| Summary: | The human body is a cultural text, and can be therefore be used to promote or resist various social norms. Jennifer Crusie, who defines herself as a writer of feminist romances, uses the bodies of her heroines to countermand several patriarchal assumptions about femininity. Within the Western patriarchal hegemony women are valued primarily for attractiveness, and the unspoken cultural definition of female beauty is a woman who is, among other things, young, thin, and sexually modest. Crusie, by creating heroines who are older, fatter, and more sexually experienced than the “ideal” woman, yet who are still able to establish their social and romantic worth, illustrates the feminist ideology that women have value and accomplishments beyond the limits of the socially paradigmatic definitions of femininity and beauty. Her novels serve as a feminist parables that reaffirm the inherent normalcy and desirability of an imperfect female body.
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