Girls, Broads, and Millennial Feminisim: Representing Female Bonds, Nakedness, and the Unruly Millennial Women in 'Girls' and 'Broad City'

Abstract

<p>The HBO television series, <i>Girls</i> (2012-2017) and the Comedy Central series, <i>Broad City</i> (2014- ), have garnered praise for their unapologetic and authentic portrayal of millennial womanhood. However, in their exploration of female sexual subjecthood and female homosocial bonding, these texts have also been criticized for not being the “voice” of all millennial women. Said criticisms revolve around the representational aspects of the series including racial diversity, class, sexual and body politics, and treatment of feminism. The resounding consensus on the series has placed both <i>Girls</i> and <i>Broad City</i> within an ongoing postfeminist discourse. Despite these series engaging with the attributes of postfeminism including narcissism, apathy, and individualism, this thesis contends that <i>Girls</i> and <i>Broad City</i> are self-aware series that engage with these qualities, not to confirm the persistence of postfeminism, but to launch a dialogue about the ways in which the sensibility fails to serve millennial women. Through a comparative analysis of <i>Girls</i> and <i>Broad City</i>, this thesis considers the combined contribution of the two texts to an emergent feminist approach I refer to as millennial feminism, which is depicted in these texts as a growing feminist consciousness produced in response to certain events that characterise this generation’s coming of age period. </p> <p>To examine how the depictions in <i>Girls</i> and <i>Broad City</i> are contributing to an emergent millennial feminism, I position the texts in relation to historical feminist and postfeminist television series, and to the scholarly debates that continue to circulate them. Exploring this dialogue in relation to the figure of the “Unruly Woman” in particular, I argue that, as millennial feminist television series, <i>Broad City</i> and <i>Girls</i> reclaim and redefine this historically and politically potent figure for a new generation, highlighting in the process the tension between millennial women and their postfeminist forerunners.</p>