This week I chose to read the essay “Who’s Laughing Now? A Short History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre” by Cris Mazza from Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young’s compilation. In it, Mazza talks about the origin of the phrase Chick Lit with reference to its ever changing (and in her mind, devolving) status. In the essay, which seems pretty well substantiated and researched, she claims to have been the first to brand the term “Chick Lit” with the publication of her anthology called Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction in 1995. She and her co-author chose this title “not to embrace an old frivolous or coquettish image of women but to take responsibility for our part in the damaging, lingering stereotype” she says. She goes on to say, however, that “what we couldn’t anticipate was that less than ten years later our tag would be greasing the commercial book industry machine” filled with “pink, aqua, and lime covers featuring cartoon figures of long-legged women wearing stiletto heels.” (see image above…)
Much to her dismay, Mazza believes that a term once coined to be ironic, clever, and to prove to a postfeminist culture that part of empowerment was admitting to be a part of the problem, had turned into yet another money-making ploy and had lost all vestiges of literary and scholarly prowess. Mazza quotes Curtis White who put it bluntly: “Chick Lit had experienced that age old commodification shuffle. It was once strong and a force for something liberating. Now it’s been co-opted by people selling things. That’s okay. Let’s move on. Chick Lit is dead. Long live chick lit.”
Though I found her point about the cheapening of Chick Lit to be true though slightly over dramatized in the essay, what I found most interesting was what she says about the initial creation of the term Chick LIt. Near the end of the essay, Mazza talks about the fact that “women’s literature” is always distinguished from just plain “literature,” “women writers” from “writers.” She says, “the translation to me has always been that men write about what’s important ; women write about what’s important to women.” In continuing to use the term Chick Lit, even though the material that it describes may be changing, Mazza’s original intentions still ring true: the title Chick Lit “was meant to point out this delusion, this second-class differentiation; not pretend it isn’t there.” I think that even commercial chick lit, as she calls it, still underscores this irony. The genre, though sometimes cheaply, still does offer this: “Here’s who we are, plus what you (still) think of us thrown back in your face.” The question remains in my mind, however, is this “who we are” really “who we want to be?”
Lit Chicks 