Erin Hurt

Historically, feminism has had an uneasy relationship with popular culture. Though the mass media has long perpetuated misogyny and anti-feminist sentiments, the mainstream, commercial market has also enabled feminists to share their ideas with wider audiences. My dissertation, “Selling Feminism: Race, Gender, and the Role of the Market in Four Contemporary U.S. Feminist Texts,” examines the complicated and fraught alliance recent feminist literature has forged with commercial success. In it, I argue that Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996), Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s chica lit novel The Dirty Girls Social Club (2003), selected poems by Lorna Dee Cervantes, and the writing of queer traveling spoken-word group Sister Spit utilize the principles of mass marketing both inside and outside of the commercial literary sphere to enlarge and revitalize feminist literary publics.

The relationship between these contemporary texts and the mass market formed against the backdrop of the 1990s, a turbulent time in which feminism sought to redefine itself. As author Kellie Bean details in Post-Backlash Feminism (2007), post-feminist authors like Christina Hoff Sommers had overwhelmed feminist discourse with arguments that blamed feminism for a host of societal problems. Rebecca Walker sought to reclaim the movement in her 1992 article in Ms. through her naming of a "third wave." The new generation of feminists who rallied behind this concept defined it as more inclusive of identities and issues such as sexuality, race, fashion, and embraced popular culture. This focus on self and celebrity troubled some second wave feminists, those who came of age during the Women's Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They feared it drew attention away from concrete issues like equal pay and sexual harassment. This earlier generation of feminist writers had also tangled with bringing feminism to a mass-market audience, a phenomenon Maria Lauret describes in Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (1994). However, they voiced anxiety that this newer feminism’s increased visibility in the public sphere would enervate the movement. My project begins with a key moment amidst this turmoil: the 1996 debut of Eve Ensler’s one-woman show, The Vagina Monologues. By uniting campus activism and celebrity performances with mainstream marketing, her play quickly rose to prominence and international recognition. By doing so, it confirmed that the use of marketing strategies, particularly using performance and/or new media in conjunction with their print texts, offered an effective means by which feminist literature could disseminate feminist ideologies. Thus, the feminist literary sphere had found a way to effectively engage with the economics of popular culture.

Though considerable work has been written about representations of women in popular culture and in critique of the mainstream mass media, my project frames close readings of each author’s work with an analysis of how she engages with and adapts mainstream and independent marketing strategies to present a specific vision. I argue, through a series of case studies, that feminist literature can do positive cultural work within the commercial marketplace—as it does in Ensler’s Monologues and the ensuing V-Day movement. At the same time, it can also be co-opted and compromised by the very forces it seeks to use, which is what Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s body of writing demonstrates. Or, by eschewing the mainstream in favor of independent modes of cultural production, authors like Lorna Dee Cervantes or those in the spoken word group Sister Spit gain considerable freedom over their texts. Each chapter also demonstrates that an author’s brand of gender, racial, and class politics can enable or disable their access to publication opportunities. My project also speaks to the polarization of the second and third wave. Rather than castigate or reify either camp, my four chapters illustrate how these feminist authors, whose texts are also continuing the projects of the second wave, use marketing tactics to reach audiences. Ultimately, I show that feminist literature’s engagement with the marketplace has created unorthodox ways of using print culture to create new feminist communities.

My introduction, “The Business of Feminist Fiction,” provides the historical context and theoretical foundations for the four chapters that follow. Drawing on work such as Terry Lovell’s Consuming Fiction (1987) and Maria Lauret’s Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America, I construct the publication and distribution history of Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) to argue that second wave popular feminist fiction was more a result of the market’s desire to capitalize on the phenomenon of women’s liberation than a conscious and savvy feminist engagement. I end with an examination of feminist magazine Ms. to show how second wave writers formed a tentative relationship with the mainstream publishing industry in order to distribute their work, while at the same time maintaining a healthy distrust of it.

The first two chapters consider texts that have achieved widespread attention and success. The initial chapter, “Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues and the Rise of Contemporary Popular Feminism,” contends that Ensler’s play evolved from a one-woman off-Broadway performance to become the foundation of an international activist phenomenon by bringing performance together with second-wave consciousness-raising, and student activism with mainstream marketing techniques. I show that though Ensler’s success stems in part from her play’s superficial multiculturalism and ahistorical version of feminism, the play also allows for the creation of new feminist communities on college campuses as well as the reinvigoration of feminism at a national and international level. The second chapter, “‘Latina Like Me’: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in the Writing of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez,” analyzes Valdes-Rodriguez’s Latina chick lit by reading it in the context of her earlier foundational third wave essay, “Ruminations of a Feminist Fitness Instructor,” and her later extensive blog posts. It shows her willingness to refashion herself and her version of Latina identity in order to appeal to mainstream readers’ and publishers’ expectations about gender and race, and to sell more books. This chapter concludes by arguing that her readiness to alter her public identity stems from, and is a possible danger of, third wave feminism’s view of feminist identity as ambiguous and contradictory when it enters the realm of the popular.

The next two chapters serve as counterpoints to the preceding two by focusing on authors who draw on marketing strategies yet position their work outside of the commercial sphere and its modes of production and distribution. My third chapter, “‘Freedom of the press belongs to the one who owns one’: Third Wave Strategies of a Second Wave Chicana,” examines Lorna Dee Cervantes, an award-winning Chicana poet who began publishing during the Chicano Civil Rights and Women’s Movements. I argue that she uses her blog as a contemporary independent press, and with the freedom over her publication and distribution this gives her, Cervantes critiques the limited ways that critics read Chicana identity in her poetry. The final chapter, “‘The rest of the story’: Sister Spit and the Spoken Word,” examines a group of mostly queer, radical, punk writers who actively reject the sphere of the popular, preferring instead to disseminate their work through more informal channels of do-it-yourself publishing. This chapter traces the founding of the group, as well as the career trajectories of co-founders Michelle Tea and Sinai Anderson, to show the difficulties and freedoms of small press publishing. By examining Tea’s struggles to avoid becoming a poster-child for the queer subculture she helped found, I demonstrate the difficulty feminist authors face when attempting to avoid co-optation and the strategies they use to do so.