In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith/Jack Halberstam proposes failure as a mode of existence defined in radical opposition to the ‘punishing norms’ of success in neoliberal capitalism (2011: 3). Contrary to how failure is defined in dominant culture – i.e. as a lack, defeat, disaster or inadequacy – they1 explore the creative potential of failure as a mode of resistance, particularly for queers and for women, to a neoliberal culture which seems to have few other outs. In this article, I aim to answer the question of what such spaces of failure might look like, examining failure's oppositional potential for, in particular, poor American women through the lens of space, mobility and landscape. I do this by analysing a contemporary cycle of women-directed US independent and Indiewood films that belong to the road movie genre or are significantly in dialogue with it, including Gas Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992), Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006), Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2008), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008), Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (Lorene Scafaria, 2012), The Guilt Trip (Anne Fletcher, 2012) and American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016). If the road movie has long functioned as a locus for the depiction of mostly-male rebels and their alternative modes of inhabiting space outside the norms of American society (Cohan and Hark: 1997), these women-centred road movies depict a separate, feminised mode of opposition that, I argue, can be interpreted as a form of resistant failure within US neoliberal disciplinary regimes of space and mobility.

The term ‘neoliberalism’ first came into use as a general label for the rise of the post-welfare state and the reassertion of free market principles in both the economic and political spheres; previous scholarship on neoliberalism and cinema has tended to focus on film as a global industry (Kapur and Wagner 2011). However, it has also been increasingly understood as a form of governmentality in the Foucauldian sense: it seeks to subject not only economic activity but all institutions, individuals and social action to the principles of the free market (Larner 2000: 12).