Women on top? Challenging the “mancession” narrative in the 2010s chick flick

ABSTRACT

The term “mancession” appeared after the economic crisis, spreading the false assumption that men were more affected by the recession than women. This discourse was fuelled across different US media outlets, including film. Some genres, such as the corporate melodrama, supported this rhetoric directly, while others did so more obliquely, as is the case of the chick flick, which pivoted to the trope of the successful working woman during the 2010s. While some contemporary films seem to pander to the myth of the “mancession” by showing women getting ahead in their careers while men fall implicitly or explicitly behind, this article argues that there is an increasing number of chick flicks that highlight sexism and gender inequality at the workplace, challenging postfeminist images of female success and empowerment. The essay analyzes how post-2008 (but pre-pandemic) working woman chick flicks downplay traditional concerns in the genre, such as romance, and open their scope to focus on women’s professional struggles, deploying the “mancession” narrative only to expose its contrivance, thus showing a greater feminist awareness than many of their predecessors often do.

KEYWORDS:

• Chick flick
• recession
• “mancession”
• working woman
• sexism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Grant PID2020–114338GB-I00); Gobierno de Aragón (Grant H23_20 R); IUI en Empleo, Sociedad Digital y Sostenibilidad (IEDIS).

Notes

1. Both LaFontaine and Fred Melamed are renowned voice actors in real life, which adds to the film’s intertextuality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Beatriz Oria

Beatriz Oria is Associate Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Her research fields include feminism and film studies, and her current research focuses on the contemporary chick flick. Her essays have been published in The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, and Journal of Film and Video, among others. She is the author of Talking Dirty on ‘Sex and the City’: Romance, Intimacy, Friendship (Rowman & Littlefield 2014), and co-editor of Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2015). She has recently contributed articles to the following edited volumes: Imagining “We” in the Age of “I:” Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture. Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard & Diane Negra, eds (Routledge, 2021); “Happily Ever After”: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age. Maria San Filippo, ed (Wayne State UP, 2021); and Screening the Crisis: US Cinema and Social Change In The Wake of the 2008 Crash. Juan Tarancón and Hilaria Loyo, eds (Bloomsbury, 2022).