Beyond “Obligatory Camaraderie”: Girls' Friendship in Zadie Smith's <em>NW</em> and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's <em>Skim</em>

Abstract

While feminisms have aimed to disengage women’s dependence on dyadic enmeshment with men, few have attended to the idea that friendship among women can also be unreasonably greedy. This article suggests Zadie Smith’s NW and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim are good novels through which to ask if women’s friendship can accommodate more autonomy, and what that might look like. Foucault’s concept of “obligatory camaraderie” is helpful here for understanding taken for granted gendering in friendship occurring in both mainstream gender socialization and particular feminist communities. Obligatory camaraderie makes legible, in the case of women and girls, loyal subjugation of reason for the cause of friendship, or a lack of pleasure and investment in one’s own discernment. These novels ask girls and women to not invest quite so much in friendship as salvation, eschewing an ethics of obligation for one of consent. Absent outsized demands, and disappointments, the authors appear to suggest, we may come to like ourselves, and our friends, a little bit more.