[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-155983-en":3,"doc-seo-155983-105":30,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":91},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":27,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":28,"read_time":29},155983,3848291630094,"Emma Wilson","https://eur-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_085a072bc5b1113ac321206ff7593b45",2,"Literature","GRETA GERWIG’S GIRLHOOD TRILOGY - O N P L A T F O R M S","An analytical essay examines Greta Gerwig’s three female-centered coming-of-age films—Lady Bird, Little Women, and Barbie—as a coherent “girlhood trilogy.” It frames Gerwig as an auteur whose work interrogates how gender, class, racial privilege, and structural sexism shape girls’ self-realization, including complicated mother–daughter dynamics. Central to the argument is reparative reading: viewers invest emotionally in cultural objects, read against dominant meanings, and find feminist affirmation and joy while also confronting the limits of such readings for women of color.","O N P L A T F O R M S  \nGRETA GERWIG’S GIRLHOOD TRILOGY  \nCaetlin Benson-Allott  \nBlockbusters are designed for cultural dominance, but few achieve it to the degree that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie did in summer 2023. Not only was it the first film directed by a woman to sell over $1 billion in tickets internationally, but it occasioned a maelstrom of marketing, fan activity, and hot-take journalism. Barbie was also writer-director Greta Gerwig’s third female-centered coming-of-age film in six years, the other two being Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019) . These coming-of-age movies, or bildungsfilme, represent an exceptional artistic accomplishment. For while Gerwig is by no means the first female writer-director of a critically and commercially successful movie about young women figuring out who they are and struggling to become that person, she is one of the few to lead three in a row.1  \nReading Gerwig’s bildungsfilme as a trilogy not only honors her achievement as an auteur but also generates important questions about what these films say about girlhood and middle-class white American women’s quest for autonomy and self-determination. Her trilogy reveals an artist struggling to make sense of girl culture and the societal paradigms that impact it. In Lady Bird, Gerwig reimagines her own adolescence in early 2000s Sacramento, with special attention to the social pressures that inhibit young women’s self-expression.2 Little Women and Barbie reinterpret some of the most influential—and in the latter instance, notorious—role models of American femininity: Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters and Mattel’s doll. Gerwig’s films explore how gender and class, racial privilege and structural sexism, and complicated mother-daughter relationships affect girls’ self-realization. In so doing, they emphasize the empowerment that received cultural objects can offer contemporary viewers—an approach called reparative reading.  \nAs theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in 1997, reparative reading names “the many ways that selves and  \nFilm Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 2, pp. 67–72. ISSN: 0015-1386 electronic ISSN: 1533- 8630 © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, [https://online. ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions](https://online. ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions).  \nDOI: 10.1525/FQ.2023.77.2.67  \ncommunities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even a culture whose avowed desire has often not been to sustain them.”3 Put simply, it’s the process by which readers (or film viewers) invest in a text, pouring their energy and love into celebrating it so that it can satisfy a need of theirs, such as hope for a better life or a more just society. Reparative reading often involves reading against the grain, as Carol Clover does in her pioneering feminist analyses of US slasher films, or privileging more-empowering narrative or formal details over less-affirming compositional choices, as Caél Keegan does in his landmark trans* analysis of The Matrix (Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, 1999) .4 Reparative readings do not seek to deny the harmful messages their texts may carry orthe cultural contexts that lead marginalized audiences to search for emotional support in creative works. Such readings are neither comprehensive nor curative, but they make life easier for those who need them. (I experienced this asa child watching Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! [CBS, 1969– 70] and rooting for Velma, who gets depicted as a frumpy know-it-all just because she’s smarter than her friends.) Gerwig’s reparative girlhood trilogy acknowledges the trauma of trying to figure out what a woman is and how to become one but also offers viewers feminist affirmation and joy. Through reparative readings of her own Sacramento teenhood, Alcot","cbCaihZKIv69wBoG","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaihZKIv69wBoG","pdf",2573868,1,6,"English","en",105,"# Greta Gerwig’s girlhood trilogy\n## Coming-of-age films and auteur achievement\n## Reparative reading and empowerment\n## Gender, class, and racial privilege\n## Film contexts and plot framing","[{\"question\":\"What films are included in Gerwig’s girlhood trilogy?\",\"answer\":\"The trilogy centers on Lady Bird, Little Women, and Barbie, treated as a connected sequence of coming-of-age works.\"},{\"question\":\"What is reparative reading in the essay’s argument?\",\"answer\":\"Reparative reading describes how readers or viewers invest energy and love into a text, often reading against the grain to find affirmation and emotional sustenance.\"},{\"question\":\"How do the films explore obstacles to young women’s self-realization?\",\"answer\":\"They examine pressures and limits linked to gender and class, as well as how privilege and sexism shape identity formation, particularly within mother–daughter relationships.\"}]","GRETA GERWIG’S GIRLHOOD TRILOGY - 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