Disciplinary Practices and Consumer Culture in Bridget Jones’ Diary

Abstract

According to Susan Bordo, the contemporary body is a bulimic body inasmuch it emerges as a result of a double bind: it is both under the control of disciplinary practices, rooted in the Protestant work ethic and is also exposed to desires generated by consumer culture. This double bind is not only the subject but also the basic organising principle and the source of humour of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Not coincidentally, a whole generation has been “hailed” by the book as postmodern, postfeminist and heterogeneous subjects, a reason why it has become a cult book not only in the English-speaking world but in Hungary as well.