| “Grace and Frankie, like Fonda and Tomlin’s...

12th Jun 2015

“Grace and Frankie, like Fonda and Tomlin’s previous work, is a lot queerer than its plot summary might suggest. Their portrayal of two women whose straight marriages are compromised by their husbands’ recently materialized gay nuptials is dramatic irony at its finest, since we know full well that Tomlin is gay and an advocate of gay marriage, and Fonda anything but the poster girl of straight marriage, having walked down the aisle three times. Largely because of the intertextual irony at play, the show’s decision to shift the focus from the gay marriage and onto the two women proves to be a very pleasurable queer project, normalizing the traditionally “queer” couple while allowing for the show to open on other, perhaps overlooked, opportunities for queer kinship. In Cruel Optimism, American queer theorist Lauren Berlant argues the power of queer readings lies in their ability “to focus on patterns of attachment we hadn’t even yet known to notice, patterns in which sexuality and intimacy are enacted in a broad field of social relations that anchor us to life.” Applied to Grace and Frankie, this could not be truer.

Given that our cultural zeitgeist favors representing younger people entering and exploring the dating world, the idea that two women in their 70s might enter the same territory as those using Tinder or OkCupid is a carnivalesque idea — it transgresses traditional ideas of women, aging, and, of course, heterosexual marriage. Berlant goes on: “Being a friend, a regular, a neighbor, a part-time lover, an ex-lover, an intimate; being gender dysphoric, or just plain gay or straight — all of it is seen as an effect of many causes and a complex, intimate practice of world-building.” In the world ofGrace and Frankie shared between the two women — and indeed its two stars — the kinship they form is a powerful, disruptive, and unconventional bond that, ironically, is really only formed by way of society’s changing “new norms” (i.e., same-sex marriage).”

They Shoot Old Film Stars on TV, Don’t They? by Nathan Smith