On HBO’s Girls, single women struggle with imperfect bodies, unfulfilling sex, and financial crises – a deliberate departure from Sex and the City. “I felt like I was cruelly duped by much of the television I saw,” creator Lena Dunham admits. Accordingly, Girls has been hailed for its realism and originality. However, the series also draws from established depictions of single women as economically marginal and sexually self-destructive. This presentation combines cultural history with textual analysis, reading Girls as an extension of the 1960s-70s “single girl.” In particular, I examine how Girls’ evolving treatment of female friendship follows established narrative traditions and complicates feminist readings.
The unkempt apartments and bleak sex scenes in Girls evoke Seventies films such as Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York (1975), which featured suicidal heroines with a penchant for promiscuity. Girls also draws from earlier traditions in its complicated treatment of female friendship. Initially, the series celebrated female solidarity, as the women shared beds and bathtubs; disclosed intimate secrets; and even accompanied each other to the abortion clinic. In recent seasons, however, the women’s bonds are broken by miscommunication and rivalries, and characters display animosity toward each other. Girls’ narrative structure now resembles 1960s films that provided parallel stories of women confronting urban life. While female rivalry on Girls could be read as antifeminist, Lena Dunham claims that the series reveres female friendship in its difficulty and complexity.
While Girls has received the bulk of critical attention, several new series offer alternate takes on female friendship. Notably, Comedy Central’s Broad City has been described as a “love story” between friends, and the web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl provides more varied examples of alliances and conflicts between women. My presentation will compare Girls to these less prominent yet influential representations.
About the presenterKatherine Lehman
Katherine J. Lehman is author of the book Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture (University Press of Kansas, 2011). She is associate professor of Communications at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, where she also co-directs the Women’s and Gender Studies program. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico (2007). She has presented at both regional and national PCA/ACA conferences, and her article “Woman, Divided: Gender, Family and Multiple Personalities in Media” appears in the March 2014 issue of the Journal of American Culture. Other recent publications include articles on postfeminist motherhood in television; gender and generation in HBO’s Girls; queer identity in Glee; Mad Men’s portrayals of working women; and Rosie O’Donnell’s role on The View.