The World Is Her Oyster: Negotiating Contemporary White Womanhood in Hollywood’s Tourist Spaces

This article analyzes a recent variation of the contemporary Hollywood travel romance that sees middle-aged female protagonists involved in the creative industries suffer a form of urban melancholy caused by years of adherence to neoliberal feminism. The films employ the trope of the creatively gifted melancholic in order to allow the heroines to “rediscover” feminism through fantasized constructions of foreign countries built by the mobilization of projected affect. These gendered narratives must be read for their racial implications, given that they present affluent white women as the ultimate bearers of burden in contemporary US society, and they must also be analyzed as offering a commentary on the extradiegetic global image of the United States.