HBO's Girls: gender, generation, and quality television

Abstract

The HBO series Girls, created by and starring filmmaker Lena Dunham, has been praised for revealing the uncertainties and contradictions produced by the apparent independence of many contemporary young women. It has also been condemned for focusing on girls who use that independence for self-indulgent complaint and celebrate their own objectification. Both feminist and not-so-feminist responses to its promotion, and to the subsequent success of the series, have debated its generationalized gender politics and its narratives about socioeconomic privilege and insecurity. Debating whether Girls has something new and vital to say about girls has thus taken up now longstanding refrains about ‘postfeminism’ and ‘girl power’. This essay considers this controversy, evidently anticipated by the series' producers and argues that understanding Girls requires situating it within HBO's stable of ‘quality’ but controversial original programming, within which Girls' provocative version of feminist girlhood serves as part of its ‘quality’ manipulation of popular conventions for narrative television.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean Fuller

Sean Fuller is a postgraduate researcher in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. His doctoral research focuses on the impact of the Internet on television within a history of media change as a field of technological, industrial, legal, aesthetic and everyday cultural transformation. His Honours thesis discussed the transformation of ‘quality television’ in the post-network era.

Catherine Driscoll

Catherine Driscoll is associate professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on youth and girls studies, media and popular culture, rural cultural studies and cultural theory. Her books include Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, Modernist Cultural Studies, Teen Film: A Critical Introduction and The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience. Her current research projects focus on everyday life in Australian country towns, media classification systems around the world, gender and videogames, and the theoretical foundations of cultural studies.