Mobility and rebel women in South African chick lit

The article explores notions of resistance in South African chick lit through Zukiswa Wanner’s novels The Madams (2006) and Behind Every Successful Man (2008). An analysis of chick lit’s potential for resistance needs to consider its use of ambivalence and its process of localization. In addition to a postcolonial close reading approach, this article draws on concepts from mobilities studies. Engaging with the symbolism of the car and patterns of embodied mobilities in the novels offers further insight into the process of adapting a global genre to a local context, as well as the tension that localization creates. Chick lit is characterized by postfeminist ideals of female subjectivity, by ideas of neoliberal individualism, and by western consumer culture, which cannot easily be transferred to contexts with different histories of gender and racial emancipation or of different class structures marked by uneven economic development. For chick lit to function on the global level it needs to be localized along intersectional axes. A mobilities perspective offers a comprehensive approach to the genre’s localized potential for resistance to different matrices of oppression.