Dirty Dancing: Feminism, Post-Feminism and Neo-Feminism

The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.

The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"

I already have published eight blog articles about the book and its articles:

Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture

Is Dirty Dancing a Musical?

Straightness and Dirtiness in Dirty Dancing

Generic Hybridity in Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing as a Teenage Rite-of-Passage Film

Dirty Dancing as Reagan-era Cinema and "Reaganite Entertainment"

Anachronistic Music in Dirty Dancing

Dressing and Undressing in Dirty Dancing: Consumption, Gender, and Visual Culture in the 1980s

Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "Dirty Dancing: Feminism, Post Feminism and Neo-Feminism", written by Hilary Radner.

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Hilary Radner

The book identifies Hilary Radner as follows:

Hilary Radner is professor of film and media studies in the Department of History and Art History, University of Otago. Her research focuses on understanding the representations of gender and identity in contemporary visual culture, particularly in terms of how these evolve over time in relation to second wave feminism.

Recent publications include: Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture (Routledge) as author and New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past (Intellect/U. of Chicago) and Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Cinema (Routledge) as co-editor.

Current projects include co-editing A Companion to Contemporary French Film for Blackwell Publishing, a manuscript on regulating the emotions after second wave feminism in the Hollywood romantic melodrama, and a further project on the woman’s film in New Zealand cinema.

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I interpret Radner's article as follows:

The Dirty Dancing story takes place in 1963 and is told from the perspective of 1987, when the movie was released. The 24-year interval -- 1963 to 1987 -- was a period "in which gender roles were most publicly interrogated." The 1987 movie audience is watching a young woman who largely accepts traditional gender roles without the intellectual benefit of the severe criticism that would happen a few years after the story. Therefore Baby is relatively naive and therefore can be excused for her still "prudish proto-feminism".

For the audience of the 1987 movie, female "self-realization and self-fulfillment, in particular sexual fulfillment, are unexamined rights" -- are taken for granted. For that audience, Baby "avoids the stigma of feminism itself as well as the sustained interrogation of heterosexuality that inflected much of 1970s feminist thought".

Compared to other young women in 1963, Baby was relatively outspoken, egalitarian and progressive. She should not be criticize because she does not act like outraged feminists attending radical-feminist consciousness-raising meetings in the early 1980.

Baby's mind is opened in 1963 not by feminist criticism, but rather "by Johnny and his friends, who know something about life that has as yet escaped her -- represented by their ability (and her inability) to dance."

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The largest part of the article explains how Baby's dance experience simulates her feminist consciousness.

The key to understanding the conversion that Frances Houseman undergoes lies in the idea of “living in the physical world” .... The centrality of Frances’ ... experience of the body as crucial to the film’s conclusion ....

Academic feminists like [Iris Marion] Young .... sought to understand the specificity of feminine experience and its embodiment. Iris Marion Young’s purpose is to describe “in a provisional way some of the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving and relation in space."

Radner had been impressed by an article that Young wrote, titled "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality".

The limitations of Frances’ dancing are signaled in various ways in the course of the film, testifying to a particular modality of experiencing the body and signifying her status as “girlish” .... She must initially throw herself into the air in certain and precise anticipation that his arms await her. She must project her body into both space and time. When she and Johnny perform together in a routine in which she stands in for Penny, Johnny’s habitual partner, Frances is unable to perform the lift.

The failed lift corresponds to an important aspect of the restrictions in movement that Young sees as characterizing feminine bodily experience in everyday, ordinary activities. She notes: “Feminine existence appears to posit an existential enclosure between herself and the space surrounding her, in such a way that the space that belongs to her and is available to her grasp and manipulation is constricted and the space beyond is not available to her movement.” Young further specifies: “The timidity, immobility, and uncertainty that frequently characterize feminine movement project a limited space for the feminine “I can.”

Though Frances worked hard to learn how to dance, this was not sufficient; her failure to perform the lift was not a result of her lack of technique, but of her inability to “act.” Subsequently, however, she does act on her desire for Johnny. She invites him to dance, which leads to her first sexual experience. One of the film’s major turning points, then, depends on the fact that Frances acts on her desire. When she is able to assume responsibility for her desire, she then also begins to change her relations to what Young calls “the modalities of feminine bodily existence” and moves toward the realization of her self as independent (expressed in the film’s conclusion). ....

Young explains that as women we are not prepared to “move out to master a world that belongs to us, a world constituted by our own intentions.” In successfully performing her lift, Frances overcomes a set of social conditions stipulating that a girl “learns actively to hamper her movements?” ....

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Radner, referring to Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex, writes that many a women suffers ...

... a conflict between a desire for independence and a desire to fulfill herself as a "sexed human being" .... She [de Beauvoir] means the economically and professionally successful woman, torn between femininity and autonomy.

In their final dance sequence, Frances and Johnny represent the idea of a perfect heterosexual union, in which the problems that arise out of the inequalities between men's and women's conditions are resolved.

Professional female dancers are not, however, ordinary professional women. Female dancers succeed because of their femininity and thus differ from, for example, female accountants.

Baby succeeds at the movie's ending, because she dances with Johnny in a feminine manner, not because she manages an anti-poverty program in Southeast Asia. Her relationship with Johnny is based primarily on her learning to gracefully follow his lead as the male dancer.

Radner writes:

The choice, then, to develop Baby's character and "coming of age" through her apprenticeship as a dancer has a number of consequences. Dance allows the film to stage a fantasy resolution in which both Johnny and Frances learn from each other and “lead” each other in new directions. Johnny teaches Frances to dance, but she encourages him to value himself, because she values him, and to stand up for himself and for her.

Because, however, this utopianism is expressed through dance, and thus can only receive its full expression through art and performance, it remains a fantasy, one that sits safely within a set of conventions that allows artists and women special privileges. ...

The [romantic] genre requires that the lovers achieve that eternal romantic union, but the premise of their relationship by its very nature (their differences) makes this implausible. ....

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Radner indicates that the film appeals to a modern movie audience that largely has gone past the severe feminist criticism that was pronounced during the interval between 1963 and 1987.

Dirty Dancing avoids second-wave feminism in order to align itself with a view proposed by popular feminine culture — what I call neo-feminism. Writers such as Helen Gurley Brown ... offered a vision of femininity ... in which sexual fulfillment, a woman’s status as a “sexed” being, became an important aspect of her identity. The reclaiming of Dirty Dancing as feminist by fans today, then, highlights the near ubiquity of neo-feminism in contemporary culture as a stand-in for feminism itself. ...

Dirty Dancing offers a vision of feminism for which no apology is necessary and, in a certain sense, makes feminists of the many women who have enjoyed the film, creating an inclusive definition of the term. ... The feminism of Dirty Dancing avoids the call to arms associated with the reformists of the second wave. .... Neo-feminism as incarnated by Baby/Frances can be achieved through the work of individuals on themselves and thus is best understood as a program for self-improvement ....

Dirty Dancing encourages women to embrace a philosophy that promotes "good looks," a toned body, and erotic expertise as the primary tools whereby the impediments of gender and class may be overcome in neo-liberal society. ....

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I did not find Radner's article on the Internet. As far as I know, it is available to read only in the book.