Fashionable Feminists: Chick Lit As Contemporary Women's Cultural Production: Chick Lit As Contemporary Women's Cultural Production

Chick lit has been an immensely popular genre among its female readers since its emergence in the 1990s. A new kind of women's popular fiction that caters to the needs of the shifting demography of female readership, its popularity is not merely restricted to its readers but also extends to the publishing industry. Chick lit generated several million dollars profit for publishing concerns over two decades, resulting in the proliferation of new publishing imprints expressly for the publication of this genre in the late 1990s and early 2000s by several publishing conglomerates. Despite its popularity among its readers and publishers, it has often not received adequate scholarly, academic and critical attention like women's literary fiction. In fact, it is more reviled than appreciated by critics. Many feminists and mainstream literary critics view it as merely women's popular fiction, frivolous, insubstantial, trivial and anti-feminist as it is believed to undermine the gains of the feminist movement. On the other hand, chick lit scholars and its women readers regard it as postfeminist and a representation of the complexities of the lived experiences of young, educated, career women in a world indisputably altered by feminism. In spite of scathing criticism and lack of adequate mainstream scholarly scrutiny, the genre has burgeoned into numerous subgenres and varieties. What began as a white, straight, middle-class, singleton genre in Britain and America has now come to include varying themes, concerns and techniques based on race, ethnicity, nationality, age and gender. It has travelled across the world and has instantly become popular among readers in diverse locations..