Bad romance

Susan Hopkins

‘Chick lit,’ or popular fiction which featured and appealed to (post)modern women, became a bestselling genre in the 1990s. Girly pop classics like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City explored the challenges and contradictions of juggling careers and relationships in the post-feminist age. Although it was supposed to speak to the contemporary dilemmas of the modern woman, 90s chick lit generally softened its wry social observations with self-deprecating humour. It explored the new gendered problem of ‘having it all’ while rolling out the traditional romance formula of ‘good girl meets bad boy’. Even more recent romance blockbusters, like Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight, typically feature innocent or sadomasochistic heroines falling for rich, powerful or dangerous men. This rush to reclaim and reposition national ‘values’ and ‘culture’ is peculiarly context free. Such statements create the strategic impression of action and leadership, but also conveniently skate over deeper cultural and political issues of how vulnerability to violence is compounded by intersections of social class, race and ethnicity. By invoking the often-repeated claim that domestic violence transcends all social class boundaries, neoliberal politicians effectively avoid responsibility for creating a ‘lean and mean’ policy environment that makes some women more vulnerable to abuse.

Bad romance

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