HBO's Girls: Questions of Gender, Politics, and Millennial Angst

Betty Kaklamanidou · Margaret Tally

மார். 2014 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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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.

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Betty Kaklamanidou is Visiting Research Fellow at the University of East London, UK and Lecturer of Film History and Theory at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She is the author of Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism, the co-editor of The Millennials on Film and Television and The 21st Century Superhero, and the author of two Greek books on film adaptation and the Hollywood romantic comedy. In 2011, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research in New York. Dr Kaklamanidou is currently working on a monograph on the political dimension of Robert Redford’s directorial oeuvre.

Margaret Tally is Chair of the Policy Studies Programs and Professor of Social Policy in the School for Graduate Studies at the State University of New York, Empire State College. She is the author of Television Culture and Women’s Lives, the co-editor of The Millennials on Film and Television, and a contributor to collections including MTV and Teen Pregnancy and Bound by Love: Familial Bonding in Film and Television Since 1950. Tally has also written on the marketing of teens in Hollywood, on the representation of middle-aged women’s sexuality in popular culture, and on changing gender roles as portrayed in television series from the 1960s–90s.