Twenty-Something Girls v. Thirty-Something Sex And The City Women

Abstract

Lena Dunham's cable television series Girls is a candid and comical look at the lives of four young women living in Brooklyn, New York. Following in the footsteps of the earlier post-feminist, woman-centred television series, Sex and the City (SATC), Girls explores numerous feminist themes centring on an exploration of what it is like to be a young white woman in contemporary US society. Yet what kind of post-feminist narrative is being constructed in Girls? How is post-feminism deployed in the show? In a comparative analysis of Girls (Seasons 1–2) and SATC (Seasons 1–6), we argue that although both shows certainly exemplify post-feminist culture, they are inflected differently in relation to the representation of sexualities, reproductive “choice,” and feminine embodiment. Compared to SATC, we argue that Girls represents a novel approach to representing young US women's lives on television, re-articulating and re-mobilising existing conceptualisations of post-feminism. To conclude, we propose that the term “post? feminism” may be used to describe Dunham's version of post-feminism for a millennial generation.