Commodification and Identity in Chick Lit

This paper looks at the parochial facets of femininity versus their globalized avatars as apparent in two chick lit novels, Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” 1999 and one of the novels in Sophie Kinsella’s The Shopaholic series, “Shopaholic Abroad” 2001. The paradigm I am operating within is that of consumerism and commodification as the new forms of globalization. More specifically, the paper sets out to investigate the extent to which global and local facets of (feminine) identity overlap, thus engendering what I label ‘glocal’ femininities, and the role of the commodification thereof.