Dakota Fanning: (good) girl star

ABSTRACT

Acclaimed for her acting, quirky personal style and successful navigation of the often-precarious trajectory from child to adult star, Dakota Fanning is that rare millennial star known more for her work, professionalism and talent than her private life. Like other serious (but usually much older) she distances herself from celebrity trivia with her limited use of social media compounding her image as a hard-working 'good girl.’ But Fanning reorients rather than forecloses identification, combining the self-reliance and putative upward mobility associated with fashion and precocious individual achievement with an evocation of sisterhood intimacy seen in her relationship with her equally successful younger sister, Elle. Despite her continued success, Fanning remains a Hollywood outlier. This paper considers how her girlish image helped her transition seamlessly from child star yet marginalises her in an era of mostly male-oriented movies and feminised celebrity culture. Conflating the contemporary with the old fashioned, Fanning’s stardom has its own temporality. Neither fully childlike or fully adult, Fanning is a girl, a figure of suspension and becoming who can grow without the abrupt breaks and career adjustments that trouble so many former child stars. Always a girl, she was never a tween, an identity based on a desire to experience the pleasures of adolescence and adulthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Postfeminism
• fashion
• female gaze
• sister stars
• girls

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Carroll (2005), Ace (2009), Ebert (2008).

2. The Runaways release was limited due to the collapse of its distributor.

3. See, for example, Gircas (2013), Vena (2010), Mallenbaum (2016).

4. Fanning had a private Instagram under a pseudonym from at least 2012 but she did not post frequently.

5. Diane Negra discusses the time-sensitive and time-bound nature of postfeminist femininity in What a Girl Wants: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2009), particularly pp. 47–85.

6. Elle Fanning’s Fan Fantasy, Vogue Original Shorts (2017), https://video.vogue.com/watch/elle-fanning-original-shorts-ariel-schulman-henry-joost; Heller, Nathan, ‘Elle Fanning Is an Old Soul Who Has Visions of the Future – and Directing,’ Vogue (2017), https://www.vogue.com/article/elle-fanning-interview-marilyn-monroe-technology-june-vogue-cover. Last accessed 14 June 2018.

7. In a June 2014 interview with Teen Vogue, Dakota Fanning mentions that the sisters do not take professional advice from each other: ‘We’ve really kept that part of our lives separate … I always know what she’s filming and where she is … but I don’t give her advice on it’. Firman, Tehrene. ‘The Fanning Sisters Just Might Be Cooking Up a Movie Together, and We’ve Heard the Whole Thing,’ Teen Vogue (2014), http://www.teenvogue.com/entertainment/movies/2014-07/dakota-fanning-very-good-girls-interview, Last accessed 8 June 2018.

8. ‘Hello Apartment, directed by Dakota Fanning,’ Miu Miu (n.d.a), http://www.miumiu.com/en/women_tales/15/film?cc=IT. Last accessed 14 June 2018.

9. ‘Hello Apartment, directed by Dakota Fanning,’ Miu Miu, (n.d.a).

10. ‘Hello Apartment: Miu Miu Women’s Tales, N. 15,’ Prada Group, n.d.b, https://www.pradagroup.com/en/news-media/news-section/hello-apartment-miu-miu-womens-tales-15.html. Last accessed 13 June 2018.

11. ‘Miu Miu Women’s Tales: Hello Apartment,’ Wonderland (2018), https://www.wonderlandmagazine.com/2018/02/21/miu-miu-womens-tales-hello-apartment/. Last accessed 14 June 2018.

12. As Harris points out, similar fears link fin-de-siecle and millennial fascination and concerns with the girl, although girlhood was regulated then through state and government apparatuses unlike today when the pressure is on the individual to police themselves correctly (2004, pp. 1–3).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Moya Luckett

Moya Luckett is the author of Cinema and Community (Wayne State University Press, 2013) and with Hilary Radner, the coeditor of Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s (Minnesota U.P., 1999). Her articles on film and television history, femininity, celebrity, British cinema, early cinema and fashion have appeared in Screen, Feminist Media Studies, the Velvet Light Trap and Aura and have been widely anthologised. She is currently writing two books, one on the relationship between celebrity, economic recession and social mobility and the other on femininity and popular media. She teaches Media Studies at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualised Study.