Women Talk: Chick Lit TV and the Dialogues of Feminism

The subgenre of the chick-lit television series, best exemplified in programs such as Sex and the City, Lipstick Jungle, and The Cashmere Mafia, has often been the subject of postfeminist critique. This article examines this subgenre as intertextually related cluster texts that function through internal and intertextual dialogism. It explores these programs' focus on discursivity, multiplicity, and performativity in order to argue that the superficially postfeminist programs can function at their core to move toward feminist goals. In these television series, focus on a multiplicity of perspectives and the importance of discursive communities of women not only represents spaces where questions of gender can be discussed but models through these series internal structure productive dialogism. Through this argument, the author demonstrates that these programs must be reexamined for political potential and not easily dismissed as regressively postfeminist.