3. Emergent Feminisms and Racial Discourses of Televisual Girlfriendship

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the cycle’s integration of emerging feminist discourses and its disruption of the postfeminist sensibility by interrogating its focus on female friendship. It highlights how the centrality of female friendship demonstrates the cycle’s liberal politics and therefore its appeal to upscale liberal or progressive audiences. The close, complex, honest relationships between main female friends on these shows, like Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, Gretchen and Lindsay on You’re the Worst, Quinn and Rachel on UnReal, or Rebecca and Paula on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, allow them a critical self-awareness to interrogate gender norms, whiteness, and millennial culture. But the cycle’s incredibly insular and encouraging friendships also obscure racial politics and diversity by recentering whiteness and celebrating a particularly narrow type of liberal feminist girl culture that also frequently centralizes white fragility. Thinking through the critical humor and other modes of political discourse of these friendships within the context of television’s racist and postfeminist roots, this chapter situates these representations of female friendships in the context of contemporary empowerment rhetoric to interrogate the potential and limitations of television’s representational politics in this era of the reemerging or mainstreaming of feminism.