Depoliticising Gender Equality: Neoliberalism and the Post-feminist Dilemma of the Feminist and the Feminine in Bridget Jones’s Diary

A growing body of feminist scholarship is concerned with post-feminism as a contested area of critical theory since the 1990. there has been a keen interest across the British popular media in ideas of female success taking into account a “ liberal” type of feminism which takes into consideration“ equal opportunities”. That period witnessed analytical unrest concerning the conditions of feminism and femininity in Britain and the United States as women were considered in danger of ending up all alone, and devoured by mental and physical illnesses due to the second-wave feminist discourse of gender equality.
This paper argues that Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary is a seminal text within the genre of Chick lit and an archetype of “Girl power culture” through which the post-feminist “double entanglement” of feminist and anti-feminist themes in contemporary popular British and Western fiction can be examined. The themes of female subjectivity, the female body as fetish, the emphasis on individualism, empowerment, choice, and self-surveillance, as well as the resurgence of values of commodification of the female bod ,and consumer behaviour are explored as typical of post-feminist discourse in media texts. Moreover, the concept of feminine masquerade is applied to this study as it emphasizes the intersection of feminism with consumer culture. Such double entanglement of feminist and neoliberal consumer values leads to a conflict between feminist ideas of empowerment and emancipation, and the anti-feminist position that reinstates patriarchal values of male supremacy, and propagates neoliberal consumer values.