A Fair Reading of Female Friendships in White Chicks

Words: Berfin Tepe

Most people seem to remember White Chicks (2004) as a lovable disaster, a film so bad it’s impossible to look away. I’ve felt strangely defensive about it ever since I watched one of my favorite film YouTubers, YMS (YourMovieSucks), dismiss it as “conceptually lazy, unbelievable, and filled with outdated humour,” nothing more than a “surface-level idea of what women do and/or think.” That critique made me wonder if my own memory of the film was skewed, so I decided to revisit it just in case my opinions had shifted since I was a 10-year-old girl. 

The last time I saw White Chicks was in the early 2000s, when my older brother smuggled a DVD into the house and let me watch it with his “cool” friends. I didn’t speak a word of English then, but just being included was enough. Now, as I slowly retire from my overly vigilant online SJW career, I figured there could be no harm in rewatching an old, problematic favourite. And if anyone enjoys criticising a messy text, it’s me.

It’s not difficult to see why White Chicks has drawn so much criticism over the years. Its humour leans heavily on racial stereotypes, exaggerated body jokes, and gendered clichés that now feel like a time capsule of early 2000s comedy at its most abrasive. Much of its plot is driven by gags that, stripped of their camp absurdity, read as textbook examples of how Hollywood has historically flattened both Blackness and femininity into cheap punchlines. Critics have argued that its reliance on drag-as-disguise plays into transphobic tropes, while its use of class and beauty stereotypes risks reinforcing the very systems it appears to mock. 

With that being acknowledged, there’s still a part of me that sees White Chicks as a love letter to female friendship. In an era defined the friendships of It Girls like Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears, which were obsessively dissected and often vilified by the tabloids, White Chicks offered soft, almost clumsy, sincerity.
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In a 2000s comedy where two Black men pose as wealthy heiresses, the most unexpected thing is how deeply they become invested in the friendship bonds of those very women and their clique: Tori, Karen, and Lisa. In a film often accused of mocking women, they actually genuinely bond with them, becoming part of their support system and inner circle. They laugh together, allow each other to be shallow sometimes, talk about situationships and help each other get out of them, dress up, suffer, dance, hate, hype each other up, push each other to grow, change, be better, and get so drunk that their best friends have to hold their hair back when they’re vomiting. Ultimately, the key to why this concept feels so genuine lies in the fact that in White Chicks, vulnerability isn’t something to be mocked, but a form of intimacy, an act of trust, and an invitation to be fully human.

“Unlike the early 2000s trend of gender-swap comedies or Eminem-style parody music videos that reduced womanhood to shallow, shopaholic stupidity, White Chicks treats these women with unexpected empathy.”

Most girls’ first experiences of womanhood are not about discovering strength or feeling “beautiful on the inside.” They’re about being yelled at on the way to the corner store at thirteen, realising far too early that your worth is tied to being watched, desired, and judged. In White Chicks, Marcus and Kevin literally experience their first moments as women in public through catcalls and street harassment – a direct mirror to many young girls’ earliest encounters with gendered attention.

This is what makes the friends’ shared support system so powerful: they don’t teach each other to overcome objectification through some neat self-love narrative. Instead, they survive it together, propping each other up in dressing rooms and party bathrooms at 3AM. Sisterhood isn’t about transcending vulnerability, it’s about being fragile in front of each other and still remaining loyal to your bonds.

As Celia Lam (2020) writes, female friendships on screen are often reduced to decorative side-events that serve male narratives. But here, they are everything. The film offers a rare space where women are allowed to be shallow, loud, insecure, and deeply supportive all at the same time. They are not objects of male conquest or cautionary tales about vanity. In fact, it’s the girls’ friendship that carries the entire emotional weight of the film.

Take the dressing room scene, for example, where Jennifer Carpenter’s Lisa spirals into a breakdown after Kevin (disguised as Brittany) compliments her. It captures that tender, almost unbearable moment of hating your own body under the unforgiving gaze of the patriarchy and shows what it means to have a friend by your side at your worst moment. Kevin, rather than trying to convince her she’s “actually hot,” simply stays silent and helps her through it – an understated but crucial choice. Vulnerability and self-doubt are not weaknesses to be fixed but a  part of the messy, collective reality of girlhood.

Unlike the early 2000s trend of gender-swap comedies or Eminem-style parody music videos that reduced womanhood to shallow, shopaholic stupidity, White Chicks treats these women with unexpected empathy. These characters are not disposable “dumb blondes” but complete people who are allowed to exist beyond male desire and narrative convenience.

Judith Butler (1990) reminds us that even supposedly inclusive feminist narratives often reinforce white femininity as an unattainable ideal – the polished, effortless, always-perfect woman who is somehow both desirable and pure, assertive but never “too much.” White Chicks makes this ideal so exaggerated and absurd that it ceases to be something to aspire to and becomes impossible to take seriously. Instead of presenting femininity as a fragile pedestal to be protected, it drags her around the dance floor in sparkly heels. Rather than disciplining its characters into becoming better, more respectable women, it allows them to embrace contradiction, chaos, and outright absurdity.

The gender performances in White Chicks become almost fluid, morphing from parody to sincerity and back again. In Marcus’s arc (disguised as Tiffany), we even see him absorb the female friendship circle’s emotional depth as a positive model for his own romantic relationship: a moment of sincere growth born from a completely bizarre context. In this way, the film queers the idea of friendship itself – suggesting that true emotional intimacy doesn’t belong exclusively to romantic love or traditional sisterhood but can thrive in unlikely, transformative spaces. Even White Chicks.

As the world we live in – and the media we consume – continues to expect female friendships to fit a certain mould, the truly misunderstood (dare I say, classic) White Chicks imagines a universe where we get to be unserious, supportive, and a little bit insane together. Oh, to be misunderstood. It’s truly girly.