Hbo S Girls And The Awkward Politics Of Gender Race And Privilege

HBO’s Girls and the Awkward Politics of Gender, Race, and Privilege is a collection of essays that examines the HBO program Girls. Since its premiere in 2012, the series has garnered the attention of individuals from various walks of life. The show has been described in many terms: insightful, out-of-touch, brash, sexist, racist, perverse, complex, edgy, daring, provocative—just to name a few. Overall, there is no doubt that Girls has firmly etched itself in the fabric of early twenty-first-century popular culture. The essays in this book examine the show from various angles including: white privilege; body image; gender; culture; race; sexuality; parental and generational attitudes; third wave feminism; male emasculation and immaturity; hipster, indie, and urban music as it relates to Generation Y and Generation X. By examining these perspectives, this book uncovers many of the most pressing issues that have surfaced in the show, while considering the broader societal implications therein.

Young women today have achieved as much as, and in many cases far exceeded, males in both educational and occupational terms. While this presents many opportunities, it also creates confusion in terms of re-negotiating traditional gender roles. The fictional representation of young women in recent film and television shows demonstrates how these tensions, created by the specific sociopolitical climate of the post-recession era, are being worked out. One specific television show focused on intelligent young women caught up in these contradictions is Girls. The show explores the lives of four female friends living in Brooklyn, two years after their college graduation, as they try to support themselves with low-paying jobs, and deal with various struggles around relationships, careers, and friendships. The HBO half-hour sitcom, created, written by and starring Lena Dunham, premiered on April 15th 2012 after receiving a flood of initial buzz and criticism, both positive and negative. This collection is the first to discuss the cultural, political and social implications of this innovative series. The contributors examine Girls through a variety of lenses: sexual, racial, gender, relationships between the male and female characters, as well as friendships between the young women. This variety of perspectives explains why Girls has had the profound cultural impact it has made, in the short time it has been on the air.

In this book, leading and emerging scholars consider the mixed critical responses to Lena Dunham’s TV series Girls and reflect on its significance to contemporary debates about postfeminist popular cultures in a post-recession context. The series features both familiar and innovative depictions of young women and men in contemporary America that invite comparisons with Sex and the City. It aims for a refreshed, authentic expression of postfeminist femininity that eschews the glamour and aspirational fantasies spawned by its predecessor. This volume reviews the contemporary scholarship on Girls, from its representation of post-millennial gender politics to depictions of the messiness and imperfections of sex, embodiment, and social interactions. Topics covered include Dunham’s privileged role as author/auteur/actor, sexuality, body consciousness, millennial gender identities, the politics of representation, neoliberalism, and post-recession society. This book provides diverse and provocative critical responses to the show and to wider social and media contexts, and contributes to a new generation of feminist scholarship with a powerful concluding reflection from Rosalind Gill. It will appeal to those interested in feminist theory, identity politics, popular culture, and media.

The New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television. The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable. In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.

This book considers the ways in which Black directors, screenwriters, and showrunners contend with the figure of the would-be White ally in contemporary film and television. White Lies and Allies in Contemporary Black Media examines the ways in which prominent figures such as Issa Rae, Spike Lee, Justin Simien, Jordan Peele, and Donald Glover centralize complex Black protagonists in their work while also training a Black gaze on would-be White allies. Emily R. Rutter highlights how these Black creators represent both performative White allyship and the potential for true White antiracist allyship, while also examining the reasons why Black creators utilize the white ally trope in the wider context of the film and television industries. During an era in which concerns with White liberal complicity in anti-Black racism are of paramount importance, Rutter explores how these films and televisions shows, and their creators, contribute to the wider project of dismantling internal, interpersonal, ideological, and institutional White hegemony. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Film and Media Studies, Television Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, and Popular Culture.

In The Affirmative Discomforts of Black Female Authorship, the author examines how three popular black female authors (Roxane Gay, Beyoncé and Issa Rae) simultaneously complement and complicate hegemonic notions of race, identity and gender in contemporary American culture.

In The Anti-Heroine on Contemporary Television: Transgressive Women, Molly Brost explores the various applications and definitions of the term anti-heroine, showing that it has been applied to a wide variety of female characters on television that have little in common beyond their failure to behave in morally “correct” and traditionally feminine ways. Rather than dismiss the term altogether, Brost employs the term to examine what types of behaviors and characteristics cause female characters to be labeled anti-heroines, how those qualities and behaviors differ from those that cause men to be labeled anti-heroes, and how the label reflects society’s attitudes toward and beliefs about women. Using popular television series such as Jessica Jones, Scandal, and The Good Place, Brost acknowledges the problematic nature of the term anti-heroine and uses it as a starting point to study the complex women on television, analyzing how the broadening spectrum of character types has allowed more nuanced portrayals of women’s lives on television.

Singing and Dancing to The Book of Mormon examines a cultural phenomenon, asking: What made The Book of Mormon such a success? In what ways does the work utilize established artistic traditions (musical theatre, comic tropes), but revise them to create something new? What cultural buttons does the work push in religion and world affairs? What artistic and social boundaries—and the transgression of those boundaries—give the work its edge? What is the effect of the work on particular audiences: in the theatre, in academia, in religious/Mormon studies, and beyond?