“Chosen Representatives in the Field of Shagging”: Bridget Jones, Britishness, and Reproductive Futurism

This article considers Helen Fielding's two Bridget Jones novels as foundational texts in the genre of chick lit as it “produces, disseminates, and proliferates certain feminist and liberal subjectivities” (Butler and Desai 2008, 5). The focus is on tracing in these two novels a racialized, situated, national subject whose narrative leads not simply to romantic union but to reproduction. Engaging with Lee Edelman's important theory of reproductive futurism, this article undertakes to trace and to problematize chick lit's narrative with reference to its primary concern with women and maternity in a national context.