Boys on the Side
The female friendships in Boys on the Side very obviously challenge existing social structures. They challenge ideas about interracial friendships through the already existing friendship between Jane and Holly and the friendship that forms between Jane and Robin. The friendships made between the Latina women in New Mexico challenge this as well. The fact that Jane is a lesbian, Robin is straight, and Holly is bisexual and that they can all develop such strong bonds with one another also challenges social norms. Robin being a straight, white, middle-class female infected with HIV is also an important facet to the plot. Demographically, this goes directly against common views about who is infected with HIV. When Jane embraces Robin in friendship despite discovering her illness, it is an important way of showing a person who transgresses a social inclination to abandon those infected with a disease as fatal as AIDS. It isn't merely the fact that all of these women with such different backgrounds become friends, it is the strength and complexity of the bonds of friendship (however cheesy they are portrayed in the film) that challenges social structures. It is one thing for them to just be friends, but, for example, to stand up for one another in the one of the ultimate spaces of patriarchal power (the court of law) is much more subversive.
Unfortunately, however daring the friendships are, at the end of the film a very traditional sense of the "normal" family gets reinscribed. After Robin dies, Jane is left feeling alone but this loneliness is supposed to be redeemed by the fact that Holly is out of prison and beginning a new family. Only, this new family does anything but challenge existing social structures. Holly serves a short sentence in prison, rightly, for a crime of self-defense but it needs to be noted that (as was mentioned in other blogs), had Jane committed the crime this would be a whole other story. Holly gets out of prison and returns to a perfectly normative white, middle-class lifestyle with a handsome, white law-abiding cop. The truely transgressive nature of the "family" that was cultivated throughout the film, in the end gets replaced with the epitome of a "normal" all-American family (bearing the names of a very revered American president, Abe Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd, haha).