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While she thanks her husband for enabling her professional success, she starts to vomit. Imogene’s idealised way of life is characterised by the privileges of the educated, white, middle classes-post-feminism’s “default” subjectivity (Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra 2007, 2)-and by the aspiration to “have it all.” The gendered struggle for heterosexual women to balance their personal life with work, and the potential to “downshift” one’s career in order to “reprioritise family” indeed looms large in post-feminist screen texts of the early 2000s (Diane Negra 2009, 18). Finally, Cynthia Nixon (of Sex and the City fame) hands Imogene a Tony Award for “Best Play.” With its glossy articulation of personal and professional fulfilment, and extra-diegetic gesture to Sex and the City, this dream sequence crystallises a number of key post-feminist concerns. Next, they luncheon at the Hamptons, their family now complete as a woman of colour cares for their newborn baby. First, her long-term boyfriend proposes marriage with a large diamond solitaire. In an early scene, a dream sequence offers access to protagonist Imogene’s (Kristen Wiig) good life fantasy. Whereas in earlier chick flicks, female authorship signifies as a form of agentic, desirable womanhood, 1 in a text like Girl Most Likely, the woman author appears to have misplaced her optimism by buying into precisely these post-feminist aspirations. Having typed 34 words in a Word document entitled “pieceofshit.doc,” Mavis’ happy facial expression morphs into a grimace and she opens her email inbox to procrastinate. Unlike Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Josie Gellar (Drew Barrymore), Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger), Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson), Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) and Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher), for whom writing appears to be effortless, for Mavis, writing is decidedly laborious. As the film opens, Mavis sits at her desk working on her latest manuscript.
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Young Adult’s woman author heroine, novelist Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), notably stands in sharp contrast to the protagonists of Sex and the City ( 1998–2004), Never Been Kissed ( 1999), Bridget Jones’s Diary ( 2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days ( 2003), The Devil Wears Prada ( 2006), and Confessions of a Shopaholic ( 2009).
In recent American “indie” films such as Young Adult ( 2011) and Girl Most Likely ( 2012), the figure of the woman author as an aspirational post-feminist heroine finds itself under considerable strain.