A NEW DIRECTION for CHICK LIT by Rachel

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ABSTRACT

CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING: A NEW DIRECTION FOR CHICK LIT

by Rachel R. Rode Schaefer

Focusing on novels published outside of the popular market, this thesis seeks to draw attention to work being published under the label of chick lit that subverts standard chick lit genre conventions. While much work has been and is being done that concentrates on popular market chick lit, such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (1996), only cursory attention is being given to transnational, minority, and religious chick lit. This thesis considers chick lit within the larger history of women’s writing in order to contextualize the genre. Since chick lit has been connected to both feminism and post-feminism in its origins, consideration of this genre as a feminist genre focuses attention on how chick lit functions as a consciousness-raising genre.

CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING: A NEW DIRECTION FOR CHICK LIT

A Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University In partial fulfillment of Master of Arts Department of English by Rachel R. Rode Schaefer Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2015

Advisor______Dr. Madelyn Detloff

Reader______Dr. Mary Jean Corbett

Reader______Dr. Theresa Kulbaga

Rachel R. Rode Schaefer

2015

Table of Contents Introduction: Reading Chick Lit as Consciousness-Raising Novel ...... 1 Project Summary ...... 1 History of Chick Lit ...... 4 Feminism vs. Post-Feminism ...... 6 Consciousness-Raising Novels ...... 9 Summary of Chapter Arguments ...... 11

Chapter 1: Cruel Optimisms in All Fall Down and Pointing with Lips ...... 13 All Fall Down ...... 15 Pointing with Lips ...... 20

Chapter 2: Feminism in Unlikely Spaces: Religious Chick Lit ...... 29 Chick Lit’s Religious Ambiguity ...... 29 The J.A.P. Chronicles and The Matzo Ball Heiress ...... 32 No Sex in the City ...... 35 The Yada Yada Prayer Group and What a Girl Wants ...... 38 Religious Chick Lit’s Feminist Leanings ...... 41

Chapter 3: Girls of Riyadh and the Transnational Conscience ...... 47 Arab Reception ...... 48 The Translation ...... 51 Girls of Riyadh Critiques the Men of Riyadh ...... 56

Conclusion ...... 62

Works Cited ...... 67

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Dedication For John, Lyna, Elijah, and Noah

Acknowledgements I cannot express enough thanks to my committee for their continued support and encouragement: Dr. Madelyn Detloff, my committee advisor; Dr. Mary Jean Corbett; and Dr. Theresa Kulbaga. I offer my sincere appreciation for the learning opportunities provided by my committee.

My completion of this project could not have been accomplished without the support of my classmates who read drafts and provided feedback and encouragement, Nicolyn, Dinidu, Allison, Catherine, Tyler, and Tory. To my children, Elijah and Noah – thank you for your patience in allowing me time away from you to research and write. Thanks to my parents, Roger and Cindy Rode, for your unwavering support and encouragement throughout the meandering path John and I embarked upon so many years ago. Thanks to my in-laws, Bob and Nancy Schaefer for the emotional support provided, not just for me but for John as well, as we have negotiated a few challenges over the past decade.

Finally, to my inspiring, loving, and devoted husband, John: my deepest gratitude. Your encouragement and confidence when the times got rough are much appreciated. It was a great comfort and relief to know that you were beside me throughout this journey.

Introduction: Reading Chick Lit as Consciousness-Raising Novel

“Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them — the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these — a composite order of feminine fatuity — that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species.”

– George Eliot “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”

Project Summary While both Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (1996) are foundational chick lit texts, they have been in print for close to twenty years now. More analysis needs to be done on texts being published in the last ten years. Because of the increased diversity in the genre, the version of chick lit that Angela McRobbie (2004), Imelda Whelehan (2005), Caroline J. Smith (2008), and Stephanie Harzewski (2011) address, though still present, is no longer the only form of chick lit. Because authors are bringing greater variety to chick lit, it is emerging around the world in diverse and interesting expressions of the life of women. In “Belles in a Jar: Chick Lit is Evolving and How,” Rupa Gulab discusses the variety of careers chick lit heroines enjoy. As Gulab notes, the content of the Indian novels moves from Bollywood, the beauty industry, politics, and law (Gulab). American and British chick lit still center around the publishing industry, Hollywood, and the blogosphere with some changes emerging in subgenres such as Christian chick lit and Native American Chick lit. Christian chick lit novelist Kristin Billerbeck creates Ashley Stockingdale as a patent attorney in Silicon Valley. Moving away from the interpretation of product design, Native American novelist Dana Lone Hill’s heroine, Sincere Strongheart, is a single, alcoholic mother of three who quits her cashier job on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In the most recent book length publication on the topic, Chick Lit and Postfeminism (2011) Stephanie Harzweski acknowledges the emergence of diversity and minority contributions in saying: “Latina, African American, Indian American, and Asian American women authors graft traits of the chick lit formula with narratives of immigration, identity negotiations of first-generation children, and inner-city struggle” (188). However, Harzewski does not seriously address these novels, which often mimic white upper middle class chick lit by establishing their minority characters as wealthy college

graduates with corporate or white-collar careers. While portraying minority women as upwardly mobile middle class women who are educated serves a positive aspirational function, it also fails to reflect the struggle that is present for many of these women, thus curtailing thematic diversity in genre. Harzewski, moreover, focuses most prominently on novels written by upper-middle class white women, allowing only for the mention of the genre’s transnational diversity in her “Epilogue”: Initially intended to impart comic relief to single professional women, chick lit’s humor and lighthearted quality work to deflect attention from the wounded economy, high unemployment rates, and the health-care crisis…With the exception of the transnational novels of Kavita Daswani, chick lit, at least that published within the time frame of my study, does not more than superficially reflect, if at all, on its Western, urbocentric privilege. (Harzewski 191) As Harzewski states, the time frame of her study limits the literature she has the capacity to analyze. However, novels that should have been known to her like Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh (2005) and Anita Heiss’s Australian chick lit novels are completely ignored even in the epilogue, where she attempts to acknowledge the existence of diversity. Moving beyond the limitations of Harzewski’s study, my thesis examines contemporary texts, focusing on those texts that do more than superficially reflect on Western “urbocentric privilege.” While seeking out novels that portray characters that are not represented in Harzewski’s mainstream or popular market1 chick lit, I have encountered work that challenges stereotypical chick lit. Such novels work with feminism rather than, as Harzewski suggests, reflect post-feminist turns away from feminism. While much work has been and is being done on popular market chick lit such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (1996), only cursory attention is being given to transnational, minority, and religious chick lit. Attending to novels published beyond the popular market, my thesis therefore analyzes work being published as chick lit that subverts the standard chick lit genre conventions. I consider chick lit within the

1 By “popular market,” I mean to refer to the novels that are easily found in local storefront establishments like Barnes & Noble as well as many public libraries. While public libraries will cater to religious chick lit, often it can be a particular series or the library may not own the full series. With the exception of Jennifer Weiner’s All Fall Down, this thesis address novels that are not commonly found in storefronts or libraries although these novels are easily available online from multiple suppliers.

larger history of women’s writing in order to contextualize the genre. Since chick lit has been connected to both feminism and post-feminism in its origins, consideration of this genre as a feminist genre provokes a range of important questions. Is chick lit feminist, post-feminist, or anti-feminist? Does chick lit function as a consciousness-raising fiction? If so, what does it raise awareness of? Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977) are considered conscious-raising novels despite criticism surrounding their original reception as “trashy” or “not feminist.”2 In “Beyond Trashiness,” Meryl Altman draws attention to the long history of the dismissal of women’s novels as trashy connecting it to “an anxiety about sex, women, and gender [which] turns into an anxiety about genre – that is, about what sort of books can be written, and by whom, for whom, within what borders, policed by whom, and how” (12). Because of this anxiety about women’s conduct, chick lit comes under particular scrutiny when portraying single women alone (i.e. without male supervision) in the city. Chick lit novels will situate women as employed, financially independent (but not always responsible), and sexually aware (if not active). The humanizing character flaws of chick lit heroines will often center on shopping food, men, work, or alcohol. Shopping and drinking are typically implied plot accessories in chick lit novels thanks to Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw. However, Sophie Kinsella connects shopping to an addictive and financially destructive cycle of behavior in Confessions of a Shopaholic (2001). While addiction to shopping is often trivialized, dependence on “retail therapy” that results in consumer debt persists as a problem for women within a heavily consumerist cultures especially as marketers target women through advertising.3 Published in 2014, both Dana Lone Hill’s Pointing with Lips: A Week in the Life of a Rez Chick and Jennifer Weiner’s All Fall Down approach the topic of substance abuse and addiction and the failure of society to directly address the addiction of adults especially mothers.

2 Lisa Hogeland writes: “Wendy Stevens in off our backs, Van Gelder in Ms., disavowed The Women’s Room as a feminist novel.” While it was not the representation of men in the novel that created the problem for Stevens, Hogeland cites Stevens as claiming that “French ‘has shown us how victimized women are and how hateful men are toward women’ (19). Instead, Stevens’s dismissal of the novel comes from its rejection of feminist activist politics as the solution to that ‘hatefulness’” (92).

3Ironically, chick lit is one of the ways that women are targeted through advertisement. The genre itself is directed particularly at women and the novels themselves often will advertise high-end brands like Manolo Blahniks, Hermès, or Louis Vuitton.

Church lit has long been acknowledged as a subgenre of chick lit (Ferriss and Young 6). I extend church lit to include literature that includes narrators who identify with religion before any other cultural category. In examining novels with self-identified Jewish, Muslim, and Christian narrators, I examine how an embodied practice of faith is negotiated through the chick lit heroine’s whole identity as woman and Muslim, Christian, or Jew. Feminist themes of equality and independence are an incorporated into the women’s lives as they are positioned to make decisions that place their adherence to their (or their significant other’s) religious practice in opposition to cultural expectations. My thesis considers one novel from the Middle East, Girls of Riyadh. This novel not only attempts to highlight and critique gender roles in Middle Eastern societies but also function diplomatically to translate for the Western reader (North American/UK) certain parts of its culture concerning wealth, gender roles, and religion. While so much analysis is centered on Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw, many chick lit novels have moved away from the formula established by Fielding and Bushnell and have created complex stories that do more than lament about one’s body size, boyfriend, or shoes. This project hopes to add to the discourse of chick lit and its varied connections to feminism by examining texts that clearly break away from the Jones/ Bradshaw template and function more directly as feminist texts that critique the cultures from which they emerge.

History of Chick Lit Chick lit and feminism have been connected from the very beginning. When journalists set out to explain the emergence of chick lit, they usually begin with the mid 1990s with books like Bridget Jones’s Diary. The term has lineage as derogatory slang in reference to Elaine Showalter’s course entitled “Female Literary Tradition” at Princeton University (Harzewski 44) then Cris Mazza and Jeffery DeShell used the term in an avant-garde collection of short stories, Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction (1995). The term “chick lit” was used to deride the collection in subsequent reviews of the text (Mazza 17), and then appropriated by publishing houses as a catchy way to market a new line of women’s writing that diverges from the romance genre and arguably finds it roots in an earlier tradition of women’s writing. Cris Mazza states that the purpose of the anthology was to “determine how, in a post-Barth-and-Barthelme era women’s experiments with form and language might be distinct from men’s” (Mazza 17). The collection

of stories is far removed from the current marketing scheme focused more on the consumerist and relational aspects of women’s daily lives. Mazza and DeShell’s anthology garnered a fair amount of attention. One reviewer, Kelly Vie, reviewed Chick-Lit and said, “One generation of women writers wrote ‘shit happens.’ The next writes, ‘yeah, it still does, but I’ve stuck my fingers in it’” (Vie qtd in Mazza 18). The idea that “shit happens” is attributed to feminism while the “I’ve stuck my finger in it” is the position of the postfeminist. The idea behind post-feminism as Mazza and Vie define it, is not that women have arrived at equality or have solved the problems women wanted resolved. Mazza elaborates on this view, “This was the ironic intention of our title: not to embrace an old frivolous or coquettish image of women but to take responsibility for our part in the damaging, lingering stereotype” (18). Vie’s description takes on even more significance once “chick lit” and “postfeminism” began to be adopted and co-opted by the publishing industry. Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) was the first novel to be widely associated with the label of chick lit. From this point, the book industry began to use the term to describe any text that was associated with working women in their 20s and 30s who faced challenges with “her boyfriend, job, living situations, marriage, dating life, etc.” (Montgomery qtd. in Mazza 24). Often these novels are about women and their interior and public lives. Mazza writes that the point of the anthology Chick Lit: “was not to reduce the contributing authors into shopping-and-dieting airheads” but to respond to the lack of female characters and authors being presented for young girls to read and identify with (27). Mazza also points out that the literary landscape was already quickly changing…writers with double-X chromosomes have been set apart, frequently called ‘women writers’ while the others remain, simply, wholly, ‘writers.’ What these women writers produce has been ‘women’s fiction,’ and the rest, unconditionally, is ‘fiction’ (or even ‘literature’). The translation to me always has been that men write about what’s important; women write about what’s important to women (27-28) 4

4 Jennifer Weiner has been a vocal advocate for more critical attention being paid to women writers, not only commercial/genre fiction but also literary fiction as well. In “Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner Speak Out on Franzen Feud: HuffPost Exclusive,” Jennifer Weiner states “I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.” Erin Keane quotes Jonathan Franzen as saying “[Jennifer Weiner] is asking for a respect that not just male reviewers, but female reviewers, don’t think her work merits. To me it seems she’s freeloading on the

While Mazza is writing this essay for publication in Ferriss and Young’s 2006 collection of essays on chick lit, the publishing industry tends to gender fiction published by women as for women; many novels that perhaps do not fit the general constraints of chick lit are marketed as chick lit in order to boost initial sales. Novelists such as Rajaa Alsanea and Dana Lone Hill have intentionally opted for the chick lit label rather than general fiction which provided them with the inclusion in algorithms of online shopping sites allowing their novels greater visibility than if they were described as Middle Eastern or Native American novels.

Feminism vs. Post-Feminism Ideally, women’s writing would cease to be gendered and all fiction would simply be fiction. Additionally, the binary of literary vs. commercial fiction should be scrutinized closely. This thesis hopes to contribute to part of that discussion through a closer examination of works being marketed as commercial fiction by focusing on important discussions that emerge within and around chick lit. Its location as a commercial genre should not undermine its value as a site cultural critique. While chick lit authors do not claim to write literary works, chick lit authors do attempt to represent women’s lives and the forces that shape and influence women’s lives. One such influence on women’s lives is feminism either through an adherence to it or a push away from it. In “‘I Am Not a Feminist but…’: How Feminism Became the F-Word,” Toril Moi reflects on her Duke University students’ identification as feminist with many initially claiming they are not feminist. Moi writes that while they initially refuse the label, they will identify with a feminism that is in “favor of freedom, equality, and justice for women” (1735). More broadly, Moi’s class seems to align with the popular (mis)understanding of feminism and what I understand to be the general audience for chick lit readers. Moi further describes her students: When I ask why they wouldn’t [identify as feminist], a long, involved discussion slowly reveals that on my liberal, privileged American campus, young women who would never put up with legal or institutional injustice believe that if they were to call themselves feminists, other people would think that they must be

legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon, and over the years in the major review organs, to promote herself, basically. And that seems like a dubious project that is ideally suited to social media, where you don’t actually have to argue, you just tweet. Where is her long essay about this, where she really makes a case? She has no case. So she tweets.”

strident, domineering, aggressive, and intolerant and—worst of all—that they must hate men. (1735-36) Because of this negative stereotype of feminists and feminism, chick lit is often accused of being post-feminist or anti-feminist because it is marketed through purses, handbags, and romance, even though these are not the focus of the novels. Critics of chick lit have failed to make a sound argument that positions the substance of the novels against or in relation to feminism as a whole. John Ezard reports literary authors Doris Lessing and Beryl Bainbridge both dismiss the genre. Lessing claims that chick lit authors write like they do in order to get published and suggests they would be more respectable and praiseworthy “if they wrote books about their lives as they really saw them, and not these helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their weight and so on” (Lessing qtd in Ezard). Bainbridge regards the novels as “froth” and thinks it “a pity they perhaps can’t read something a bit deeper, a bit more profound with a bit of bite to it” (Bainbridge qtd in Ezard). If award-winning authors dismiss the genre, claiming it does not reflect women’s lives and is “froth, “ then the genre itself appears to work against women rather than for women. Post-feminism is often presented as a resistance to feminism. Rather than see these two ways of thinking as oppositional, I argue that feminism and post-feminism work together as a kind of call and response – a way of moving forward and then assessing progress. In order to establish the differences and similarities, it is necessary to clarify the terms feminism and post- feminism. In Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (2008), Susan Ferriss and Mallory Young define feminism in these terms: • Reliance on political action, political movements, and political solutions; • The primacy of equality; resistance to and critique of the patriarchy; • Choice is collective – it refers to women’s right not to have children and to enter careers and professions formerly closed to them; • A rejection – or at least questioning – of femininity; • Suspicion of and resistance to media-driven popular culture and the consumerism it supports; • Humor is based on the disjunction between traditional women’s roles and women as powerful, independent people. (3-4)

While the principles that Ferriss and Young describe can be assimilated to third-wave feminism, they mostly fit of second-wave feminism—the feminism that Moi’s class finds so off-putting, at least insomuch as all of these issues have political dimenstions and require political activism to promote. Popular market chick lit embraces feminism through its portrayal of women who are understood to embody the ideology of second-wave feminism. The conflicts in the novels often arise when these women fail to uphold second-wave feminism’s goals. Altman creates a list of topoi for feminist novels. Among the list of thematic elements are “routine harassment” along with a continued awareness that personal appearance influences professional advancement or as Altman more specifically states, “an explicit awareness that it is very difficult to be worrying constantly about how you look and simultaneously do anything else at all well” (9).5 Chick lit novels point out that in order to be taken as competent young professionals, women still conform to certain expectations. Chick lit attempts to reconcile these feminist ideas with the heroine’s daily life while refusing to completely reject normative femininity, traditional gender roles, and the consumer culture in which chick lit thrives. The conflict of feminist ideologies often will take the form of generational differences. Ferriss and Young’s post-feminist bullet points create unquantifiable markers for feminism. “The personal as political; agenda is replaced by attitude” is difficult to identify without social and political activism as an exterior representation. Additionally, the “rejection of second-wave anger and blame against the patriarchy” is not clear in Ferriss and Young’s explanation for why these young women are oppressed or what is preventing the young women from reaching their goals. Individual choice concerning career or physical alterations to the body

5 Meryl Altman’s topoi for feminist literature: • the routine harassment and abuse of girls by boys, and women by men, which is considered normal: e.g. in Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen little boys gang up on the female protagonist to pull down her pants, and “friends” from the football team trick her into getting into a car and then force her to touch one boy’s penis; marital rape scenes; employers and mentors expecting sexual favors; • an explicit awareness that it is very difficult to be worrying constantly about how you look and simultaneously do anything else at all well; • a conflict between the heroine’s erotic and ambitious wishes, and an awareness that one will not be permitted to satisfy both; • a wish not to marry, knowing it was a trap, but somehow marrying anyhow; • the expectation that one would both arouse and police desire; • a guilt about masturbation and other forms of sexual self-expression; • an emphasis on sexual disappointment and male inadequacies, described in graphic detail; • an awareness and critique of other forms of oppression, including class and race, with analogies made to the condition of women. (9)

ultimately connects to Ferriss and Young’s next point that post-feminism is a “return to femininity and sexuality” as well as taking “[p]leasure in media-driven popular culture and an embracing of the joys of consumerism” (4). Chick lit’s ultimate connection to post-feminism is not just in its ties to consumerism but in its use of humor “is based on the discrepancy between the ideals put forward by both feminism and the media, and the reality of life in the modern world; as such, the humor of postfeminism is often ironically self-deprecating” (Ferriss and Young 3-4).. It is this self-deprecating humor that is the backbone to chick lit. At the very core, chick lit is meant to be light and humorous. However, this does not prevent chick lit from tackling and creating discussion around very serious issues.

Consciousness-Raising Novels In Feminism and Its Fictions, Lisa Maria Hogeland describes consciousness raising novels as “important and influential in introducing feminist ideas to a broader reading public, and particularly in circulating feminist ideas beyond the small group networks that made up radical feminism in the early part of the [1970s]” (ix). Additionally, consciousness-raising novels allowed for “wider circulation of ideas…by moderating those ideas, by softening their political edges, by personalizing and novelizing feminist social criticism” (ix). Hogeland later distinguishes consciousness-raising novels as “a wholly new way of understanding and of making political change” (23). Chick lit novels further soften, moderate, and individualize feminist social criticism thus reducing the political power these novels have.. However, the authors of chick lit novels are aware of the political implications of their work and attempt to build upon widely accepted second-wave feminist principles and expand upon the need to identify areas where gender, racial, and social class inequality still exist. Jennifer Weiner openly critiques the gender inequality in publishing and marketing of genre fiction while Rajaa Alsanea’s book Girls of Riyadh was banned in Saudi Arabia for its explicit sexual content. Dana Lone Hill writes about racism against Native Americans in South Dakota and Neta Jackson attacks the racial divisions in U.S. Christian churches. All of these critiques are carried over into the novels and softened through the use of humor. John C. Meyer argues that “[n]ot only is humor pleasant; its recurring presence in rhetoric suggests that communicators believe it is also persuasive” (310). Rather than attempt a lecture or construct an aggressively polemical text, chick lit lightly argues in self-deprecating terms against materialism and ‘having it all.’ This

tactic is contrary to the feminist argument that Ferriss and Young put forth, that feminism provides humor in “the disjunction between traditional women’s roles and women as powerful, independent people” (4). In this disjunction, women who do find satisfaction and fulfillment in taking up “traditional women’s roles” can be made to feel like the punchline of the joke—and dismissed as not being feminist because they embrace traditional gender roles. Post-feminism is more palatable, to repeat the claim from above, because the “[h]umor is based on the discrepancy between the ideals put forward by both feminism and the media, and the reality of life in the modern world; as such, the humor of post-feminism is often ironically self-deprecating” (4). In The Feminist Bestseller, Imelda Whelehan offers a different way of thinking about the emergence of the genre: It seems at first glance as if the chick litters of the nineties to the noughties have redirected their gaze away from the personal being political, but you do not have to read many of these texts to observe a shared note of anxiety about the fate of femininity after feminism and the culture of achievement it has seemed to breed. Chick lit speaks to those afraid that they won’t make the cut and thrust of high female achievement (6). Rather than framing the contemporary woman as afraid of failure in choosing family over career or, as Whelehan terms it, of not making “the cut and thrust of high female achievement,” more commonly referred to as “having it all,” chick lit allows the heroine to fail and redirect her life in the novel in ways that strain personal relationships as she focuses on her career, and, conversely, as she focuses on her personal life, her career becomes threatened. The novels demonstrate for the reader that choice involves a sacrifice. Sometimes this sacrifice is painful and will bring about a better life. Sometimes this sacrifice (usually for a job and sometimes a man) costs the woman her dignity or her family. Second-wave feminists may find post-feminism threatening to the wider feminist project because the roles are reversed and feminism and the media become the objects of the humor. While self-reflexively joking that women cannot be perfect and take up all that is requested of them easily, post-feminism finds humor. It is through this humor that post-feminism argues that women can choose what to take up and what to leave behind—to be mothers or not to be mothers—to embrace femininity or to reject femininity. Instead of the consciousness-raising novel, which might imply that their problems are caused by patriarchy alone, chick lit as a post-

feminist fiction, through self-description, places the responsibility for their problems not on patriarchy alone but also on women themselves through the conflicts that arise at the personal level when patriarchal structures and consumerism are intermixed with feminist ideologies. Chick lit assumes a feminist heroine in an environment that expects the heroine to embody feminist ideologies. While establishing the heroine as feminist, the conflicts demonstrate the contemporary choices that women must make in order to survive or thrive. It is the conflicts that raise questions and concerns about the current status of women in society demonstrating that many of second-wave feminism’s goals have been met while in other ways they have failed and need to be re-evaluated for the next generation of women. As Helen Fielding stated, "Sometimes I have had people getting their knickers in a twist about Bridget Jones being a disgrace to feminism. But it is good to be able to represent women as they actually are in the age in which you are living" (qtd in Ezard). Rather than disregard feminism completely, chick lit seeks to represent women in the environment in which they live – not where our second-wave feminists wished we lived. This, at times, casts a confused look backward.

Summary of Chapter Arguments Chapter 1 looks to the United States to seek the ways that women are required to transform themselves in order to participate productively in both the workplace and the home. Confessions of a Shopaholic, All Fall Down, and Pointing with Lips highlight failures of successful conformity to the neoliberal capitalist economy by portraying heroines who become addicted to shopping, pills, and alcohol resulting in their failure to take up the citizens’ productive responsibilities. In order to become productive members of the community the heroines must transform themselves and transcend their addictions. In Chapter 2, I examine chick lit that highlights the heroines’ religious identity as a factor in how they negotiate their contemporary environments—striving to achieve a balance between religious and ethnic identities and the identity of a contemporary, liberated female who needs to transcend material culture and prejudice in order to unite faith with feminism. Chapter 3 addresses literature of the Middle East that is marketed to Western audiences as chick lit. While Girls of Riyadh seeks to explain the cultural phenomenon of chick lit within Saudi Arabia, Alsanea demonstrates the dissonance of the expatriate experience juxtaposed with the domestic/national experience of being a woman in Saudi culture. Through the novel, which was translated into English, Alsanea

seeks to translate a version of her culture to Western audiences with digressions that explain what to Middle Eastern audiences would already be understood. The novel also seeks to transform women’s understanding of the patriarchal structures by critiquing them. In doing so, the text does not solely lay blame at the feet of men but also implies the women’s complicity in their own oppression and subjugation in their culture.

Chapter 1: Cruel Optimisms in All Fall Down and Pointing with Lips While the addiction to shopping theme was made popular with Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (2000), substance abuse made an appearance as the main plot line in two 2014 novels. As a genre, chick lit favors single young women who are working in cosmopolitan environments. With the emphasis on a lifestyle involving clubs, parties, and friends, the workplace is usually seen as an obstacle to the enjoyment of this lifestyle. Some authors, like Jennifer Weiner, do challenge these formations by writing about mothers who balance their careers and home life. The intention to take advantage of the promise that women could “have it all” is interrupted by employers who fail to reimagine the patriarchal corporate structures that shape the workplace for women and men who both place increasing importance on shared parenting and bread-winning responsibilities. In many chick lit novels, the mothers opt to work from home as freelance writers or as bloggers. Such is the case in Weiner’s All Fall Down (2014), whose mothers are working from home, caring for children, and negotiating the romantic relationships with their partners. In Weiner’s novels, various conflicts arise for women who attempt to work as well as maintain their positions as highly involved mothers. One could read the popularly misconstrued “feminist” promise that women can “have it all” as cruel optimism, as Lauren Berlant describes, existing “when something your desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). Berlant later defines cruel optimism as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (24). The belief that life can be balanced is itself a cruel optimism. Other women can make it look possible, but the truth lies in the chaos and imbalance behind the closed doors of the home. When chick lit novels portray the working mother as struggling to keep up with their work schedules as well as their children’s schedules for school events, projects, conferences, as well as all the extracurricular events and after school activities, their representation just seems more realistic and relatable to other women readers who are similarly forgetting soccer games or bake sales. Readers continually returns to the fantasy only to have their reality unchanged. I would argue that the “problematic object” is not actually the desire to “have it all,” but the belief that “it” should actually be obtainable and sustainable for long periods of time. For Becky Bloomwood in Confessions of a Shopaholic, “having it all” translates the “problematic object” into the need to have all the material things she desires even though her bank account would suggest otherwise. Rather than live within her means, Becky continually

overdrafts her account and ignores notices from her bank. Her position as a finance journalist puts her in the path of her bankers later in the novel where she is forced to confront her personal financial problems. Becky’s belief that having the right Hermès scarf will somehow make her a better employee or just a happier person brings her further debt and unhappiness. Initially, this novel may appear to support the idea that women are not responsible with money; however, read more closely, the novel emphasizes the inadequacy of Bloomwood’s salary as well as the bank’s role in establishing an overdraft loan allowing Bloomwood to maintain a continued state of debt—raising awareness of the banking industry’s complicity in expanding personal debt. While Kinsella’s novel resolves the problem through self-education and self-improvement, the reader does not cheer on Bloomwood’s shopping habits but cringes at her irresponsibility. Rather than establishing a perfect role model, the chick lit heroine embodies the flaws of real women. Through identification with the heroine, the reader can presumably find a solution or the courage to solve her own problems. While Kinsella’s novel was published in 2000, more recently, two novels which present similarly flawed heroines who readers do not want to emulate but may identify with in such a way as to take control of their own lives. Jennifer Weiner’s All Fall Down (2014), published as a “popular market” novel, and emerging Native American author, Dana Lone Hill’s Pointing with Lips: A Week in the Life of a Rez Chick (2014), published by a small cooperative press, focus on mothers who are dealing with substance abuse issues. While both are classified as chick lit, they stand alone in way they raise awareness about the contemporary issues prevalent in the lives of women. Both novelists directly confront the reasons behind the addictions while showing their negative effects, and ultimately promise transformation of the women back to health. Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism is present in these novels through the desire to financially support their immediate families through their employment while simultaneously caring for extended family members while the father(s) of their children remain conspicuously distant. Both heroines are working with the belief that they can balance career and family while maintaining personal relationships. In order to survive their respective days, the women turn to substances that promise first to help them achieve the unachievable dream of being a superwoman but then become what controls their lives.6 The pills and alcohol are consumed with the hope and promise

6 Cris Mazza defines post-feminist writing as “writing that says women are independent & confident, but not lacking in their share of human weakness & not necessarily self-empowered; that they are dealing with who they’ve made

that it will provide the women with the ability to manage and cope with the stress of their daily lives. However, the characters only find themselves consuming the pills and alcohol to excess and place their lives as well as the lives of their loved ones in danger. Reading these novels alongside each other highlights the socio-economic disparity in the United States. Weiner’s protagonist, Allison Weiss, is easily positioned as one of the 1% as Weiner locates her, in a well-to-do neighborhood of Philadelphia, while Lone Hill’s protagonist, Sincere (Sis) Strongheart, lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the United States’ poorest communities.7 I argue that Weiner’s All Fall Down and Lone Hill’s Pointing with Lips: A Week in the Life of a Rez Chick can be read as consciousness-raising novels in the genre of chick lit by highlighting the personal experiences of two vastly different women struggling through similar addictions. Presenting the personal as political and social, these chick lit novels highlight the struggle of women to care for their families in persistently patriarchal communities. The story of each protagonist illuminates the ways in which the social interactions remain struggles to maintain a balance and sense of self within her personal life (friends, men, and kids) and within her workplace as an environment that holds the potential to be flexible and adaptive to her life. More broadly, the stories demonstrate clashes between their cultures, their own personal belief systems, and popular feminism as the women seek to find this elusive promise of balance and “having it all.” All Fall Down In All Fall Down, a mother who is addicted to prescription painkillers pushes her abilities by trying to be everything to all people and being nothing to herself. The protagonist and narrator, Allison is married with a college education living in an upper middle class or lower upper class neighborhood within commuting distance to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Allison attempts to raise her daughter according to standards that are defined by the judgmental mothers

themselves into rather than blaming the rest of the world; that women can use and abuse another human being as well as anyone; that women can be conflicted about what they want and therefore get nothing; that women can love until they hurt someone, turn their own hurt into love, refuse to love, even ignore the notion of love completely as they confront the other 90% of life. Postfeminist writing says we don’t have to be superhuman anymore. Just human.” (“What is Postfeminist Fiction?” 9).

7 A 11 May 2015 New York Times editorial addresses the strikingly high suicide rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation and cites the Pine Ridge Reservation as located “in three of our country’s poorest counties. The United Nations’ 2010 Report on Poverty included Pine Ridge in its discussion of the most marginalized indigenous communities in the world.”

that she knows who feed their children organic food, throw extravagant birthday parties worthy of Pinterest, and manage to maintain a perfect body and seeming body/mind balance. Allison attempts to achieve a “picture perfect life” with the help of Percocet and Vicodine. However, she ultimately fails to put together a perfect life as her marriage falls apart, her father’s8 health diminishes with Alzheimer’s disease, and she becomes more responsible for her mother. Moreover, it is difficult to cry over her failings as a mother since they are the failings of many mothers around the world. Competitive careers are difficult to manage while raising young children. Motherhood becomes a competition unto itself in that mothers must compete in order to prove to each other and themselves that they are more than just “stay-at-home” moms who lounge around eating bon-bons and watching soap operas all day. Weiner’s text is indeed important in that she is acknowledging these problems.9 Allison’s failure to achieve the balance among working on her blog, maintaining an ideal physical appearance and active sexual relationship with her husband, and being an involved parent to a special needs child, places a significant amount of stress on her which is heightened when her husband retreats from interacting with her. The novel follows Allison’s increasing dependency on the drugs and her desperation to maintain the secret rather than to ask for help. In Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, Rita Felski suggests a way of reading Allison’s struggle to work and financially support her family while fulfilling rigid cultural expectations that continue to position women as the primary caregivers for young children: The ideal of a communal gendered identity generated by the feminist public sphere is thus both empowering and constricting; it can be viewed negatively as ideology, insofar as it fails to come to grips with the material reality of a class-and race-divided society, but also positively, in that changes in worldview resulting from the feminist emphasis upon the specificity of gender politics and the

8 Allison’s mother had “trouble” following Allison’s birth which one is led to believe involves depression and drinking. Allison was much closer to her father who in the novel is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. While present in the story, her mother is unable to care for her husband and Allison has to step in and clean the rotten food from the refrigerator and re-wash her parents soiled and mildewed clothes that were forgotten in the washing machine (Weiner 119-27).

9 Wednesday Martin’s essay “Poor Little Rich Women” discusses the group of women with advanced degrees staying home and managing the household(s) as they would run a corporation basing the evaluation of their “job” on which schools their pre-college-aged children were accepted into and how well they managed the home finances. The women gave up “high-powered” careers and in turn live a life generally segregated from men with their own discretionary income earned as a “wife bonus” at the end of the year..

problems which women share as women can serve an important critical function in making women more aware of and less amenable to their own exploitation. (169) As Felski suggests, the reader will see Allison’s oppression in the novel and in turn reflect back on the ways they hold themselves to unreasonable and oppressive expectations or find themselves under external sources of oppression. Allison’s solution will provide the reader the courage to seek a path towards liberation. Eventually, as can be predicted, Allison loses control of the situation and is forced to choose between asking for help or losing her family. Allison spends time in a rehab center and rather than be immediately reunited with her husband and daughter at the end of the novel, Allison is in recovery and is dating her husband. The ideal reader is left hoping and cheering for Allison that she has learned her lesson and can be reunited with her husband and daughter in an idealistic way. We do not know that Allison will succeed. There is opportunity for this to fail. She may relapse, no longer want to be with her husband, or she may not want to be a stay-at-home mother anymore. These changes are not seen but the conclusion of the novel leaves the final outcome open to some interpretations though the happy ending is strongly suggested. Despite the lighthearted treatment of the debates surrounding motherhoods/ parenthood, it is difficult to really laugh throughout All Fall Down. 10 Allison’s abuse of prescription painkillers spirals out of control and the effect of the narrative is akin to watching a train wreck. Weiner subverts the typical formula for chick lit novels and finds instead a novel that is shaped not only by personal experience but also the national news. In a June 2014 book signing in

10 Humor is one of chick lit’s key features. The humor is specific to the group of women the book is written for. As the audience changes, so too does the humor in the text. Weiner’s humor in All Fall Down is aimed at mothers. When Allison meets Janet, another mother, at play group, Janet pegs Ellie as Allison’s first child and correctly assumes that Allison and her husband are careful about the child’s diet by not allowing high-fructose corn syrup in Ellie’s diet. Allison confides a secret to Janet that she has not even shared with her husband, Dave. Allison lowers her “voice and looked around, feeling like a con on the prison yard” and confesses “‘I gave her a McNugget’” (51). While not laced with high-fructose corn syrup, McNuggets are about as distant from organic, free-range chicken as you can get. The guilt Allison feels about feeding her daughter a McNugget is real in an environment that promotes the purity of the food alongside the ethical and humane treatment of the animals to be consumed if one is even to consume the animals. With plastic cups laden with BPA threatening to poison the children, every toxin must be accounted for childhood obesity must be fought from birth. We can ignore the very obvious fact that the parents in these cases have likely grown up on McNuggets and BPA laden plastic cups and possibly have eaten a few lead paint chips. Outside of parenthood this type of thinking may be seen as extreme and among more laid back parents it is seen as extreme. The rhetoric surrounding products and childcare recommendations for parents promotes healthy habits but can tend toward a hyper-vigilance that Weiner here uses for comedic effect with the guilt of her character.

Cincinnati, Ohio, Weiner shared her own experience dealing with the aftermath of her father’s various addictions.11 Vicki Hyman reported on All Fall Down, in these terms: Prescription drug abuse (or the awareness of it, at least) has skyrocketed in recent years, with the Centers for Disease Control labeling prescription painkiller overdoses among women an epidemic, with a 400 percent increase between 1999 and 2010. It's also an issue that hits home for Weiner, whose psychiatrist father dropped out of her life after he and her mother divorced, and she discovered later that he was an addict. He died a few years ago, overdosing on a mixture of heroin and crack. (Hyman) Weiner writes not only from the autobiographical position but also from the journalistic point of view—reporting on important issues in women’s lives. In Chick Lit and Postfeminism, Harzewski elucidates the connection between chick lit and autobiography by listing several authors who have used autobiographical details to help plot their first novels. Weiner’s Little Earthquakes (2004) is among these. Harzweski writes: In a Women’s National Book Association panel, Sessalee Hensley, head fiction buyer for Barnes and Noble stores, has said of chick lit, “If it was serious it wouldn’t be chick lit. It would be memoir.” This distinction, while exaggerated, points not only to the humorous function of chick lit but also to the high frequency of autobiographical parallels between the author and character. (156) Weiner combines the conflicting advice on parenting, the pressure to not only maintain a career but to be distinguished in this career, and the personal connection to addiction. Weiner’s personal experiences with these issues only provide gravitas to the plot rather than allow it to be pure fantasy. Weiner is far from alone in pulling details from her life to inspire her novels. Harzwewski’s text, published in 2011, is limited in scope in that she focuses primarily on Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (more the HBO series than the book which Bushnell had less to do with after the first season) and Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding.12

11 At the book signing Weiner described an event following her father’s death where she had to clean out his belongings. Among the belongings were various forms of pornography. Weiner also commented that her father had been dependent on alcohol and other substances over the course of his lifetime. 12 Harzewski provides quite a few brief readings on a many American and some British chick lit published prior to 2008. Since Harzewski wrote this text, chick lit has gone in a somewhat different direction in the attempt distance itself on some levels from the heavy consumerism that is typical in the genre. Harzewski also does not attend to the transnational chick lit that has emerged globally.

Annalisa Quinn reviewed All Fall Down for NPR.org and is far more critical of the novel than other reviews of the same time. Quinn cites a failure to recreate natural and sympathetic characters. Quinn writes: The book's least tolerable attribute is its unkindness toward the various low-rent "Ashleys and Brittanys and Ambers and Caitlyns" who populate Allison's rehab and whose addictions are of a less polite strain — the heroin and the coke addicts with track marks down their arms. Of course, by the end, they're a happy family — the Ashleys and Brittanys start calling her "A-Dub," and she's throwing ironic gang signs (spare me). They even put on a musical together … But her selfishness and her cruelty are hard to forgive, and when the inevitable reconciliation with her husband happens, all you can think is "Why, Dave? Why?" (Quinn) Quinn seems to fail to separate the author from the selfish, unstable, drug-addicted narrator in this sense.13 While there are no Caitlyn’s mentioned in the novel, Allison, the narrator is involuntarily checked into rehab by her husband. In the initial shock of this moment, Allison does position herself as superior to the other addicts in the rehab facility because she does not accept the nature of her addiction or the seriousness of what she has done. As an NPR reviewer, Quinn underscores the privileged distance the upper-class have when it comes to drug addiction. Allison does not regard her addiction to painkillers as equivalent to heroin use. Early in her treatment still suffering from withdrawal and denial Allison reflects: I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t like these women. I didn’t have any DUIs that needed to be expunged, a judge hadn’t ordered me to stay, and I hadn’t flunked a drug test at work. Nobody named D-Block had ever stuck a needle in my arm, and I wasn’t sure if I could find Kensington even with my GPS. Heroin, I thought, and shuddered. These girls had done IV drugs, and probably worse things to get the drugs. All I’d done was swallow a few too many pills, all of which (except the ones I’d ordered online) had been legitimately prescribed. (245)

13 The underlying assumption made by Quinn is that the potential reunion of Dave and Allison will be a happy ending. While Dave cannot be blamed for Allison’s choices, the stress that was placed upon her as he struggled with his insecurity of not earning as much as his wife should not be ignored. For Allison to return to a relationship with Dave without significant amounts of counseling for both Dave and Allison would be foolish. What is expected at the end of this novel is that Allison would give up the blogging career to stay home and take care of Ellie, however, this would only reinforce a sexist gender-role limiting Allison to the domestic sphere in order to pacify Dave’s ego.

It is clear from this early passage that Allison does not accept the severity of her addiction nor does she yet feel any compassion or empathy for the other women in rehab facility. At this point Allison is still refusing to admit that she has a serious problem. Even later in the novel when Allison has to share her story in group therapy, she does not feel that it is tragic enough to be a legitimate problem. The women in the support group critique her narration saying that she doesn’t sound like it is personal to her. They accuse her of having a “high bottom” because she has not descended to homelessness or utter poverty and loss before seeking help (331). This is the very issue that divides the upper-class chemical dependents from the less privileged chemically dependent. If you have not lost everything and can continue to make it through the day without being caught or called out for intoxication, then you don’t really have a problem. To the contrary, Weiner’s point is that all addiction is addiction regardless of income or social position. Drawing from her own psychiatrist father’s addiction to heroin and crack, Weiner positions addiction as a problem that cuts across all class boundaries.

Pointing with Lips Just before the release of Weiner’s novel, another novel entered the market through a small Native American co-operative press called Blue Hand Books. Dana Lone Hill’s novel Pointing with Lips: A Week in the Life of a Rez Chick, published in March 2014, focuses on Sincere (Sis) Strongheart, a single mother who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota. Chick lit emerging from new geographic locations is too often compared with the claim that it is a “version of Sex and the City.” The goal is to position the new novel on a level with the most well known of chick lit, Bushnell’s Sex and the City. But like Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh, there is little in this text that closely resembles Sex and the City. There is a group of friends Sis, Boogie, and sometimes Zona who run around drinking and getting into difficult situations. However, the primary differences of class and race are so great that it is difficult to compare the two. Carrie Bradshaw’s on-again, off-again relationship with Mr. Big show her to be pretentious and spoiled compared to Sis’s struggles with alcoholism, poverty, raising her three children, and protecting the rest of her family from arrest. In comparison to the existential struggles of the Native women on the reservation, the Sex and the City foursome appears entitled and whiny. Pointing with Lips has more in common with the Saudi novel Girls of Riyadh in that

the novel functions as a politically conscious novel while Weiner’s All Fall Down functions as a more socially conscious novel. While chick lit has evolved since 1996, it is still being marketed through the cosmopolitan “Sex and the City meets ____” tagline. Lone Hill is largely responsible for her own marketing since her press, BlueHand Books, lacks the resources to do it. The reviews on Native American blogs and online Native American journals are thus the primary source of the novels marketing. Lone Hill describes her own connection to chick lit through the HBO series Sex and the City: Something many people don’t pick up on with my book because it associates with being from the rez and being Native and all that genre is that my book is “chicklit” and that was the intention when I wrote it…I remember one time a couple of friends and I bought some VHS seasons packages at Family Dollar of Sex & the City …we would watch the seasons and make our own rez versions up and then we talked of how a book needed to be written about a modern day rez chick. (“The Strides of March”) Lone Hill writes that people did not find her book to be chick lit because it represents life on the reservation. The readers of chick lit have expectations that the novel will portray a fantasy or at least represent a life that while it has problems, enables their escape from their current reality. Lone Hill’s book brings the reader into complicity with Sis as she illegally drinks beer and drives around the reservation drunk while caring for her children and family and hosting cookouts at her house with the food she purchases with her food stamps. Lone Hill’s goal is to create a literature that she and her fellow readers on the reservations can relate to—a literature that reflects the goals, priorities, and actualities of their lives. In writing Pointing with Lips, Lone Hill makes space within the chick lit genre for Native American authors and follows along the lines of the genre as it appears in global contexts to raise political issues through personalizing them in story form. While Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues against analyzing Native American literature against mainstream literature, stating, “the reason it is not so easy for Native American writers to express intent in such discussions is because their work is almost always being focused toward a contrived ‘mainstream,’(a function of 'colonialism'), not only in publishing and editing but in critical analysis as well” (27). However, as Lone Hill writes, she is intentionally attempting to

write chick lit and as such her efforts can be evaluated or critiqued based on her use of the key markers of the chick lit genre. As Urban Native writer Patty Stein touches on in her review, the text frankly discusses “drug use, alcoholism, boarding schools’ dark legacy, domestic violence, homosexuality, sexual abuse, and even Black Hills gold” (Stein). Lone Hill uses her novel to place these political issues back into the public consciousness; however, the story itself follows many other tropes of chick lit. Lone Hill’s novel presents an anti-heroine who works an hourly-wage job and supplements her income with food stamps as well as craft work sold on the street to tourists. The presentation in chick lit of women living below the poverty line helps to reframe one’s expectation of what it is to be a modern woman. The novel itself is an extended letter to the rehabilitation facility, a necessary step to justify her participation in a treatment program. Through her telling of the story, we learn that Sis needs help, not because she is incapable of helping herself but because she is the only one in her family who wants to change and remain on the reservation. She is the only one in a position to keep her children, siblings, and extended family together. Sis needs treatment at the rehabilitation facility because there is no one in her family or community who is in a position to help her. She must be the one who helps them.14 Lone Hill herself promotes the novel as Rezi Chick, inaugurating a new subgenre of chick lit. Stein reviews Pointing with Lips stating: At first glance Pointing with Lips may just seem like a rez-ified version of Sex and the City, which, don’t get me wrong, we’ve needed some rezzed out chick lit for a while, but it is oh so much more. Aside from pulling you into Sincere’s world to the point of laughing and crying at all hours of the night, Lone Hill gives honest insight into contemporary rez life. Stein presents Sis’s story as a light-hearted read. Sis experiences as a high-functioning alcoholic, similar to Allison’s high-functioning addiction to painkillers, allow her to care for her children, cook, make quill work, and even drive. Unlike Allison, however, nearly everyone is aware of

14 Sis’s personal history is punctuated with an alcoholic mother who neglects her children and places Sis in the position where a man attempts to rape her at the tender age of 9. As Sis fights back with a knife she had just taken from the kitchen in order to open the can of milk for her baby sister, she stabs her attacker in the stomach. Her uncle walks in on the attack and finishes the job. Her uncle stands not only between her and her attacker but also protects her in that she will not have to live with the guilt of killing her attacker (though the wound she did land would likely have been fatal) nor would she have to live with a murder attached to her reputation. Her uncle spent years in jail for the death of this man and Sis lived with a secret of sexual assault (165-75).

Sis’s drinking, although few try to intervene. Casual observers might see similarities between alcohol abuse and prescription drug abuse, but the real difference seems to be that Sis is a Lakota living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Pine Ridge Reservation is dry, making the sale, possession, and the consumption of alcohol illegal on the reservation. The interpretation of the law for possession is strict in that if one has alcohol in one’s body at any level, one can be arrested for possession. Lone Hill’s characters are sympathetic yet there is also a sense of waiting for the catastrophe – every time Boogie and Sis openly drink and drive through the reservation with their beer in one hand, the reader half-expects them to be arrested or seriously injured. Like Weiner, Lone Hill pulls from autobiographical experiences on the Pine Ridge Reservation where she grew up as well as current political issues that shape life on the reservation. Lone Hill’s blog addresses the current issues in White Clay, Nebraska. In June 2013, a series of protests and much discussion preceded a vote that would make alcohol legal. On June 20, Lone Hill writes: One of the biggest arguments for legalizing alcohol amongst most people is to be able to build treatment centers. With the reservations alcohol rate looming around 80% and 100% affected by alcohol and the unemployment rate around 85%, it makes one wonder how well treatment works when one has to return to the same environment. The life expectancy rate on the reservation is 52 for women and 48 for men. (“A Tribe Divided Over Alcohol”) In her blog post “Something Has to Change,” Lone Hill personalizes the issue of alcoholism revealing the storyline in Pointing with Lips as autobiographical in nature, not just stemming from local issues concerning alcohol on the reservation. Lone Hill writes: I have been through the battle with alcoholism. I know it’s not over. I take it day by day, and am grateful every night when I close my eyes and I am sober. Of course it wasn’t easy. I had to hit bottom, and practically lose everything- including myself- to find myself. Besides being a mother to four beautiful Lakota children, my recovery is the best thing that has ever happened to me. (“Something Has to Change”) The personal experience of having lived the life of dependency as well as the conflict within the community, perhaps, is what makes the humor in Pointing with Lips work for the reader. Lone Hill humorously demonstrates the division in the community between the government and the citizens through the division presented in Sis’s family. Sis jokes about how

her brother George threw her in jail for fighting with him under the charge of “assaulting an officer” (19). Her subsequent retaliation for being arrested was to vandalize his car and as Sis describes “Mark [another brother] watched me go psycho on the cop car. All this happened while Misun [another brother] took George out for target practice shooting prairie dogs. That is a secret we are carrying to our graves, because surely it is a federal charge” (20). The collective bonding of the siblings in retaliation for George’s betrayal of familial loyalty through the arrest of Sis takes a humorous turn in the novel. While such violence against the police would not normally be funny, as Lone Hill presents the family dynamics it light and playful while driving home the point that the issue of alcohol consumption quite literally divides families on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In his review of the novel, James Mackay describes the novel as: raucous comedy, from set pieces such as the time Sis’s brother Mark wakes up from his alcoholic stupor to find himself rolled in a blanket, stapled to the floor, being abused in Lakota by a ninety-seven-year-old elder, to Sis’s own struggle to hold her developing beer gut and her wry reflections on the absurdities of reservation life. This is important, as Lone Hill clearly wants to show the attractions of a permanently buzzed lifestyle in the company of friends and relations, especially when contrasted against the grim history of colonialism and present-day racism (gestured to, for instance, in Sis recalling the horrific torture and murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder as she enters the town of Gordon). (89) Mackay lists some of the lighter moments in the text as well as the heavier political commentary that emerges throughout. In a recent review of Pointing with Lips, Brian Twenter acknowledges the traditional mode in which Lone Hill writes: While Pointing with Lips can be seen as just another comedic “rez chick” novel, … it is really much more when read through a Lakota lens. Writing Lakota is a challenging task. To fill a novel full of traditional Lakota kinship relationships, stories, language, landscapes, and humor is demanding, but to do so and portray real contemporary reservation life, the good, the bad, ugly and sad, in a thoughtful, honest, and humorous portrayal is what makes writing Lakota and Dana Lone Hill’s Pointing with Lips uniquely wonderful. (115) Twenter acknowledges the richness of Lone Hill’s story and its honest reflection of Lakota traditions. However, much of the book is about coming to understand one’s self as much as it is

in taking the time to really see what is happening in one’s environment. Lone Hill presents her reservation as she has seen it—a variation of her own story. The government structures at work in Pointing With Lips fail Sis in a number of ways. The institutions (e.g., food stamps) set up to ease the work of supporting her children through an hourly wage position at the local supermarket reinforces the borders that hold her in. As Rita Felski has observed in extending bell hooks’ comments concerning the white women’s exclusion of black women from feminist discourse, “As a result, it has become apparent that female community cannot simply transcend existing power structures but is deeply implicated in them, and that the exclusive focus upon gender politics can serve to obscure other, equally fundamental structural inequalities within late capitalism” (168). Such inability to transcend the power structures within the government’s social services being offered to the families on the reservation is evident in the novel. While Sis does not present herself in the novel as oppressed because of her gender, there is a lack of female solidarity in the novel, particularly across class boundaries. The social worker depicted at Family and Social Services is an older white woman from Nebraska who rigidly enforces and without compassion the reduction of Sis’s food stamp allowance because Sis quit her job rather than be fired.15 Sis continues to struggle to negotiate the government institutions that have failed to connect fully with the citizens they exist to aid. Upon leaving the social worker’s office, Sis and her alcoholic mother drive to the university on the reservation to find out more information. As Sis fills out an application, a male sociology professor enters and suggests Sis’s anger at the social service system be redirected to becoming part of the system. Sis spends most of the novel supporting, nurturing and rescuing family members, and, as a result, the reader feels that this is a career would use Sis’s abilities, yet Sis will have to be made a legible (sober) citizen first. Sis drives past a new sign “Hope Recovery Center” (274) and calls to inquire about treatment for herself on her way to White Clay to purchase beer. Sis is told that to sign up for treatment at the facility she must justify herself as needing treatment for alcoholism by writing an essay of 250

15 This particular rule as it is enforced rigidly, denies the worker a just reason to leave the job. While Sis’ hung-over state causes her to lose her temper and yell at a customer who repeatedly damages the merchandise in order to obtain a discount, thus may not qualify as a justification, but Sis would have likely been fired had she not quit first. The system would have Sis experience public (and self) humiliation by waiting patiently to let her boss fire her. Similarly, leaving a job for untenable reasons (sexual harassment, etc) may prevent her from receiving state assistance. While Sis’s assistance is reduced, the white woman lacks compassion and is curt. Eventually, Sis finds out that she could be a college student and receive more assistance.

words and completing an evaluation. While the recovery center is present to help residents addicted to alcohol, the admission for treatment is based upon one’s ability to interrupt and suspend one’s life in order to receive this help. While attempting to “have it all” is a cruel optimism, the road to being free from addiction similarly, as Berlant writes, “attends to practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance that indicate people’s struggles to change, but not traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making value has been cast” (27). While it is optimistic for Sis to seek help, the cruel optimism Berlant writes about is in the ways that Sis must pause her life and recreate herself to conform to the system. The (patriarchal) system does not make itself open to helping the community where alcoholism is rampant. Sis has to negotiate her right to be a part of this system. While writing essays seems minor, she has to justify her place within the system before she can obtain help. She has to make herself better before she is deemed worthy of assistance. The neoliberal structure of the rehab center and again through the state assistance scholarship program requires that Sis demonstrate in an essay that she will bring a positive return on their investment or times and resources. In other words, if Sis wishes to improve her life she has to sell herself, market herself as a product. Sis has to qualify herself as worthy of investment and risk, demonstrating that she won’t back out of the program and that her life following treatment will continue to benefit the community. Sis has to work hard in order to establish herself as a good investment; Allison has no such need. Allison’s support system, husband and mother, work together to take Allison to the rehab facility in New Jersey, not Pennsylvania. Their privileged position of being white and upper-middle class allows them to walk into the facility without any other credentials. Allison is kept against her will, particularly during the early withdrawal stages and then beyond as she is forced to receive care she does not want. Sis’s lack of a support system leaves her vulnerable and requires her to work harder to rescue herself from addiction, so she can in turn rescue her family from the dangers that come with addiction: separation, poverty, etc.

Conclusion Weiner’s text All Fall Down has a long history of feminism to support its character. Allison’s myriad, choices as well as her education, are products of the second-wave feminist movement. Lone Hill’s characters do not embody the privileges that feminism has provided white elite women in the same way. Though legally the benefit is there, the cultural behaviors

and attitudes of the population are more connected to colonialist communities rather than a portion of the United States of America, primarily because the reservation is not technically under the jurisdiction of the United States but is tribal land. As these reservations were established, the mode of governance on the reservations often took similar shape as the white culture off the reservation rather than reflecting their own tribal values. In Lakota Culture, World Economy, Kathleen Pickering makes this observation: “A gender-based division of wage labor positions began early during the emergence of reservation life. Lakota women were expected to follow the model of mainstream white society and clean, cook, or sew” (80). Pickering also highlights the ways that the United States government reinforced white European gender roles on the reservations. By restructuring the gender roles on the reservation to mimic that of the European settlers, the U.S. government altered the society as well as how women particularly understand their value and place in society. In “Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama,” Jane Arthurs concludes, “An ability to see ourselves in these characters works not simply to confirm our sense of self but to question the costs as well as the benefits of living in a postfeminist consumer culture. It is in the messy contingencies of the everyday that feminism is produced or inhibited in practice, and it is this quality that Sex and the City is able to capture” (95). While Arthurs analyzes the HBO series, the sentiment is applicable to chick lit novels as well. The greatest appeal of these novels is how they reflect a reality that some women do live in. It is the conflicts or “messy contingencies,” though treated humorously, which provide the greatest social critique. The response of the female characters to these conflicts is often based upon their own personal failings. In these novels, those conflicts include addictions to shopping, drugs, alcohol, yet in other novels one could see negative responses to life in other behaviors that might include eating either restricting or binging on food, domineering behavior that isolates the character, or even a lack of will allowing other characters to take advantage of her. These failures are worked into the plot of the novel through the humorous anecdotes and self-deprecating humor of the first person narrator. In one accusation leveled at chick lit, Quinn accused Weiner’s characters of “selfish behavior” in her NPR review. While “selfish” characters do exist, the reader is made aware the behavior is selfish. It is clear that the characters ignore activist causes, exploiting the guilt inherent in humanity. Knowing that one ought to help and helping through actually joining activist causes are very different. Sometimes the characters know they should be involved and

doing more for charitable causes but are torn with the busyness of their daily lives. Or, the characters are skeptical that they can really make a difference by joining larger causes. Instead, the characters will often, like Sis, focus on taking care of family and friends rather than taking on more globalized projects because this is what they are able to do. By writing about these conflicts authors of chick lit draw attention to the general need for charitable and activist work, but the authors draw attention to the disconnect women experience in their own lives. However, it does not and is not likely to increase charitable or activist behaviors in a reader, only to raise them to the level of acknowledging the failure or pacifying one’s guilt because they once did something, which is more than what the character did. While the novels do not provide a step-by-step process for readers to solve all the problems of substance abuse or poverty in reality, the novels do highlight specific problems that many readers may not be conscious of. It is easy to focus on one’s lived reality as the defining reality. Weiner and Lone Hill both identify obstacles that define real women’s existences. Through these stories readers are able to vicariously experience the realities of women who struggle with substance abuse and the difficulties of seeking help. Lone Hill’s novel additionally provides historical details and cultural contexts that limit and drive the characters’ reactions and positions on and off the reservation. Such consciousness-raising in this context is not strictly focused on women’s positionalities as women in the world but examines the influence race and class have on women’s positions in the world.

Chapter 2: Feminism in Unlikely Spaces: Religious Chick Lit One of the arguments against chick lit is its lack of depth—a shallowness that focuses on consumerism, which informs how women perceive and present themselves. While the media and advertisers of the genre want readers to favor Prada handbags, they are not the focus of the novels or of most characters’ storylines. Through the characters the novels raise questions that address the different ways that women engage the world. One such way is how women negotiate their personal identity as modern women while holding onto their traditional beliefs. Specifically within the genre of chick lit, there are novels that are written from an explicitly religious point of view. While these are typically easy to identify with titles like Neta Jackson’s The Yada Yada Prayer Group (2003), other titles such as Randa Abdel-Fattah’s No Sex in the City (2013) and Kristin Billerbeck’s What a Girl Wants (2004) do not reveal in this way that they will engage with the narrator’s religion. However, both Abdel-Fattah and Billerbeck have written young adult novels that do engage religion. Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005) tells the story of a teenaged Australian Muslim girl who decides to wear the hijab. In her novel Perfectly Dateless: A Universally Misunderstood Novel (2010) Billerbeck presents an American Christian teenager who wants to attend prom but whose parents have decided she is not old enough to date. Granted, it is more common in young adult novels to find moralistic plots and themes. However, Abdel-Fattah and Billerbeck have published chick lit novels for adults. In this chapter, I examine the ways novels published with openly religious characters engage with feminist ideas without making explicit claims about feminism. Through this engagement of ideas, the novels create a context as well as a conversation to explore how institutionalized religion creates spaces that allow for abuse and discrimination. Rather than reinforcing the power of institutionalized religion (which is constructed, in all three religions discussed, as an historically patriarchal structure that policed women’s movements and bodies as well as the expressions of their gender and sexuality) these novels present women who have benefited from second-wave feminism but may not agree with feminism’s politics on every point.

Chick Lit’s Religious Ambiguity The bridge between secular chick lit and religious chick lit is populated with characters whose stories do not mention religion to characters whose stores incorporate religion adherence

into the plot. In the middle are characters claiming religious affiliation without active adherence to religion itself. It is common in chick lit for characters to identify as atheist or as a lapsed Christian. Dana Lone Hill’s Pointing with Lips: A Week in the Life of a Rez Chick (2014) positions itself in this in-between space. The Catholic church on the reservation is used as a way to entertain the children for a morning during Bible school (206-07) but beyond that Sis, the protagonist, has little use for it, though it does seem to be attended by others on the reservation. My Grandma Pacific was born on the reservation back in the days when boarding school really wasn’t an option. She was abused by Catholic priests and nuns to the point where she isn’t religious at all. Or I can’t say that she isn’t religious because she is spiritual in our Lakota way of life, but she detests Catholics and other organized religions that believe their ways are the only way. (137-38) The abuse, we learn later, extended to the male staff at the Catholic high school. Sis narrates this episode of reservation history as she and Ricky drive past the Catholic high school and graveyard: “We even pass the secret baby graveyard no one cares for… the church won’t acknowledge it because it is a part of their shameful history. It is where they supposedly buried babies of former students impregnated by male staff back when the boarding school first started forcing kids from their homes to assimilate them to be more like white people” (214). Here the church is associated with abuse, neglect, and trauma. These associations are not uncommon. Marian Keyes makes no secret of her characters’ Catholic backgrounds, but they have given up adhering strictly to their religions. They will discuss the church as part of their past, but it has little bearing on their futures beyond something that needs to be overcome. In Last Chance Saloon (1999), three friends, Tara, Katherine, and Fintan, leave their rural village in Ireland and move to London. When Tara and Katherine discover that their Swedish roommate Liv wanted to move in with the Irish girls, hoping that “the girls’ Catholicism might rub off on her” (8), Tara and Katherine quickly position themselves outside of practicing Catholicism. Katherine replies that they are “lapsed Catholics” while Tara adds “‘Lapsed isn’t a strong enough word!...Collapsed would be more like it’” (8). Liv is left to find spiritual guidance elsewhere. As in Pointing with Lips, the references to the Church reveal more of a cultural or historical past that one needs to move beyond in order find one’s way place in the world. Other references to churches or religion in chick lit are fairly similar in that the characters will go to a church for weddings and funerals, but churches are clearly an organization that young women do not need

to worry about unless they are planning a wedding. Indeed, most churches in chick lit novels are not for worship but are typically seen as places of oppression—a place where feminism cannot exist. In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay provides an accessible and inclusive version of feminism that connects to the unstated feminist themes of the religious chick lit novels. Gay explains: “I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I’m not trying to say that I am right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do something good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself” (xi). Like Gay, the authors of religious chick lit are putting forward stories that are meant to engage with women in a way that is more personally reflective than other forms of fiction. Typically novels that engage with religion will cite holy texts in order to support the character’s choices or highlight a particular dilemma. Chick lit novels tend to move away from these overt references to the holy texts but still work within these particular frameworks while still presenting characters that embody feminist beliefs. Through these characters the authors are presenting different modes of feminism that are negotiated through personal beliefs. By intentionally creating religious characters, religious chick lit avoids plots explicitly promoting a defined feminism to its readers. In doing so, it recreates the “bad feminism” Gay asserts through her collection of essays. However, it becomes difficult to write a chick lit novel that does not have a strong independent character because the genre centers on the main character’s struggle to balance her secular career and religiously driven personal life. Gay’s argument allows for multiple interpretations of feminism: “Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us” (xiii). Gay’s explanation of bad feminism bridges this divide by emphasizing solidarity among all women rather than the divisiveness that becomes highlighted through the political use of religion. The solidarity requires that as women we find ways to join together in what unites women. In this chapter, the religious chick lit novels present groups of women or friends who do not all come from the same location although they are often brought together through some unifying identity. Usually it is religion that binds these women together, overlooking differences of race, class, and sexuality, but in other novels it is friendship that cuts across religious differences. Not owning the label feminist as, Gay states, creates a “disconnect that does not need to be there”(xii). Religious chick lit novels aim more to motivate

readers towards personal agency that encompasses their beliefs, while the larger feminist projects overlooks the particular way religious identity is part of a woman’s identity.

The J.A.P. Chronicles and The Matzo Ball Heiress Isabel Rose and Laurie Gwen Shapiro create their novels from a Jewish perspective. While several chick lit authors identify as Jewish, the Jewish identity is often effaced from the plot of the story. Here Rose’s The J.A.P. Chronicles (2005) and Shapiro’s The Matzo Ball Heiress (2004) situate the characters in context with their religion either through practice or ethnic identity that the characters must bring together with their public and private lives. Rose’s The J.A.P. Chronicles records the present as well as back stories of self-proclaimed Jewish American Princesses as thirty-something adults in New York City who were brought together through their shared experiences at the Willow Lake summer camp during their junior high and into their high school years. At the Willow Lake Reunion, pregnant Ali Cohen is invited to create a documentary about the summer camp. During her filming, Ali is inspired to interview each of her former cabin mates about what they understood to be their defining moment after catching Wendy and Carol in a compromising sexual encounter. Having been bullied by Wendy and Arden as a camper, 16 Ali’s motivation is to get as much dirt on these women as she can and possibly to destroy their lives. Through the process of interviewing and interacting with the former campers as adults, Ali learns the back-stories of these women. The goal to destroy Wendy, or at least make Wendy fear her power as documentarian, diminishes over the course of the novel as her role as mother becomes more imminent she loses the desire for revenge. While Wendy’s story is told through Arden, these two women’s stories make up the majority of the novel. Wendy’s story is centered around her attraction to women and the difficulty she has had in accepting this part of her life. Married with three children, Wendy begins an affair with her former camp counselor, Carol, at the Willow Lake Reunion, which Ali serendipitously discovered and evilly records. Arden’s story begins when her parents attempt to bring formalized religious practice into their home. When Arden is nine years old, her family attends a weekend retreat on how to “make a proper Jewish home” (172). It was at this camp

16 Wendy and Arden bullied Ali at camp: cutting her hair, giving her swirlies, trying to make her wet the bed. The most troubling and final event was when Wendy and Arden gagged Ali and dragged her out to the woods. With Wendy holding Ali down, Wendy ordered Arden to stick a mascara wand in Ali’s anus. Unable to actually do as ordered after several tries, Wendy manages to accomplish the task. Arden runs away but returns later to help free Ali from Wendy.

where an assistant Rabbi first molested Arden. This assistant Rabbi continued to molest her for a number of years. Arden told no one. As an older teenager and young adult, Arden spent time in rehab and was in several abusive relationships. After her long-term relationship abruptly ends, Arden’s parents attempt to practice “tough love” and refuse to let Arden return home assuming she is abusing drugs again. Arden spends some time working as Wendy’s nanny. While working for Wendy, Arden discovers Wendy’s secret life through hidden magazines, videos, and bookmarked websites and chat rooms. It is also during this time when Arden suspects Wendy’s husband, Seth, is cheating on Wendy.17After a sexual indiscretion, Arden is forced back to the streets to find work. She does find work at her ex-boyfriend’s nightclub as a bathroom attendant. It is in this club where she is offered and accepts drugs for sexual favors—recreating the cycle of addiction and abuse.18 Mostly in The J.A.P. Chronicles Judaism is an ethnic marker that brings these girls together. When it is practiced as an organized religion, it opens Arden up to be sexually abused - - reinforcing the notion that organized religion is damaging. Otherwise, being Jewish is strictly ceremonial, indicating where one is to be married, who one marries, and a list of holidays to celebrate. While the religion is presented nihilistically, Renny, Ali’s boyfriend, says, “‘You can take the Jew out of temple, but you can’t take the Jew out of the girl,’” indicating that one cannot escape Jewishness but perhaps one could escape Judaism (1). While none of these very rich young ladies really “finds God,” they do manage to find acceptance with who they are when they are able to move past the damage done through organized religion. Throughout the novel, the reader knows that Ali possesses a videotape of a sexual encounter between Wendy and Carol. Unsure of what will become of this tape, Ali in the final scene of the novel tosses the tape that could destroy Wendy’s carefully constructed life into the back of a trash truck where it is crushed. This final chapter is entitled “Shalom” indicated that

17Seth and Wendy leave Arden alone for the weekend with the children. Arden successfully takes care of the children Friday and Saturday. Sunday, while the older child was at a play date and the younger two were sleeping, Arden invites the snow removal guy in for sex. Arden and snow shoveler are caught when Wendy and Seth return home early and Arden is expectedly fired.

18 She meets a man named Chad who seems like a promising night with a bed and shower guaranteed. When she meets up with Chad at the bachelor party, she is held down and raped by the men at the party and beaten. It is only following this trauma, that her parents bring her home. Once at her parents’ house, she magically detoxes and finds her inspiration to write about her “defining moment.” Ali’s invitation to interview Arden for her documentary was mailed to Arden’s parents’ home with no other address on file at Willow Lake. Arden reaches out to Ali to apologize for bullying Ali with Wendy.

Ali has finally made peace with her past. With Ali no longer wishing to seek vengeance on Wendy, the tape is destroyed without so much as a confrontation. Arden apologizes to Ali and becomes her personal assistant again stressing peace and reconciliation. Dafna marries and Beth remains single with a book contract for her wedding planning diary. Everyone from Willow Lake seems to find a happy ending.19 Through the construction of the documentary, Rose brings a confessional tone to the novel though it is written with a third person narrator. Establishing the text as the process for creating the documentary allows the characters’ interiority to be revealed creating interconnectedness through the personalization of the events and vulnerability in this collaborative community. The women’s stories highlight various ways that they have experienced trauma from disinheritance to rape. This allows the story to advocate for awareness of these issues. Ali, the documentarian, listens to all of the women’s stories and forgives the women the wrongs they did to her. While these attributes are not directly associated with any of the religious discussions in the novel, Rose wants her readers to understand that listening and really hearing the stories of others will lead to peace and forgiveness. There is value in being able to let go of that which harmed you and moving on to define your own life. Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s The Matzo Ball Heiress (2004) is much more aware of and explicite about Jewish religious practice—particularly in that Heather Greenblotz, also documentarian, and one of the heirs to the Greenblotz Matzo company. Even though the factory keeps kosher, no one in her family practices Judaism—not even to observe holidays. This becomes a problem when the Food Channel wants to highlight the family patriarch Izzy Greenblotz in a documentary about food innovators and then follows up with a promotion to

19 Religion as a family ritual and inheritance is seen through Dafna and Beth’s stories. Religion dictates marriage partners and rituals but does directly influence daily life. Dafna readily admits to making mistakes that cause her to be disinherited and again fired from her job, leaving her financially vulnerable. Avoiding the center pews at the front of the synagogue, she sits at the back (while the synagogue was empty) “For the first time in her life, she felt alone in the presence of God” (75). Having spent most of her time in synagogue hiding her singleness (lack of a ring), she finds herself alone, unemployed, and desperate for a direction in her life. It is in this state of mind when she first tries to pray. Dafna later describes her upbringing as “very Reformed” (97). Living off of her savings, she quickly finds a Jewish man to marry. Beth’s story of her engagement from the beginning to its end is recounted through a wedding planning journal she hands to Ali. Laura, who is only briefly mentioned towards the end of the book, is sick from breast cancer with only a few months to live. She kills herself with an overdose of Vicodine (330-33). This chapter seems so out of place with the other stories being told. Laura is in Hollywood and Jessica, an actress and another briefly mentioned Willow Lake girl, runs away to California after discovering her husband’s affairs with men. Laura finds Jessica a job and then ends her life.

broadcast live the Greenblotz family Seder. Since the family business is starting to lose sales to other kosher conglomerates, Jake, Heather’s cousin and head of the company, agrees. Heather spends the rest of the book falling in love with Jared, a Jew who keeps kosher and is a cameraman for the Food Channel, and tracking down her estranged gay father through the gay bars in Amsterdam. Shapiro brings together many social issues that highlight the need for individuals to listen to each other and make space for others. Heather creates a collaborative community of some family and many friends to be filmed and broadcast for the Seder including: Jake; Siobhan, Jake’s Irish girlfriend who poses as Shoshanna from Israel; Vondra, Heather’s African American business partner; Mahmoud, Vondra’s UN diplomat Egyptian boyfriend; Sukie, the Tibetan- Jewish shop owner; Heather’s father, Sol and his lover Pieter; Gertie, long time employee of Greenblotz and Grandpa Ruben’s former lover; Jake’s brother Greg, who manages the Florida sales; Amy Hitler, Greg’s fiancé from Ohio by way of Florida; and Jocelyn,Heather’s mother who shows up unannounced. Shapiro constructs an unlikely group to participate in a live televised Seder in order to demonstrate the possibilities for peace and reconciliation. The ethnic and racial backgrounds presented at the table engage the expectation of conflict: Jews/Hitler, Muslim/Jews, spouses/lovers, Catholic-Christian/Jews, etc. The gathering represents the heart of Seder as a celebration of liberation. At this Seder the participants are liberated from prejudice and history that would normally pit one side against another. Heather has to manage this disorganized group in order to get them to cooperate long enough for Seder. Jared helps Heather run through rehearsals. Jake and Siobhan read up on Passover and Seder and manage to get everything together. Sol Greenblotz is the only member of the family who reads Hebrew. The group manages to pull of the Seder with little drama and boost the company’s sales as expected. The biggest decision that Heather needs to make is how she will negotiate this relationship with Jared. With assertiveness and attention to her own needs, Heather negotiates a bargain with Jared in the end to be kosher at home and when she is with him, but she retains the right to eat and act as she pleases when she is away from him.

No Sex in the City While Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh represents a Muslim perspective, it is framed within a larger cultural narrative in Saudi Arabia. In Muslim novels not set in the Middle East,

one might expect to find less overt representations of Islam within women’s literature. However, the representation of Muslim women in literature follows around the world wherever Muslim populations exist. Authors continue to write about what they know and the realities they experience. Such is the case with Randa Abdel-Fattah’s No Sex in the City. While the title is a clear nod to Bushnell’s Sex and the City, the plot follows four young ladies who come from diverse backgrounds and meet up around Sydney for dinner, lunch, and manicures. Esma, the narrator, explains: The four of us met at a protest at Sydney University, which is where we all studied. I think it was about student union fees, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or overpriced food on campus. I can’t remember exactly because we seemed to be protesting about something every month. There were some guys standing near us who weren’t taking it seriously, talking through the speeches. When one of them made a comment about the speaker’s breast, we simultaneously blasted them. They didn’t know what had hit them, being ripped to shreds by four girls from different directions. The four of us had a laugh afterwards, introduced ourselves to each other, and quickly became best of friends. (15) This group of educated, socially, and politically active women are struggling to find datable men. While all of these women are educated and work busy schedules, they also all volunteer in their communities. Additionally, these young women do not share a single religious background. Ruby is Greek Orthodox, Lisa is Jewish, Nirvana is Hindi, and Esma is Muslim. With such a diverse array of characters, Abdel-Fattah attempts to highlight the similarities among these religions and the women who practice them. One way she manages to do this is by highlighting the volunteerism these women engage in. Ruby, the lawyer, does a lot of pro bono work; Lisa, the social worker, takes her work home with her and spends extra hours at work; Nirvana, a midwife, teaches Sindhi to preschoolers at her temple; and Esma, a human resource technician, volunteers with at the Sydney Refugee Center. Abdel-Fattah lays out the details of these women’s busy schedules in the first chapter. Because these women work hard and give so much to their communities, they do not have time to date or meet men. They meet for coffee or manicures in what they refer to as the “No Sex in the City” meetings. Esma and Nirvana allow their families to introduce them to various men recommended to them by friends and family.

Nirvana finds love early on in the novel while Esma passes on a number of ineligible young men and then strings two very different young men along before deciding on one. The novel focuses particularly on Esma as she is the narrator and relater of all the stories in the book. Esma begins the book with a failed home meeting with a young man named Hassan who is Turkish and speaks very little English. While Esma does speak Turkish, the capacity for speaking English and Australian citizenship are highly desirable traits though not on her checklist. 1. He has to be Muslim…. 2. Even though I want to be with a Muslim, I’m not exactly observant. Spiritual? Yes. Rituals? Quite lazy. Sure, I don’t drink, I’ve never had a boyfriend (in fact, most primary-aged children would have more experience than me) and I’m inconsistent about keeping up with the five daily prayers. As for fasting in Ramadan, I try to get through most of the month, but there are days when I cave in to the temptation and end up going to McDonald’s. Notwithstanding, it would be nice to meet someone on the same religious level, or even a bit more observant than me. Not a totally clueless guy, or a fanatic either. 3. Mr. Right has to be educated and employed and care about social justice. 4. He doesn’t have to be super good-looking by any objective Cleo or Cosmo measure. Just attractive to me. 5. Oh! And he has to exist outside my fantasies. (12) Esma’s checklist centers on a set of common values. Rather than looking for superficial features of a mate, Esma’s list highlights points of compatibility that would allow her to live a life with someone who matches her religiously, socially, intellectually, and yet is employed and attractive to her, not according to cultural expectations. It may seem that while Esma is meeting men who have been selected by her extended family and network of her mother’s friends that she is being forced into an arranged marriage. But Abdel-Fattah highlights the young lady’s agency in the arranged marriage process. While not all parents are as patient about selecting a partner, Esma’s parents refuse to force her into an incompatible marriage. Esma agrees to meetings with the young men but rarely follows up with a second meeting. Her mother is exasperated with Esma’s pickiness but allows the decision to be Esma’s. As a twenty-eight year old virgin who has never been kissed and lives with her parents, Esma is an educated, beautiful, professional young

woman who by society’s standards should have no problem finding a date. However, Esma rejects advances and refuses to conform to cultural expectations concerning men who do not match up to her checklist. It is Esma’s refusal of men’s advances and what might seem like minor flirtations that cause her to leave her job. Esma struggles with the decision to leave her job because her paycheck goes mostly to her father for the house payments. He had mortgaged the house to pay off gambling debts and never told his wife. Esma is situated in this novel as the caretaker for her family. However, she is caught between taking care of herself, by quitting a hostile workplace, and taking care of her family: “Every time Danny edges into sleaze territory I have to bite my tongue, because my parents’ house, and maybe their marriage, depends on me keeping this job” (25). The consequences for revealing her father’s secret to her mother could potentially cause their marriage to break up, or so she fears. Once Esma tells her friends about the work environment, Ruby helps her create an ultimatum, but she must also confront her father about the debt she is helping to keep secret. Esma considers her father’s request and makes arrangements to pay off the gambling debt. Esma’s role as financial provider and keeper of her father’s secrets is a role that would more conventionally fall upon a son rather than daughter.

The Yada Yada Prayer Group and What a Girl Wants In Faith and Fiction: Christian Literature in America Today, Anita Gandolfo explains chick lit “as presenting ‘real-life situations that modern women of faith face without sacrificing morals and values: How do I live an authentic contemporary Christian life?’” (83). The attempt to live an authentic Christian life presents a number of problems such as what does an authentic Christian life look like? Gandolfo cites Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt’s definition of ‘good girl lit’ on their website: Let’s face it. Life is messy. And trying to live by faith only makes it harder. Good Girl Lit features contemporary characters dealing with modern life. It’s about facing real issues with faith. It’s about trying to live as God wants, and failing. It’s also about the redeeming power of grace. It’s Christian fiction of the real world. (qtd in Gandolfo 83) There are various kinds of chick lit in Christian women’s fiction: some focus on a group of women who meet and help each other, while others feature the single girl in search of the love of

her life kind of chick lit. In her article “Redeeming Chick Lit,” Ramona Richards critiques secular chick lit “While the women of this genre are funny and have a distinctive literary voice, they can be annoyingly young, somewhat shallow and materialistic, and definitely obsessed with sex and men” (51). Christian theology is generally in conflict with these highlighted traits of materialism and the obsessions with sex and men. Removing shopping, materialism, and the preoccupation with sex and men from the lives of young women who hope to marry and have children seems to be a fool’s errand. However, the Christian chick lit genre confronts reorders the priorities of these young women who hope to marry and have children. The first chick lit attributed to sub-genre Christian chick lit is Neta Jackson’s The Yada Yada Prayer Group (2003), which introduces a multi-ethnic group of women who must find their commonalities before they are able to fully understand each other. While the differences expressed through prejudices of the women in the novel are clear and almost overwhelming to the white, middle-class narrator, the common threads that connect the women in the group are the love of God, the love of family, and the desire to share God’s love with their community. These differences are overcome through praying for each other and visiting each other’s churches and homes. The novel is set in Chicago and begins with the narrator, Jodi, and Avis, her school principal, attending the Chicago Women’s Conference—a gathering of Christian women from the Chicago metropolitan area intended to “break down the walls and link hands with our sisters” (15). . At the conference they are grouped together with Florida, an African- American mother of three who is five years saved and five years sober; Adele, an African- American beauty shop owner; Yo-Yo, an ex-con; Ruth, a messianic Jew; Delores, a Hispanic nurse; Leslie, a white real estate agent and former social worker; Nonny, a South African Northwestern University professor’s wife; Hoshi, a Japanese Northwestern University student; Edesa, a Honduran student; Chanda, a Jamaican house cleaner. This group of women is brought together in a prayer group. When Delores receives word that her son has been shot, Jodi assumes that José was participating in gang activity when the truth is that he was the crossfire after telling one gang to leave the park where he was supervising his younger siblings. The prayer group takes turns visiting and bringing meals to Delores and her family as well as praying for José’s health. Jackson moves through each character and her story by having Jodi interact on a personal level with each character. Through this process, Jackson demonstrates the racial and socio- economic divisions that divide the larger church body as well as a variety of worship styles that

are often a source conflict among Christians. Jackson also highlights how church members will forgo getting to know fellow Christians because they do not look like them either through differences of ethnicity or social class or denomination. The prejudices that divide the church body are called out and questioned in Jackson’s novel. While Jackson’s novel does not feature the single girl in search of a spouse, focusing instead on friendships among women. As Richards writes, “What Neta—and her readers— discovered is that chick lit really is about women’s hearts and the incredible friendships that can grow between them as they struggle with ordinary issues in life—men, work, stress. Christian women readily relate to these topics, especially if the story also shows how faith drives a woman’s choices in fashion, fun and friends” (51-2). The novels resonate with Christian readers challenging and motivating the readers to examine more deeply how the issues of race and class unnecessarily divide the collective church body. In her Ashley Stockingdale series, Kristen Billerbeck also attempts to create realistic characters that fall more in line with the Bridget Jones model of chick lit. However, Billerbeck elevates the disaster prone Jones template by providing her character with a stronger sense of self and a better job. What a Girl Wants represents Ashley Stockingdale struggling with her single lifestyle as a successful patent attorney and active participant in her church’s singles group. Ashley’s job takes up most of her life as she files and defends patents for the engineers employed by her company in Silicon Valley. On the weekends Ashley attends church and sings on the worship team. Every Sunday she dines out with the same group of single people from church, and she participates in some Friday night events with the same group. Ashley finally decides she is interested in dating Seth, an engineer in her singles group, only Seth is interested in the younger twenty-something petite blonde, Arin, who is dating a handsome doctor, Kirk. Ashley is trying to determine if God’s plan is for her to remain single for a particular reason, or if God is having her remain single for only a season in her life. Ashley struggles with her jealousy of her friend Arin who leaves midway through the book on a medical mission trip to Central America, leaving her Dr. Kirk available. Ashley faces several challenges when she has to travel to Taiwan for work to defend a patent. Her apartment complex is infested with rats and she has to move. Seth’s mover friend helps to empty her apartment while she is in Taiwan on a second trip. When she returns, Ashley discovers that her credit is no longer good and she cannot rent a new apartment because her previous landlord refused to recommend her as the microwave and

refrigerator were stolen from her last apartment. Jetlagged, Ashley takes a walk and through the neighborhood. When she sits down to rest, she dozes off only to be awakened by a police officer grabbing her Prada handbag. Disoriented, Ashley slaps the officer’s hand away and is compelled to take a sobriety test. Failing the sobriety test she is taken to jail for loitering, public intoxication, and assaulting an officer. In jail she clears her self of the intoxication charges, having had no drugs or alcohol in her system but has to wait for someone to come bail her out. In all of this, Seth discovers that his friend’s employee was stealing and selling stolen property from the apartments they were moving. Ashley is forced to stay with Kay, the über-organized singles group leader. The series of events plays out much like a Bridget Jones story, with one unexpected calamity after another. The major differences between Bridget Jones and Ashley lie in the Ashley’s resiliency as a professional woman who continues to do her job well despite unfortunate circumstances. Ashley is portrayed as intelligent poised while Bridget Jones is often interpreted by strangers and dull-witted and crass. Like Bridget Jones, Ashley’s major fault is a failure to discipline her social life—careers may have their ups and downs but a woman should be married or in a serious relationship by her mid-twenties. Ashley falls in love with Dr. Kirk only to find out that he is not a Christian and does not share her faith. This attendance to Dr. Kirk’s lack of faith as a non- marriageable trait is divergence from secular chick lit like Bridget Jones’s Diary. Seth, who does profess to be a Christian, eventually figures out that he really is in love with Ashley. This love triangle eventually results in Seth turning down a job with a promotion in Phoenix to stay and see what happens with Ashley. Dr. Kirk begins attending Bible studies, but at the close of the first book it is not clear where he stands with his faith. Like Esma in No Sex in the City, Ashley holds similar standards for dating. Ashley’s decision is purposefully to date men who have similar values and perspectives on life.

Religious Chick Lit’s Feminist Leanings Jewish chick lit reinforces religion as an identifier of ethnicity and social class. In The J.A.P. Chronicles and The Matzo Ball Heiress both sets of characters identify as Jewish while neither set practices Judaism on a regular basis by attending synagogue, keeping kosher, or

observing the Sabbath20. There is some attention to holidays but it is limited. As in The Matzo Ball Heiress, the reigning Matzo producers do not personally keep kosher, but they keep their Matzo production kosher. Additionally, the do not celebrate Passover with a Seder. In fact, Heather reveals her typical Passover meal is a prosciutto and Swiss cheese Panini (12). So, when Heather falls in love with Jared who keeps kosher, she has to decide if she really wants to be with Jared if it means keeping kosher. Heather’s hodgepodge adherence to these dietary laws allows her be with Jared but also provides her with an important power. The real difficulty of adhering to the dietary laws is not so much in dining out but in maintaining a kosher kitchen. With multiple sets of dishes and practices for meal preparation, the household needs to be vigilant not to mix these up. If Shapiro is suggesting that Jared do all the cooking and meal preparation, she is playing with a gender role reversal that she does not spend any time addressing. While there is little religious practice for the betterment of self, there are only perfunctory conclusions that can be drawn from the self-identified Jewish royalty. There is little debate concerning the relationship of non-orthodox Judaism and feminism. As much as I tried to find chick lit that portrayed Orthodox Jewish characters, The Matzo Ball Heiress was as close as I could find. Both The J.A.P Chronicles and The Matzo Ball Heiress portray contemporary issues with little discussion or judgment. The homosexual characters in both books hide from the more conservative people around them fearing public judgment and rejection by their families. However, Wendy fears being exposed because she does not want to lose the financial stability of her current life or restrict access to her children through shared custody though by the end of the novel, it seems pretty clear Wendy’s husband knows about her desires and seeks physical intimacy with other women. Neither husband nor wife confronts the issue together leaving the couple in an unresolved state. Sol, Heather’s father, leaves the country to avoid negative associations from conservative Jews that purchase the family product. At the end of The Matzo Ball Heiress, Sol and Pieter move in with Jocelyn through the guided negotiations of the UN Diplomat, Mahmoud. Jocelyn, Sol, and Pieter negotiate an acceptable arrangement in much the

20 I would like to point out that Jennifer Weiner also draws attention to Judaism in novel Certain Girls (2009), a sequel to Good in Bed (2002) that follows the mother, Cannie, and child, Joy, through Joy’s bat mitzvah. While Weiner draws attention to these rites of passage, they remain little more than a coming of age moment for the character and hold little religious significance or influence on one’s overall demeanor or behavior outside of these spaces.

way Jared and Heather negotiated theirs—only for them it took an Egyptian diplomat to work out the issues. While seemingly trite, there are political implications within this arrangement. It nods to the on/off peace negotiations between Israel and the Arab world as well as the redefining of marriage. In “Hearing the Daughter Voice: The Bat Kol as Rrrabbi Grrl,” Alana Suskin connects Judaism to politics not only concerning Israel but also its history of engaging in issues of social justice. Suskin focuses on her own experiences as a Jew growing up and her own negotiations with feminism. Suskin writes that she was taught from an early age “good Jews do not buy products from companies that prevent workers from making a living wage” (263). This early introduction to social justice led her to identify as a feminist because “feminism was about making the world a just place” (264). While not initially an observant Jew, Suskin writes: “I found myself defending even the possibility of being both a ritually observant Jew and feminist” (265). As Suskin became more involved in Jewish women’s studies, she sought to understand the origins of the traditions rather than allowing them to remain set aside for men. Further Suskin writes: Jewish women have been disproportionately represented in feminism in every wave, just as Jews are disproportionately represented in all social justice movements. However, despite our numbers, it is only recently that, like other ethnic feminists, Jewish women have begun to see that feminists have not yet weeded out all of their own prejudices against those who are nonwhite and non- middle-class. (267) It is far too easy to overlook the anti-Semitism that persists in the United States. Suskin points to Evelyn Torton Beck’s work, which studies the misogyny and anti-Semitism in “JAP-bashing” (267). This is seen in Isabel Rose’s novel. The J.A.P. Chronicles, while focusing on upper class Jewish women, addresses some of this self-loathing through Beth. While all the girls in the novel presumably identify as Jewish American Princesses, the term is used negatively as well. Beth writes in her wedding diary “I never really liked Marcy (what a J.A.P.!!)” (Rose 118). Beth further tells her own story of self-loathing as revealed in her wedding diary. In this section, Beth is concerned about her appearance for her wedding. After being told by the designer that she had the wrong body type for the dress and had arm cleavage (whatever that is), she cancels the dress and secretly purchases the dress of her choice. At this point, Beth writes about how pretty she

feels in the dress and how her liposuction date is set for after the trip to St. Bart’s, but she is still debating about the nose job: “I’m still agonizing about my nose and wish I could do it. I’ve always hated it. But Michael asked me to marry him with this nose, so it can’t be that bad” (135). Beth reveals that she added a last minute breast reduction as when she went for the liposuction surgery (137). These surgeries correspond to Suskin’s analysis of the poisonous attitudes that Jewish women have come to accept about ourselves…Caricatures of Jewish women—as people with hair that is too curly, noses too big, bodies too round, voices too loud (both literally and figuratively), breasts too big, and sometimes skin, hair, and eyes too dark—are also part of these “critiques”…they are not really critiques but rather prejudice beneath the surface. The struggle to be secular is not necessarily different from any other kind of hair straightening or nose bobbing. (267) Rather than exclude religious women from feminist spaces, Suskin argues that just as criticizing a group’s physical features is an act of racism, feminism should not exclude women who hold religious beliefs as they are just as much, or more, a part of people as their nose or hair. Writing chick lit about characters that adhere to or identify with a particular religion allows religious women to self-identify with feminism when they otherwise might not. Muslim and Christian women are less likely than Jewish women to be associated with feminism unless they are often framed as victims of the patriarchal religious structures that inform their daily lives. In “Where Are the Antifeminist Evangelicals?” Sally K. Gallagher reports, “More than half of all conservative Protestants believe that feminism is hostile toward their moral and spiritual values, compared to about one-quarter to one-third of other Americans” (457). Feminism has been characterized as hostile towards religion. Unlike Reformed Judaism as represented in the novels by Shapiro and Rose, Islam and Christianity both require faithful followers to pray daily as well as to abide by principles established in the holy books. While often portrayed as opposed to one another, Islam and Christianity have more in common than one might initially expect. As with Judaism, a commitment to social justice is a part of both religions. Muslim and Christian chick lit is, perhaps, more aware of class distinctions. These novels are more likely to present multiple socio-economic classes interacting. In “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections of the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Saba Mahmood recounts her experience with the mosque movement

in Cairo, which involved women teaching other women Islamic doctrine. Mahmood explains: “Notably, even though this movement has empowered women to enter the field of Islamic pedagogy in the institutional setting of mosques, their participation is critically structured by, and seeks to uphold, the limits of a discursive tradition that holds subordination to a transcendent will (and this, in many instances to male authority) as its coveted goal” (204). This submission is often critiqued as the loss of a woman’s agency as places herself as a subject to male authority. In this case the higher authority being submitted to is God or Allah, usually figured as masculine. Issues of modesty in No Sex and the City are expressed through the Esma’s behaviors rather than through clothing. Esma’s boss’s expectation and continued violation of personal boundaries attempting to get Esma to share her personal life in her place of business is interpreted by Esma as sexual harassment. Esma’s modest conduct of not sharing with men—or employers—the finer details of one’s dating life including her choice to remain a virgin ultimately clashes with the more laissez-faire attitude of her boss. Abdel-Fattah’s focus on behavior as an indicator of modesty works together with Mahmood’s analysis of al-haya’ and challenges the non-Muslim prejudice that the veil, abbaya, or niqab are signifiers of oppression. Mahmood addresses the issue of modesty in her analysis of the al-haya‘. The religious discipline of veiling, as Mahmood explains, “is the means both of being and becoming a certain kind of person, whereas for Hussein the act of veiling is an expression of a performed self instead of actually contributing to the making of that self” (215). Rather than viewing the veil as a performance of ethnic identity, Mahmood’s explanation of the al-haya‘ or modesty is to practice modesty (veiling) until it becomes embodied. This religious discipline fails if it is forced upon a person. Comparably, dress codes for Christian churches that require women to wear long skirts and cover their arms, rarely work to promote modesty if the performance of said modesty is required and not a voluntary disciplining of the self. This modesty and self-discipline can be seen in Abdel-Fattah’s No Sex in the City when Esma refuses to date non-Muslim men, remains a virgin, refuses to kiss or allow herself to be alone with a man she is dating. While these practices seem somewhat old-fashioned for the modern chick lit crowd, they are practices of self-discipline that many Muslim women voluntarily practice. Similarly, Ashley in What a Girl Wants similarly refuses to date non- Christians or have sex outside of marriage. The discipline of prayer is expected for both Muslims and Christians, though it is not really addressed in No Sex in the City, though prayer is the main

focus of The Yada Yada Prayer Group. The purpose of prayer in Neta Jackson’s novel is to move the main character Jodi out of her prejudiced bubble and really get to know the women in the prayer group rather than assuming she understands these women. This certainly fits in with Suskin’s representation of her own feminism: Feminism made me someone who went out and interacted with actual people, someone who worked in the community to change the world, and not just someone who thought about what was wrong with it without even attempting to conceive a solution. Truth is important, but it’s only a beginning. Feminism taught that to do God’s will means to listen to people’s pain, but then to take action to change society so that people do not have to adjust to injustice. To do God’s will means to work to see justice ring out across the land. (270-71) As Suskin explains, moving out of the house and interacting with people in the community either next to or near one’s home is a step toward social justice. The characters in No Sex in the City spend time volunteering and listening to people who do not have the same privileges as the young women in the novel. While Ashley does not spend time volunteering outside her church and family, her interactions helping her mother and her brother’s Korean fiancée plan a wedding allow Ashley to put aside her prejudices towards her brother and mother. The focus on religion in these chick lit novels moves away from the consumerism and material culture that can be found in other chick lit novels. Religion is practiced in these novels not merely as an extension of the characters’ identities but with the goal to become better people through self-discipline.

Chapter 3: Girls of Riyadh and the Transnational Conscience A girl’s reputation is all she has in this world. When another woman threatens to expose the deepest secrets of the women of a mysterious world to which they belong, all of the girls’ reputations are now at stake. At least, the controversy surrounding Rajaa Alsanea’s novel Girls of Riyadh or Banat al-Riyadh21 suggests that the book would like its readers to buy this idea. Alsanea’s use of “banat” in her title translates as the “daughters” of Riyadh. The use of the ‘daughters’ rather than simply ‘girls’ creates an ambiguous reference that leads some to believe that the title is a reference to all women of Riyadh (Wahab). Alsanea clearly disambiguates the reference in the English translation in her “Author’s Note” (Alsanea ix-x). But if the book does not attempt to reveal the secrets of the women of all of Riyadh, whose secrets is the book going to reveal? For secrets, revelation, and glimpses behind metaphorical curtains are promised in the conceit of the book as well as in the “Introduction” to the Arabic publication written by Dr. Ghazi al Gosaibi and the “Author’s Note” in the English translation. Alsanea claims, “I felt it is my duty to reveal another side of the Saudi life to the Western world” (ix). Dr. Ghazi al Gosaibi, Saudi writer and Minister of Labor, also reinforces this idea of revelation in his introduction to Banat Al-Riyadh when he writes “‘[w]hen the curtain is removed, the scene is exposed to us with all its funny and sad elements, with all the details unknown to those outside this enchanted world’” (Gosaibi qtd in “Asharq Al-Aswat”). If we are to believe al Gosaibi, we will take away from Alsanea’s book many truths about the women of Riyadh. As controversial books tend to do, this book gained a lot of attention not only from readers in the Middle East but also from those in Western countries. Upon its original publication the book was initially banned in Saudi Arabia, which was later lifted. In 2009, the Girls of Riyadh was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award though it did not make it past the long-list of nominees (Butler). Marilyn Booth translated Banat al-Riyadh into English and submitted the translation for approval from Alsanea and Penguin. Booth’s translation, careful as it was to maintain the unique style and features of the Arabic edition, was ‘flattened’ or so she claims, and now reads as a very American version of a story that takes place primarily in Saudi Arabia with Saudi characters. This chapter attempts to elucidate what is really at stake in Rajaa Al-sanea’s Girls of Riyadh: first the chapter will explore the reception of the novel in Saudi Arabia and the

21 I will refer to Banat al-Riyadh when referencing the Arabic translations and Girls of Riyadh when referring to the English translation. All citations in this chapter refer to the 2007 Penguin edition published in the United States.

Middle East; then the it will evaluate the translation to Western audiences; finally, the chapter will explore the challenges to patriarchal structure in Saudi Arabia.

Arab Reception Banat al-Riyadh was reviewed and discussed in a variety of contexts ranging from book reviews to interviews with Rajaa Alanea on television and on websites. Siraj Wahab, journalist for Arab News, reviewed the text in March of 2006 and examines the controversy surrounding Banat al-Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. The reception from one Saudi attributed the book’s original success to the beauty of the author and the savvy of the marketing: "This is the age of television and looks matter," said a 30 year old Saudi who read the book last week. "Somebody got it for me from Beirut. Beauty drives the marketing of your product. Rajaa has the looks, and so even when the product, i.e. the novel, is bad it sells and is selling like hot cakes," he said. (Wahab) Wahab subtly indicates this reader is a Saudi male with the use of the pronoun ‘he.’ This Saudi male, who casually and familiarly refers to the author by her first name, obtained the novel through international connections since it was not being sold inside Saudi Arabia. While the book itself does not have an image of the author on the cover, this man knows that Alsanea is beautiful. This knowledge of Alsanea’s image speaks to the marketing of the book through the press and interviews with the author on television. However, after reading such a potentially scandalous text, the Saudi male dismisses the novel because the author is pretty –it must all be marketing, rather than the substance of what is in the book, which is drawing attention. If the substance of the book is inconsequential and not worthy of notice, one wonders why he would request this book to be brought from Beirut to Saudi Arabia. We also might presume the reviewer in question is previewing the text for moral reasons—to see how dangerous this book really is. Rather than claiming the text is dangerous or scandalous, which might attract more attention to the book, this male Saudi reviewer discredits the book as not worth reading and places all the credit for the attention given to the book on the appearance of the author. Since the text has been seen to be unworthy of all of the publicity it is getting, the only conclusion this unnamed 30-year-old Saudi male can come to is that the text is only popular because of its author’s appearance. In contrast, after Banat al-Riyadh met Western audiences as Girls of Riyadh, Mona

Eltahawy interviewed a 21-year-old Saudi student named Ahmed al-Omran for her article “Saudi Girls Gone Wild.” While still banned for sale in Saudi Arabia, Al-Omran also obtained a copy smuggled into Saudi Arabia this one from Bahrain. Al-Omran read the book with his friend and found it surprisingly un-shocking. Eltahaway quotes al-Omran “I understand that [those over 40] would probably be shocked to learn about the lives of younger people, like how they have fun and how they manage their relationships with the opposite sex in such a strict society, but for people my age, it didn’t carry that big amount of surprise because this is our life, this is how we go about it and how we try to deal with our issues” (al-Omran qtd in Eltahawy). While younger than the other Saudi male whom Wahab quotes, al-Omran as a male found that the representation of dating and male-female interactions was not to be scandalous but representative of what is actually transpiring between the young men and women of Saudi Arabia. Wahab’s review also reports that one female Saudi journalist seemed concerned about how the novel would be used in order to “other” Saudi women further: ‘We know there are problems in our society, but the general reaction is to keep quiet. We have been taught from an early age that if we talk about the ills of our society, people will laugh at us. We are seen as role models in the Muslim world. And even when we are not entirely perfect, we should pretend that we are. 'Banat Al-Riyadh' deals with four characters. They may or may not represent all of Saudi society. But yes, we do come across the four fictional characters in our daily lives. Probably Saudi society - and especially Saudi women - are so much in the spotlight that this novel has come in handy for people who want to take a peek into the lives of Saudi girls. My only problem is that it sheds only a negative light on Saudi women. People outside this country will take it as a definitive word on the girls of our country.’ Many of Al-Sanea's critics would agree and they want her to change the title of the novel precisely because they think it gives the impression that it is true of all the girls in Riyadh. (Saudi journalist qtd in Wahab) While we cannot read the four women as all of the women of Riyadh or Saudi Arabia, we can according to this journalist understand that there are women like these women. We can presume also that there are women like this journalist who are very much concerned with how they are perceived by the West and do not want to be understood according to this book. While the inaccurate portrayal of Saudi women is of concern, the next of the scandals

seems to be the epistolary structure of the text, which purports to be written for a Yahoo! listserv. The language used in the text is colloquial and meant to be representative of a certain group of people. Wahab writes: “They (the critics) say the style is atrocious. They say the language is far from classical Arabic. They say it is peppered with chatroom English and full of meaningless terms from the Internet” (Wahab). While Western readers may not be able to pick up a copy of the original Arabic text and read the non-classical writing or the nuance shifts between Arabic dialects, we can still see that a text that is written in opposition to traditional conventions might be dismissed. However, with an endorsement from the Saudi Labor Minister Dr. Ghazi Al- Gosaibi, who is also a poet and author, the credibility of Alsanea as an author is being upheld. In “Building New Spaces” Gemma Ventura and Agnès Garcia-Ventura, argue that “[t]his techno- fictionalization gives the novel an underground tone. Technology writing has already been used by other Arab writers such as Jumana Haddad or Hilda Isma‘il, creating a new form of Arab cyberfeminism” (5). One could read this scandalous text written by a beautiful woman as an experimental and modern form of feminist writing. In order to appeal to female readers, Alsanea had to represent the language that her readers used on a daily basis. Wahab notes: When Alsanea was asked about [not writing in classical Arabic], she was blunt. "I wrote the first few chapters in classical Arabic, but I modified them later because I couldn't convince myself that women my age would use classical Arabic to speak to each other. I used colloquial language to improve communication with my readers." (Wahab) Alsanea purposefully moved from the classical Arabic and moved among several different varieties of colloquial Arabic to capture the way people really speak to each other. In the author’s note to the English translation, Alsanea writes, “In my Arabic version of the novel I interspersed the classical Arabic with language that reflects the mongrel Arabic of the modern world—there was Saudi dialect (several of them), and Lebanese-Arabic, English-Arabic and more. As none of that would make sense to the non-Arab reader, I had to modify the text somewhat” (ix-x). Alsanea’s use of a variety of colloquial dialects throughout the Middle East is understood by readers of the region as representative of a variety of different peoples and groups that exist throughout the Middle East. These dialects work to characterize individuals as from particular regions and socio-economic positions. While Alsanea modifies her English text to

allow non-Arab readers to understand the story she has to tell, she eliminates these nuances in the text and begins a controversy that seems to be bigger than her original publication.

The Translation The translator, Marilyn Booth, also shared the concern that Alsanea’s text would flatten and stereotype Saudi women as well as lose the nuanced code-switching and characterization that Alsanea included with her characters’ use of language. Booth addresses the problem of a more Westernized translation in two articles written about the dismissal of and divergence from her own translation. Booth makes it clear that what is in between the covers of the Penguin editions is not her work per se, but the work of Penguin and Alsanea. In “Girls of Riyadh Go on the Road,” Booth indicates that the press made it seem like she played a small role in the translation of the text. Booth writes to clarify the situation. “Between the presence of my name on the title page, its absence in the Acknowledgements, and Alsanea’s invocation of me as a desultory editor of her English lies a story of text circulation and commodification that, I argue, is best understood when one considers the apparatus of publicity and public image-making along with the less visible process of actually producing the text of a translation” (150). According to Booth, Alsanea and Penguin stripped the text of political and social commentary that could be misunderstood by Western audiences. Around the time Banat al-Riyadh was published, the United States was involved in military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten came under harsh criticism from Islamic communities for publishing not only images of the Prophet but critical and mocking images of the Prophet in a dozen cartoons. When an author considers translating a text that is critical of one’s own society, one might be concerned about the political climate such a critique is being released into. In order for Alsanea and Penguin to make the text more palatable for sale in the Western markets, they may have decided that it would be best to tone down some of the critique and to make the text more familiar and less ‘foreign’ for Western audiences. Even with this more American translation (spellings and phrasing are more American than British), the presence of an Americanized story does not remove but actually enhances the likelihood of the uninformed Western audiences to stereotype and orientalize Saudi women. Providing less information about the diversity of the society only reifies the ignorance of the reading population.

In Going Global: Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj consider how texts from the Third World or the global south are received in Western or First World markets: Given the key role of literary intermediaries in shaping the content as well as form of the canon of “Third World literature” available in the West, it is clear that the view of Third World women’s texts as providing unmediated glimpses into “Other” cultures is not only naïve, but also highly problematic. The entire range of processes by which a text “travels” from a Third World to a First World context, including translation, packaging, advertising, and distributing, is carried out within the context of intricately intertwined economic, literary, and discursive forces. (Amireh and Majaj 5) Amireh and Majaj indicate that the text is always going to be wrapped up in economic and political discourse. The “literary intermediaries” select certain texts to be translated and marketed to First World audiences. Whatever is available is clearly a non-representative selection of texts from the area. To address this lack of representation, one might think that it would be best to have a nuanced translation that reflects the intricacies of the society when the book is being translated, packaged, advertised and distributed throughout the Western world. However, this is not what Penguin and Alsanea chose to do. Booth is concerned about this commodification of “transnational-translated figure of the Muslim female”: The marketing of an authorial persona frames the text’s reception by readers and—as with memoiristic texts written in English by female immigrants and refugees from Muslim-majority societies—secures a commodified image, the transnational-translated figure of the Muslim female writer as cosmopolitan authority in the Anglophone-dominated global cultural marketplace. Girls of Riyadh exemplifies this process as an avowedly fictional work lauded (like much Arabic literature in translation) as providing sociological insight into the lives of young people in Saudi Arabia today—a truth effect, a notion of experience as transparently rendered through a text, that the author’s media appearances do not dispel and that the final, published translation buttresses. (“Girls of Riyadh Goes on the Road”150)

Booth’s attention to the varieties of Arabic being used in Alsanea’s text was meant to preserve the modern, cosmopolitan qualities of the characters. As we think about Booth’s concerns, examining the covers, the advertisement of the interiors of what was published for Western audiences becomes important. First the German edition is simple with a pink gauzy fabric draped behind the title. The French cover returns to an image not unlike that of the Afghan girl’s iconic image depicted in National Geographic in the 1980s although the other French edition mimics the curved S pattern of the 2007 hardback edition. The Spanish cover is pink and returns to the high heel theme common in the chick lit genre. The UK edition features a purple cover with flowers and an array of revealing items: a shisha pipe, tea, purse, high heels, earrings, red lipstick, and a sports car. The US edition with a bold red cover has an Orientalist theme with the minaret, crescent moon, palm trees, a mobile, and high heels blending into the swirly Arabesque lines. On the UK and US covers Penguin entices the reader to open the book and read with pithy blurbs that reinforce the idea that the reader will be able to understand Saudi women by reading this book. One statement from New Statesman proclaims the this book is “Wonderfully vivid, highly readable. Will tell you more about one of the world’s oldest and most closed societies than a library of books . . . excellent” (UK Cover). Alsanea’s text obviously does not reveal all the mysteries of Saudi society, but it does show us the fictional lives of four Saudi women who navigate their lives. The US book cover is less suggestive despite its more overtly Orientalist cover. The cover entices us by relating it to the well-known chick lit novel and HBO series: “‘Imagine Sex and the City, if the city in question were Riyadh.’” –Time” (US Cover). Published well before Sex and the City 2 hit the theaters in 2010, one almost suspects that the disappointment readers experienced when finding no descriptions or even titillating references to sex acts in this book created a demand for the Sex and the City girls to head to Abu Dhabi. Any mentions of sex are vague and glossed over as “they did it,” “they didn’t do it” or “we don’t know if they did it, but it’s none of our business anyway.” The promises made on the covers of these books are not upheld by the content of the pages. Whether it was the fear that the political, social critique and banter was too polemical or the question was more about maintaining neutrality regarding the position and condition of Saudi and Muslim women in general is not clear. Penguin perhaps didn’t want to be seen as publishing a book that critiques Saudi Arabia or Islam. Alsanea possibly wanted to neutralize her critique out of national or religious loyalties. Texts that have openly criticized the Prophet have garnered

negative attention from more conservative Islamic groups. The Jyllands-Posten Muhammed cartoons controversy in September 2005, about the same time of Banat al-Riyadh’s publication, is one example of a Western publication forwarding a critique of Islam which was met with significant backlash from Islamic populations. While Alsanea does not offer any images of the Prophet or portray Islam in a negative light, she critiques some of the institutional traditions that shape Saudi society. While some of these are more culturally situated as Wahhabi-ism rather Islamic teachings, Penguin may have wanted to publish a book that would sell without threats of lawsuits or death. Alsanea, and definitely Penguin, would want to depoliticize the text. The poet Nazir Qabbani is referred to several times throughout the novel. In her article “Translator v. Author,” Booth offers the backstory of Qabbani that is referenced and subsequently excised from the Penguin edition: The narrator then refers to a widely known incident in the poet’s family life, when his elder sister committed suicide because she was barred from marrying the man she loved, a tragedy that determined Qabbini to contest prevailing strictures on gender relations. He experienced tragedy again when his second wife, Iraqi-born Balqis al Rawi, was killed in Beirut in 1982 by a bomb targeted at Iraq’s embassy… Mentioning Balqis, it invokes the context of war that brutally shapes the lives and deaths of so many in the Arabic-speaking region. It foreshadows the more “private” stories that the narrator will tell and also the way such stories are both suppressed and known. The stories of the sister and of Balqis thus act as cultural templates for the stories of the four girls, while quietly reminding readers and characters of the ultimate tragedies that result from attempted resistance to the implacable dominance of shared cultural practices. The passage is important thematically and structurally; to delete it is to depoliticize and de-gender the text. (Booth 207) Words and phrases catch the readers’ eyes: suicide, forced marriage, Iraqi, bomb, Beirut, embassy. These words circulate with the American and British audiences with such connotations as fear, terrorism, oppression, yet these events, Booth argues in this passage, are part of the fabric of daily life for many. Resistance to these structures Booth argues is dangerous. It would make sense that Alsanea and Penguin might be sensitive to the political tensions and biases of American and British audiences. Penguin and Alsanea removed any reference of Qabbani’s Iraqi

wife and Qabbani’s sister’s suicide from the novel. Booth argues that for Middle Eastern audiences these names and references to specific historical events would resonate, but these events are not widely know in the West. While not known, Booth argues that it removes both political and gendered arguments form the text. While Booth wanted a clear and authentic translations of the text, Alsanea and Penguin were more focused on creating a text that would be salable in Western markets, offering the cultural details to reaffirm what is known or assumed to some extent about Saudi women and Arab society—just enough that it is palatable. Eliminating the “foreignness” of Booth’s translation and creating a familiarity – a connection between Western audience and the characters in the story—makes the Saudi women likable and may have been viewed as a way to bridge the cultural gaps in order to create the feeling of international “gal pals.” Booth’s rebuttal to Alsanea and Penguin’s edition, “Translator v. Author” highlights some significant changes that occurred in the transition from Banat al-Riyadh to Girls of Riyadh. One particular change that is puzzling is in the opening lines of the novel. Alsanea writes in the Penguin edition “To all of you out there / Who are over the age of eighteen, and in some countries that’ll mean twenty-one, though among Saudis it means over six (and no, I don’t mean sixteen) for guys and after menarche for girls” (Alsanea 1). Booth’s translation presents the women in the last line differently. Booth translates it as “who are over the age of eighteen, and in some countries that’ll mean twenty-one, though among us Saudis it means over six (and no, I don’t mean sixteen) for guys and what we call “the age of despair,” commonly known as menopause, for gals” (Booth 207). Menarche specifically references the beginning of the menstrual cycle while menopause is the end of the menstrual cycle. This presents female adulthood from two entirely different perspectives. Booth does reference the potential irony of this particular line. However, it would seem that Alsanea removed this in order to avoid constructing her culture with misunderstandings. What Booth does say is that the idiom “[the age of despair] can also bear a highly ironic sense, as older women (across Arabic societies) are often powerful within the family and the larger social realm. The published version not only effaces the idiom and its resonant significations but turns the text on its head, reading simply ‘after menarche for girls’“ (Booth 207). The reference to “after menarche” could mean a girl as young as 12 or we could understood as after menstrual cycles are finished which presents an entirely different meaning as Booth points out.

Ursula Lindsey discusses the issues around Booth’s translation in “Those girls of Riyadh!” which was published on a blog called The Arabist, which is dedicated to Arab politics and culture. Lindsey is also concerned some of the issues of “voyeurism and sensationalism” that may come “with the generally quite superficial and misinformed Western coverage of Arab culture” (Lindsey). Lindsey goes on to discuss the controversy of Booth’s translation and Lindsey concurs with Booth finding that “based on the examples [Booth] gives it certainly looks as if the changes flattened the narrative voice she’d created into something more formal and less charming” (Lindsey). Although Lindsey had not yet read Banat al-Riyadh or Girls of Riyadh at the time she wrote this, Booth’s translation sounds much more sensitive to accurately representing the story Alsanea originally created.

Girls of Riyadh Critiques the Men of Riyadh Eltahawy finds that the while the book itself is not great writing, the truly alarming issue in Girls of Riyadh / Banat al-Riyadh is “just how many barriers to communication the Internet has removed” (Eltahawy). The book does not limit the girls to communicating on the Internet, but also through mobiles and texting. The technological advancements in flirting and dating in the novel appear to have been missed by their elders. This openness of cyberspace is an intentional construct for Alsanea. The book chapters are arranged as weekly posts to a Yahoo! listserv. While most of the responding readers of the listserv are male, the narrator is decidedly female in this context. From the opening pages of the book, a female narrator is disclosing female secrets to a male audience. Girls of Riyadh diverges self-consciously from traditional Arab novels in its form. Alsanea is familiar enough with the form she is working with; however, the existence of book as a Yahoo! listserv seems new from the way it makes reviewers uncomfortable. The form Alsanea chose clearly marks a divergence from traditional forms just as the women in the book do not go about their relationships as might be traditionally expected. Alsanea’s characters critique the men of Saudi Arabia quite openly as well as discuss the limitations of both genders based upon cultural codes of conduct. The novel itself is marketed as to Western audiences as chick lit. The genre itself is a deviation from Cris Mazza and Jeffery de Shell’s exploration of how women’s writing differentiated from men’s resulted in a collection of postfeminist fiction that Mazza describes “courageous and playful; frank and wry; honest, intelligent, sophisticated, libidinous, unapologetic, and overwhelmingly emancipated. Liberated

from what? The grim anger that feminists had told us ought to be our pragmatic stance in life” (18). Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh and probably more so Banat al-Riyadh fits the description of a text that is bold and playful and liberated. Wenche Ommundsen is interested in what happens “when a popular chicklit formula travels from its original cultural context to distant lands, lives, and loves, and the implications for our understanding of the transcultural work performed by popular fiction” (108). Ommundsen considers three novels in her article, Girls of Riyadh being one. Ommundsen writes the cautious optimism of Alsanea’s message locates her novel within the traditions of women’s writing that resonate beyond the postfeminist preoccupation with individual pleasure and desire. For all its careful, and at times uncomfortable, navigation between different agendas, generic constraints, and cultural codes, Girls of Riyadh marks a considerable achievement for chick lit as a vehicle for social intervention. Its commercial success…points to the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of popular fiction as forum for debate and agent of social change. (120) While chick lit is dismissed as nonliterary as well as fluff, light reading, the genre has traveled the globe: what is marketed in England and America as popular women’s fiction that portrays women living postfeminist and arguable neoliberal feminist lives has sprung up as domestic novels in countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Nigeria, India among many others where the West is still waiting to see feminism or even protofeminist ideologies begin to emerge. With this in mind, how Alsanea represents her critique of Saudi society to the world becomes important. Alsanea raises the question through her characters and narrator Are men afraid of strong, intelligent women? Alsanea’s characters conclude that men don’t want strong or weak women and women should not depend on men for their needs. This is seen in Gamrah’s character, who married a man who had been living with another woman in the United States while he was attended school. His parents refused to allow him to marry the woman whom he loved. Instead his parents found a good Saudi girl for him to marry. After the wedding and move to the United States, Gamrah is unable to elicit any affection or much assistance from her husband. Gamrah questions whether her independence challenges her husband’s authority and concludes: A man must sense the strength of a woman and her independence and a woman must realize that her relationship with a man shouldn’t just be built on needs: her

need for his money, his share of domestic responsibilities, his support of her and her kids, and her need to feel her own significance in the universe. It is very unfortunate, isn’t it, that a woman has to have a man to make her feel this sense of importance? (78) After Gamrah discovers Rashid’s premarital life and his loyalty to his lover, Gamrah returns to Saudi Arabia pregnant and is served with divorce papers while visiting her family. As girlfriends will do, the four women rehash the situation to analyze what went wrong and who is to blame. Michelle, the most liberal of the four, turns from the playful banter concerning astrological signs and says to Gamrah: You had the right to say no, but you didn’t. So you better drop all this “fate” theory, all this stuff about us not having any hand in any of your life paths. We always act the role of the helpless females, completely overcome by circumstances, and as if we don’t have a say in anything or opinions of our own! Utterly passive! How long are we going to keep on being such cowards, and not have even the courage to see our choices through, whether they’re right or wrong? (125) While Michelle has her own problems, having fallen in love with a man who cannot stand up to his mother and will not even tell his mother that he is in love with her and wants to marry her, Michelle extols that as women they have no right or reason to be passive. They need to stand by their decisions whether they are right or wrong. This principle of being opinionated and standing by these opinions and seeing choices through is an act of agency on the part of the women. By taking up this position, they become the decision makers and will stand by them regardless of the consequences. This theme is continued later when Sadeem is lamenting the lack of control she feels over her own life “We can never do anything without the fear of being judged holding us back. Everyone steers us along according to what they want. What kind of life is that? We don’t have a say about our own lives!” (178). Sadeem is frustrated and reeling from being divorced for consenting to have sex with her (contractual) husband before the wedding ceremony and then from a summer spent in London recovering from the combined shame of being divorced and then flunking out of school when she meets Firas whom she spends much of the summer avoiding because he’s Saudi only to fall in love with him later. Sadeem continues to meet with

Firas, who holds a governmental position, secretly in Paris. Sadeem’s refusal to own her actions is critiqued by Michelle who lays out the double standard men and women are held to in Saudi society: “Of course,” Michelle broke in, “right after it, right away, he asked you, ‘How come you feel so comfortable and relaxed about going out with me?’ Or he doesn’t even ask; he just starts doubting you immediately, and by the next day he’s already treating you differently. Different from when you had never agreed to meet him. After you meet a Saudi guy behind your family’s back, behind the society’s back, he loses his respect for you instead of appreciating your move! I know this stupid business really well; these hang-ups are built automatically into the messed-up heads of our guys. They are mentally twisted! Why do you think I left this country to live somewhere else?” (179) While Michelle blames the men for this inconsistency, Lamees, who is more level-headed, concludes later in the discussion that “Men’s insistence on calling the shots…didn’t just come about in a vacuum” (180-81). Lamees expresses her thoughts that passive women allow and encourage men to exert “that kind of domineering behavior” (181): They’re just kind of wicked. A guy will begin backing off from a girl and even trying to escape as soon as she seems available. Because then he feels, Okay, I don’t have to do anything to get her. She is no longer a challenge. He doesn’t say this to her face. He doesn’t let her figure out that he is in the wrong, no way! He makes her believe that she is the one who has problems, not him. Some of them give the girl hints, hoping she will end the relationship herself, but we stupid girls never pick up on them. We go on working on the relationship until it kills us, even if we’re pretty sure from the start that it’s a total disaster. That’s why in the end we make fools of ourselves. We’re the ones who don’t hold on to our pride from the start to get out with our honor intact. (181) Rather than allow men, who in her opinion are wicked and cowardly by definition, to take the blame for these relationships gone wrong, Lamees blames the women for sacrificing their pride and honor in the futile attempt to hold on to men who are not worth their time. Michelle points out that is the men’s problem. They refuse to move against tradition and marry for love because

they are afraid of having to live with these consequences and owning their own mistakes. Michelle tells Sadeem: “Sweetie, this is the escape strategy of an immature little boy. … He doesn’t get it, he doesn’t conceive of love as a foundation that builds a family. Maybe he’s even a really cultured and highly educated guy who’s been around. Maybe he knows deep down that love is a basic human need, that it isn’t shameful for a man to choose his partner in life himself, as long as he’s completely sure she’s the right one. But he is still afraid. It worries him to even think about following a path different from the path his father followed, and his uncle, and his grandfather before them. … he follows their steps and doesn’t go against their ways of doing things. That way, no one can come along someday and rub it in that he failed because he strayed from the path of his ancestors. Our men are just too scared to pay for their own decisions in life. They want others to follow, others to blame.” (181-82) Alsanea underscores that these ideas about men are held by all the women in the story when she writes, “Not one of the three other women had any idea where Michelle obtained her theories of how guys think. But they felt that her words evoked strong echoes in all of them. They didn’t know how she had reached her conclusions, but they knew, in her hearts, that she was right” (182). The main connection among all of these critiques seems to be that the society is bound up in a tradition that both men and women find problematic. The men are in the position to change this tradition, but as Alsanea presents it, the men are too frightened to deviate from tradition because they want to avoid blame if something goes wrong. Instead both men and women suffer from broken hearts by marrying for traditional reasons (family arrangements, etc.) rather than marrying for love. While there are other critiques of Saudi men and Saudi society contained within the text, the criticism of the men and thus society being bound to tradition seems to be the strongest. Alsanea figures women in the novel as participants in their own oppression. In doing so, she is calling women to take more responsibility for the culture and the cyclical nature of oppression that occurs across generations. Women in this sense need to stop participating in the traditions that allow men to wield such power over women. Although Alsanea does not offer any solutions,

she has at least highlighted the problem so the discussion may take place. Professor Menahem Milson’s comparison of Girls of Riyadh to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin allows us to further view the revolutionary potential of this the novel. As readers and critics we need to move past the mentality that enabled Nathaniel Hawthorne, around 150 years ago, to refer to his female contemporaries as “a d—d mob of scribbling women” (qtd in McPhee).

Conclusion Chick lit should not be viewed as a diminishment of women’s writing; rather, the genre could be viewed as an evolution from the consciousness-raising novels of the 1970s or an experimental space where women can share their stories about their daily lives or critique oppressive systems of power that might be imposed by women themselves. My thesis seeks out examples of the evolving ways chick lit is subverting its stereotype as a popular middlebrow genre. Rather than view chick lit as anti-feminist, or post-feminist in the sense that feminism is no longer necessary or useful for women, I read chick lit novels for the ways they celebrate women with all of their contradictory behaviors. Problems that are often specific to women are highlighted and examined and sometimes overcome. In the novels, women question the culture they live in, point to problems within their communities, class structures, and cultures, and seek to overcome these problems, demonstrating their strength and resiliency. In “Theory as a Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks argues that theory, in writing, can be used to discuss women’s oppression in ways that do not connect to women who live out feminism in practice every day (65). In a similar fashion, the public does not always read literature that is valued in the academy even though highbrow literature informs and shapes the middlebrow novels the public reads. Nevertheless, this literature is perceived as inaccessible. Readers are told that it was “literature” that represented life. Upon reading it, though, they found it bears little to no resemblance to their own experiences or experiences of people they know. In A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire, Janice Radway analyzes the tension between high culture and middlebrow culture: It began to occur to me, then, that despite the traditional claim that middlebrow culture simply apes the values of high culture, it is in fact a kind of counterpractice to the high culture tastes and proclivities that have been most insistently legitimated and nurtured in academic English departments…it may be a competitor to English departments for the authority to control reading and to define the nature of literary value. (9-10) Following hooks and Radway’s arguments, we might imagine a new literary practice that involves analyzing books that are not exclusively classics or conventionally “literary.” Instead, we might analyze texts inasmuch as they connect to women’s lived experiences. The hierarchy

of literary vs. popular would need to be altered to allow the study of such middlebrow or lowbrow novels to be included in academic discussion that connects to contemporary arguments. In the spirit of bell hooks’s argument of theory and practice, Stephanie Harzewski calls for chick lit to be viewed more broadly by beginning the fourth chapter of her book, entitled “The Legacy of Working Girl Fiction” with this ominous appraisal of working with popular fiction: There is a temptation for the literary critic to award points to the popular fiction with canonical masterworks as intertexts, as if the use of allusion logically lends gravitas to the popular. The reflex to highlight a pedigree is in part a defense mechanism against suspicions about the relevance of the endeavor to the established canon and the implication of questionable taste, the critic reasoning, consciously or not, that an elucidation of intertextuality may offset accusations of ‘slumming it’ or, especially for junior faculty, dubious time management. (123- 24) When popular fiction revisits canonical texts directly through allusion or direct parody, then the popular fiction can be perceived to be more worthy of study for the ways that it recreates a classic novel. Bridget Jones’s Diary is often approached specifically because of its connections to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. However, it is still not deemed as worthy of study as its Pride and Prejudice. According to Harzewski, though, linking chick lit only to female predecessors is also problematic. This action limits the agency of chick lit authors assuming them only to have read and been influenced by women writers. By contrast, the epigraph to All Fall Down by Jennifer Weiner is a passage from Philip Roth and in Girls of Riyadh, Rajaa Alsanea provides an extended discussion of Nizar Qabbani’s life and poetry. These literary male writers were not selected randomly for inclusion, but rather can be read as thematically influential or inspirational for the story being told in the novel. The novel’s interpretation does not rest solely on those connections. At the same time, the novels are carrying on a longer conversation that occurs within literature with many interlocutors of multiple genders. In seeking to discover the longer conversation that chick lit carries forward in the 21st century, I connect this heritage back to the consciousness-raising novel. While suburban women no longer attend consciousness-raising groups, book groups continue to be popular. Indeed, many popular novels include suggested discussion questions to get book groups’ discussions

started. Roisin Emma provides a number of questions that can jumpstart a discussion in her blogpost “Starting a Chick Lit Book Club.” At the top of the list is “Which character did you most relate to and why?” Other questions lead participants to engage the themes the novels themselves raise. Goodreads.com provides a number of selections for chick lit novels for book clubs as well on the shelf “Popular Chick Lit Book Club Books.”22 While book clubs are not consciousness-raising groups by definition, by focusing on the themes of the books being discussed members can engage with similar ideas that are mediated through the text. This secondary engagement would remove the personal confession that is typical for traditional consciousness-raising groups. In a way, book groups repurpose the methods of consciousness-raising groups. In “Consciousness-Raising: A Tool for Feminist Praxis in Research and Granting Voice,” Joanne Ardovini highlights the benefits of consciousness-raising texts by emphasizing what she calls reflectivity and reflexivity: “Through reflectivity, both parties will become consciously aware of their reality and the process by which these realities have been constructed. Reflexivity, an important element of consciousness-raising, offers a micro-level approach in incorporating the social context of people's everyday lives and allows consciousness-raising to occur” (55). As a point in discussion, identifying with characters and discussing the conflicts the characters experiences allows chick lit novels to function in part as a kind of consciousness-raising novel through this reflection on characters’ choices and motivations. Androvini establishes that consciousness-raising occurs in two parts: first, through the reality of everyday life, and second, through the “social construction of their realities” (55). While readers in the book clubs may not discuss the books in this precise language, discussion of the conflicts in the novel ultimately has the potential to bring readers into conversation about social constructions that define the characters’ realities, for example when considering which kinds of alternative endings are possible. Through identifying with the characters and creating a scenario of “what I would have done if I were her,” readers might consider that the character could have been prevented from accomplishing her goals because she lacked resources or because doing so would have threatened her income. Through identifying with the characters, readers are bound by the social

22 This list includes more than what is typical to chick lit with Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out without Me? (And Other Concerns) (2011), Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009).

constructions and everyday lives presented within the novels. It is as if they have taken on avatars within the world of the novel who then must answer consciousness-raising questions such as these suggested by the New York Radical Feminists in 1976: “How does being married affect your self-image?” (5) or “Does being a mother live up to your expectations?” (6) or “How do you manage money? How important are material possessions to you?” (7). Discussion of these books continues to raise the social and political issues implicit within the text, but readers can engage these issues more safely and with less personal revelation than would be the case in a consciousness-raising group. If certain chick lit novels are to be read as the 21st century’s consciousness-raising novels, it becomes necessary to determine which novels address key cultural and political issues. In doing so, the books move beyond the national and cultural boundaries to highlight issues faced by contemporary women from increasingly diverse backgrounds. The relatable chick lit heroine’s conflict underscores the unfinished work of the second-wave feminist movement and highlights the inconsistencies or gaps within the current third-wave feminist project, identifying ways that feminisms have not always included and encompassed the experiences of religious women, women of color, postcolonial, or third-world women, among others. Contemporary women who struggle to “have it all”—by which college educated white middle class women mean having both a career and a family—are let down by popular feminism’s promise that women can achieve career advancements similar to men while raising children and being engaged and hands-on parents inside the home. The drive to be both professional career woman and mother creates a set of rigorous expectations for women who are faced with workplaces that, for example, do not allow for flexible schedules or childcare. When Sheryl Sandberg, who has become CEO of a large corporation and has children, too, encourages other women to do likewise in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, she creates expectations that cannot be met by many women, especially those lacking educational and financial resources. Women can be caught in a double bind: asking for raises or even more flexible hours can create the impression that she cannot manage the tasks given to her. Simultaneously, women are called upon to quit complaining and to voice demands. In chick lit novels, such dilemmas are presented, even as they also directly characterize finances, workplace, religion, health, and family as feminist issues. Cris Mazza initially conceived of chick lit as post-feminist because it demonstrated ways

that women are not victims. Indeed, to portray women as victims reinforces the very power structure that needs to be overcome. Moreover, women’s acknowledgement that they, too, are part of the problem gives women the agency to self-reflexively examine and question how they contribute to their own unhappiness or oppression. Through its humorous plots and relatable characters, chick lit helps readers themselves in the novels. In Chick Lit: The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction, Rocío Montoro argues that the constant references to feminism in the novels seem to indicate that these women have not abandoned entirely all of the conventional preoccupations;…their newly formulated concerns are twenty- and twenty-first century realities, not of the prototypical feminist involvement of the 1960s or 1970s. All of this suggests that their claims to feminism should be understood as anchored firmly on the authors’ contemporary worldview of the reality that has begotten the genre and not as independent from it. (134) Montoro finds that women will respond more positively to feminism that encompasses experiences and characters that emerge in their daily lives rather than a feminism that is political and translates to policy removed from their day-to-day lives. While the feminisms found in chick lit are varied and inconsistently carried out, it might best be understood through Chela Sandoval’s idea of differential consciousness which represents a strategy of oppositional ideology that functions on an altogether different register. Its powers can be though of as mobile—not nomadic, but rather cinematographic: a kinetic motion that maneuvers, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners…it permits functioning within, yet beyond, the demands of dominate ideology. (43.4) Such flexibility allows women to challenge and promote the feminism that is needed in that moment. While chick lit does not present itself as consciousness-raising, it is also important to remember that chick lit is a label supplied by book marketers. Novelists do not always want to be connected with the genre, though many do—particularly, novelists like Dana Lone Hill and Rajaa Alsanea whose books otherwise would have difficultly finding a broad audience. Feminism is part of the novel to be sure, but telling the stories of women they know is the primary goal.

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