Chick Flicks Research Articles

Gaze, Female Agency, and Gender Power Dynamics in Chinese Chick Flicks in the 2000s

Gaze, Female Agency, and Gender Power Dynamics in Chinese Chick Flicks in the 2000s

The Evolution of Feminism in Chick Flicks from the Early 21st Century to the Present

With Barbie making a strong comeback, chick movies, a commercial film genre that primarily concentrates on female characters, have recently become more popular in peoples eyes. The feminist underpinnings of this genre have also been well shown. However, there is still a research gap in the connection between feminism and the development of chick flicks from the early 21st century to the present. Therefore, this article uses feminist theory to analyze how feminism has evolved in chick flicks throughout this period as well as how typical chick flicks have developed during this time. According to the research, the development of chick flicks has gone through three stages: the peak period, the bottleneck period, and the return to the golden period. Meanwhile, feminism has evolved from focusing just on the rights and status of women to achieving gender equality and womens intellectual awakening. Conclusions can be drawn based on the analysis of this article given that chick movies are primarily about women and focus on womens issues: the evolution of feminism in chick flicks from the early 21st century to the present tends to appear in a better situation with the development of social feminism.

“Any cosmo girl would’ve known”: Collaboration, feminine knowledge, and Femme theory in Legally Blonde

In 2001, the film Legally Blonde was released into a pop cultural landscape saturated with the Spice Girls’ brand of feminism-lite and postfeminist media texts like Sex and the City (1998–2004). With its firm hold on “girlie” feminism, Legally Blonde is postfeminist — but not post-femme. I extend the claim that femme theory can be located in low-cultural spaces and texts to understand the “chick flick” as another possible site of femme theory. I argue that Legally Blonde demonstrates that femme resistance can be located in the success of femininity, rather than only in its failure.

Women on top? Challenging the “mancession” narrative in the 2010s chick flick

ABSTRACT The term “mancession” appeared after the economic crisis, spreading the false assumption that men were more affected by the recession than women. This discourse was fuelled across different US media outlets, including film. Some genres, such as the corporate melodrama, supported this rhetoric directly, while others did so more obliquely, as is the case of the chick flick, which pivoted to the trope of the successful working woman during the 2010s. While some contemporary films seem to pander to the myth of the “mancession” by showing women getting ahead in their careers while men fall implicitly or explicitly behind, this article argues that there is an increasing number of chick flicks that highlight sexism and gender inequality at the workplace, challenging postfeminist images of female success and empowerment. The essay analyzes how post-2008 (but pre-pandemic) working woman chick flicks downplay traditional concerns in the genre, such as romance, and open their scope to focus on women’s professional struggles, deploying the “mancession” narrative only to expose its contrivance, thus showing a greater feminist awareness than many of their predecessors often do.

Banners, Banter and Boys: Feminism and Historical Distortion in Iron Jawed Angels

This paper investigates the relationship between the 2004 film Iron Jawed Angels and the historic events and figures it purports to represent. As a major film on the national women’s suffrage movement in the US, Iron Jawed Angels had great potential in terms of educating viewers on the lives and accomplishments of America’s suffragists. However, this paper argues that in modifying the character and story of activist Alice Paul to appeal to female, conservative, and American audiences, the movie diminishes Paul’s achievements and assumes that female spectators require the tropes of a “chick flick” to sustain their interest.

Irrational exuberance: cuteness as affective bubble in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

ABSTRACT There has been a palpable shift from the studiously unconscious cuteness of the “chick flick” to the semi-conscious cuteness of a strain of contemporary female-led quality comedy and this shift highlights a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary socio-economic and political conditions. More recent series, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019) and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015-2019), feature female protagonists whose performances of cuteness expose many of the predicaments, challenges and issues facing the contemporary neoliberal female subject. These series use their dysfunctionally cute heroines to expose contradictions, hypocrisies and double standards in contemporary Western society. The defining trait of the female protagonists is a cuteness linked to overcoming traumatic past events. In this article I will be defining cuteness as a bulwark intrinsically linked to trauma and loss and as a ballast against threat. Both series studiously attempt to transform social abjection into a more palatable cuteness that enables the female lead. However, this cute performance extracts a heavy psychological toll, bringing societal demands into question. Cuteness works as a temporary coping mechanism but is not a viable solution for either female protagonist in the long-term.

Subtitling Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) in a Chinese Context: The Transfer of Sexuality and Femininity in A Chick Flick

This paper explores how sexuality and femininity1 are transferred in the Chinese subtitles of the chick flick, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). In order to address this question, the article is divided into three main parts. In the first section, a review of how the film is received in the Anglophone and Chinese markets is presented respectively, also including the challenges posted to the subtitlers, e.g. the translation of sexuality and swearing in the discourse of women. The second section offers a theoretical framework that structures the paper, adopting Ernst-August Gutt’s (1986) “Relevance Theory” and Anthony Baldry and Paul Thibault’s (2006) “Multimodality” to examine how the Chinese subtitles work for primarily the Chinese female audiences. What follows is a detailed analysis of two situational categories of recurrent features (swearing and sexuality) in the Chinese subtilties of this chick flick, specifically proving constructions of feminist ideology. The paper concludes that the Chinese subtitles articulates a relatively moderate version compared to the original explicit sexuality and taboo language. Such moderation reflects an increasingly improved entanglement of feminine identity in a contemporary Chinese context.

Post-feminism and chick flicks in China: subjects, discursive origin and new gender norms

ABSTRACT Most research on post-feminist culture has been conducted in the Western context. Within the very limited scholarship on post-feminism in China, the conception of globally transmitted and duplicable post-feminism is dominant, which is usually rationalized in the global expansion of neo-liberalism. This article, however, argues that post-feminism in China exists but encapsulates notable distinctions from its Western counterpart, in terms of the class of its subjects, female elites’ relationship with the state, and post-feminism’s entanglement with local feminisms. To emphasize the transnational perspective, I would like to coin a new term for the Chinese equivalent of post-feminism, what I will call “consumerist pseudo-feminism” (消费主义伪女权), acknowledging the buzzwords ‘consumerism’ and ‘pseudo-feminism’ that are frequently used in the Chinese media. Anchored to this reconceptualization, Chinese chick flicks, burgeoning genre films with its niche audience of middle-class young women are analyzed. Through close-reading, I would like to investigate how consumerist pseudo-feminism is represented in terms of middle-class women’s fantasies, the rhetoric of women’s empowerment, and new gender norms.

Radical rom-com: not an oxymoron

ABSTRACTThis special issue assesses a range of works, from U.S. silent cinema to transnational web series, that configure romance in politically and representationally radical ways. In resisting the genre’s romanticizing tendencies, while also defying its perception as escapist “chick flicks,” these works subvert rom-com fantasy and formula and reflect critically on the realities and complexities of intimacy.

Willful Women in the Cinema of Maren Ade

While Maren Ade’s three feature films—Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (The Forest for the Trees, Germany, 2003), Alle anderen (Everyone Else, Germany, 2009), and Toni Erdmann (Germany/ Austria, 2016)—employ techniques of realism prevalent in contemporary transnational cinema, they are nonetheless geopolitically and historically specific, consistently focusing on the awkwardness of white, heterosexual, middle-class, professional German women and what Lauren Berlant refers to as the “cruel optimism” that renders their seemingly privileged existence precarious. Ade distinguishes herself through the characters she develops and the milieus that dominate her cinema. While there is an absence of glamour, romance, and sentimentality, the characters also do not dwell in a state of material precarity; the insecurity they face is instead personal and social. Three tendencies distinguish Ade as an auteur and coalesce into a new paradigm for representing female figures who might otherwise lose representability in both mainstream cinema (dominated by market forces) and alternative cinema. For one, she intervenes in a monolithic representational landscape of first-world, white, middle-class professional women to subvert the prevalent assumption that their struggles are no longer systemic in nature while conceding that the notion of a universal experience of femininity across geopolitical and class boundaries is largely illusory. As well, she develops an aesthetic of embarrassment and awkwardness to give affective expression to cruel optimism. Finally, she reworks the chick flick to implicitly reject certain postfeminist, neoliberal premises.

‘I hate to be the feminist here…’: reading the post-epitaph chick flick

Numerous accounts in recent years have announced (often zealously) the death of the chick flick, a genre whose output has conspicuously slowed since a peak in the 1990s. We analyse here two recent hits from the ‘post-epitaph’ phase in order to understand the kinds of generic updates such films are attempting and how they place women in regard to changing gender norms and the conditions of neoliberal capitalism. We find that in Trainwreck (2015) and The Intern (2015) female protagonists’ affiliation with patriarchal power structures is re-confirmed and both films ultimately retain a commitment to a rigid order unwilling to countenance female sexual agency or envision more flexible economic arrangements.

Between the Family and Politics: Female Politicians as Media Objects in Bollywood Films

Of late, researchers have examined the stereotyping of female politicians in entertainment media as a serious problem in several democratic societies. Despite chauvinism and stereotyping, the entertainment industries find female politicians attractive content producers, which guarantee tangible profit, as audiences are interested in learning about the life stories of female politicians. This article employs feminist political economy of communication to analyse exposé of female politicians in three Bollywood chick flick movies featuring lead characters in important political positions. This study finds that chick flicks—movies centred on attractive female lead characters and typically marketed to women—serve as a mechanism to sell commercial entertainment products to both female and male audiences. I argue that Bollywood’s political movies are marketed through a focus on bodily attributes of female politicians that helps perpetuate patriarchal ideology in which women are passive homemakers and effectively domesticated and excluded from public sphere.

Feminist tropes: corsetry and rape in Saul Dibb’s The Duchess

This article seeks to investigate the deployment of feminist tropes – tropes that are used to indicate a character’s or text’s feminist credentials – in Saul Dibb’s 2008 film, The Duchess. I argue that this film is representative of a broader subgenre of postfeminist historical ‘chick flicks’, which, by privileging identifiably feminist characters, produces a version of feminism and feminist history that circulates in popular culture in particular ways. By taking as my focus the tropes of corsetry and marital rape, both of which are historical artefacts that are presumed to be resolved within a postfeminist cultural context, I explore the ways that The Duchess establishes its feminist sensibility in relation to historical modes of oppression, while simultaneously obscuring the ways that women’s bodies continue to be policed and constrained in contemporary societies.

Product placement with ‘Chinese characteristics’: Feng Xiaogang's films and Go Lala Go!

This study examines the practice of product placement (or ‘soft advertisement’/ruanxing guanggao) in Chinese cinema in order to create an understanding of the specific realities of film production and consumption. The return of consumer culture, instead of nostalgically recreating the ruined socialist past, engenders the imaginary of a ‘brand’ new China of the global future. Commercialization of film and television exploits the emerging practice of product placement as economic necessity and a reflection of the urban consumer culture. The director Feng Xiaogang, encouraged by the private film company Huayi Brothers, exemplifies the integration of product placement in a series of high-budget box-office hits. Feng's films, Feichang wurao/If You are the One (2008) and its sequel (2010), successfully merge the narratives surrounding the new urban middle class and their conspicuous consumption in China and abroad. Adapted from a popular ‘workplace’ novel, Du Lala shengzhi ji/The Promotion of Du Lala (2007), Xu Jinglei's Go Lala Go! (2010), a chick flick aimed at white-collar women, places products including luxury cars, apartments, personal goods, fashion items and laptops, while downplaying office politics in favour of love and consumption as its main tropes. Through examining product placement in Feng's films and Go Lala Go!, this study analyses why twenty-first-century Chinese cinema merges entertainment and commercial culture, and how the practice reflects the emergence of consumer culture in China and the specificity of the use of product placement in Chinese cinema.

Feminine Sexualities in the Chick Genre

This paper foregrounds the voices of women who read chick lit or watch contemporary chick flicks or both, and who, to date, have been absent in the scholarship on representations of women's sexuality in this genre. It is informed by an empirical study of responses from forty-one Australian women to an anonymous Internet survey that asked, “How do you think women's experiences of sex are portrayed in the chick genre?” and “If you were a writer of the chick genre, how else would you portray women's sexual experiences?” Following the works of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, and Joke Hermes on “interpretive repertoires,” the data reveal that most readers draw on two repertoires to interpret representations of women's sexuality—one, as “passive or asexual,” and the other as “perfect with Mr Right”—both of which are situated within a wider “romantic love” frame of reference. Participants are, predominantly, critical of the way women's sexuality is represented in the chick genre. The findings, that also show that most readers have a preference for texts that show a broader range of sexual representations for women, are discussed in the light of current theorizing about postfeminist texts.

Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture by Hilary Radner (review)

Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture by Hilary Radner (review)

Neoliberal frames and genres of inequality: Recession-era chick flicks and male-centred corporate melodrama

Media forms play a vital role in making cultural and political sense of the complex economic developments and profound ideological uncertainties which have accompanied the global recession. This article analyses how popular genre cinema tackles the inequalities – in particular, gender inequalities – that follow from the financial crisis, situating Hollywood’s representational strategies in the context of recessionary media culture. It posits and analyses two sub-genres which demonstrate different approaches to an altered socio-economic climate: the recessionary ‘chick flick’ and the corporate melodrama. Amid the financial crisis these sub-genres shift emphasis to respond to changing circumstances, notably in relation to the once-ubiquitous trope of choice central to post-feminist media culture; neoliberal choice rhetoric is now considerably harder to maintain. The two case studies contrast the different ways in which female-centred chick flicks and male-centred corporate melodramas address unemployment, downward mobility and the challenges of work–life balance.

Pretty people: movie stars of the 1990s

In 1990s, American civil society got upended and reordered as many social, cultural, political, and economic institutions were changed forever. Pretty People examines a wide range of Hollywood icons who reflect how stardom in that decade was transformed as nation itself was signaling significant changes to familiar ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and nationality.Such actors as Denzel Washington, Andy Garcia, Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, and Antonio Banderas became bona fide movie stars who carried major films to amazing box-office success. Five of decade's top ten films were opened by three women--Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, and Whoopi Goldberg. Chick flick entered lexicon as Leonardo DiCaprio became King of World, ushering in cult of mega celebrity. Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise defined screen masculinity as stark contrasts between the regular guy and the intense guy while roles of Michael Douglas exemplified endangered Average White Male. A fascinating composite portrait of 1990s Hollywood and its stars, this collection marks changes to stardom and society at century's end.

Reimagining the Southern Imaginary

Reimagining the Southern Imaginary Daniel Cross Turner (bio) American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. Ed. Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn McKee. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2011. ixix + 374374 pp. $69.95 cloth. $24.95 paper. Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. By Karen L. Cox. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. 224224 pp. $34.95 cloth. Despite invoking those old southern staples of monumentalism and place, one could properly call co-editors Deborah Barker and Kathyrn McKee's collection of essays a "landmark" study. Of course there have been many essays and book chapters on southern films strewn through journals and anthologies over the past decade. There have also been single-authored books on the topic, such as Alison Graham's Framing the South (2001), and books that intermix film analyses with other media, such as Tara McPherson's Reconstructing Dixie (2003). But American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary marks the first significant essay compilation on the subject since Warren G. French's The South in Film (1981) and Edward D. C. Campbell's The Celluloid South (1981), both of which are now long in the tooth. Barker and McKee's collection recalibrates understandings of visual culture within and across traditional delineations of the region. It does so by incorporating the cultural-historicist bent and critiques of regional exceptionalism associated with [End Page 139] the New Southern Studies, in combination with the theoretical acumen of new media studies. The multi-authored format is ideal for capturing something of the sheer multiplicity of filmic visions of the South. This enables an impressive historical and generic range (silent to contemporary eras, studio system to indies, documentaries to exploitation films, chick flicks to vamp shows, etc.), cross-hatching matters of economics, ethnicity, and sexuality with the cinematic atmospherics of various southernnesses. The volume contains fourteen essays that address more than thirty movies classed as "southern film," though one of its central concerns is to reassess questions of regional and genre definition—what is meant by "southern," even what is meant by "film" as such. As Barker and McKee put it in their capable "Introduction: The Southern Imaginary," after the "postsouthern" and New Southern Studies (NSS) watersheds, critical cathexis on an essentialist and/or exceptionalist southern identity has yielded to the idea of a South that is "as much imagined and represented as it is concrete, as much created and performed as it is organic." That redoubled "as much" is a serious, if by now familiar, load-bearing wall. Current scholarship has devoted much time to treading the Möbius strip of the region's relative "realness," spinning back-and-forth the paradox between the conceptual and the experiential, the lived and the imaged. But the balanced Introduction and nuanced essays give this knotty matter a riveting turn of the screw. The editors rightly credit Michael Kreyling for picking the lock of traditional southernism, opening transit from "postsouthern" (parodic pantomine of received forms, the past as pastiche) to "transouthern"/"global South" (the transnational dimensions of the region, what James Peacock calls "grounded globalism," something well-nigh visualized in the global media of film trafficking in the South). This genealogy—one opposed by Jon Smith, who has tried to distance the achievements of the "post-southern" line—has been supported through elaborations by Thomas F. Haddox, Martyn Bone, and Scott Romine that limn the line from "PoSo" to "TranSo" and "GloSo," as well as Jay Watson's contribution to this anthology, "Mapping out a Postsouthern Cinema." If the volume's title strikes a monolithic tone, we learn from the Introduction and the essays that the cinematic South is not double, but multiple. The finely layered chapters, however, press beyond touting multiplicity itself as endgame; the exponential representations of southernness are given, if not "true" depth, the powerful illusion of same—not unlike the cinematic medium's play in the interstices of made image [End Page 140] and the impression of depth projected onscreen. Through recourse to variegated historical contexts that infuse and are infused by the films under study, the essays underscore cinema as a symbolic, transparent medium that nevertheless carries "the stain of the real...

Review: Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture by Hilary Radner

Review: Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture by Hilary Radner