Girlfriends, Postfeminism, and the European Chick-Flick in France

Abstract

Anglo-American feminist film and television scholarship has of late been increasingly concerned with the negotiation by onscreen narratives of so-called postfeminist values, as well as their close cousin, “chick” culture. While postfeminism is often seen to succeed second-wave feminism in a neatly chronological way from the 1980s to today, the chick “cultural explosion” is located by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young from the mid-1990s onwards, catalyzed for its most prominent theorists by the international success of the British novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (Helen Fielding, London: Picador, 1996). For Ferriss and Young, “chick culture is vitally linked to postfeminism,” through an aesthetic defined by: “a return to femininity, the primacy of romantic attachments, girlpower, a focus on female pleasure and pleasures, and the value of consumer culture and girlie goods.” It can be seen as a collection of popular culture media forms principally concerned with middle-class women in their twenties and thirties, which are mostly American and British in origin.¹ The starting point of this essay is the deracination of what I am calling “chick texts” at the point of production. Specifically, it argues that elements of the Anglo-American chick-flick—a term used by the popular press connoting female-focused narratives with an emphasis on traditional feminine concerns such as heterosexual romance, designed to appeal to a largely female-identified audience—have begun to be appropriated by filmmakers in different European contexts.²