Fictional Feminism

This book focuses on the ways in which second-wave feminism has been represented in American popular culture and on the effects that these representations have had on feminism as a political movement. Kim Loudermilk provides close readings of four best-selling novels and their film adaptations. According to Loudermilk each of these novels contains explicitly feminist characters and themes yet each presents a curiously ambivalent picture of feminism; these texts at once take feminism seriously and subtly undercut its most central tenets. This book argues that these texts create a kind of fictional feminism that recuperates feminism's radical potential thereby lessening the threat it presents to the status quo.