“I’m Not a Real Person Yet”

Queering Coming of Age in Frances Ha
dc.bibliographicCitation.firstPage97en_US
dc.bibliographicCitation.lastPage116en_US
dc.bibliographicCitation.volume12en_US
dc.contributor.authorSchadewaldt, Annika M.
dc.contributor.editorEr, Öykü Dilara
dc.contributor.editorGerlach, Laura
dc.contributor.editorHussey, Ben
dc.contributor.editorNavin, Margaret
dc.contributor.editorPuccio, Daniele
dc.contributor.editorSchubert, Stefan
dc.contributor.editorSpieler, Sophie
dc.contributor.editorVogelsberg, Anne
dc.contributor.editorVossen, Hannah
dc.date.accessioned2022-11-08T16:56:16Z
dc.date.available2022-11-08T16:56:16Z
dc.date.issued2019en_US
dc.description.abstractThe 2012 film Frances Ha, portraying twenty-seven-year-old Frances Halladay’s everyday struggles in New York City, poses a problem of genre classification: No critical consensus exists on whether Frances Ha’s portrayal of Frances should be called critical or affirmative. Yet even the sympathetic descriptions of what is perceived as Frances’s arrested development suggest that Frances as a character continually fails at being a ‘proper adult.’ This essay, however, posits that this alleged indecisiveness of the film’s central message should be understood as a conscious strategy insofar as Frances Ha ‘queers’ the genre of coming of age. That is, I suggest that understanding the film in terms of conventional notions of coming of age based on a bildungsroman tradition must necessarily prove insufficient. Drawing on the work of, among others, Susan Fraiman and Jack Halberstam, this essay argues that Frances Ha can be read as an interrogation of heteronormative concepts of maturity by queering notions of matrimony, development, and mastery. In doing this, the film opens up spaces for imagining alternative ‘modes of life.’ Treating Frances’s perceived immaturity as consciously made ‘mistakes’ instead allows us to unpack the film’s subversive intervention into what it means to be a ‘grown up’ in twenty-first-century America.en_US
dc.identifier.doi10.54465/aspeers.12-07
dc.identifier.urihttp://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/2628
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.relation.issn18658768en_US
dc.relation.journalaspeersen_US
dc.relation.journalaltemerging voices in american studiesen_US
dc.rightsL::CC BY 3.0en_US
dc.subject.ddcddc:305.3en_US
dc.subject.ddcddc:791en_US
dc.subject.fieldamericanstudiesen_US
dc.subject.fieldmediastudiesen_US
dc.subject.fieldgenderstudiesen_US
dc.subject.fieldculturalstudiesen_US
dc.title“I’m Not a Real Person Yet”en_US
dc.title.alternativeQueering Coming of Age in Frances Haen_US
dc.typearticleen_US
dc.type.versionpublishedVersionen_US
dspace.entity.typePublication
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