual 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 social 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., domesticity. 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 associations 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 opportunity. 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 motherhood 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 rhetorical 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 eternal 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 constitutive 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 challenging 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 maintenance 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 unfortunately 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 obviously 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 belongings, 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 immediately 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 prospective 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 relations 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, however, 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 independence, in order to be admitted into the social sphere of Manhattan’s upper classes. The ending shows her as a woman who has found happiness beyond domesticity by retaining a powerful position in the very industry 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 ignore for the sake of genre conventions. The quest narrative heavily criticizes 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 neutral terms as “a designer of haute couture” or “a devoted follower of fashion”, 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 Contemporary 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), Marian 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 Criticism and Transnational Feminism.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–31. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Dyer, Richard. White. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Print. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Print. Fox, Margalit. “Erica Kennedy, a Music Writer Who Satirized the Hip-Hop World, Dies at 42.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 18 June 2012. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print. Genz, Stephanie and Benjamin Brabon. Postfeminism, Cultural Texts and ­Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Print. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity P, 2007. Print. Guerrero, Lisa. “‘Sistahs Are Doin’ It for Themselves’” Chick Lit in Black and White.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Eds. Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. New York and London: Routledge, 2006: 87–102. Print. Hollinger, David. Postethnic American: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Print. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. New York: South End P, 1984. Kennedy, Erica. Bling. New York: Miramax Books, 2004. Print. ———. Feminista. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009. Print. Lebenthal, Alexandra. The Recessionistas. Grand Central Publishing, 2010. LeFlore, Lyah Beth and Charlotte Burley. Cosmopolitan Girls. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. Print. McMillan, Terry. Waiting to Exhale. 1995. New York: New American Library, 2006. Print. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage, 2009. Print. Mesure, Suzie. “End of a Chapter: Chick Lit Takes on the Credit Crunch.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 30 Aug. 2009. Web. 24 July 2014. Morrison, Amanda Maria. “Chicanas and ‘Chick Lit’: Contested Latinidad in the Novels of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 43, no. 2, 2010, pp. 309–329. Print. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print. Ogunnaike, Lola. “Black Writers Seize Glamorous Ground Around ‘Chick Lit’.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 30 May 2004. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Neoliberal Fantasies  149 Silver, Amy. Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista. Arrow Books, 2009. Squires, Catherine R. bell hooks: A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. Print. Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa. The Dirty Girls Social Club. 2003. London: Arrow Books, 2009. Print. Walker, Rebecca. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Print. ———. “What Is a ‘Feminista,’ Exactly?” The Root. The Root, 24 Sept. 2009. Web. 21 Feb. 2014. Walker, Wendy. Social Lives. St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Weinreb, Karen. The Summer Kitchen, St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Williams, Tia. The Accidental Diva. New York: Putnam Adult, 2004. Print.

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 burgeoning 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 published. 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, indigenous, 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 publishing 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 collection, including my own work on chica lit (Latina chick lit). In the introduction 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 “catching 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 author, 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 juxtaposes 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 emergence 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 differently 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 romantic 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 decides 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 moment. In Carolyn See’s 1992 review for the Los Angeles Times, she describes 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 decades, but the majority of their books have been consciously literary efforts, or novels in which ideology is at least as important as character 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 essentially conventional blacks, who have up to now received little attention. 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 community of readers, one whose purchasing power was beginning to command 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 commercial is an idea that most scholars already accept. What is more contentious 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 unintentionally, 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 existence was acknowledge and accepted but whose precepts were still so far out of reach. These scholars point out the ways in which postfeminism 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 represent a supposedly universal female experience allowing identification for the largest possible audience” (154). A handful of scholars, including 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 inequality. 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 feminism as developed by ‘younger’ feminists, most of them born during or after the heydays of the second wave … [and] The mainstreaming 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 ‘normal’, 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 enlightened [or concerned) about the pressures of contemporary womanhood 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 tragically, is her paradoxical existence of being successful and independent 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 worries 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 emergence of this new model of [a black, professional middle-class woman] onto the popular stage posed a nearly herculean move toward naturalizing 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 dominates 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 “continuation 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 Amendment, 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 activism stems directly from her experience as a result of both her femaleness and her blackness while watching Anita Hill testify at Clarence Thomas’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 prioritize 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 anthologies such as To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995) and Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (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 decade before Walker’s essay, offered essays, poems, and letters that critiqued white feminism but also shared experiences of being feminists of color. Pieces such as the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist 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 writing 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 continued 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 representative 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 always 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 primarily 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, anxieties, 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 mobilization 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 include 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 intersectional 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 attention. 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, Savannah replies, “That disease is ruthless, isn’t it? There’s so many folks getting 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 refers 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 offering 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 protagonists 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 understood 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 success” (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 introduce 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 fiction 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—­thirtyeight 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 successful literature (“Black Literary Agents” 64). McMillan’s success meant that publishing houses became more willing 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 represented but also led to structural change within the commercial publishing 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 success (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 publishers 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 together 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 purpose 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 toward those texts and frameworks that scholars claim as literary precursors 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, Harzewski, 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 conditions, 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 sistahs 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 analyzing 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 postcolonial 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 account 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 anxieties and sociohistorical contexts specific to black women’s lived experiences. 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 romance. 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 romance, with characters often seeking professional success and/or or self-satisfaction, the heart of the genre lies with the search for a successful 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 Bridget 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 Literary History,” Juliette Wells constructs a literary history for (white) chick lit, presenting a range of chick lit tropes and the historical predecessors 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 situation, 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 autobiography is most often categorized as a slave narrative, I include it here as a predecessor to McMillan specifically and chick lit more generally because 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 enslavement. 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, enraged 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 ability 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 aggressive 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 decision. 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 compulsion,” 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 tender 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, particularly 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, characters consume and respond to white women’s magazines, and scholars often mention these moments when noting how often chick lit novels reference popular culture. This is true of Waiting to Exhale as well. During a conversation with Savannah about the experience of dating and finding 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 consciousness 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 generally (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 scholarship 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 “Today, 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 magazines 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 examine 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 respectability 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 readers, 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 ­ merican twentieth centuries, explaining, “While a majority of African A 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 declined 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 narratives 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 American 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 turnof-the-century possibilities for a modern future, the writers and editors of these early publications repeatedly gazed back at an enslaved past to battle stereotypes and cultural constructions of their characters 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, especially cultivating domesticity through the consumption of goods, to recuperate 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 signal an embrace of dominant cultural understandings of womanhood and gentility” (Rooks 9). As Rooks points out, “This formulation of domestic 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 comparison 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 perceptions 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 themselves 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 Magazine] 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 unmarried 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 “confessional 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 obsession 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 literature 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 demonstrates 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 continuing 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 representations 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 professionally 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 narrative and these twentieth-century magazines are presented here in service 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 women’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 reenvisioning 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 African 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 Culture (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 protagonists 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 concerns 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 generation, 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 endowed 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 history, and a way of reading, that accounts for all of chick lit’s ethnic categories 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 published 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’mNot-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 relation 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.

Works Cited Banet-Weiser, Sarah. “What’s Your Flava?: Race and Postfeminism in M ­ edia Culture.” Editors Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2007, pp. 201–226. “Black Authors Rarely Have Made the Best-Seller List.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 34, Winter 2001–2002, pp. 128–130. “Black Literary Agents Are Making Appearances in the Lily-White Field of Book Publishing.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 28, Summer 2000, pp. 64–65. Bragg, Beauty. “Girlfriend Fiction: Black Women Writeres and Readers Negotiating Post-Civil Rights Womanhood.” Reading Contemporary African American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African American Canon. Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 39–61. Brooks, Daphne A. “‘It’s Not Right but It’s Okay’: Black Women’s R & B and the House That Terry McMillan Built.” Souls, vol. 5, no. 1, 2003, pp. 32–45. Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Revised Tenth Anniversary Edition, Routledge, 2000. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 140, 1989, pp. 139–167. ———. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–1299. Davis, Thulani. “Don’t Worry, Be Buppie: Black Novelists Head for the Mainstream.” War of the Words: 20 Years of Writing on Contemporary Literature, edited by Joy Press. Three Rivers P, 2001, pp. 176–185. Edmondson, Belinda. “The Black Romance.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1/2, The Sexual Body, Spring – Summer 2007, pp. 191–211. Farr, Cecilia Konchar. “It Was Chick Lit All Along: The Gendering of a Genre.” Editor Lilly J. Goren. You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture. UP of Kentucky, 2009, pp. 201–214. Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young, editors. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006. Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young. “Introduction.” Editors Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006, pp. 1–13.

Centering Black  173 Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Viking, 1996. Findlen, Barbara, Editor. Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. Seal Press, 1995. Génz, Stephanie. “Making It on Her Own: The Singleton.” Postfemininities in Popular Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 134–151. Goren, Lilly J., editor. You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture. UP of Kentucky, 2009. Guerrero, Lisa. “‘Sistahs Are Doin’ It for Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black and White.” Editors Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006, pp. 87–102. Harzewski, Stephanie. Chick Lit and Postfeminism. U of Virginia P, 2011. ———. “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners.” Editors Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006, pp. 29–46. Hurt, Erin. “Trading Cultural Baggage for Gucci Luggage: The Ambivalent Latinidad of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s The Dirty Girls Social Club.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 34, no. 3, Fall 2009, pp. 133–153. Jacobs, Harriet. Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861 Edition, Black and White Classics, 2014. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. Barnes and Noble Publishing, Inc, 2001. Max, Daniel. “McMillan’s Millions.” Review of Waiting to Exhale by Terry ­McMillan. The New York Times, 9 Aug. 1992, www.nytimes.com/1992/08/09/ magazine/mcmillan-s-millions.html?pagewanted=all. ­Accessed 19 Apr. 2018. Mazza, Cris. “Who’s Laughing Now? A Short History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of the Genre.” Editors Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006, pp. 17–28. McCracken, Ellen. Decoding Women’s Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. St. Martin’s Press, 1992. McMillan, Terry. Waiting to Exhale. Penguin Books, 1992. Waiting to Exhale. 1992. First New American Library Trade Paperback Printing (Updated Edition), Penguin Books, 2011. McRobbie, Angela. “Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime.” Editors Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2007, pp. 27–39. Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color. 2nd ed. 3rd printing. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983. Mißler, Heike. “That’s Me! – Enter Everywoman.” The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism, and Representation. Taylor and Francis, 2017, pp. 9–48. Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.” ELH, vol. 59, no. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 939–964. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Postcolonial Chick Lit: Postfeminism or Consumerism.” The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 189–271. Rooks, Noliwe M. Ladies’ Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them. Rutgers UP, 2004.

174  Erin Hurt See, Carolyn. “A Novel of Women Triumph, Revenge and Comradeship.” Review of Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan. Los Angeles Times, 22 June 1992. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-06-22/news/vw-526_1_terry-­ mcmillan. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018. Smith, Caroline J. “One Simple Step to Becoming a V.G. Consumer: Read Women’s Magazines.” Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit. Routledge, 2008, pp. 20–44. Springer, Kimberly. “Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: ­A frican American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil Rights Popular Culture.” Editors Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra. Interrogating Postfeminism: ­Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2007, pp. 249–276. Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra, editors. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2007. Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra. “Introduction.” Editors Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Duke UP, 2007, pp. 1–25. Taylor, Natalie Fuehrer. “The Personal is Political: Women’s Magazines for he ‘I’m Not-a-Feminist-But’ Generation.” Editor Lilly J. Goren. You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: Women, Politics, and Popular Culture. UP of Kentucky, 2009, pp. 215–232. Walker, Rebecca. “Becoming the Third Wave.” Ms. vol. 2, no. 4, Jan./Feb. 1992, pp. 39–41. ———, Editor. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. Anchor Books, 1995. Wells, Juliette. “Mothers of Chick Lit? Women Writers, Readers, and Literary History.” Editors Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction. Routledge, 2006, pp. 47–70. “White Publishers Open Their Coffers to Black Writers.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 19, Spring 1998, pp. 53. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. Harper and Brothers, 1945. Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792–1995. Greenwood Press, 1998.

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, romance, 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 considered 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 inspirational 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 American 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 understand 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 introduced 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 English are spoken, and certain cultural traditions are observed, for example, 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 different. I related more to Rose, who is overweight and a hardworking attorney. Maggie is gorgeous and fashionable but irresponsible, consistently 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 Borrowed). 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 emphasis 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 relationships 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 heroine 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 familiar. 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, romances, and difficult job situations. They represent a spectrum of Latinas, 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 beautiful Mexican self” (Valdes-Rodriguez 129). Though she undertakes a radical change in regard to her culture, I understood her sense of wanting 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 specifically 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 written 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 experience 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 organization 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 committing 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 people 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 involved 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 understand 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 appeal 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 millennials 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 childhood 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 continues 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 following 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 parents, 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 interspersed throughout to provide some clarity as to why Alba behaves as she does in the current day. For example, as a child, Alba feels inferior 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 opposite. 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 different 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 because 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 between 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 encountered 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 character, 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 confront 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 emphasizes 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 disapprove 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 convey that she is a young woman who is connected to her culture; her heritage 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 culture to become the main focus of the book. Her desire to become a confident 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 celebration 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 independent, 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 remarried, 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 circumstances 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 heroine, 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 paramount 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 acknowledgments 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 retiring 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 generalize, 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 stereotypes: 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 defensive 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 ethnic 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 denigrating 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 realism 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 characters 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 humorous 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 attendant 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 performs a menial job. Likewise, it’s not a good idea to make the only ethnic 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 pursuit 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 compromise 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 engaged, 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 behind 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 ending 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. Reluctantly, 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 difficult 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 accomplishment at having achieved a dream. I’d had no formal training in writing fiction before starting my novel. I’d never realized just how difficult 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 message 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 familiar 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 repeatedly 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 Publishing, 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 Latinas 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 married 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 enjoyed 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 fictionalized 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 “Americanized”? 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 experiences 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 example, “…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 represent 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 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? It’s possibilities 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 protagonists 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 protagonists. 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 moments 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 cultures and countries writing to tell me how moved they were by something 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 entire 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 something 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 process 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 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? 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 Latinas 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 experiences 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 bathroom. 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 assumptions 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 political 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 positive 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 authentic 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 person 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 purchased 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 because 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 opportunity 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 relatability. Furthermore, readers of chick lit often mention this same characteristic and comment that they see themselves in these protagonists. 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 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. Reading 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 because 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 herself 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 challenges 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 ethnicity 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 writing 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 example, 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 sister 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 everything 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 unapologetically 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 portrayals 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 intergenerational 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 professionals, 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 uncomfortable. But those who bother to read it will discover Efrain’s Secret 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 “negative” 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 question 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 familiarity to the genre or its conventions and whose works were labeled and marketed as chick lit by publishers. From comments you’ve made elsewhere, it seems as if you have a strong, perhaps intentional or purposeful 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 entire 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 usually 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 character 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 assessment 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 experience 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 compassionate and (2) to show the characters healing and evolving, regardless 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 deliberately 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 aspirational” is a phrase you will often hear from Hollywood TV and film executives. 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 believe 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 stories 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 successful and sociopolitically meaningful; they are allowed to do that because the assumption is that their stories are universal. Take any of those ­ rientation— constructs out of the equation—race, gender, and sexual o 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 telenovelas 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 novels, are. Their comments indicate that they enjoy how much they can see themselves in the characters of the novels they read. 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 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 responded to her with profound humility over the mistake and that I encouraged 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, nonfiction, and social media posts. Your characters’ worldviews are also informed by feminist ideas. What are some of the most exciting developments 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 opportunities 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 media, and the impulse and pressure to be entertaining is so strong, performance 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 feminist 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 Rihanna 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 messages. 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 Donald Trump, despite his unapologetic and blatant misogyny, makes that clear. I don’t know how in the new millennium one claims to be a feminist 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 unapologetically 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 feminism 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 representations of Latinidad that the novel found intractable and oppressive, not just those found within the white supremacist dominative cultural imaginary 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 experience. 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 compelling 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 occupying 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 really 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 fantasies. 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 understandings of Latinidad as well as the ways that this identity is enacted and enforced, and where readers, with all manner of interpretive frameworks, 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 configurations 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 feminist 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 literature. 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 Kennedy’s Feminista demonstrates how Kennedy’s novel self-reflexively critiques 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 because 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 conventions of the chick lit genre is highlighting oppression and discrimination in women’s lived experiences, many of these novels and their protagonists deliver these cultural critiques from within a neoliberal framework. This framework undermines and constrains, in insidious ways, the cultural 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 describing 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 neoliberalism’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 policies and principles that encourage a free market; under neoliberalism, the state’s role shifts from being a “provider of public welfare” to “[promoting] 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 interpellates 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 constantly monitoring our social status and seeking to boost it in every aspect 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 individual 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 control 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 turning to the writing of Cris Mazza. Mazza coined the term chick lit when she coedited an anthology titled Chick Lit in 1995, though her definition 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 ideology 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 women’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 attractiveness of neoliberal feminism. For Mazza, if women can be part of the problem, then perhaps they are not at the mercy of a larger patriarchal 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 backlash discourse to the #metoo movement. Tarana Burke created the “Me Too” campaign in 2007, and Alyssa Milano boosted it into the mainstream 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 responsibility for sexual abuse: whether it is a woman’s responsibility to

216  Erin Hurt navigate, withstand and overcome the misogyny that she encounters, 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 worries, “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 wondering as I hear story after story of adult women who helplessly acquiesce to sexual demands. … a majority of women I know have been in situations in which men have come on to them — … They have routinely 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 feminism, 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 cultural 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 ensures 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 readers because it acknowledges the specific challenges women face in the ­t wenty-first century, while also adding an aspirational twist to give readers an optimistic and hopeful ending to those same problems and challenges. 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 relationship. While current novels, films, and other cultural texts offer contemporary 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 various 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 individuals 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’ willingness 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 Exhale display “an absence of protest” (Davis 26). Though Davis and others 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 neighborhoods, 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 prioritize 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 husband’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 offers 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 conventions 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 representational ground by resisting long-held narratives about black women and respectability, instead offering viewers’ characters who are elegant professionals 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 character of Liz Davelli, Ryan’s white agent.5 This neoliberal fairy tale, like others, helps its audience to feel seen and represented by offering representations 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 marriage is rewarded in the film when Best Mart decides to sign Ryan and Stuart. The CEO of Best Mart, when explaining in a business meeting 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 Stewart 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 rationality reasserts itself. Ryan succeeds because she takes the right actions. The final scenes of the film reward Ryan’s truth telling and strength with financial success. Though the film acknowledges the limits of self-will and personal power with regard to having it all, it instead replaces ­Ryan’s original 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 structure” (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 instead 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. Neoliberalism 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 systemic 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 nightmarish 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 confusion 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 baitand-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 rationality 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 Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai’s “Prologue—A Second Read: Further Reflections 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 attitudes, 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 conventions, 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 because institutional racism has prevented nonwhite families from accumulating much wealth that can later serve to offset emergencies or skyrocketing debt, health-care costs, or other expenses.

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224  Erin Hurt may/11/ how-metoorevealed-the-central-rift-within-feminism-social-­ individualist. Accessed 15 May 2018. Duroy, Quentin. “Thinking Like a Trader: The Impact of Neoliberal Doctrine on Habits of Thought.” Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 50, no. 2 (2 April 2016), pp. 603–610. Garcia, Sandra E. “The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags.” The New York Times, 20 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/us/metoo-movement-tarana-burke.html. Accessed 1 May 2018. Girls Trip. Directed by Malcolm D. Lee, performances by Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tiffany Haddish, Perfect World Pictures, 2017. Hall, Stuart. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Social Justice, vol. 20, no. 1/2 (51–52), Rethinking Race (Spring-Summer 1993), pp. 104–114. Hobbes, Michael. “Millennials Are Screwed: Why Millennials Are Facing the Scariest Financial Future of Any Generation Since the Great Depression.” highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/. Accessed 1 May 2018. Hurt, Erin. “Cultural Citizenship and Agency in the Genre of Chica Lit and Sofia Quintero’s Feminist Intervention.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 42, no. 1 (Spring 2017), pp. 7–31. @jaclynf, “In My Book, Unscrewed, I Coin a Word for This Bullshit Argument: Fauxpowerment. It’s the Idea That Women Can Somehow Just Self-­ Improve Our Way Free. Fauxpowerment Is Gaslighting. It Tells Women If We Don’t Feel Free, It’s Our Fault and We Just Have to Get Stronger on Our Own. 5/.” Twitter, 6 April 2018, 11:22 a.m, twitter.com/jaclynf/­ status/982277440033636352. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018. Mazza, Cris. “Editing Postfeminist Fiction: Finding the Chic in Lit.” Symploke, vol. 8, no. 1/2 Anthologies (2000), pp. 101–112. ———. “Who’s Laughing Now? A Short History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of the Genre.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Guide to Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, Routledge, 2006, 17–28. Mcmillan, Terry. Waiting to Exhale. 1992. First New American Library Trade Paperback Printing (Updated Edition), Penguin Books, 2011. Merkin, Daphne. “Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.” The New York Times, 5 Jan. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/ golden-globes-metoo.html. Accessed 1 May 2018. Mirowski, Philip. “Everyday Neoliberalism.” Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013, pp. 89–156. Reid, E. Shelley. “Beyond Morrison and Walker: Looking Good and Looking Forward in Contemporary Black Women’s Stories.” African American Review, vol. 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000), pp. 313–328. Washington, Arlene. “‘Girls Trip’ Stars Celebrate Sisterhood at L.A. Premier.” Hollywood Reporter, 14 July 2017, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ girls-trip-stars-celebrate-sisterhood-at-la-premiere-1021169. Accessed 1 May 2018. Weaver, Caity. “There’s Something Funny about Tiffany Haddish.” GQ, 26 March 2018, www.gq.com/story/tiffany-haddish-profile-2018. Accessed 1 May 2018.

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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.

228 Bibliography 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

Index  233 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

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