Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary woman-directed road movie, including Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006), Gas Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992), and Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008), through the lens of neoliberal spatial politics. Drawing on Jack Halberstam’s concept of failure as a queer way of life that has paradoxically positive, constructive, even ecstatic potentialities for resistance against neoliberal disciplinary regimes, I explore how poor women’s spaces depicted in these films function as pockets of resistance against neoliberal power. The road movie genre as a whole is full of rebels against society, most of them male and white, yet they are spatially and colonially empowered – traveling freely across the landscape and finding self-expression through mobility. In the women’s road movie, on the other hand, poor women (particularly those who aren’t attached to men) tend to be immobilized, often failing to get anywhere at all. Poor women’s resistance here is instead configured within the fragile, passed-over lives they build for themselves in the in-between spaces of neoliberal failure. These films depict how poor women’s consumer practices and aesthetic tactics function to reject the dominant, colonial and masculine spatial order of neoliberalism.