Roxane Gay’s on HTML Giant talking about the covers of chick-lit novels and the stigma attached to their formulaic visual coding, though the feminization of book covers is taking over more than just the chick-lit genre. It’s unfortunate that women writers have to consciously avoid being pigeonholed into chick-lit genre or are marketed via book cover designs as such. Why are women forced to defend their writing as serious and distinct chick-lit?
“The far more serious problem is the sexism (or is it misogyny?) fueling this conversation, the sexism that makes women feel so defensive and that encourages people to dismiss or disrespect women’s books whether they are ‘chick lit’ or women’s fiction or literary fiction. Until we recognize and address the sexism at work here, we’ll continue wearing ourselves out by dealing with symptoms rather than the disease.”
