Anonymous asked: Re "headdesk": is 'chick lit' used the same way 'chick flick' is used? Do you think that term is problematic too, and if so, is it for the same reasons? 'Chick flick' is often used in a disparaging way, but it does seem to pick out a certain type of film, so does sorta work as a description. Is chick lit like that?
I think there’s definitely a similarity in the usages, and while acknowledging that some authors, filmmakers and actors deliberately claim the ‘chick’ term for their work, there’s definitely a problematic aspect to their colloquial, common usage.
The main problem with labeling genre along gender lines is twofold. Firstly, it implies that these works aren’t for men; and secondly, it suggests that women who like them do so because they’re women. None of this says anything about the range and depth of the stories on offer, but instead suggests that because they’re all for women, they must all be fundamentally the same, when in reality, the only thing they have in common are female creators and, most likely, female protagonists.
While this might be useful for the purposes of easy categorisation, it becomes problematic when women are viewed, not as half the population, but as a special interest group. For this reason, once a book is dubbed 'chick lit’, it’s been effectively separated from mainstream 'literature’ - which becomes retroactively defined as literature written by and for men - by virtue of being special interest, and therefore fundamentally less serious. Hence the derogatory connotations of both terms: that chick stories are intrinsically different to proper stories.
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