Women who don’t need to “make it here.” Frances ha and the de-stigmatasion of representation of female failure in New York

Abstract

[eng] The critical praise received for director Noah Baumbach’s 2012 comedy Frances Ha focused especially on Greta Gerwig’s portrayal of the titular protagonist Frances and the realistic depiction of aimlessness of New York living in your late twenties. The academic articles that followed seized upon the uniqueness of Frances’s depiction as “queering” the female coming of age story through a homosocial relationship, the aimless unproductive passing of time, and criticised the unapologetic depiction of “creative class” white gentrification. While the protagonist and tone of the film has drawn comparisons to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, no research has been made into how both protagonists are bound by place: New York City. The urban setting allows a certain freedom from heteronormative expectations (Bondi and Rose 2003) for women who are privileged in terms of race and class to be represented. This paper will argue that the way in which the film represents Frances Ha as being permitted to forego traditional heteronormative markers of maturity is born out of/stems from a pervasive narrative that emerged in the 1970s and persists in contemporary film and television texts set in New York City. By reading Frances Ha in dialogue with other texts, and drawing on feminist human geography and the work of Jack Halberstam, this paper will show how Frances Ha’s defence of alternative modes of living can be inscribed within the trope of white middle-class female characters postponing, or opting out of, normative life goals.