Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls

1. Why Girls? Why Now?
Meredith Nash, Imelda Whelehan

Part I. Postfeminism(s)

2. ‘I Have Work … I Am Busy … Trying to Become Who I Am’: Neoliberal Girls and Recessionary Postfeminism
Stéphanie Genz

3. Hating Hannah: Or Learning to Love (Post)Feminist Entitlement
Imelda Whelehan

4. Genres of Impasse: Postfeminism as a Relation of Cruel Optimism in Girls

Catherine McDermott

5. From Sex and the City to Girls: Paving the Way for ‘Post? Feminism’
Ruby Grant, Meredith Nash

6. Bad Sex and the City? Feminist (Re)Awakenings in HBO’s Girls

Melanie Waters

Part II. Performing and Representing Millennial Identities

7. ‘A Voice of a Generation’: Girls and the Problem of Representation
Hannah McCann

8. HBO’s Girls and Twenty-First-Century Education
Laura Witherington

9. Reading the Boys of Girls

Frederik Dhaenens

10. All Adventurous Women Sing: Articulating the Feminine Through the Music of Girls

Alexander Sergeant

11. ‘Doing Her Best With What She’s Got’: Authorship, Irony, and Mediating Feminist Identities in Lena Dunham’s Girls

Wallis Seaton

Part III. Sex, Sexuality, and Bodies

12. ‘Art Porn Provocauteurs’: Feminist Performances of Embodiment in the Work of Catherine Breillat and Lena Dunham
Maria San Filippo

13. ‘You Shouldn’t be Doing That Because You Haven’t Got the Body for It’: Comment on Nudity in Girls

Deborah J. Thomas

14. Sexual Perversity in New York?
Christopher Lloyd

15. All Postfeminist Women Do: Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health in Television Comedy
Elizabeth Arveda Kissling

16. Afterword: Girls: Notes on Authenticity, Ambivalence and Imperfection
Rosalind Gill

Keywords: Cultural and Media Studies, Film and Television Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Theory, Media Studies, American Culture