The Time of Your Life: Border Crossing in Dirty Dancing

Lisa Mendelman

“I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.” The refrain of twenty-one-year-old pop icon Britney Spears’ recent hit articulates an important ambiguity in popular culture representations of girl- and womanhood, and raises problematic questions for Third Wave feminism: when does a girl become a woman? Are the two categories separated merely by physical differences, or are there greater emotional and social distinctions which inform them? What are the costs and benefits of border-crossing between the two, and to what extent is border-crossing disavowed?

In my paper, I examine these questions through the character of seventeen-year-old Frances “Baby” Houseman in Emile Ardolino’s popular 1987 film Dirty Dancing. The film itself is a generic hybrid, a revision of the Hollywood musical, the dance film, and the nostalgia piece. Baby embodies a similar combination of complex dualities within her performance of girlhood; she is a Daddy’s girl and a desirable woman, a naive student and a knowledgeable teacher, an innocent virgin and an educated whore. I argue that these paradoxes are possible because of and produced by Baby’s position as a seventeen year old, middle class, white female. Further, these dualities permit Baby to border-cross with larger issues of class, race, religion, sexuality, education and physical attractiveness. Through Baby’s character and the hybridization of several cinematic genres, Dirty Dancing is able to examine potentially volatile cultural issues without risking box office failure. In the end, however, the film sacrifices cultural critique for traditional narrative, returning Baby to her “proper” place in the socioeconomic, gendered binary. Border-crossing is a time-constrained luxury, whose questions and ambiguities are enabled by the finite nature of girlhood; as the film’s nostalgic slogan testifies, order will be restored at the beginning of adulthood, leaving only fond memories of “the time of your life.”