“Billions in Debt and Still Surviving”: Curing the Female Shopper in Confessions of a Shopaholic

Abstract

This paper analyses P.J. Hogan’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) in three sections. In the first section, it studies how the film maps shopping as an illness that needs to be cured onto the body of its female heroine. It does so, as is argued here, by portraying her as a patient suffering from Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD). In the second part, it traces how Confessions necessitates the cure of the female shopper, given its background of the Great Recession and how this holds generic significance for the romantic comedy. The paper then concludes by charting the heroine’s cure in group therapy as predicated upon the principle of the Foucauldian confession and how this then resolves the narrative as, what Diane Negra calls, one of “adjusted ambitions.”