Reinforcing/Countering the Patriarchal Ideologies and Sexist Tendencies: A Post –Feminist Reading of Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love ’.

The present paper is mainly concerned with the question of women’s empowerment and the many problems that continue to hinder the objective, realistic, balanced, nuanced, un stereotyped, and empowering portrayal of women in today's fiction.
For this purpose, this paper investigates whether the so-called concept of "women's empowerment' has surely found its place in today's incredibly popular, post- feminist genre of women fiction known as 'Chick lit' or not. Sensing that there is something troubling about these narratives, the researcher seeks to understand whether these narratives can truly offer a way for women to resist the patriarchal structures imposed on their lives; or more precisely speaking, whether they can sincerely provide a platform for women's empowerment, or is it a case of disempowering through empowerment?
By administering an approach that blends Michel Foucault's theory of Power/ Knowledge and Stuart Hall's theory of Representation / Stereotyping, and by conducting a content analysis to an important woman- centered chick lit, Elizabeth Gilbert's 'Eat, Pray, Love', the researcher reaches the conclusion that the incredibly popular afore-mentioned genre is actually a tool of manipulation and a means of both domination and subversion. Regardless of the women - friendly culture and the promising false fantasies that Gilbert's 'Eat, Pray, Love' may offer, the narrative under consideration does limit (not expand) women's options by reinforcing the very regressive gender – based stereotypes and sexist tendencies it claims to break, through a combination of conflicting messages, power dynamics and gender practices in which females are objectified and disempowered.