“(Don’t) Look at Me!”

Paradoxical Feminism and Postfeminism in Lena Dunham’s Girls

Masterarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades

Master of Arts (MA)

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von

Sarah LAHM

am Institut für Amerikanistik

Begutachter: Univ.-Prof. Dr. M.A. Stefan L. Brandt

Graz, 2015

1 Acknowledgments

Thank you,

Mom and Dad, for making all of this possible,

Dan, for being the best husband ever,

and Stefan L. Brandt, for your support and guidance.

2 Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 4 Defining Feminism and Postfeminism ...... 6

1. (Post-)Feminist Bodies ...... 8 1.1. The Imperfect Body as Spectacle ...... 14 1.2. “Riot Grrrl” - The Refusal to Lose Weight ...... 20 1.3. “Throwing” Abortions – Liberated Bodies in New York City ...... 30 1.4. HPV and the Casualties of Liberated Sex ...... 33 1.5. The Obsessive (-Compulsive) Woman ...... 36 2. Character Development and Self-Empowerment ...... 39 2.1. Who are the Ladies? – Paradoxical Self-Identification...... 41 2.2. Who are the Leaders? – Empowering “Careers” ...... 43 2.3. Problematic Power Relations ...... 46 2.3.1. “Grander and More Dramatic Than Any Romance”: Female Friendships...... 47 2.3.2. The Gay Best Friend ...... 50 2.3.3. Self-Empowered or “Just a Whore”? ...... 53 2.3.4. Damsels in Distress vs. “Leave Me Alone!” ...... 55 3. Looking for the Female Gaze: Contradictory Voyeurism and Scopophilia in Girls ...... 61 3.1. Gazing at Males ...... 64 3.2. (Un-)Pleasurable Screen Images and the Female Auteur ...... 66

Conclusion ...... 71 Filmography ...... 74 Bibliography ...... 75 List of Figures ...... 79

3 Introduction

“I don’t want to freak you out, but I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.” (Girls , Pilot)

Hannah Horvath, the protagonist of Girls , is high when she tells her parents in the series’ pilot episode that she could be the voice of her generation, while trying to convince them to continue supporting her financially. After watching four seasons of Girls and recognizing its immense success (it has been renewed for a fifth season before the season four premiere), Hannah’s statement seems to have been a true prophecy. Girls has been discussed consistently in the media by critics and viewers, and public interest in Lena Dunham never quite fades. Lena Dunham’s first feature film Tiny Furniture (2010) inspired Judd Apatow and, subsequently, HBO to have Dunham create a television show. Her memoir Not That Kind of Girl was published by Random House in the fall of 2014. Given this, we have to ask ourselves why Dunham’s work is so provocative. What ingredients does it have that provoke fervent discussions and reactions, both positive and negative? And in what sense does Dunham’s Girls represent different elements of feminism, or rather, postfeminism? The first step towards an answer to this question is to list some of the themes that arise when talking about Lena Dunham’s works, especially Girls . Feminism , postfeminism , body image , millennials , generation Y, heteronormativity , femininity , masculinity , violence towards women , rape , postmodernity , consumer culture , urbanity – all these concepts emerge when we talk about Girls , and I have been able to observe numerous paradoxes and contradictions in the ways that these concepts were represented in the show. I argue that many of these paradoxes are present in Girls in order to capture the different and often contradictory facets of postfeminism. The problematic or even ambiguous nature of some of these notions, as well as the cultural significance and controversy of others, calls for scholarly investigations of the show and the application of critical theory to the themes and motifs in Girls . The aim of this thesis is to show that Girls ’ paradoxical representation of feminism and postfeminism renders it a perfect example of postfeminism. This can be said because in Girls , feminism and postfeminism are mixed together in a paradoxical way that perfectly exemplifies the elusive nature of the term postfeminism, being defined as both a backlash against the achievements of feminism and an extension of it, with the potential to improve and develop the notion of feminism further. This paper is going to focus on one of the central areas of Girls with an investigation of the show as a recent and strong example of postfeminism. In this paper, I will define

4 postfeminism in relation to feminism as accurately as possible, all the while keeping in mind that it is generally considered an elusive term. I will then apply the most agreed-upon characteristics of postfeminism, as well as important aspects of second-wave feminism, to Girls . What makes Girls an example of a television show that captures the contradictory definitions of postfeminism is that the young women in Girls are facing numerous contradictions in terms of “re-negotiating traditional roles between men and women” (Kaklamanidou and Tally 2). Specifically, I will analyze in this paper the different ways Lena Dunham represents feminist and postfeminist ideologies and characters in her television show Girls and to what extent these representations are paradoxical due to frictions between feminist and postfeminst elements. For a conclusive analysis of Girls ’ narrative and characters, I will refer to key scholars in the fields of feminist and gender studies, discourse studies, and film studies. Foucault’s theories about discourse and subjectivity continue to be applied to analyses of literature and film. Judith Butler’s interpretations of Foucault will be used for the analysis of power- relations between genders. Since Foucault’s stances have already been appropriated for discussions about gender and feminist studies by many scholars, I will refer to Foucault’s theories as they have been interpreted and applied by Judith Butler. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble , and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’” have been tremendously influential for feminist film and media studies. Their theories, along with E. Ann Kaplan’s Women and Film , will be applied in this paper to investigate the representation of femininity and the female heroine in Lena Dunham’s Girls , as well as the effect the show has on its female audience. In particular, I am interested in the way Girls treats everyday issues such as female friendship, romantic relationships, the casualness of sex, and the questions and contradictions that arise from these representations when we try to characterize them as feminist or postfeminist. Contemporary discourse about the female body, power relations between men and women, and how the millennial generation presents self-identifies, will be analyzed as well. This paper will investigate the contradictions arising from Girls ’ rendering of the constant renegotiations of how women’s bodies should be portrayed and how corporeal performances should be interpreted in terms of second-wave or postmodern feminism, as well as the consequences of the shifting power-structures between millennial women and men. Close readings of screen images and entire scenes will be integrated into this paper’s analysis of Girls to illustrate contradictory patterns in the show’s narrative structure. In my conclusion

5 I will show that the contradictory or paradoxical plotlines and visual elements of Girls render the show the epitome of postfeminism.

Defining Feminism and Postfeminism

Many of the paradoxical elements to be detected in Girls arise from contradictions between feminist and postfeminist elements or sometimes even from occurrences of different forms or definitions of postfeminism. One of the definitions of postfeminism describes the movement as a “white ‘chick’ backlash that denies class, avoids race, ignores (older) age, and ‘straight’- jackets sexuality” (Holmlund 117), which can be attributed to Girls in some, but not all instances. Thus, these above mentioned characteristics of postfeminism stand next to contradictory characteristics that arise from a feminist perspective, such as the inclusion of complex gay characters, some portrayals of older, aging characters, and an awareness of race and class issues that is part of the slightly satirical character of the show. Chris Holmlund divides postfeminism into three groups, the first of them being “chick” postfeminist women, which can be working girls who date and party or women who stay at home. These women are girly women who generally either take the achievements of second-wave feminism for granted or are even opposed to them. The second postfeminist group, who could playfully be called “riot grrrls,” is more “eager to carry on first- and second-wave feminist struggles,” while a third fraction is made up of academics who engage in “postmodern, postcolonial, poststructural, queer, (etc.) theory” (Holmlund 116). Postfeminists, such as the women from Sex and the City , for example, according to Jane Gerhard, perceive “gender differences, such as wanting to look sexy and flirt” as “playful, stylistic, and unrelated to the operations of social power and authority” (Gerhard 37), allowing them to enjoy the positive aspects of a gender-specific conception of men and women without accepting the negative ones. What emerges from this specific definition of postfeminism are questions about whether or not this playful usage of gender differences can be looked at without its relation to “operations of social power and authority.” Foucault, regarding this question, “[…] officially insists that sexuality and power are coextensive and that we must not think that by saying yes to sex we say no to power” (Butler, Gender Trouble 152). So, the problematic in this postfeminist attitude is that it disregards that there is the possibility that even if female sexuality is seen as part of a “[…] ‘multiplicity of pleasures’ in itself which is not the effect of any specific discourse/power exchange”

6 (Foucault in Butler, GT 152), we cannot simply assert that female sexuality and power relations in our society are not connected to each other. Girls picks this up in many instances where the girls try to see themselves as postfeminist girls who can playfully use their status as women on a small scale in order to seduce men or get jobs. However, because Dunham creates comical paradoxical situations when she mixes feminism and postfeminism, these attempts are always either ridiculed, or they backfire in a way that reminds the girls that their actions have consequences that go beyond their intentions or calculated outcomes. This is where contradictions and paradoxical situations emerge in the plot of Girls , and this is where the viewer often asks herself if it is possible to be a postfeminist in this very restricted sense, disregarding the fact that sexuality and power can often not be seen as different, separate concepts, but that they are intrinsically interconnected. At times, it appears that the biggest divide between feminists and post-feminists lies in their different levels of satisfaction with what feminism has achieved so far. But does postfeminism, then, present a backlash to feminism, or does it simply state that feminism can only go so far, highlighting feminism’s limits and pointing to the potential of postfeminism to grow beyond its predecessor? If we take another look at Holmlund’s “chick,” “riot grrrl,” and “academic” postfeminists, we see again that the concept of postfeminism is problematic and contradictory in itself , including both women who carry on the goals of the first two waves of feminism, as well as women who are opposed to these very goals. Postfeminism, according to Faludi, encapsulates an “undoing of feminism” and at the same time engages in “a well-informed and even well- intended response to feminism” (Faludi quoted in Hamilton 45), and I argue that it is exactly this simultaneity of contradictory characteristics and paradoxical elements of one and the same concept referred to in Girls . Its screen action and its characters therefore often encapsulate both sides of the coin that is postfeminism. Therefore, when I talk about postfeminism in this paper, I will refer to its different and contradictory aspects, comparing these aspects to those of feminism, especially second-wave feminism and its extensions, such as discussions and questions about the difference between gender and sex, and Judith Butler’s contestations of this dichotomy specifically. Furthermore, I will frequently refer to the problematic relationship of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, to social questions of power and authority and how this is tackled, and mocked, in Girls .

7 1. (Post-)Feminist Bodies

Firstly, when discussing the idea of bodies that have the potential to be feminist and/or postfeminist, it is necessary to again refer to the different aspects of feminism and postfeminism, as discussed before, to create a basis for this investigation. In public discourse, feminism is nowadays often simply defined as being about “women having all the rights that men have,” as Lena Dunham puts it in an interview with Playboy (Rensin 2013). Historically, first-wave feminism was mainly concerned with voting and property rights, while second- wave feminists “expanded on those issues by including topics such as sexuality, family, reproductive rights, and legal inequalities” (Elinor Burkett in Hamilton 2014). Therefore, we could say that second-wave feminism represents an extension to first-wave feminism, as women were not quite satisfied yet with what they had achieved concerning equality between the sexes and felt the need to include more issues that represented problems for women in particular. From cultural discourse we know that all of the aforementioned issues, especially female sexuality, reproduction, and family planning are still hotly debated. So, if some problems have been solved, and some issues of second-wave feminism are still being debated today, what is third-wave feminism, and what do we need it for? Feminist critics have questioned notions of sex, gender, and society’s attitude towards both the male and female body and their assigned roles more and more since the rise of second-wave feminism. After the first wave of feminism and its concerns with women’s rights in the period around the turn of the century (nineteenth and twentieth century), particularly a woman’s right to vote, the second-wave of feminism, having its starting point in the 1960s, began to further question the seemingly natural differences that were still taken for granted by women of the first wave and employed both poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Its main premise was that gender is socially constructed, a notion which has been picked up and developed further by Judith Butler, in criticizing second-wave feminism, especially its view of sex and gender. According to Butler, who drew partly on Simone de Beauvoir’s assertions concerning culturally constructed gender, it is not only gender that is constructed in this way, but also the category of sex. She goes so far as to say sex is just as much of a construction as gender:

If ‘the body is a situation,’ as [Beauvoir] claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. (Butler, Gender Trouble 11)

Third-wave feminism in this sense can be considered a radical reaction to second-wave feminism, and according to Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, it is, on the one hand, similar

8 to second-wave feminism in its critique of “beauty culture, sexual abuse and power structures,” but at the same time utilizes the “pleasure, danger, and defining power of those structures” (Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake quoted in Hamilton 44). Judith Butler notes that “as both discursive and perceptual , ‘sex’ denotes an historically contingent epistemic regime,” further describing this regime as “a language that forms perception by forcibly shaping the interrelationships through which physical bodies are perceived” (Butler, GT 155). Judith Butler draws from Simone de Beauvoir when she discusses the development that second-wave feminism has gone through when she says that:

“[…] for Beauvoir, sex is immutably factic, but gender acquired, and whereas sex cannot be changed – or so she thought – gender is the variable cultural construction of sex, the myriad and open possibilities of cultural meaning occasioned by the sexed body. […] (Butler, Gender Trouble , 152) Girls , in comparison to other television shows featuring a female protagonist or female main characters, portrays issues such as body image and sex from the perspective of young women, and it does this in a particularly graphic manner most of the time. However, because the show is by a young filmmaker who provides an arguably more real, more honest perspective on the life of millennials, critics have generally had high expectations of the narrative, which is why it has also been subject to heavy criticism in terms of how women are portrayed and in terms of how women act and react to the fictional world they are part of. I would argue that much of the criticism, but perhaps also some of the praise it has received, stems from Girls’ paradoxical representation of feminist and postfeminist elements. Often, two actions that are either consecutive, or spread over more than one episode or season, or even the traits of a character as a whole, are contradictory, and the contradiction very often arises in a dichotomy between feminism and postfeminism. Feminism, in this sense, describes situations and characters that attempt to be affirmative in terms of women’s equality in a broader sense, or that allow a character to think and act self-affirming and empowered as a woman, specifically, on the other. Postfeminism, then, is mostly seen as a specific sort of backlash from feminism. As mentioned in the introduction of this paper, the question about whether or not Girls “somehow represent[s] a backlash” in terms feminism and the women’s movements of the past decades and what they achieved (cf. Kaklamanidou and Tally 4) has been asked frequently. The question about whether Girls is feminist or postfeminist should, however, not be central, as Girls undoubtedly contains both feminist and postfeminist aspects, and with its narrative technique and elements such as its use of humor, inspires the viewer to think about these discrepancies between feminism and postfeminism critically. A factor that influences viewers heavily is the way the characters perform in the show, and how these performances contradict each other in terms of feminism. Thus, it is important to talk about performativity

9 in Girls and its possible impact on the viewer. The concept of performativity and the analysis of texts regarding their performative elements has “shifted the long-standing debate on essentialism to a recognition of degrees and forms of constructedness” (Brooker 1999). Thus, being a deconstructive approach towards sexual identity, performativity represents liberation, but it also problematizes, as Brooker further states, “ideas of collective identity and thus of any common social-sexual agency for change,” as the concept implies that a certain superficiality, and even an illusory quality, is inherent in sexual identity. Judith Butler claims that “[…] acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.” (Butler, GT 185). These fabrications are performed over and over again, and are therefore at some point considered necessary and normal, as Judith Butler explains: […] the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction ‘compels’ our belief in its necessity and naturalness. The historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other than those punitively regulated cultural fictions alternately embodied and deflected under duress. (Butler, GT 190)

How does Girls represent “regulated cultural fictions” and does it try to construct its narrative in a way that tries to convince the reader of the naturalness of polar genders? If so, are there attempts to provide alternative positions to such polar constructions of gender, or is there punishment for not adhering to these traditional constructions? According to Judith Butler, “bodily pleasures are not merely causally reducible to this ostensibly sex-specific essence, but they become readily interpretable as manifestations or signs of this ‘sex.’” (Butler, GT 128) Therefore, when we discuss those bodily pleasures, or represent them visually in films and on television, it is difficult to find instances where this representation of specific feminine or masculine features as a sign of the respective “sex” is subverted, as it is so deeply inscribed in the way we think. Undoubtedly, Girls sketches a contemporary picture of how young women see their own bodies, and how they present and utilize their bodies in different social situations. Therefore, it provides an interesting and insightful example that will be looked at in this thesis with respect to its portrayal of feminist and postfeminist elements. As feminism and postfeminism clash, they create paradoxes, for example, when the characters attempt to perform according to their social expectations and then have to deal with a completely different outcome of their attempts, because other characters react differently to their performance than expected. Sometimes, Dunham’s girls know exactly how to make their bodies look and how to perform in order to be successful (or at least they think they do), but

10 the responses their performance will receive, and the consequences it will have, almost always differ from their intentions. Instances in which the emotional outcomes of the girls’ corporeal performances are very different from what they intended, are quite frequent. Jessa, for example, seems to have much experience when it comes to looking desirable and thus utilizing her body and her sexuality to get what she wants. When Jessa’s ex-boyfriend calls her because he happens to be in New York City and wants to meet up with her, she is wearing what he, when they are taking a walk, calls a “sexy Geisha-outfit” (Girls , 1.5, “Hard Being Easy”) before telling Jessa that she is beautiful and subsequently, after assuring Jessa that he loves his girlfriend, Gillian, having sex with Jessa in her apartment which she shares with her cousin Shoshanna. Throughout the course of Girls , Jessa represents the kind of woman who has fun reassuring herself that she has the power to get anything that she wants at any moment. Most of the time, this means that she can get almost anything by flaunting her female sensuality and her sexuality. However, her psyche suffers from her corporeal decisions. Her combination of a liberal corporeal attitude and a lack of good judgment is how she gets into trouble at the first job we see her take in Girls , namely as a babysitter for Jeff and Katherine, a yuppie-couple with two children. This couple’s financial situation is completely dependent upon Katherine, whose occupation is not defined exactly, but involves creative work, as she is apparently shooting material for a documentary about formerly wealthy homeless people. Due to the nature of this woman and her career we are again reminded of the postmodern setting of the show. Katherine’s husband Jeff is unemployed and, therefore, home more often than Katherine, which creates moments he spends alone with Jessa, smoking pot with her once and spending more time with her in episode seven of season one, “Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident,” at a warehouse party. They never have sex, but by the time Jessa realizes that she has somehow maneuvered herself into a zone that could potentially cause problems within Jeff and Katherine’s marriage, it is already too late. After Jeff gets beaten up at the aforementioned party because Jessa insults a couple of punks by calling them “crusty” and insulting their mothers, they end up at the hospital, where Jeff asks Jessa to spend the night with him. Jessa declines and Jeff calls her a “tease,” which leads to a final breakthrough for Jessa, who finally realizes that her behavior has an effect on other people that goes beyond a little entertainment and her need to be different and edgy, which at that point seems to be almost pathological. Before Jessa babysits Katherine and Jeff’s two daughters for the first time, she has a conversation with Shoshanna wherein Shoshanna points out that Jessa’s outfit might be a bit

11 too “threatening for a babysitting-job” ( Girls , 1.3, “All Adventurous Women Do”), a comment which Jessa counters by arguing that her dress is, after all, floor-length. Later, when we see Jessa at her first babysitting job, standing in Katherine’s kitchen, we can see that she and Shoshanna have reached some kind of compromise, as Jessa is still wearing her transparent dress, but has apparently agreed to throw on a shawl. Generally, apart from this transparent dress, Jessa does not seduce by means of traditionally sexy attire; she does not wear miniskirts or accentuate her cleavage, but she comes across rather as a bohemian version of Samantha from Sex and the City .

Fig. 1: Jessa’s post-Sex and the City sexual liberation becomes transparent

Jessa is in fact often compared to Samantha Jones from Sex and the City as she is the most outgoing and sexually liberal character on Girls . While Samantha Jones is mostly sketched out as a mature woman, slightly older than her friends, having had more sexual experience than any of her friends, Jessa often appears almost as a parody of this type of character. Although she is only in her mid-twenties, she has been able to travel extensively without really having to work, and the way she presents herself suggests that she enjoys sex liberally – liberally enough to find herself pregnant upon her return to New York City. When Jessa, as mentioned above, has sex with her ex-boyfriend when he already has a new girlfriend, she justifies this experience right after it happens to her cousin Shoshanna. Deeming the affair an attempt on her side to show that she cannot be defeated, she argues that it was inconsequential and merely figuring as a pleasurable experience for her without further emotional investment. “That was me showing that I cannot be smoted. I am unsmotable,” Jessa explains happily to Shoshanna ( Girls , 1.5, “Hard Being Easy”), using the word “smite” incorrectly, as the correct way of using the word would have been “smote” or “smitten” and “unsmitable,” respectively. Jessa’s inaccurate usage of a word that either means to slay or strike (often in a biblical sense)

12 or to charm someone reflects her immaturity and ignorance as a character and as a woman who considers herself an individual and a feminist, but at the same time feels the need to “prove” that she cannot be “smitten” by a man. Thus, Jessa’s need to prove that she is fully in charge of her sexual escapades and can enjoy sex without emotional involvement, just like Samantha Jones, is paradoxical in that she feels the need to verbalize her intentions, to explain what just happened, perhaps because she herself is not entirely sure how sex with her ex- boyfriend who now has a girlfriend should be interpreted. She seems to realize, therefore, that there is a political dimension to her actions as a woman, and her sexual actions in particular, and that these actions are necessarily embedded in social discourse. She knows that her actions are being judged by society, and that her body is torn apart by society, figuratively, as Judith Butler discusses in Gender Trouble : Note as well that the category of sex and the naturalized institution of heterosexuality are constructs , socially instituted and socially regulated fantasies or ‘fetishes,’ not natural categories, but political ones (categories that prove that recourse to the ‘natural’ in such contexts is always political). Hence, the body which is torn apart, the wars waged among women, are textual violences, the deconstruction of constructs that are always already a kind of violence against a body’s possibilities. (172)

Judith Butler illustrates the fluidity of what the body means to society by referring to Foucault’s concept of genealogy and its objective “‘to expose a body totally imprinted in history’” (Butler quoting Foucault, GT 176). Butler then illustrates this idea with a war metaphor, saying that “the body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of history” (Butler, GT 177). Jessa’s body is somewhat visually “torn apart” in this scene with her ex-boyfriend. When they enter the apartment, kissing, the focus is on her torso and her breasts, after which there is a cut to the bed where Jessa’s pants and underpants are being taken off, followed by another cut to an exterior shot of the window, where we see Jessa and her ex-boyfriend’s faces cringing when they both reach a quick climax. Note that Jessa’s ex- boyfriend remains unnamed, while his new girlfriend’s name, Gillian, is mentioned constantly, as Jessa keeps mispronouncing it until her ex-boyfriend corrects her, saying that it is “Gillian. Hard ‘g’” ( Girls , 1.5, “Hard Being Easy”). From this perspective, Jessa’s ex- boyfriend as a character is portrayed as merely a male body that Jessa uses in order to prove something to herself and to society, and the fact that his body is just as fragmented visually as hers creates an equality between them as characters of different sexes. Overall, though, the situation could be interpreted in different ways, as it is never quite clear in situations such as this who has “used” whom. Moreover, it is difficult to describe the outcome of Jessa’s seduction, as there are no further consequences in terms of emotional involvement; Jessa’s ex- boyfriend leaves and never appears again, and Jessa never mentions him again. Jessa is simply able to add another potential sexual triumph to her experiences, as many of the things

13 that she does are merely means of passing time. If one of her motives was to prove her attractiveness, she has succeeded, but since Jessa’s body represents a normative body, with a feminine, slightly curvy shape, long blonde hair, and a pretty face, it cannot quite be seen as a representation of an imperfect body. When Jessa’s body is represented as a spectacle, it is not surprising to the viewer. Consequently, we also need to take a closer look at other characters with less normative or conventionally beautiful bodies and their representations as spectacles.

1.1 The Imperfect Body as Spectacle

The focus of the visual narrative on an imperfect female body as a spectacle is rare on mainstream television, especially when it comes to weight. When imperfect bodies are portrayed in popular television shows, they usually undergo a more or less radical makeover at some point in the narrative, or they are, as for example in the case of Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006-2010), represented as unattractive through the application of glasses, braces, and ill- fitting clothing, which is then often commented upon by other characters, trying to give the character fashion advice. In the case of Girls , Hannah, who is overweight, with a small bust, and, as she calls herself in the first season, “naturally hunchy” (Girls , 1.4, “Hannah’s Diary”). There is the potential of looking “nicer,” conforming to the (sometimes) unspoken imperative to try to look as attractive as possible according to traditional standards. However, Hannah Horvath does not necessarily try to look attractive by all means, and the reasons for that are somehow contradictory. On the one hand, she clearly does not care enough about what other people or society in general expect her to do in order to conform to set norms. On the other, she also does not have the means to do look as fabulous as the women on Sex and the City , as Hannah is a typical millennial, with middle or perhaps upper middle class parents, living in Brooklyn and facing her own financial crisis at the beginning of season one. In the world of Broad City (a web series by Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson that was picked up by Comedy Central with its first season having premiered in 2014) the protagonists, especially Ilana, wear a mixture of urban apparels, stylish but mostly cheap, and they do so unapologetically, while on Girls there is often a kind of helplessness and uncertainty that goes along with the characters’ efforts when they dress and accessorize. Girls , however, is able to make a bold statement about body image by depicting a female body that is not normative in its posture and shape, but that is continuously shown naked, and most of the time with just as much naturalness and justification as the perfect, normative, and thin bodies that we see in other shows such as Sex and the City or Game of

14 Thrones . Both critics and viewers have called the way Lena Dunham exposes her body in front of the camera “brave,” to which she responded in her memoir Not That Kind of Girl , that The subtext there is definitely how am I brave enough to reveal my imperfect body, since I doubt Blake Lively would be subject to the same line of inquiry. […] Performing in sex scenes that I direct, exposing a flash of my weird puffy nipple, those things don’t fall into my zone of terror.” (Dunham 105, her italics) Lena Dunham’s body is, as she calls it herself, imperfect. When saying that a body is imperfect, this implies that we recognize its shortcomings and its characteristics that diverge from a perfect ideal. The first problem with this notion of an imperfect body is that it is compared to an ideal, but not to a norm or average. What the bodies of actresses are usually compared to within popular cultural discourse are the toned and defined bodies of models, slender, tan, with perfect skin, perfect hair, and perfect accessories. Different media are full of tutorials about how to wear make-up, how to wear one’s hair, and so on. This is often alluded to in Girls , for example, when Hannah cuts her hair according to a ripped-out page of a magazine that shows Carrie Mulligan’s short hair, or when Hannah applies make-up before Adam’s Broadway debut, trying to imitate Olivia Wilde’s make-up on a picture in another ripped-out page of a women’s magazine. The ideal that Dunham’s body is inevitably compared to is the ideal that every woman’s body is compared to, and that every woman compares her own body to when reading magazines, and it is a paradoxical comparison. As Hamilton points out, Hannah consciously does not try to lose weight, but at the same time “recognizes that there is an ideal that she is not meeting, and her inaction does not necessarily connote acceptance of her body” (Hamilton 47). While I agree with Hamilton’s statement in that Hannah’s refusal to lose weight does not equal body acceptance, I do think that this contradiction between not wanting to change one’s body in order to adhere to the most common beauty standard and recognizing said beauty ideal makes in important statement about just how omnipresent this beauty standard is in America, and especially in American television. Dunham makes her character a spectacle using contradictory techniques; for example, when Hannah lies on her parents’ hotel room floor, “high” on opium pods and in the midst of an existential crisis, she screams, faux-embarrassed, “Don’t look at me!” in a half-hearted attempt to cover her face, after having mumbled about wanting to die in a garret like Flaubert (cf. Girls , Pilot). The reason she is has come to her parents’ hotel room, however, is precisely to be the center of attention, and to convince them to continue to support her financially after they had announced over dinner the night before that it is time for Hannah to stand on her own feet, since she had only been interning unpaid for the past two years after graduating from college. This “satirical disparity between her ontological age and her behavioral age”

15 (Bianco 79) is a perfect example of the paradox that emerges from both the personal hypocrisy of the characters and the contradictory goal of millennials to simultaneously become successful as soon as possible (Marnie’s acquaintance opens up her own gallery at the age of twenty-three with her parents’ capital) and to generally take longer when it comes to growing up and engaging in steady relationships. There are a number of instances in Girls where Hannah tries to cover up her narcissism and self-involvement with feigned shame, another of them happening at the end of season two, when Hannah calls her neighbor and former addict Laird to help her after she has cut her own hair due to her obsessive-compulsive disorder. After Laird is done cutting her hair into shape, Hannah, yet again, lets herself fall to the floor and when Laird asks her if she is okay, she tells him that she doesn’t “have the strength to fight [him] off this time” ( Girls , “Together”). She does this even though Laird has never made any romantic or sexual advances towards her in the past. The only comparable incident was when Hannah, high on cocaine Laird was able to acquire for her, kissed Laird in their apartment building’s hallway. Hannah’s dramatic accusation causes Laird, for once, to tell Hannah how “rotten [her] insides are,” while Hannah is lying on the floor, wearing only a long t-shirt. The visibility of Hannah’s naked body, or parts of it, in this case, and in some other instances, highlights the facets of her personality that are unlikable. It seems that, as another of Hannah’s character traits is exposed, her body must also be, to create a visual image that corresponds to what is being revealed about her contextually. The inherent paradox in this scene is that Hannah, although she is fully aware that Laird is only in her apartment because she called him there to help her cut her hair, evidently not feeling threatened by him in any way, still chooses to use his masculinity as a reason to create a dramatic scene where she can portray herself as the victim. When discussing the representation of and discourse about the female body in Girls , I am also discussing its divergent representation compared to the body image that is prevalent in other popular television shows that have young women at their center. It is therefore necessary to take a quick look at how the “ordinary” female body is placed within contemporary television shows and how the female body is usually constructed in and through mass media. One example of a recent television show that revolves around women would be 2 Broke Girls (CBS, 2011-present), which portrays two female leads, one of which corresponds fully to the body image of the slender, shapely women that are advertised in women’s magazines and advertisements. The other character, a curvy brunette, diverges slightly from this “perfect” image. Considering how the shaping of a specific body image is always a

16 consequence of the processes of cultural construction, as are notions of gender, there is always room for attempts to counter the notion of a perfect female body with the “ordinary” body that, for example, Max Black (Kat Dennings) in 2 Broke Girls represents. Female leads are very often portrayed as “different” from most other women or girls in other television shows as well, for example in New Girl (Fox, 2011-present), where the main character is quirky and sometimes very “uncool.” Another example would be Suburgatory (ABC, 2011- 2014), where the main character is a high school girl whose character (intelligent, witty) and hair color (red) diverge from the rest of the characters (superficial, shallow, blonde) portrayed in the show. In Girls , it is Marnie who represents this normative body, as she is thin, active, and she dresses in a way that will present her body in the most flattering way, meaning that her stomach and thighs are flattened, while other zones are accentuated. Marnie is also described as “the uptight one” by Jessa, who is the least “uptight” of the girls. Even Marnie’s mother calls her prudish in season two when they are having lunch and her mother tells her that Marnie and other girls nowadays look like floating dolls from the Macy’s parade, with “these big heads on these tiny bodies” ( Girls , 2.1, “It’s About Time”). Hannah, who we must not forget is the main character, after all, complains about the shape of her body many times during the show, although the reasons for these complaints are often contradictory, as sometimes she complains simply out of narcissistic reasons and self-pity, for example, when she is trying to prove to Adam that her being thirteen pounds overweight has always been a serious problem for her. At the same time, however, the viewer is compelled to think that the issue cannot have been seriously traumatizing when Hannah, confronted with Adam’s comment that she could easily lose four pounds if her weight bothers her, declares that she has decided that she has other concerns in her life (cf. Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”) that are by far more important than losing weight. Hannah’s breasts, for example, are referred to in Girls when, for example, Jessa and Marnie are having drinks at a bar and talk about Hannah’s breasts being “teensy,” using the opportunity to refer to Hannah’s sloppiness when it comes to her outer appearance, talking about how they have both seen Hannah put on nice clothes and make-up, while leaving “her forehead shiny,” saying in unison that Hannah should “wash her forehead” ( Girls , 1.8, Weirdos Need Girlfriends Too”). Jessa tells Marnie about losing her virginity at the age of seventeen, explaining this comparatively late event (Marnie lost her virginity when she was fourteen) by saying that she “didn’t grow breasts for a long time, and sex without breasts is creepy” (Girls , 1.8). The way that the body, especially the female body, is treated on Girls , is visually explicit and the viewer is constantly reminded of the characters’ corporeality. This is

17 sometimes accentuated by the illustration of bodily functions, for example, when Adam pees on Hannah while they are taking a shower together, or when Jessa pees on the street in season four. Hannah, for example, vomits in front of a café after being told that she has to write an e- book within a month. The physical manifestation of diseases is frequent, when Hannah counts and twitches her head obsessively as a manifestation of her obsessive-compulsive disorder. Manifestations of other conditions are portrayed graphically as well, for example, Jessa starts bleeding during a sexual encounter with a stranger shortly before her scheduled abortion and the viewer is shown the stranger’s bloody hands as they emerge from Jessa’s crotch. Even self-injury finds a place in the narrative due to a Hannah’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, as she eventually ruptures her eardrum with a q-tip and has to have it removed at the hospital. Adam breaks his leg when a car hits him while he is fighting with Hannah in the season one finale, and Hannah’s father slips in the shower while having sex with Hannah’s mother, Loreen. Hannah’s father’s injury is particularly interesting because it is a purely physical injury, and the men in the show only experience physical injuries as opposed to the bodily discomforts the girls experience, which are always significant to social issues or concern mental health. Shoshanna’s virginity, for instance, despite not being a disease, is nevertheless treated as an emotionally toll-taking condition. Hannah’s HPV is, paradoxically, portrayed as both an everyday issue and a serious condition by Hannah, who also holds an uncomfortable monologue at her gynecologist’s about “wanting AIDS,” so that people “aren’t gonna bother” her about other issues, such as finding work. Remarks about the perception of bodies and losing weight are frequent, such as Marnie’s conversations with her mother about being too thin. Tally Schifrin, who is Hannah’s nemesis (they took the same writing classes at Oberlin College), says at her book party how she wants to be so thin that people will frequently ask her if she is sick. These scenes, especially those portraying Hannah’s refusal to be ashamed of the non-normative aspects of her body, create a type of newfound freedom within the landscape of female-centered television. However, as Girls deals with issues of body shame and corporeal otherness in the form of diseases not simply in a way that rejects shame and negative influences on the characters’ psyches, these issues will be discussed in terms of their paradoxical and contradictory portrayal. This is due to the omnipresent discrepancy between the refusal to accept a negative body image as a reality and different forms of resignation and agreement with destructive norms. When Hannah, for example, takes cocaine (which he has obtained from her downstairs neighbor Laird) with her gay ex-boyfriend Elijah, she subsequently switches tops with a man she dances with at a gay club. For the rest of the episode, we can see her breasts through a yellow mesh top. When Hannah, later in this

18 episode, shows up at artist Booth Jonathan’s house, who is Marnie’s latest romantic conquest, Marnie reacts to Hannah’s fashion choice with a mixture of surprise and disgust. Hannah simply replies, “it’s a Wednesday night, baby, and I’m alive” ( Girls , 2.3, “Bad Friend”). When we talk about postmodern feminism as opposed to first-wave and second-wave feminism, we also have to regard the postmodern body and the way it is represented in Girls . As Stefan Brandt points out, “[…] we are confronted with a multitude of potential and contradictory bodies.” This is a concern for the characters in Girls as far as the potentiality of their bodies is considered. With social media booming, our society has become a society where mass-produced pictures of sexed bodies are omnipresent, representing ideals for women to live up to. At the same time, girls and women still have to be careful not to act in a way that would suggest “sluttiness,” thus the way women’s bodies are represented is facing a contradiction. As Stefan Brandt points out, “the body in postmodernity is at once everywhere and nowhere; it is an abstract ideal as well as the vanishing point of desires and expectations, a composite of countless images and designs rather than a homogeneous entity (Brandt 61)” Hannah’s body in Girls is not a “panic body” (Kroker and Kroker, cited in Brandt 61), or a “zombie-like” creature, but her body is still often used as a means to express an existential angst and, especially when her body expresses the various symptoms of her obsessive-compulsive disorder in the latter part of season two, we are shown trapped and confined body, a person who is not in control of her body. She hides under her bed when Marnie drops by her apartment to tell her that she got back together with Charlie, she ruptures her eardrum with a q-tip, she cuts off her own hair, and she is unable to even even begin work on her book. The e-book that she is writing is due within a month and arguably the main cause for the outbreak of her OCD. The postmodern body is a body which has to perform fast and efficiently. Even though Girls has been criticized for portraying girls who come from at least upper-middle class families and thus the seriousness of their struggles can be argued about, Dunham portrays an interesting aspect of a postmodern New York City. Trying to make it in New York City within a creative profession means competing with many individuals who believe that “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere” (theme from New York, New York , 1977). Hannah’s performance in her private life is threatened when Adam does not give her the space she needs after their break-up and so her OCD becomes worse. Interestingly, the issue that gets resolved first, at the end of the season, is Hannah’s private life, as she gets back together with Adam. In the third season, Hannah is seeing a therapist, taking her medication, and living together with Adam. Comically, her obsessive-compulsive disorder actually helps her in the process of writing her e-book, as her editor David gives her

19 more writing time after learning that she has OCD, not necessarily out of human compassion, but because it could be interesting to incorporate it into Hannah’s stories, something that he feels they can work with. Therefore, the only way for Hannah to really deal with her OCD does not simply lie in treatment with medication, but in integrating it into her creative performance.

1.2. “Riot Grrrl” - The Refusal to Lose Weight

The very first remark Hannah makes in the pilot episode is a response to her mother telling both Hannah and her father that the two of them should “slow down, you’re eating like they’re going to take it away from you,” to which Hannah replies, “I’m a growing girl.” This statement describes Hannah and Girls on several levels. First of all, Hannah is, in fact, still “growing” with every experience, which the title of the show, Girls , also reflects. On the other hand, the assertion also works as part of the self-deprecating humor she employs throughout the show, often referring to her weight, sometimes lightly, sometimes with a bit more desperation. More importantly, it is the use of irony that highlights the contradictory nature of her claim. Of course, Lena Dunham cannot be said, contrary to what Joan Rivers was joking about in social media, to be advocating obesity, but she often depicts a very common truth about how many women feel at this moment in history, not particularly enjoying exercise, being intimidated by good-looking friends and the beauty standards advertised in magazines and social media, and enjoying food, occasionally a bit too much. Many viewers of Girls would certainly find themselves in many of the paradoxical everyday situations portrayed, which is very often achieved by Dunham’s use of ironic references to herself and her body. When Adam asks Hannah about her tattoos in the pilot episode of Girls , she tells him, “Truthfully? I gained a bunch of weight very quickly and I just felt very out of control of my own body, and it was just this, like, Riot Grrrl idea, like ‘I’m taking control of my own shape’” ( Girls , Pilot). Invoking the Riot Grrrl Movement that was started by women within the punk culture during the early 1990s and became more and more popular towards the late 1990s (cf. Feliciano 2013), Hannah is saying something significant about her idea of what it means to regain power over her young female body. She consciously chooses not to lose the weight that she had gained or resorts to quicker, more harmful means to achieve this, risking becoming anorexic or bulimic. Instead, she does something that reflects her personality as a creative person and, specifically, as a writer, as she tells Adam that all her tattoos are

20 illustrations from children’s books. The only tattoos that are not from children’s books are small doodles that her friend Jessa did “sophomore year, with a safety pin” ( Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). Usually, tattoos are used in comedy television as accidents, simply as the outcome of a funny story when a character got too drunk or tries to impress a love interest. For example, in How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 2005-2014), Ted, the main character, gets a butterfly tattoo on his lower back during a drunken night because a girl he is flirting with takes him to a tattoo studio ( HIMYM , 3.1, “Wait for It”). This story that Hannah shares with Adam about bodily concerns harmonizes with a conversation the two of them have in the next and aforementioned episode, after Adam plays with Hannah’s stomach (see Fig. 2) and asks her if she has “tried a lot to lose weight.” Hannah immediately replies, “No, I have not tried a lot to lose weight! Because I’ve decided that I was going to have some other concerns in my life” (Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). With this statement, Hannah clearly declares her stance on a positive body image, as she is not willing to prioritize losing weight over other things that she would rather do with her time. What is paradoxical about this statement is that Hannah still seems to be uncomfortable within her own body, which is displayed when she tells Adam that she does not “want [her] body to be funny” ( Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). She refers to her own weight as a problematic issue in other scenes as well, as do other characters in Girls when it comes to Hannah’s figure. Her friends, however, often refer to Hannah’s weight reassuringly in a way that suggests that she has actually lost weight over a given time period, presumably since college. For example, in the pilot episode, Charlie, Marnie’s boyfriend, says that he did not want to wake Hannah and Marnie after they had fallen asleep watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970- 1977) because the two of them looked “so angelic.” Hannah responds by pointing to Marnie and calling her a “Victoria’s secret angel,” while referring to herself as a “fat baby angel.”

Fig. 2: Hannah’s stomach as comical object

21 In a society where many women (and men) are obsessed with their bodies and with looking as much like the celebrities they see in magazines and in social media as possible, it is undoubtedly novel to be presented with a main character who not only looks very much “imperfect” according to contemporary ideals of beauty, but also stands up for her decision that there are other concerns more important than losing weight. There are countless other scenes on Girls where Hannah’s slight paunchiness is accentuated visually, for example in episode 3.7, titled “Beach House,” where Hannah, unlike her friends, is seen wearing a bikini for the entire episode, except for the very first and very last scene where we see the Girls getting off the bus and waiting for the bus, respectively. The most striking scene regarding body shaming is when Hannah stands in front of a grocery store that she is not allowed to enter with bare feet only wearing her bathing suit when someone behind her makes a snide remark about her weight comparing her to a whale, after which Hannah turns around, only to see that it was Elijah who was body shaming her with some of his friends. Hannah’s reaction displays a sense of resignation and acceptance of the practice of body shaming. She simply accepts it as a fact and subsequently invites Elijah and all his friends to dinner at the beach house that they are staying in. The display of a woman’s imperfect body in a bikini is making a statement about body shaming in itself, and the fact that it is thematized explicitly in the episode is even more significant. An example of a more negative form of body shaming would be the first Sex and the City movie that features a scene where Samantha’s friends body-shame her for having a “gut,” as they call the small belly Samantha has developed after some breakup, they provide an unconstructive thematization of a problematic social issue, presenting it as a serious problem.

Fig. 3a and 3b: Hannah’s imperfect body as spectacle and subject of body-shaming

22 What is really significant about the fact that Hannah is just wearing a bikini for a whole episode is not simply that she is doing it with an imperfect body, it is that she is wearing a bikini not just on the beach or on the pool, but in situations where all her friends are wearing clothes. And she seems to be comfortable in her own skin, because even after she is taunted by Elijah, she keeps wearing the bathing suit. Other comments made about Hannah’s appearance include, “did you leave in a rush?,” a question Natalia’s friend directs towards Hannah’s clothing style in Girls ’ third season when they both see Hannah for the first time, together with Adam, who briefly dated Natalia in season two. In Girls’ fifth episode of season two, titled “One Man’s Trash,” Patrick Wilson guest stars as Joshua, a forty-two year-old doctor with whom Hannah spends two nights, one of them blissful, one of them sorrowful. This particular episode provides the most poignant examples of a display of an imperfect body that is at once aesthetically pleasing and off- putting. Both the visual techniques and the public discussion this episode has sparked are interesting in terms of female sexuality. First of all, Hannah and Josh meet because of a dispute Josh has with Ray, who runs the Grumpy’s coffee shop Hannah has just started to work at, over trash. What we learn when Hannah, after Josh storms out of Grumpy’s, knocks on Josh’s door, and is invited in by him, is that Hannah has been putting Grumpy’s trash into Josh’s cans for weeks because she lost Ray’s dumpster key and was afraid to tell him. The first problem that arises here in terms of a feminist reading is that Hannah was afraid to tell Ray about losing the key for the dumpsters, because of “what a total fucking dick he can be” (Girls , 2.5, “One Man’s Trash”). The next issue is that Hannah sets foot into a strange man’s house although she even says herself that she could be putting herself into a potential “Ted Bundy situation.” The fact that Hannah is seen naked, or at least partly naked, in virtually every episode of Girls , could, according to Nikita T. Hamilton, be regarded as a “feminist statement if not for the fact that Hannah negates such conclusion by bemoaning her weight” (Hamilton 47). Furthermore, as Hamilton states, Hannah, despite not actively trying to become thinner, “recognizes there is an ideal she is not meeting, and her inaction does not necessarily connote acceptance of her own body” (Hamilton 47). I would argue, however, that the fact that Hannah never makes an effort to lose the weight that she, or her environment, considers “overweight,” is more significant than Hamilton gives it credit for. If we assume that Girls aims to present both a satirical and realistic portrayal of young women in New York City, we have to acknowledge the fact that Hannah and her environment sometimes engage in a

23 discourse about the fact that she really does not meet society’s standards when it comes to the shape her body is in, literally and figuratively. Thomas-John, Jessa’s short-term husband, for example, refers to Hannah’s “shorteralls” in a complementing way, asking her if she came up with the concept, to which Hannah replies, “I wish, I’d be rich.” So, there is almost always a comedic element to any conversation about weight or Hannah’s ability to just be “brave” enough to wear the types of clothes that other women with imperfect, or average, bodies, would not wear because they are self-conscious. Early in the third season, Hannah is getting dressed in her room and when we see her step into the kitchen, where Adam and his sister Caroline are arguing, the viewer can see that the top Hannah just put on in her bedroom displays her stomach. It is significant that this image has the potential to simply have a disorienting effect on the viewer at first because we are simply not used to seeing an imperfectly shaped body in this kind of apparel. Hannah already refers to exactly this thematic in the pilot episode when she and Marnie are in the bathroom together, Hannah sitting in the bathtub, naked, while Marnie is sitting on the rim of the bathtub, covered in a towel and shaving her legs: Hannah: But I never see you naked and you always see me naked, which should actually be the other way around. Marnie: You are beautiful, shut up. Hannah: I don’t need that. I need to see your boobs. Girls , 1.1, “Pilot”

When we watch this conversation, we see a relationship between women that is affirmative and supportive, and which is also infused with humor. Hannah, nevertheless, points out something that is sadly rooted in a very harsh truth, which is that society at large would prefer seeing someone like Marnie naked, rather than Hannah. Marnie, especially, is thin, and seems to become even thinner over the next seasons, while Hannah always stays approximately the same weight, and I would argue that it is not merely a matter of laziness, but a conscious choice, a refusal to lose weight in order to look more attractive in a conventional sense. An example of Hannah being very in touch with her weight and her body is at the beginning of season two, in the first episode, “It’s About Time,” which starts out after her fight and, as we are about to learn, her subsequent breakup with Adam, is when Hannah, at the end of this episode, shows up at her new Republican boyfriend’s (played by Donald Glover) apartment, where she asks him if she can borrow The Fountainhead , after which she turns around, walks towards his bedroom, and takes off her dress with one swift motion, exposing her naked body, framing her back with her tattoos as well as her legs, and the viewer can see that she is wearing a thong. The mood in this scene is, compared to many others, and especially the scene just one episode earlier, in the season one finale, so light and so positive in terms of

24 body image, that the viewer gets a sense of Hannah’s body as completely perfect. Of course, analyzed next to all the other instances where she is naked, and juxtaposing all of those scenes up next to each other, it can be seen that overall, the representation of her body is contradictory. In order to discuss Hannah’s often contradictory mixture of self-consciousness and self-confidence, I want to take a closer look at two specific scenes in “One Man’s Trash” (2.5), which take place at Joshua’s brownstone, with whom Hannah has a brief affair over the course of two days. After having sex, Joshua asks Hannah if she wants to stay over, and they have steak and play table tennis. The scene where they play table tennis together visually signifies complete equality between Hannah and Joshua (see Fig. 4a). The screen is divided by a thick column which divides the table, and either side is occupied by Joshua or Hannah, respectively, who are both wearing the same amount of clothes, that is, underpants. One detail in this picture is a bit different, though, namely the background on Hannah’s side of the screen, which is a mostly, with the exception of a part of an open door closer to the middle, a wooden wall, looking a bit like a mosaic made up of different logs in different colors. In contrast, Joshua’s side of the screen is a fragmented glass wall, also displaying the outside. Especially when we consider what happens a bit later in the episode, this image seems to already foreshadow Hannah and Joshua’s emotional states as characters. The background behind Hannah is more restrictive, although not completely enclosing her, as there is still some glass behind her, showing the outside, and the wooden wall is fragmented. Joshua, however, stands in front of an open window, but it is also fragmented, not allowing an unhindered view of the outside world, which, significantly, is not the front of the house, which overlooks a street in Brooklyn, but the back of the house, which seems to be a somewhat wild garden. This episode as a whole, after Hannah leaves Ray’s in order to apologize to Joshua, who is a virtual stranger, for putting garbage bags into his garbage, is showing the viewer, as well as Hannah, a different perspective on the world, and it gives her an idea of real grown-up life, as the reader is aware most of the time that Hannah’s and her friends’ everyday struggles are mostly part of their transition into adulthood and independence from their parents. Hannah, enchanted by Joshua and his brownstone, engages in a completely blissful day. We can see that Joshua and Hannah enjoy playing together, and for the first time in Girls , we see Hannah having a pleasurable sexual experience that is seamlessly woven into the screen action that shows them playing table tennis (Fig. 4c). Note, however, that in the frame that depicts Joshua and Hannah having sex on the table, it is not Joshua who came onto

25 Hannah’s side of the screen, but Hannah has suddenly been transported to Joshua’s half of the screen, her underwear lying on the floor of his side. When interpreting the significance of this screen image, it seems to reflect Hannah’s “visit” at Joshua’s house as a whole. Hannah has come to Joshua’s house and was invited into his home, sharing with him his adult life, if only for two days.

Fig. 4a and 4b: Joshua and Hannah playing table tennis divided by a column, illustrating their different emotional and social backgrounds

Fig. 4c: Hannah’s naked body is cornered in the midst of a mosaic

This blissful experience at Joshua’s takes a turn to a sorrowful and, because the viewer must never forget that she is watching Girls , to an awkward experience both for Joshua and for Hannah. Hannah, after they spent the day playing and having sex, takes a shower in Joshua’s bathroom, which contains a sauna. First of all, the bathroom is interesting visually, because of the way the mosaic-looking tiles resemble the arrangement and shape of the wooden pieces in the previous scenes in Joshua’s table tennis room. This resemblance may already signify stagnation emotionally for Hannah, an inability to go beyond her own experience and shift her perspective fully. In Joshua’s shower (Fig. 4c), Hannah sits down comfortably, again showing

26 her whole naked body, and fiddles with the control panel in order to turn the shower into a sauna. There is a cut to the bathroom being extremely steamy, and after asking Hannah if she is okay without receiving an answer, Joshua opens the door and sees through the steam that Hannah has fainted. There is another cut to Joshua’s bedroom, where they sit on the bed, Hannah wrapped into a towel, Josh comforting her. It precisely here that Hannah opens herself up to Joshua, telling him dramatically that she wishes to be happy and explaining, in response to his confusion about her statement, that it cannot be taken for granted that she wants to be happy because she wants to “feel it all,” take in all possible experiences that present themselves to her in life in order to be able to write. She then claims that this specific quality, or endeavor of hers, if anything, makes her “better” than everybody else, at which point the viewer can see on Joshua’s face that having Hannah in his house has now become strange and not overall positive anymore. The situation turns awkward when Hannah realizes this change in Joshua’s behavior, after she asks him specifically what happened between and his soon-to-be ex-wife, a topic Joshua is not quite comfortable with. It becomes apparent more and more during this conversation that Joshua does not want Hannah to stay any longer, although he does not say that he wants her to leave. The situation becomes tense again when Hannah calls him “Josh,” an abbreviation he had told her earlier he is not happy with, and after Joshua corrects her again, Hannah becomes impatient, telling him that it is the same word, “with an extra sound stuck on the end” ( Girls , 2.5, “One Man’s Trash”). This comment makes Hannah seem more in control over her emotions again and despite having had an emotional moment, she is still in charge of the conversation. From a feminist perspective, this episode has been a confirmation of Hannah’s power as a woman. It was her choice to leave Ray behind at the coffee shop as it was her choice to enter Joshua’s house and, even more so, to kiss him. Having an emotional outbreak like she does towards the end of the episode also emphasizes that she is in power, and the fact that she mentions during it that she wants to feel it all and that this makes her better or more special than other people, in a way, goes along with her narcissism. In terms of character development, this episode represents a small breakthrough for Hannah because she realizes that a “normal” life has a certain appeal to her, and that she might want certain parts of it. Still, the life that she catches a glimpse of in this episode is already broken, in a way, and ultimately, she does not belong there, which is why it is not difficult for her to simply get dressed, take out the trash, and leave Joshua’s brownstone the next morning. The viewer sees Tally Schifrin talk to someone at her book party, saying, “I want to be so skinny that people are going to be, like, do you have a disease? Are you gonna die?” ( Girls ,

27 1.9, “Leave Me Alone”). Hannah bears an obvious dislike for Tally Schifrin and articulates this at the book party when she tells her friends that Tally was simply lucky that her boyfriend killed himself so that she would be able to write a book about it, to which Jessa ironically responds that Hannah also deserves to have a boyfriend who would do the same thing. Tally is represented as a beautiful woman, and Shoshanna points this out at the beginning of the episode when she says that Tally is “painfully pretty.” Although at first, Hannah’s dislike towards Tally seems to be destructive rather than constructive in terms of rivalries between women, Tally eventually inspires Hannah in this episode to give a reading of one of her short stories her former professor, whom she met at the book party, has invited her to give. Thus, Tally’s success has inspired Hannah to take more chances than she would have otherwise, and so, Hannah goes to the reading. However, this particular narrative strand also again reminds the viewer that Hannah is vulnerable to criticism, as she tells both Marnie and Ray about the story she wants to read at the reading that night and both of them react disappointed. Marnie, however, is not able to offer any usable criticism to help with the decision which story Hannah should read instead, while Ray immediately provides Hannah with numerous ideas of what she should be writing about, excitedly reciting a list that contains, divorce, acid rain, urban sprawl, the plight of the giant panda bear, and, finally, death. Hannah immediately takes his advice to heart and decides to read a story at the reading that she wrote on the subway on the way there, which is about the death of a girl’s “first internet boyfriend.” The story is not received very well and her professor, after the reading, tells her that “it didn’t come together for [him]” ( Girls , 1.9, “Leave Me Alone”), after which Hannah leaves, disappointed. All she wants once she gets home is to tell Marnie about her day, but Marnie was apparently also deeply inspired by Tally Schifrin’s book and has started to rid herself of some of her old clothes. In the episode immediately following this one, which also marks the season one finale, Hannah dramatically screams at Adam during their fight in front of Jessa and Thomas John’s wedding venue, “I am thirteen pounds overweight and it has been awful for me my whole life!” (Girls , 1.10, “She Did”) In contrast to, for example, women in Sex and the City and most other television shows, Hannah does really not seem to be a female archetype. For example, when watching Sex and the City (and this is referred to in the pilot episode of Girls ), each of the four main characters that the viewer is following represents a specific type or archetype of woman, Samantha Jones being the successful businesswoman who has uncomplicated sex, like a man; Charlotte being the most conservative woman, who is financially independent, but who willingly gives up her career for a man she has waited for her whole life; Miranda as the most

28 emancipated of the four, the only one who sometimes gets annoyed by the “girl talk” her friends enjoy so much; and, finally, Carrie, who is less of a type because she is the main character and she is therefore portrayed as a particularly brave, but also a particularly vulnerable woman, looking for true love in New York City. In Girls , there is a similar categorization into types, when we take a look at Jessa, Marnie, and Shoshanna. Marnie is financially independent, Jessa is sexually liberated, and Shoshanna, still a virgin, lives off her parents’ money being a student at NYU. Hannah, a bit like Carrie in Sex and the City , is less of an archetype; her financial stability fluctuates more than that of the other characters, she wants to have a creative job, and her sexual experiences are more nuanced, or, rather, less easily categorized than those of the other characters. What is different about the characters in Girls , however, is that the characters start out as certain “types,” but each of these conceptions is later reconfigured. Girls is, after all, about the life of millennials who are trying to make it in New York City at an economically difficult time and are still growing up in their early to mid-twenties. Marnie loses her job and makes a series of poor choices, Jessa’s sexual liberation has various consequences, ranging from an unwanted pregnancy to causing substantial trouble in her marriage with Thomas John (who wanted to have a threesome with her and Marnie when they first met), and Shoshanna loses her virginity, gets into a serious relationship too quickly, and falls behind in her studies. In “On All Fours,” (Season 2, Episode 9), Adam is getting coffee with his new girlfriend, Natalia, and upon seeing her put artificial sweeteners in her coffee. He asks her about it, learning that “the other stuff” will make her fat, to which he replies, “I’d rather have you fat and healthy” ( Girls , 2.9, “On All Fours”). Natalia represents a type of woman that is more commonly portrayed in the media than the type of woman Hannah represents. Natalia is conscious about her figure and consequently she is careful about what she eats and drinks, she wears nice, complementing clothes, and she is, as Hannah notices when she runs into Adam and Natalia at an engagement party, “the kind of girlfriend whose friends get engaged” ( Girls , -“On All Fours”). Contrastingly, after Hannah and Adam get together as a couple in the first season, Hannah makes an effort to become fit, at least once. She and Adam go running together at the beginning of “Weirdos Need Girlfriends, Too,” which is cut short by Hannah, who lies down in the middle of the street, declaring that “endorphins don’t work on [her]” (Season 1, Episode 8). Food is often referred to in Girls , and it is mostly used in references to Hannah’s weight or her eating habits. In the “Crackcident” episode, food even becomes part of a short anecdote Hannah tells Adam’s lesbian friend, Tako, who offers Hannah a drink, to which she

29 responds that she better not drink because “the last time [she] got drunk [she] ate all this brie and threw up on [her] cell phone” (Season 1, Episode 7). In season 3, Hannah starts to work at GQ magazine and is completely amazed when her colleague shows her the snack room. Excited, Hannah asks him about how employees pay for the snacks and beverages they take or if there is an “honor system.” After he tells her that everything is free Hannah brings home an assortment of snacks that night to Adam, who immediately tells her that they should not eat any of it because it’s all processed “shit” ( Girls , 3.1, “Free Snacks”). “I’m eating grapes as a snack,” Hanna declares at the beginning of season four, indicating a healthier body and mind. In season 2, Hannah is often seen eating whipped cream directly out of a cup or olives directly out of a jar, which emphasizes the immediacy between Hannah’s hunger and the food she consumes. In turn, this mirrors Hannah’s psychological state as well, as we see her eating compulsively the most when her OCD symptoms come to the surface. Hannah goes from her snack-obsession to a more conscious way of eating only in season four, when she moves to Iowa, which represents a significant new beginning in Hannah’s life as an adult, but is then cut short when she leaves about a month later to go back to New York City. Marnie, in season three, also makes an interesting remark about Hannah’s outer appearance when Hannah’s parents, at her birthday party, mention how wonderful she looks, at which point Marnie comments, “doesn’t she? I keep telling her she could look like this every day if she wanted.” The way Hannah represents herself is highly significant and often clashes with the way other characters seem to perceiver her, or, more importantly, with the way Hannah talks about her own body. Hannah renders her body into the center of numerous contradictions and paradoxes, demonstrated clearly by Hannah’s approaches to nutrition and her refusal to lose weight, while at the same time complaining about her figure and general appearance. Hannah simultaneously embodies a postfeminist woman who wants to look pretty, dress fashionably and who will follow make-up instructions from magazines; and a feminist “riot grrrl,” getting tattoos instead of working out, accepting herself and wearing and saying whatever she wants, despite, or because of, postfeminist (or perhaps misogynistic) beauty ideals.

1.3. “Throwing” Abortions – Liberated Bodies in New York City

Girls, as a successor of Sex and the City , in the portrayal young women’s lives in New York City, “paints a millennial generation that not only idealizes being artists, but also worships creative cities – places where many creative people live” (Erigha 145). This, I would argue, is

30 an important factor in the decisions the girls in Girls make, and in the ways they act as women. Hannah, especially, as the writer she is, or at least wants to be, belongs or at least wants to belong in New York City. With respect to this, Lena Dunham does something very similar with Girls (which she has also done with her first feature film, Tiny Furniture), something that Woody Allen, for example, has done for most of his creative career, which is portray New York City as the place she has grown up in, where she has developed as a woman and as a person, the place where she, just like most of the writers and artists that she admires, can pursue a writing career. In the pilot episode of Girls , Hannah tells her parents about the book that she is writing and that is supposed to be a memoir, comprised of about eight stories about her experiences, and she points out that she has to “live them first.” Doubtless, she feels these experiences are best to be “lived” in New York City, as one only has to look at the setting of similar recent stories about women, such as Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004), 30 Rock (NBC, 2006-2013), Broad City (Comedy Central, 2014-present), and, most recently, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt , which premiered on Netflix on March 6, 2015. Girls , as it portrays the millennial generation, puts more emphasis on characters who aspire to creative careers and the environment that fosters these careers than any other show, even more so, I would argue, than Sex and the City . As Erigha states with respect to this aspect of Girls , “Hannah builds her creative life around adventures that she does ‘for the story,’ such as doing cocaine and having diverse sexual encounters. Jessa and Hannah even brand their sexually transmitted infection as an experience” (Erigha 147). This leads me to one particular problem I want to discuss that merges feminist, postfeminist, and intertexutal approaches to the analysis of Girls , namely the topic of abortion. Characters like Hannah prioritize their creative career and the sexual liberation that enables them to have the experiences needed for their potential memoirs. As women’s bodies are liberated, so is their ability to express themselves, which includes being able to talk openly about issues such as abortion. Hannah already refers to the subject of abortion in the pilot episode when she mentions at dinner with her parents that a friend of hers “had two abortions and nobody came with her,” arguing that this happened as a direct result of this friend’s parents not supporting their daughter any longer. Hannah’s mother responds, “What does that have to do with anything?” ( Girls , Pilot). In Sex and the City , for example, the topic of abortion is dealt with, but this discussion is limited to the narrative of one episode. Contrastingly, in Girls it is incorporated in different contexts and different episodes, capturing the zeitgeist of the era the show is set in and the generation of millennials it portrays more accurately. One other

31 example that is worth mentioning in this context is the 2014 film Obvious Child , written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, which depicts abortion and romance in a realistic way while at the same time defying conventions of the romantic comedy genre, as well as some of the established conventions of narratives about abortion. In Girls , Dunham incorporates the topic of abortion in a comedic way, and frequently so. When Hannah’s parents tell her in the pilot episode that they will not support her any longer financially, one of Hannah’s arguments against that decision, apart from arguing that her parents should feel lucky because she is not a drug addict, is that, as discussed before, her “friend Sophie, her parents don’t support her. Last summer, she had two abortions, right in a row, and no one came with her.” A bit later, in the first season’s second episode, Jessa has an abortion scheduled and when Hannah leaves Adam’s house after yet another instance of awkward sex, Adam asks her what her plans for the day are, after which Hannah brings up that she is “actually accompanying a friend to her abortion.” Hannah’s conversation with Adam about abortion is tense because Hannah talks about abortion in a very casual way, while Adam reacts surprised to her casualness, reminding her that the matter at hand is still more than an everyday discussion topic. At the clinic, while the girls are waiting for Jessa, who is running extremely late, Hannah asks Marnie, who is upset about Jessa’s absence, “how could she ruin the beautiful abortion that you threw? […] You’re a really good friend and you threw a really good abortion” ( Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). Hannah also reassures Marnie that Jessa does not have to be scared of the abortion because she is sure that “they have done it a million times before,” which is a paradoxical statement in that it would be a very positive thing to say about, for example, appendectomies, but when we talk about abortion, it is a somehow “loaded” statement as it invokes the discussion of abortion rights and women’s rights concerning making decisions about their own bodies, but also about the fact that too many women are not careful enough about protection. Hannah also remarks this in this episode when she is arguing with Adam that she has little sympathy for people who do not use condoms (cf. Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). In summation, the way abortion is dealt with in Girls captures the paradoxes and contradictions that arise with the discussion of such a problematic topic, and this can be attributed to the discrepancy between the almost blasé attitude towards the topic (represented by Hannah) in a postmodern New York City, where women with liberated bodies are able to make choices for themselves, and, in contrast to this, a reminder that it is not an easy choice to make. This reminder is represented by both Adam, as mentioned above, and Marnie, who also tells Hannah that she should not take the matter lightly and that she “got worked up” on the

32 train on the way to the doctor (cf. Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). Jessa, meanwhile, seems to be the only character who has not talked and does not talk about her own pregnancy and abortion at all. She, therefore, may represent the voices that are still repressed and who are too afraid to even talk about it, although she is the one who is experiencing it. With this, the viewer is confronted with young women who have never been confronted with abortion and are at the same able to talk about the topic of abortion freely, while the only person who is actually confronted by this choice does not voice her opinion, but is spoken for by others. Hannah, especially, represents more than a blasé attitude. When she talks about Jessa’s abortion, as discussed above, Hannah seems to expect women to not only make a choice, but she expects women to automatically choose abortion. Through this expectation, Hannah removes women’s choice again. This situation clearly illustrates that there are certainly still many contradictions and paradoxes to be tackled when it comes to open discussions about women’s rights.

1.4. HPV and the Casualties of Liberated Sex

Sexually transmitted diseases such as HPV as consequences of liberated sex in the big city and elsewhere are dealt with at the beginning of the first season of Girls , and although the subject is more often discussed in reference to female bodies than male bodies, it concerns women and men alike. As one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, HPV (human papillomavirus), is dealt with in two consecutive Girls episodes, namely episode 1.2, “Vagina Panic” and 1.3, “All Adventurous Women Do,” together with the subject of abortion, which I discussed in the previous chapter. Hannah is displaying her neurotic obsession with health issues typing questions into Google that most other people would be unlikely to even think about, such as “stuff that gets up around the sides of condoms,” which she also mentions at her appointment with the gynecologist. There is generally a tremendous amount of innocence and naivety that is juxtaposed with the girls’ liberal talk about sex. Shoshanna’s logic when she tells Hannah that it would be okay to sleep with her ex-boyfriend Elijah because they both have HPV already is exemplary for this naivety. When Hannah mentions to Elijah that he must have given HPV to her when they were together in college (when Elijah was still in the closet) because Adam “got tested and he doesn’t have it,” Elijah tells her, not without schadenfreude that “there is no test for men.” Hannah’s obsession with, but lack of concrete knowledge about certain common diseases is also referred to by Marnie when she says that Hannah has “always been obsessed with getting AIDS,” to which Hannah quickly

33 adds that she is not a fool and that she has a fear of HIV that is going to turn into AIDS. In fact, the girls’ knowledge about AIDS seems to mostly come from their knowledge about pop culture, according to naïve statements such as, “I have very bad fear of AIDS […] It's more of a Forrest Gump based fear ; that's what Robin Wright Penn's character died of" (Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). Hannah’s conversation with her gynecologist gets even more uncomfortable when Hannah talks herself into a frenzy about wanting AIDS so that she would have something to Blame Adam for that was actually tragic instead of the emotional strain that he is putting on her by being distant. Shoshanna’s innocence and lack of knowledge when it comes to sex, and related problems and diseases is even more ignorant, when she says to Hannah, “a little bird told me that you are getting an STD test. Fun!” (Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). Shoshanna’s uncertainty about how to talk about sexually transmitted diseases seems to stem from the fact that she is a virgin which she confesses to Marnie when they are waiting for Jessa to show up for her own abortion. During the girls’ conversation about AIDS, Shoshanna responds to Marnie’s attempt to calm Hannah that AIDS is “not that easy to contract,” by pointing out that “ it’s not that hard to contract either though, like, haven’t you seen Rent ?,” thus again drawing her knowledge about the probability of contracting AIDS from a pop culture reference. Marnie, not surprisingly, responds, “of course I’ve seen Rent , that’s basically why I moved to New York” (Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). One of the most paradoxical conversations arising with respect to Hannah’s affliction with HPV is when she tells Marnie that she has it in a conversation on the phone. First, Marnie starts to sob, which surprises Hannah, who tells Marnie that it is not really anything to worry about at all. After Marnie calms down, she reminds Hannah that rent will be due soon, to which Hannah replies, “I have pre-cancer!” ( Girls , 1.3, “All Adventurous Women Do”), dramatizing the issue simply in order to postpone having to assume responsibility for as long as possible. This is another of those examples where paradoxes and contradictions arise because of a character’s personal hypocrisy, but also with respect to feminism and women’s health issues. The characters are aware of the severity of their conditions on the one hand, but in the age of information technology (Hannah, for example, obsessively googles all sorts of questions about her body) where information is readily available and self-diagnosing is frequent, women’s health problems are often taken less seriously. In the same episode, Hannah and Shoshanna watch Baggage together, a dating game show hosted by Jerry Springer on Game Show Network, where the contestants have to reveal personal secrets that they categorize by their importance as either small, medium-sized, or large baggage items. Shoshanna asks Hannah about what she would put into her baggage,

34 only to interrupt Hannah’s answer in order to immediately state her own baggage from small to big. Shoshanna’s bags contain her IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), the fact that she does not love her grandmother, and the fact that she is a virgin, the last of which Hannah contests when she says that it will become invalid as soon as Shoshanna will have sex for the first time. Hannah’s baggage from small to big, according to herself, is that she is “unfit for any and all paying jobs,” that she just bought three cupcakes and ate two in Shoshanna’s bathroom, and the fact that she has HPV. Shoshanna’s opinion about Hannah’s HPV is that it is really not so bad because Jessa has “a couple of strains” of it, and Jessa says that “all adventurous women do” (cf. Girls , 1.3, All Adventurous Women Do”). With respect to a postmodernist reading of Girls , this scene is a perfect example of the utilization of more or less serious personal problems for the purpose of entertainment, and Shoshanna and Hannah prove that it works, as Shoshanna is completely transfixed by the game show, which is then even able to spark a conversation between both of them. References to Sex and the City are frequent, for example, when Shoshanna asks Jessa upon her arrival at Shoshanna’s apartment in the pilot episode whether Jessa likes her Sex and the City poster, a show that Jessa has never watched. Another verbal reference to Sex and the City is made by Shoshanna when the girls are at Tally Schifrin’s book party for her memoir, Leave me Alone and Shoshanna exclaims, “this is, like, the most SATC” ( Girls , 1.9, “Leave Me Alone”). And again, the events that follow this exclamation indicate that the “real” life of the young women in Girls is far less glamorous than Sex and the City . I would argue that these contradictory female viewpoints of how best to deal with sexually transmitted diseases as manifestations of postfeminism, rather than feminism, as Hannah views the contraction and presence of her HPV as something more or less normal (which is also emphasized by the fact that Jessa, the most liberal of the women, takes having HPV for granted). At the same time, she clearly displays a lack of awareness of “the operations of social power and authority” (Gerhard 37) when trying to put the contraction of a sexually transmitted into perspective regarding her relationship with men. Furthermore, Dunham employs comical elements in her portrayal of the issue as well when she has Hannah instantly believe Adam that he “has been tested” and, instead of claiming space in order to deal with her disease, asks him if he will still sleep with her. Hannah displays the same kind of comical “chick” attitude when she meets her college-boyfriend Elijah in order to talk to him about her HPV, believing that there might still be a spark between them, only to find out that he is gay. With these instances, Hannah displays a form of postfeminist thinking that questions female self-empowerment as much as it discards them comically.

35

1.5. The Obsessive (-Compulsive) Woman

Whenever mental health issues are depicted, women usually serve as the vessel to do so, at least historically. The “hysterical” woman as a concept in the mid to late nineteenth century is still often discussed with respect to women’s literature, one of the most famous examples being “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892). When looked at through a feminist lens, the depiction of female hysteria and the way it has changed, or not changed, over the centuries is important when we consider the way the notion of the female sex was shaped and reshaped over time. As Judith Butler states, “[…] Foucault understands his own project to be an inquiry into how the category of ‘sex’ and sexual difference are constructed within discourse as necessary features of bodily identity” (Butler, GT 130). In our postmodern society, and in contemporary arts, literature, and culture, I would argue that there is room for serious discussion of mental health issues and diseases that afflict mental stability, but it is an issue that must no longer be restricted to women. When looking at the range of narratives in television and film more closely, however, there is a certain pattern that becomes apparent in the distribution of different types of mental issues; there are certainly more male serial killers such as Dexter (from ‘s Showtime’s Dexter, 2006-2016), Hannibal Lecter, and Patrick Bateman (from Bret Easton Ellis’s 2000 novel American Psycho ), just to name a few, and, on the other end of the spectrum, more psychotic women (a quick look at IMDb’s list of “250 films with neurotic, disturbed, psychotic and schizophrenic women” would be enough for the purpose of examples). So, how is the subject of mental health dealt with in Girls ? When it comes to the depiction of concrete diseases, Hannah’s obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a substantial part of the storyline of the last three episodes of season three. Towards the end of the second season, Hannah ruptures her eardrum during the intense return of her symptoms of OCD because she is not able to control herself while cleaning out her ear with a q-tip. During this flair-up of OCD symptoms, she also cuts her own hair and experiences physical symptoms of her disorder, such as twitching. The flair-up coincides with stress she experiences because of the pressure she is under because of the e-book she is supposed to write. By the time Hannah relapses into the full spectrum of obsessive- compulsive disorder symptoms she had experienced as a child, the viewer is already accustomed to Hannah’s narcissistic tendency to dramatize things. Even Hannah’s own mother, on a visit to New York with Hannah’s father to attend a conference about Anne Patchett and in order to see Hannah, mentions that Hannah always found excuses in order not to have to do things that she did not want to do ( Girls , 2.8, “It’s Back). This tendency is often

36 used in order to create comic situations, such as when Hannah calls herself an “undiagnosed hypoglycemic” (a person suffering from chronic low blood sugar. Hannah’s symptoms of OCD take charge of her narrative for several episodes, and here, Lena Dunham’s role as writer and director of Girls , its auteur , certainly plays a significant role, as the obsessive-compulsive disorder Hannah is suffering from is also something that Lena Dunham herself has been suffering from since childhood. This fact aside, to what extent could the depiction of this disorder be interpreted as a metaphor for female passivity or lack of control? Hannah is generally less, or not at all, in control of her body and her actions; she becomes passive and is shown in scenes that take place at her apartment, where she spends her time trying to write her e-book, but instead looking up various anxious questions about ailments of the body online and eating. In one of these scenes, Hannah sits on the wooden floor of her and Marnie’s apartment eating a jar of olives, when she suddenly starts sliding across the floor in order to get a cushion from the couch and promptly gets a splinter stuck in her behind. After removing the splinter with tweezers, she starts cleaning out her ears with the q-tip that that marks the lowest point of her obsessive-compulsive period. It must be taken into account that Adam’s behavior towards Hannah becomes increasingly obsessive after Hannah breaks up with him at the end of season two, which continues through the beginning of season three. Adam’s obsession with Hannah, which leads him to stalk her a bit later in the season, is a significant trigger for her OCD symptoms to return. How does this dynamic affect the season’s outcome? What does it tell us about Hannah as a female lead character, and what effect might this portrayal have on the viewers, especially female viewers? Hannah, in the second episode of season two, “I Get Ideas,” calls the police on Adam when he comes to her apartment unannounced and uninvited with the keys Hannah gave him when they were still together. When Adam refuses to leave, Hannah tells him that this is “space rape” and only after Hannah yells “go away” at Adam numerous times in a row and pushes him while yelling, does Adam realize that it might be time for him to leave. However, when, seconds later two police officers arrive and talk to Hannah and Adam from the stairwell, Adam points out that Hannah has also stalked him in the past, coming to his house unannounced. This is interesting in terms of the dynamic between Hannah and Adam and the question who has the power, and who can control the other. Even though season two starts with this incident and Adam is presented as one of the reasons why Hannah’s OCD symptoms return, she lets Adam rescue her at the end of the season. This will be discussed in more depth in the following chapter.

37 Not related to Hannah’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, but nevertheless important in terms of the portrayal of obsessive women, or women who have problems with mental problems, or are portrayed as “hysterical,” is the appearance of Adam’s sister Caroline at the beginning of season three, in the third episode, “She Said OK.” She visits Hannah and Adam, coming out of an abusive relationship and apparently not in possession of much money. Caroline is portrayed as crazy and unpredictable, as she stands between Hannah and Adam when Adam wants to throw her out of their apartment, while Hannah is compassionate towards her as another woman and is compelled to let her stay when Caroline shows her a bruise on her leg for which her ex-boyfriend is responsible.

Fig. 5: Caroline as the embodiment of feminine liberation and depression

Later in the episode, Caroline attends Hannah’s birthday party and tries to dance with Ray, who is not interested. At the birthday party, the attention is focused away from Caroline and mostly on other events, but when Hannah and Adam come home, Hannah opens the door to the bathroom and finds Caroline standing in the bathroom, wearing a top but no bottom, displaying her pubic hair and holding a glass in her hand, which she then suddenly crushes in her bare hands (see Fig. 5). This scene is highly important in establishing another power dynamic between men and women, and in this particular case, between brother and sister. It is not clear with affliction (perhaps depression) that can be specifically described, if any, Caroline suffers from, although Adam mentions a certain history concerning her unpredictable and sometimes violent, or at least highly provocative, behavior, which Caroline displays when she breaks the glass as seen in Fig. 5. After returning from the hospital, Hannah tells Caroline that she can stay at their apartment for a while. Caroline stays at their home for a little while, and Hannah occasionally spends time with her, but then Hannah comes home one day and gets into a fight with Caroline during which Caroline analyzes Hannah’s relationship with Adam and says derogatory things about him, which ends in Hannah kicking

38 her out of the apartment. The fact that Hannah is the one to tell Caroline to leave is an interesting turn, and it somehow also sheds light on how contradictory Hannah’s decisions are when it comes to taking advice. The viewer has seen Hannah take relationship advice from her coworkers whom she barely knows, but she will not take advice from her boyfriend’s sister – perhaps because she is too intense, more intense, even, than Hannah. This example of Hannah taking charge, as well as her as her contradictory way of dealing with her OCD systems, using them to manipulate her family and friends, while at the same time displaying real anxiety about a mental health issue, gives the viewer another idea of a postfeminist, rather than feminist, portrayal of millennials.

2. Character Development and Self-Empowerment

When watching Girls , there are numerous contradictions to be found with respect to the progression of the show’s plot in terms of female character development. Frequently, an event or development which could be considered self-empowering in a feminist sense, or postfeminist sense, for a specific character, is cancelled out in another, later episode, or merely a few scenes later, and vice versa. Furthermore, there are some paradoxes to be seen in Girls with respect to what a character is saying as opposed to what the same character is doing at the same time. With respect to aspects of performativity in Girls ( cf. Judith Butler, GT 191), we have to look at the narrative in terms of what kinds of acts are repeated by the characters and if there are any counterpoints to repeated behavior, asking ourselves where the characters try to escape this constant repetition and reassert themselves only for themselves as women. With respect to the repetition that is necessary to “produce” gender, Judith Butler asks, In what senses, then, is gender an act? As in other ritual social dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated . This repetition is at once, a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation. Although there are individual bodies that enact these significations by becoming stylized into gendered modes, this ‘action’ is a public action […] (Butler, GT 191)

When Hannah, for example, at the beginning of season two, talks about her new boyfriend and that she is planning to make smarter choices, Marnie counters her argument and simply states, “yeah, until Adam shows up and asks you to wash his nutsack” ( Girls , 2.1, “It’s About Time”), pointing out that Hannah is easily manipulated by Adam. When it comes to Adam, Hannah often seems to be unable to stop herself from repeating the same kind of performance over and over again. This repeated performance in the presence of Adam and because of his

39 presence is subservience, resulting from Hannah’s eagerness to please Adam in many respects. In season one, for instance, Adam sends Hannah a picture of his penis, with a piece of fur wrapped around it, only to text her immediately after that this picture was not meant for her. As viewers, we can only assume that Hannah is shocked, or hurt, by the text message that follows the picture Adam sends her, but Hannah subverts our ideas of how she might react by answering Adam’s text message with a nude picture of herself. Instead of confronting Adam verbally, Hannah decides to let her body speak for her. Later, however, we learn that this incident indeed hurt Hannah, and she decides to break up with Adam. Again, the situation is turned around completely when Adam kisses her and Hannah succumbs to his masculine charm. This presents yet another example where the viewer can detect contradictions between the way characters act, or try to act, and what they are feeling, discrepancies between “tough” outer appearances in contrast to their vulnerabilities. This is what is exemplified in “Boys,” episode six of season two, where Ray is accompanied to Staten Island by Adam, only to be abandoned by Adam after they get into an unreasonable argument about Hannah. At the end of the episode, we see Ray sitting on a bench overlooking Manhattan, where he starts crying, overcome by feelings of failure; he is dating Shoshanna at that time and she found out shortly before that Ray is currently homeless and has been living with her under false pretenses. Hannah and Marnie often represent completely opposite poles when it comes to relationships, which causes friction between them. With their mutual criticisms, they point out aspects of each others’ relationships that each of them would respectively have ignored otherwise. For example, Marnie reminds Hannah of the fact that Hannah is, in fact, not in a relationship with Adam at the beginning of season one when Hannah tells her about how miserable Adam makes her sometimes with his changing behavior towards her, to which Marnie simply replies, “Adam cannot do that to you. He can’t, he’s not allowed, he’s not your boyfriend” (Girls , 1.5, “Hard Being Easy”). Hannah, on the other hand, points out uncomfortable aspects about Marnie’s relationship with Charlie, her boyfriend of four years. Hannah advises Marnie to break up with him, after Marnie tells her that she does not feel attracted to Charlie any more. At the same time, however. On the one hand, Hannah’s choice to break up with Adam and tell him that she does not want to be with him ever again can be seen as a bold step forward for herself as a woman, realizing that she should take her time deciding what she wants. On the other hand, she has already begun dating someone else while still constantly spending at Adam’s house. This seems to stem from Hannah’s feelings of guilt because she is partly to blame for Adam getting hit by a car in the first place, but the viewer

40 can also assume that Hannah is still also partly enjoying spending time with Adam. This is evident when, for example, Hannah watches a movie with Adam at his apartment. There are not really any conspicuous or radical inversions in Girls in terms of gender appearance, which highlights the evident postfeminism of the show, as the girls exactly as they would be expected to act, or they think they are expected to act, which is overall “girly.” Hannah may diverge from normative standards of beauty in various ways, but she is never portrayed as masculine. The constant depiction of Hannah’s breasts, however, is portraying her as a feminine woman on the one hand, but on the other hand, it is reasserting a certain sense of body-comfort and confidence that differentiates her from other, more self-conscious, heroines in television series. Girls sometimes subverts expectations of the genders, but almost always comes back to where these subversions started to take shape, therefore creating countless paradoxes in the characters’ developments the way that female empowerment is portrayed.

2.1. Who are the Ladies? – Paradoxical Self-Identification

The numerous contradictions in how Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna identify themselves as millennials living in New York City raise many questions about feminism, and postfeminism, both in a broader social scope and in contemporary popular television. Some of these questions have already been addressed, but this chapter will provide another, closer look at these four women’s fluid identities and their attempts to assert their identities as women. As Melinda M. Lewis points out, “love, desire and sex are further complicated with the advent of postfeminist culture, which has sought to capitalize on the success of early feminist movements,” further elaborating that “postfeminism fosters reluctance in young women who are nervous about firmly claiming themselves feminists within the current cultural context” (Lewis 174). “Who are the ladies?” is the first question Jessa asks when Shoshanna is reading to her and Hannah from a fictional advice book called Listen Ladies: A Tough Love Approach to the Tough Game of Love . “This woman doesn’t care about what I want,” Jessa points out when Shoshanna tries to convince her that they, and women in general, are “the ladies” the author is referring to. Jessa blurts out that she’s “offended by all the ‘supposed-tos’” and further states that she does not “like women telling other women what to do or how to do it or when to do it. Every time I have sex, it’s my choice” ( Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). The girls often make attempts at defining themselves deliberately as different, as individuals, and as

41 feminists, which seems to be necessary for them to assert themselves in a postmodern society in which individualism seems to be becoming difficult to even conceptualize. Friendship is often portrayed as more important than romantic relationships in Girls , but there are at the same time many instances where this sense of the initially established prioritization of friendship is contradicted by performative acts. For example, Marnie and Jessa complain about Hannah being unavailable in the first season after Hannah and Adam become an official couple. Ironically, an important reason why Marnie and Jessa are getting closer as friends is because Marnie and Charlie have recently broken up and Marnie needs someone to talk to and would have otherwise most probably spent the night with Charlie if they were still together. Marnie’s criticism of Hannah’s behavior while she is engaging in a similarly selfish kind of behavior illustrates a mixture of paradoxical notions of self- identification and personal hypocrisy. There are a number of instances where characters are talking or thinking consciously about their respective self-conceptions. An iconic scene where Hannah is contemplating different ideas for her twitter feed (for example, “You lose some, you lose some” and “My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy”) until she finally chooses “All adventurous women do,” disregarding her first two ideas, which were far more negative and self- indulgently melancholic. These first statements she writes down in order to tweet them, and, in contrast, the tweet she chooses in the end, represent a positive choice in terms of Hannah’s self-identification and one of her high points in the show. The contradictory feelings that Hannah is experiencing are visually represented when the viewer is first shown only her computer screen, and then briefly her facial expression. These feelings are simultaneous, paradoxical feelings, signifying that several different ideas representative of feminism and postfeminism can exist next to each other. When Hannah changes her tweet, she also changes the song that her computer is playing at the time from a sad ballad to an upbeat dance song. Marnie comes home and finds Hannah dancing in her room and decides to dance with her. Hannah, with respect to asserting her identity as a woman who wants to have as many experiences as possible in order to be able to write about them, will comically suggest sex in the most unlikely situations. It happens various times that it is in fact Hannah who, after an awkward argument or a fight with a man, still tries to have sex with him. For example, after having an argument with Adam over the question whether it was he who gave Hannah HPV, Hannah’s question at the end of their conversation is, simply, whether or not Adam will still have sex with her. After breaking up with her boyfriend Sandy because he did not like her essay, she ends the conversation by asking him if he wants to “have sex, still,” and after he

42 declines she tells him that she only asked him because she “didn’t want [him] to have blue balls” ( Girls , 2.2, “I Get Ideas”). One of the most comical contradictions to come from Hannah during an argument is when she and Adam are arguing about their recent breakup in season two and Adam, afraid to lose Hannah, and not being able to believe in the reality of the breakup quite yet points out to Hannah, “you said that I made your whole body feel like it was a clit,” to which Hannah initially responds that she never said that, to which Adam shortly protests until Hannah says to him, “okay, and I meant it!” ( Girls , 2.1, “It’s About Time”).

2.2 Who are the Leaders? – Empowering “Careers”

Girls portrays the lives of young women who have finished college very recently and are starting careers in New York City. Jobs and job opportunities shape the girls’ self- identification. Therefore, it is important to look at this aspect of Girls and in what ways their careers are different from the men’s careers. In 2014, Betty Kaklamanidou and Margaret Tally edited the first anthology that deals exclusively with Lena Dunham’s Girls , titled HBO’s Girls: Questions of Gender, Politics, and Millennial Angst , published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, a work that presents the reader with a variety of aspects investigated by thirteen different scholars. One of the overarching questions dealt with in this work is how millennial men and women try to interact with each other in an era that presents them with a “changed set of economic, political and social circumstances” (cf. Kaklamanidou and Tally 2). For instance, Marnie works as a curator at a gallery but is fired later in season two because her boss, the owner of the gallery (who is a woman) cannot afford two employees any longer and keeps her other employee Julian, who is not as qualified as Marnie However, when Marnie asks her why she would rather keep Julian, she responds, “Well, I fuck Julian, so he could sue me.” Marnie is then not able to find another curatorial position and starts working as a hostess at club that is mostly frequented by older business men. Marnie is mocked for taking this position from all sides. Hannah tells her that she is only making a very small amount at Grumpy’s, the coffee shop Ray manages, “but that’s clean money, like, I’ve made a choice […] not to cash in on my sexuality” (Girls , 2.3, “Bad Friend”). Charlie’s new girlfriend Audrey also criticizes Marnie by asking what it is that she is doing specifically and if by hostess she means that she is hosting a slam poetry night or open mic night; while Ray, Shoshanna’s boyfriend at the time, tells her one day that she “can’t keep dressing like a magician’s assistant” forever. Audrey’s critique of Marnie’s way of making money is especially problematic in terms of empowerment, because her attack on Marnie underlines

43 their rivalry . Their rivalry is, firstly, due to Audrey dating Marnie’s ex-boyfriend Charlie, and secondly, Audrey is a blogger who just started her own mustard company, so there is also a different sense of jealousy to be detected in Marnie’s resentment towards Audrey. The fact that Marnie’s development as a character is slowed down by this rivalry instead of encouragement by another woman to do something creative highlights a more profound lack of positive feminist thinking in general and once again blurs the boundaries between feminism and postfeminism as a countermovement. Hannah, as was already mentioned in the introduction to this paper, is trying to be dramatic when she says in the pilot episode of Girls that she “may be the voice of [her] generation”, but as viewers we might get the sense that she might also be serious. In season two, when her editor tells her that she could be writing about her “lost generation,” Hannah is, paradoxically, when we think back to what she told her parents in the pilot, amazed that someone would think that. After giving up her internship of two years, Hannah takes on a position at a law firm and immediately becomes subject to sexual harassment by her new employer, Rich. “I’m just a touchy kind of guy,” he tells Hannah after patting her buttocks. When Hannah tells her co-workers that Rich “touched [her] breasts a little bit,” (see Fig. 6) her colleagues tell her that she will “get used to it,” and that they tolerate Rich’s behavior because he is an otherwise nice and generous employer (Girls , 1.4, “Hannah’s Diary”).

Fig. 6a and 6b: Sexual harassment in a New York office

While Hannah’s co-workers tolerate Rich’s behavior, Hannah is taken aback by it and finds it difficult to simply accept this type of sexual harassment as an everyday normality at her workplace. However, instead of speaking to Rich about the fact that the touching makes her uncomfortable, Hannah resorts to other means. Rich in fact asks Hannah on one occasion to simply tell him if the “touching ever bothers [her],” adding that he is “just a touchy kind of guy” ( Girls , 1.5, “Hard Being Easy”), which Hannah ignores as she walks out of the door to his office, perhaps because she assumed, as the viewer is intended to, that it ought not to be necessary for a female employee to be required to tell her employer that it is in fact very

44 bothersome for him to touch her inappropriately. Hannah, after talking to Jessa about the matter, who tells her that she considers it a flattering thing and advises her to “hump” him, walks into Richard’s office and tries to seduce him, which merely makes Richard laugh innocently, telling Hannah that he is a married man. Hannah, perhaps relieved, but also disappointed in her seduction skills, threatens to sue and extort Rich together with her coworkers, which he also fails to take seriously, telling her that there is no “suing app” on her iPhone (cf. Girls , 1.5, “Hard Being Easy”). Hannah then quits and tells Richard that one day she will write a story about him and that she will not change his name, again emphasizing her desire to do things “for the story,” which is exactly what she tells Adam later that same day when she relates the incident to him, referring to it as “a sex-scandal in [her] office.” This marks the beginning of another period of unemployment for Hannah. There is some significance in the men’s jobs as well. For example, Jeff, who was mentioned in this paper’s first chapter, is unemployed, while his wife Katherine works in the creative industry, producing or directing documentaries. This arrangement could be considered progressive in terms of feminist criticism, as Katherine keeps her high-paying job. Jeff stays at home because the yuppie-couple has two daughters. However, we are introduced to Jeff and Katherine because they hire Jessa as their babysitter. When Jessa is at their apartment for the first time, right before Katherine has to leave to shoot her documentary, Jeff is not present yet, but he returns home that night after having been to a show at the Bowery Ballroom. Jessa and Jeff’s conversation continues after he asks her if she smokes pot. After Jeff does not want to specify what he does for living, Jessa, as well as the viewer, learns that Jeff has no job. The first question that arises from this new information is where Jeff has been all day and why Katherine and he need a babysitter when Jeff currently has no place to be during the day. This arises from a commonsensical expectation that whichever parent has the necessary time should care for the children. So far, the viewer has seen Jeff come home from a concert, smoke weed with his daugthers’ babysitter, and a bit later we see him walking with a friend when Jessa has just picked up his daughters from school. When Jeff says to Jessa and the children that he and his friend are talking about work, even his six-year old daughter finds this funny and points out that he does not “even have a job” ( Girls , 1.4, “Hannah’s Diary”). Marnie, after Charlie breaks up with her, has a breakdown like those that the viewer is expected to have seen in various movies, one example being Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), where the female lead seems to spend days at home in her pajamas, eating junk food and, in Marnie’s case, obsessively browsing Charlie’s Facebook profile on her laptop and judging his new girlfriend, Audrey. This display of post-breakup depression has certainly become a cliché

45 in the past decade, arguably even earlier than that, and Marnie’s behavior, which she herself describes as being in the process of “dealing with the deeply painful fact that I’m probably not going to end up with him” ( Girls , 1, Episode 8, “Weirdos need Girlfriends Too”), is perhaps a mixture between postfeminism and a backlash to pre-feminism. After Marnie has been presented as the girl who had her life together the most, with a paying job at an art gallery, her breakdown after losing her boyfriend seems even more irrational when considering the fact that from the very first episode, Marnie has been complaining about her relationship with Charlie and that her sexual interest in him has faded.

2.3. Problematic Power Relations

In the girls’ romantic relationships, who holds the power over the other shifts frequently and sometimes it is not clear who is in charge of where the relationship is going. When we look at the power-relations in Girls from a feminist perspective, we hope to find that mostly the women are the ones who have power of their own lives and that they consequently also have an equal part in their relationships. From a postfeminist perspective, however, it is possible that the girls do not see the need to always be in charge of their own bodies and minds and that they are possibly willing to give some of this power to the male sex. The question that arises here is which of the problematic shifts within the power-relations that we find in Girls are the result of postfeminist, feminist, or anti-feminist processes. First of all, if we regard the girls’ sexualities as imbedded in a historical context, we should consider how Judith Butler puts this into perspective when she says:

“Foucault engages a reverse-discourse which treats ‘sex’ as an effect rather than an origin. In the place of ‘sex’ as the original and continuous cause and signification of bodily pleasures, he proposes ‘sexuality’ as an open and complex historical system of discourse and power that produces the misnomer of ‘sex’ as part of a strategy to conceal and, hence, to perpetuate power-relations. (Butler, GT 129)

Traditional power-relations between men and women are kept alive by this sexuality that presents society with a naturalized conception of sex. From this perspective, the sustaining of power relations through this strategy that Butler discusses happens in discrete and almost undetected ways. In order to be a feminist, one has to necessarily try to subvert traditional power-relations in order to perpetuate equal power-relations between men and women. Equality is what is seldom attained in Girls ; instead, the power dynamics in the girls’ relationships shift back and forth between the men being the ones in power and the women

46 being in power, and situations, where it is not clear who is in charge. These shifting and often paradoxical power-relations will be discussed in the following chapters and will provide insight into the complex presence of feminism and postfeminism in Girls .

2.3.1. “Grander and More Dramatic Than Any Romance”: Female Friendships

A central premise Kaklamaidou and Tally put forward in their introduction is that “young women today have […] exceeded males in both educational and occupational terms” (Kaklamanidou and Tally 2). As a result of this development and, additionally, the omnipresence of discussions about female identity in social media, the women in Girls “have been able to craft a subjectivity that both converges with conventional images of femininity while at the same time subverts them” (Kaklamanidou and Tally 2). It is precisely these contradictory images of femininity that call for a thorough discussion of how these contradictory notions influence the power structures between the young women and men portrayed in Girls and what effect this might have on the viewer as a consequence. When Hannah is trying to write an e-book full of memoirs for her publisher, she writes down some potential first sentences during a long phase of writer’s block, one of them describing a friendship between girls in college as “grander and more dramatic than any romance” ( Girls , 2.10, “Together”). Girls indeed provides depictions of friendships between women that are more complex, and definitely more dramatic than many of the friendships portrayed in other television shows. Sex and the City , for example, simply does not provide enough dramatic moments of friction between the girls, and Broad City focuses mostly on aspects of comedy that emerge from Abbi and Ilana’s friendship, not the drama. Margaret Tally names a few important shows besides Sex and the City that predate Girls and portray female friendships, such as the Mary Tyler Moore Show , I Love Lucy , Laverne and Shirley , Golden Girls , and Friends , but she emphasizes that Girls “offers a deeper level of physical and emotional intensity” (Tally 37-38). However, Tally also points out that a certain trend has emerged, especially during the last half century or so, that portrays women as “somehow inherently aggressive, on a verbal level, to each other and numerous accounts of this “mean girl” phenomenon began to flood the media in the later part of the 20th century” (Tally 36- 37). Girls channels this contradiction whenever the characters have emotional moments with each other, but at the same time are shown displaying cruelty and selfishness. There are instances in Girls where rivalries arise between the girls and other women. For example, there is Marnie’s rivalry with Audrey, Charlie’s new girlfriend; there is Jessa’s sort of abstract

47 rivalry with her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend Gillian, whom she never meets but whose existence inspires Jessa to successfully seduce her ex-boyfriend; there is Hannah’s creative rivalry with her former college classmate, Tally Schifrin; and later in season three, there is Shoshanna’s rivalry with Marnie because Marnie sleeps with Ray after Shoshanna has broken up with him. These rivalries hardly represent a feminist stance and the question remains whether a show such as Girls could do without them. These rivalries certainly create dramatic emotional terrain and in some cases, they back up Hannah’s claim during the show that female friendships are “grander and more dramatic than any romance” ( Girls , 2.10, “Together”). The fights the four main characters engage in with each other prove that the girls are challenging each other more than, for example, the women of Sex and the City , making the friendships in Girls more complex, and in turn, more important than the girls’ romantic endeavors. As Kaklamanidou and Tally claim, “[…] these fictional female friendships serve as a kind of counterweight to the conventional image of young women competing over men” (3). However, the validity of this counterweight that Kaklamanidou and Tally have attributed to Girls is bound to be questioned again when we contrast the female friendships portrayed in Girls to the female friendship at the center of Broad City (2014), another show about twenty- something girls living in New York City that incorporates more comedy than Girls , and less intensive drama. The two protagonists of Broad City , Abbi and Ilana, experience various humiliating situations and trouble with men, just as the girls in Girls , but their friendship is always the stable foundation of all their endeavors, and their status as best friends is never questioned or challenged. One example of an uncomfortable incident that is representative of the stage of their relationship and its inherent power structure is when Adam pees on Hannah when they are taking a shower at his place, his creepy entrance into the shower immediately invoking Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). After the scene in Adam’s shower, Hannah and Adam are both wearing adult-sized onesies, and Adam is preparing food for them in his kitchen while Hannah is reading Saul Bellow’s Him With His Foot in His Mouth . The way Hannah supports Adam in season one is unconditional, for example, when she supports Adam’s involvement in a play he is producing and acting in with a friend, she asks him, “do you know how rare it is to see something that is so honest and weird and where you’re not making fun of them in your mind?” (Girls , 1.8, “Weirdos Need Girlfriends Too”). This support is never mutual and almost always it is Hannah who supports Adam, creatively and, at times, even financially, as in season three. In season three, however, Hannah’s support for Adam when he gets cast in a Broadway play turns into anxious clinginess, resulting in Hannah driving Adam farther away

48 when he is trying to rehearse and prepare for his Broadway performance and Hannah keeps distracting him with what he calls “drama”. The irony in this is how Adam tries to get away from Hannah’s drama in order to be able to pursue a career on Broadway, literally engaging in drama. Adam keeps changing his mind when it comes to how important Hannah is to him and his attitude towards their relationship is often paradoxical – he wants to be close to her, but needs his space when he is sure of Hannah’s affection, and once Hannah’s affection is in question, he fights for her attention to the point where he invades her private space in an unwanted way. The first relationship Adam has after he accepts that Hannah has broken up with him is with Natalia, the daughter of a woman who approaches him after an AA meeting. The way Natalia behaves towards Adam and how she reasserts herself is paradoxical in the sense that it is a development from being demanding to submissive. When she and Adam start dating, it is she who decides when she is ready to have sex with Adam. When they finally do have sex, she tells Adam exactly what he is allowed to do and what he cannot do, and Adam adheres to her wishes. After they have been dating for a while longer, Adam takes Natalia to his apartment for the first time and, after she criticizes the way it looks, tells her to get down to her knees and crawl to his bathroom, which she does, reluctantly. He then picks her up from the floor, maneuvers her onto his bed and starts to orally pleasure her from behind, to which she reacts with irritation, telling Adam that she hasn’t “taken a shower today.” He continues, starting to masturbate and he then finally ejaculates on her breasts, while she quickly takes down her dress because she does not want it to get stained. This precise moment is where their relationship takes a turn for the worse and the viewer does not know if she breaks up with Adam right then and there or not, and for the rest of the season (for one more episode), we do not hear anything about Natalia again. She reappears again, just once, in the first episode of the third season of Girls , where she delivers an angry speech when she sees Adam and Hannah at Ray’s coffee shop in Brooklyn. Her speech is contradictory in itself, as it mostly contains a hateful overview of all the disgusting things Adam had done while they were dating, but Natalia also makes it clear that she was mostly hurt because Adam never called her again after the incident. Natalia’s perspective on the development and ending of her relationship with Adam is paradoxical and thus representative of the contradictory traits that constitute postfeminism.

49

2.3.2. The Gay Best Friend

The role of the gay best friend has been a well-known trope since at least Sex and the City’s Stanford Blatch and Anthony Marentino, who figure as Carrie’s and Charlotte’s best friends, respectively. Both Stanford and Anthony are rather flat characters; they mainly offer support and advice for these two women of Sex and the City whenever they need counseling. They are not given any screen time by themselves and don’t necessary develop into or are portrayed as complex characters. This does not mean that their roles in the narrative of Sex and the City are not significant in integrating and portraying gay men in mainstream television. However, their roles do not represent a significant development from, for example, the sometimes very one- dimensional portrayals of gay characters in other shows, such as Jack in Will & Grace . Elijah, who is introduced to the world of Girls in the first season’s third episode, “All Adventurous Women Do,” plays a role that initially has nothing to do with being the main character’s gay best friend. When Hannah learns that she has HPV she confides in Shoshanna about the matter, who, despite having had no experience with sex so far, convinces Hannah that she has to call her ex-boyfriend from college, Elijah, and tell him about the disease. When Hannah tells Shoshanna that she is concerned that she and Elijah may end up having sex, Shoshanna concludes that this would not be a problem because they “both already have HPV” (Girls , 1.3, “All Adventurous Women Do”). However, when Hannah meets up at a bar with Elijah to talk to him about her HPV, the conservation takes a turn Hannah was not expecting when Elijah assumes that Hannah is meeting with him to discuss his homosexuality:

Elijah: Are you asking did I always want to have sex with men? Yes. Are you asking did I think about it when we were together? Yes. Hannah: So then how were you able to have sex with me? Elijah: Well, there’s a … There’s a certain handsomeness to you, just… Hannah: I’m very happy for you. But I do wish that you could have maybe figured this out a little bit sooner, like maybe when we were at Liberal Arts College, because there were a lot of gay men there. Girls , 1.3, “All Adventurous Women Do”

Initially, Hannah is shocked about Elijah’s confession, but she is also trying to express happiness for him, she acts as she believes a young urban woman ought to, liberally and level- headedly, and indeed she acts as if she is genuinely happy for Elijah’s self-discovery. At the same time, of course, it is her ex-boyfriend who confesses to her that he is gay, and this is where she feels somewhat betrayed and where it is impossible for her not to think about herself. Elijah’s more or less newly discovered sexual orientation, however, is contradicted later, in season two, when Elijah and Marnie have sex after Elijah’s and Hannah’s

50 housewarming party. Elijah tells Marnie that he is “bi,” and that he feels sexually attracted to her. Hannah, after she learns about the incident later in the season, is deeply upset, telling Elijah that she was “meant to be [his] last.” In this situation, it becomes clear that many of the paradoxes we can detect within Girls ’ narrative stem not only from contradictory representations of feminist ideas, but also arise from personal hypocrisy, or, as I would argue, from a clash between personal hypocrisy when it comes to the characters following, or not following their own supposed viewpoints and convictions. Referring to Bodies That Matter , Straayer states that “Judith Butler analyzes how ‘properly’ gendered bodies are materialized through heterosexual norms and how such formation of heterosexual subjects relies on foreclosures that produce homosexuality and gender inversion as abject.” (Straayer 174). Homosexuality is not represented as the abject in Girls . For a show such as Girls , it almost seems obligatory to incorporate at least one gay character in the narrative, at least when we look at its predecessor, Sex and the City . Girls ’ attempts to portray different characters and different types of self-identification is one of the reasons why it is currently relevant within the scope of contemporary television and its complex and often paradoxical representation of these issues makes it, as I claim in this thesis, a very powerful example of postfeminism and captures the term’s elusiveness. Other shows about young New Yorkers, such as Broad City , which actually takes the representation of homosexuality a step further with having not only a side character who is a gay Latino (who is in the United States illegally at the beginning of the show, but later obtains citizenship), but also portraying the different sexual facets of one of the show’s heroines, Ilana, who is bisexual. In terms of the abject, neither of the aforementioned television programs represent a dichotomy between straight sex s normal and gay sex as the other. However, neither Sex and the City nor Girls have yet managed to integrate homosexuality, or bisexuality, into their core narratives. With respect to female homosexuality or bisexuality, Sex and the City , for example, has Samantha “turn” lesbian for one episode, with the other characters reacting mostly surprised and judgmental, while in Girls , the only moment where the viewer can see sexual experimentation in terms of sexual orientation is when Marnie starts kissing Jessa at Thomas John’s apartment because Marnie wants to “be free” ( Girls , 1.8, “Weirdos Need Girlfriends Too”). Apart from featuring Elijah as a recurring character and integrating him into the narrative, homosexuality is not dealt with until later in episode eight of season four, “Tad & Loreen & Avi & Shanaz,” when the story line focuses on Tad and Loreen, Hannah’s parents, dealing with Tad confessing to Loreen very much out of the blue that he is gay. This plot development was hinted at only once, in the first season, when Elijah, in episode three, “All Adventurous women Do,” confesses to

51 Hannah that he is gay and later during the same conversation, after they have gotten into an argument and just as Elijah is about to leave, tells her that her “dad is gay,” backing up his argument by pointing out to Hannah that he has a “stud in his ear,” to which Hannah responds that her father got the stud on a trip with “a bunch of his male friends,” followed by Elijah asking her if “we are hearing ourselves,” and Hannah repeatedly stating that she “know[s] what that sounded like” ( Girls , 1.3, All Adventurous Women Do). Viewers most likely have mixed feelings about this particular episode of Girls ’ fourth season, suddenly picking up on a detail that was mentioned at the very beginning of its first season. On the one hand, the viewer is perhaps already familiar with similar stories about married men who at some point are confronted with a self-discovery or, alternatively, with the sudden ability to finally feel comfortable expressing their sexual orientation. Examples that come to mind are Bobby Fine and Bitsy von Muffling in Sex and the City (5.8, “I Love a Charade), who get married although Bobby Fine is a flamboyant and presumably gay entertainer; as well as the 2010 movie Beginners , which deals with this kind of self-discovery by portraying its main character’s father, Hal, who is played by Christopher Plummer, as an elderly man in his seventies who confesses to his son that he has terminal cancer and that he is gay. It is also important to point out, in terms of the dynamic of the friendships in Girls that, as Lena Dunham points out in one of her “Inside the Episode” interviews, that Hannah has replaced Marnie with Elijah after she has moved out of their shared apartment. “We’re the sexiest non-sexual couple in here,” Hannah declares at a gay club she goes to in order to dance and snort cocaine for an article she is writing for an online magazine. When Hannah, earlier in this episode, talks to magazine editor about potential freelance work for them, the editor points to a drawing she has put on the office’s wall, consisting of a circle and an arrow pointing outside of the circle, with the caption, “this is your comfort zone” ( Girls , 2.3, “Bad Friend”). When Hannah signs up for the job, planning to get high on cocaine, she does not yet anticipate in what way she will be taken out of her comfort zone. Coming back to Hannah’s replacement of Marnie with Elijah, the climax of the episode is when Hannah and Elijah, in the bathroom of said gay club, snort some more cocaine together and both become very emotional with one another. Elijah all of a sudden becomes confessional and tells Hannah that he had sex with Marnie, which starts a fight between Hannah and Elijah, which soon transforms into a fight between Hannah and Marnie, when Hannah, still very much high on cocaine, makes it her goal of the night to have Marnie admit that it is in fact Marnie who is the bad friend, and Hannah who is the good friend (cf. Girls , 2.3, “Bad Friend”), which Marnie eventually does. At the end of this particular night, Hannah starts kissing Laird (who

52 is her neighbor and former heroin addict) in front of his apartment door, her reason being that it is “for work,” leaving out no chance to fulfill her “quota of sexual behavior” (cf. “Inside the Episode”). In the end, Elijah, has been part of a dramatic heterosexual plotline even though he identifies as a gay man, rendering his identity paradoxical at times. This constitutes both a subversion of gender roles and at the same time seems to disregard the full potential for Elijah’s identity as a gay character. As a result, this partial denial of Elijah’s potentiality as a gay character in the show represents another paradox in a narrative that simultaneously represents liberal, feminist and open characters.

2.3.3. Self-Empowered or “Just a Whore”?

One important question that arises when analyzing Jessa as a feminist character on Girls is what place she falls into within the spectrum of self-empowerment. Her actions are usually unapologetic in terms of her quest for pleasure and liberating sexual experiences. She obviously wants to have, and has had, many experiences with different men in different countries, but it is usually only displayed through herself or other characters talking about these sexual experiences, merely referring to them. We sometimes see Jessa enjoy sex, and, significantly, the experiences we get to see are usually satisfying – Jessa is having enjoyable sex. Whether Jessa has sex in a bathroom at the time of her scheduled abortion, seduces her ex-boyfriend, performs cunnilingus on a girl at the rehab facility, or sleeps with a Mimi- Rose’s ex-boyfriend in season four, these scenes always emphasize her joy. Frequently, Jessa tries hard to make a point after her sexual escapades, for example when she seduces her ex- boyfriend and takes him back to her and Shoshanna’s apartment, sleeping with him, but acting judgmentally when he tries to kiss her after they are finished having sex because he just cheated on his girlfriend. She jokingly calls her cousin Shoshanna a “fucking perv” after she realizes that Shoshanna has been watching them having sex from behind a curtain. From this perspective, this scene is also worth taking a closer look at in terms of Shoshanna assuming the role of a Peeping Tom, which will be discussed in a later chapter. However, Jessa’s flirtatious behavior and her flippant attitude towards sex sometimes lead to situations where she finds herself surprised about her own power over men’s desire. When she is alone with Jasper, a middle-aged addict, in her room at the rehab facility in season three, he makes an advance (see Fig. 7) that he himself sees as non-verbally agreed upon when he and Jessa first met, while Jessa is completely surprised by his desire for her.

53

Fig. 7: Jessa’s sexual liberation has unforeseen effects on men

Paradoxically, Jessa can be completely naïve and ignorant of her own sexual power while at the same time being fully aware of it. When Ray first meets her at the warehouse party he asks her, referring to the boa she is wearing,“ does everyone in The Age of Innocence fan club get one of these or just the gold members? [...] Looks like it’s just ready to like, just, mouth- fuck you” ( Girls , 1.7, “The Crackcident”). Jessa’s development as a character is perhaps the most difficult one to conceptualize, even more difficult than Hannah’s, although Hannah is the main character. The viewer knows just enough about Jessa in order to be able to relate her often reckless behavior to her past, growing up between her grandparents’ care and that of her parents , the latter of which both have had (and perhaps still have) problems with drugs. “Bet you were born on a dirt floor […] It means I don’t think you’re cool and I think your mother was poor” ( Girls , 1.7, “The Crackcident”), Jessa yells at two men dressed in punk-attire (who Jessa calls “crusty” before further insulting them) at the warehouse party where she spends time with Jeff, whose daughters she babysits. The fact that Jeff is beaten up by the two men Jessa insulted while she herself faces no immediate consequences symbolically illustrates her simultaneous distance and closeness to the harshness of the world. Jessa’s decision to marry Thomas-John at the end of season one marks the peak of this paradox and results in Thomas-John telling Jessa that she is “just a whore with no work ethic” ( Girls , 2.4, “It’s a Shame About Ray). Jessa’s conception of relationships is obviously problematic, which results in this very short and disastrous marriage to Thomas-John. The other characters’ conceptions of relationships are not less complicated than Jessa’s. Marnie’s first romantic conquest is Charlie, whom she is able to win back for a short amount of time after they separate. After Charlie, Marnie starts sleeping with Booth Jonathan, who sees their relationship in a completely different way than her, which results in them breaking up as well. Before this, Marnie has already become increasingly uncertain of who

54 she is, which is illustrated by Marnie having sex with Elijah after he tells her that he might be “bi.” After this, Marnie asserts her sexual power over men by sleeping with Ray, which problematizes her relationship with Shoshanna, who had dated Ray previously. In season three, Marnie begins her musical career with Desi, who acts in the Broadway play Adam is also cast in, and they soon start having sex, while Desi still has another girlfriend. This detail about Desi challenges Marnie, and she is soon responsible for Desi’s girlfriend, Clementine, breaking up with him, immediately after which Desi and Marnie become a couple. After Marnie and Desi have been dating for a while, they have a fight about a monetary decision Desi makes, and Desi resolves the conflict by asking Marnie to marry him. By saying “yes,” Marnie displays a facet of postfeminism that might just be a backlash to pre-feminism, as she is indeed willing to forgive and forget any problem she has with the things Desi does simply because he, the man, takes initiative and proposes marriage to her.

2.3.4. Damsels in Distress vs. ‘Leave Me Alone!’”

The latter part of this subchapter’s title is taken from season one’s eponymous episode and refers to the title of Tally Schifrin’s (fictional) book, Leave Me Alone , in which she writes about her boyfriend who killed himself. In this episode, Hannah talks about how she wishes she were like Tally Schifrin, who takes chances more frequently than Hannah does and thus ends up with more material to write about than Hannah. Hannah’s neuroses, as she complains about during and after the book party, often stand in the way of her making bold choices. Because of Hannah’s attempts to be an active part and to have an equal part in her relationships and the course of her career and friendships, and the subsequent failure of these attempts, paradoxical situations are inevitable. Hannah’s relationship with Adam especially keeps getting more and more complex and contradictory throughout the series, and does not quite get resolved until the end of the fourth season, which at the time of this writing has just recently aired. In this chapter, I will provide a comparative close reading of both the season two finale and the season three finale of Girls , analyzing the very last scenes of both episodes. The aim of this close reading is to illustrate the change in Adam and Hannah’s romantic relationship, and to emphasize the changes Hannah goes through during the course of season three with respect to her own power and her power in relation to both Adam and the dynamics of their relationship as a whole. In season two, Hannah and Adam are broken up because Hannah decides that she does not want to be with Adam any longer. Adam has problems

55 accepting this and keeps invading Hannah’s privacy, which results in Hannah at one point calling 911 when Adam is at her apartment and a round of accusations from both Hannah and Adam about each other’s stalking habits at different times, respectively. Thus, Hannah’s transformation from passive to active reaches its climax at the end of season three. In her relationship with Adam, he changes from a woman who is clingy and uncertain into a woman who walks away from security in order to pursue her own dreams. At the beginning of season three, Adam’s role is to take care of Hannah, making sure she takes her OCD medication while only contributing a small portion of the rent, which Hannah tells her therapist at the very beginning of season three. Hannah, being the breadwinner in her relationship with Adam, takes on a job within the advertorial section of GQ magazine, a position that will frustrate her increasingly on a creative level, until she gets herself fired after a rant about the work she and her coworkers are doing, calling the advertorial section of GQ a “sweatshop factory for puns” ( Girls , 3.11, “I Saw You”). Meanwhile, Adam gets cast in a Broadway play, and the problem that arises from Adam’s newfound creative motivation, is that it changes the power structure of Hannah and Adam’s relationship again. Hannah has problems dealing with Adam’s commitment because she wants to thrive as a writer and seeing others, especially her partner, succeed, brings out her motivation. However, this desire to thrive is countered by Hannah’s fear of losing Adam, a feeling that is first instilled in Hannah when Patti LuPone warns her about Adam becoming too close with his fellow actors and consequently sleeping around after having been cast in a Broadway play while interviewing Patti LuPone for an advertorial article in GQ. This conversation makes Hannah extremely desperate for Adam’s attention, and Adam becomes increasingly frustrated about her clinginess, which results in Adam’s decision to move into Ray’s apartment for a while. Thusly, Adam takes control of their relationship and the pace at which it is or is not progressing, actually emotionally backtracking when he moves out of their shared apartment. In order to illustrate Hannah’s transformation in terms of the relation of power between Hannah and Adam over a longer period of time, namely a whole season, and the corresponding actions she takes, I will provide close readings of the finale of season two and the finale of season three, respectively. These two last scenes reveal a great deal about Hannah’s development as a female character when contrasted with one another. With a particular interest in the power dynamics that change between the two finales, I want to look closely at the symbolic representation of gender categories in Girls , as they are sometimes subverted, but sometimes reinforced, making for contradictory statements about gender relations. As Butler reminds us, “[…] the category of sex is neither invariant nor natural, but

56 is a specifically political use of the category of nature that serves the purposes of reproductive sexuality.” This is a very important stance in terms of a filmmaker’s choice in the direction a certain narrative is taking and in terms of how the characters are supposed to develop, how they behave and how their actions will define their beliefs as feminists or postfeminists. Girls ’ season two ends with Hannah cutting off her hair due to her obsessive- compulsive disorder and crouching in her bed, anxious and helpless. The scene starts with a medium-distanced shot of Adam, who is working on the boat he is building in his apartment. We can see his facial expression indicating a troubled thought, and he suddenly starts to smash his unfinished boat with a wooden plank, first tentatively, then with more and more vigor. Again, he remains shirtless during the whole scene, which is a manner the viewer is already used to. Adam’s (apparently new) iPhone starts ringing and, in a fashion that is closer again to his image as the “original man,” raw and not patient enough to use technology, Adam just yells, “Operate! Siri, operate!” ( Girls , 2.10, “Together), with which he is successfully able to talk to Hannah via FaceTime. Hannah’s hair is now short, as the viewer had seen earlier when Hannah started cutting it off and let Laird, her downstairs neighbor, finish the job, and she looks anxious. Upon noticing that Hannah is not well, Adam tells Hannah that she should not move and that he is coming for her.. After this we see a succession of shots that show Adam running from his house to Hannah’s house, running down the stairs to the subway and reappearing above ground in the next shot, until he reaches Hannah’s stairway. From the moment Adam starts running, the scene is accompanied by dramatic music, and once Adam has reached the door of Hannah’s apartment, we can see Hannah hiding under her blanket. There is a cut to Hannah’s empty living room and suddenly the door is kicked in by Adam, who walks through the living room, enters Hannah’s bedroom, lifts the blanket, and picks her up. Hannah holds onto him, they are shown in a medium close-up (see Figs. 6a and 6b), as the camera zooms out and we see them kiss. This is the final scene of season two. This scene, first of all, is vaguely reminiscent of the final scene of Manhattan (1979), where Isaac (Woody Allen) runs through the streets of Manhattan in order win Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) back and tell her that she should not go to London; this may be an homage to Woody Allen’s portrayal of New York, but appropriated to Dunham’s perspective, set in Brooklyn instead, and borrowing the aesthetics of the idea of a man running through the streets of New York towards his love interest. In contrast to Allen, however, Dunham decides to make Adam, who has been Hannah’s love interest, but is, after all, not the show’s main character, the hero of this scene. There are several things that I would deem problematic about this season finale. First of all, Hannah makes it very clear at the beginning of season two that she needs space

57 from Adam – a request which Adam, although she tells him loud and clear that she does not want to see him anymore, ignores completel y, instead m ildly stalking her up to a point where Hannah calls the police because she tells Adam that he is committing “space -rape” ( Girls , 2.2, “I Get Ideas”). The fact that she is rescued by the man she accused of “space -rape” at the beginning of the season is doub tlessly questionable in terms of a feminist idea l of self- empowerment. Secondly, Adam’s attempts to convince Hannah that they still belong together arguably contributed (together with her anxiety over having to write an e -book within a month) to the return of the symptoms of her obsessive-compulsive disorder . This paradox renders the fact that it is Adam who practically releases her of this burden at the end of the season highly ironic. Of course, Hannah’s OCD has not vanished in season three – she continues with her therapy sessions, she takes her medication, and the subject is finally discussed with her editor, who gives her more time to finish her e -book. However, at the end of season two, Hannah’s extreme anxiety and mental instability is briefly completely resolved, or at least, successfully suspended, when Adam picks her up they kiss. To the viewer, it almost seems as if the struggles Hannah goes through in season two have been the result of her break-up with Adam, although the opposite could be argued just as wel l.

Fig. 8a and 8b (top left and bottom left) : Hannah and Adam are reunited through Hannah’s mental crisis ; Fig. 8c and 8d (top right and bottom right ): Hannah and Adam have become Distant, and Hannah walks away in order to pursue her own creative career.

58 When put into perspective from a critical feminist point of view, this dynamic between Hannah and Adam at the end of season two is merely a regress to gender stereotypes, as Hannah is clearly the (hysterical, or, rather, obsessive-compulsive) damsel in distress and the only relief that she can obtain in this situation is through being rescued by a man. When Judith Butler points out that “gender is a kind of action that can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the apparent binary of sex” (Butler, GT 152), she proposes an idea that can potentially be picked up by contemporary film and television, and which is actually embraced by contemporary narratives that subvert binary conceptions of gender. Broad City , for example, in its season one finale, presents an excellent example of powerful female characters and the subversion of gender stereotypes while focusing on female friendship when Ilana, one of the two female leads in Broad City , passes out at a restaurant because she keeps eating shellfish despite having a shellfish allergy. Abbi, Broad City ’s other leading woman, picks her up and carries her out of the restaurant. This image is indeed very similar to the way Adam picks Hannah up in Fig. 8b above. In terms of the subversion of gender stereotypes, however, Girls fails to provide a positive example in its season two finale, which is creating another contradiction when we compare this ending to the numerous examples of subversion that Girls provides the viewer with at the same time, even if they sometimes appear as paradoxical in themselves. With respect to the comparison I drew earlier to Manhattan , this season finale appears as a backlash even more so when we compare Tracy’s reaction to Isaac’s attempt to make her stay in Manhattan. She leaves despite his confession of love, whereas Hannah succumbs to Adam’s longing for her at the end of season two. However, Hannah later, at the end of season three, walks away from Adam in order to leave New York in order to pursue her dreams, and later in season four, when Adam tells Hannah that he loves her still, she tells him, in a very mature way, that it is over, displaying a higher level of self-empowerment than ever before. After this contradictory development in season two, with the somewhat antagonized man becoming the hero who rescues Hannah from a state of mental decay, season three becomes even more interesting in terms of the subversion of gender stereotypes and female empowerment. After the heroic rescue at the end of season two, Hannah and Adam are once again a couple and living together, although Hannah is somewhat concerned about rent because Adam does not have a steady income. He is mostly selling handcrafted things, such as dream catchers, on online platforms such as Etsy, which Hannah tells her psychiatrist in the first episode of season three. Soon, Hannah becomes the breadwinner when she takes on a job in the advertorial section at GQ magazine, which soon makes her unhappy because she is still

59 striving for a creative career. Meanwhile, Adam gets cast in a play on Broadway and starts rehearsing, and as Hannah becomes more and more unhappy with her position at GQ, Adam becomes more and more invested with the play he was cast in and from this discrepancy between Adam’s and Hannah’s careers, conflicts start to emerge, resulting in Adam moving out of Hannah’s and his apartment in order to move in with Ray (who now lives in Adam’s former apartment) for a while in order to be able to rehearse without Hannah distracting him. Hannah becomes more and more anxious about them, telling Adam that she feels as though he is trying to break up with her, but in such a slow speed that she will not notice it. Hannah’s behavior results perhaps from both her dissatisfaction with the way her career is going and serious concerns about Adam’s involvement with the theater, as other characters warn Hannah repeatedly about Adam becoming too involved with his fellow actors. By this time, Hannah’s main objective has not become finding a new path for her own creative career and her calling as a writer, but simply to save her relationship with Adam. In the very last episode, however, things take an unexpected turn when Hannah gets an acceptance letter from Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which does not come as a complete surprise to the attentive viewer, as Hannah tells Shoshanna in episode 3.2, “Truth or Dare,” that she applies to graduate school every year. Hannah receives said acceptance letter on the day Adam’s play premiers on Broadway and she decides to tell him about it shortly before he has to go on stage (see Fig. 8c). The way the camera captures Hannah and Adam in a medium close-up in Fig. 8c is significant in terms of how it mirrors Fig. 8a. Hannah now looks different, her hair is short but stylish and she is dressed for Adam’s premiere, looking confident and looking directly at Adam, while in the finale of season two, the way her face was bent down reflected her anxiety. Their heads are positioned in the same way now in the finale of season three, with the back of Adam’s head, looking at Hannah, on the left, and Hannah’s face on the right. However, this time, Adam and Hannah are not touching, but rather keeping a distance necessary for their serious conversation and reflecting that they have drifted apart. After the play, which is a major success, Hannah and Elijah wait in the alleyway outside the stage door, and after Elijah leaves in order to give them some space, Adam accuses Hannah of being responsible for Adam’s mediocre performance, as he was distracted by Hannah’s news, thinking about their future and what will happen to them if Hannah moves to Iowa. Their conversation reaches a point where Hannah simply tells Adam that he performed well in the play, and she turns around and leaves (see Fig. 8d). Again, as in the season two finale, Hannah and Adam are experiencing a defining moment in their relationship next to a door, but this time, Hannah decides to walk away, turning away from the camera and moving toward the street, while Adam remains

60 standing in the alleyway, before he has to go back to have pictures taken with the rest of the cast. Most importantly, with respect to the transformation Hannah as a character has undergone during season three, this is not the final scene of this episode. It is followed by a brief scene where we see Hannah return to her apartment, and, in a medium shot, she lifts her acceptance letter from the table and holds it close to her chest, and this very last scene is cut when she starts to smile. From a feminist perspective, Hannah has now finally realized that in order to be happy, she has to let go of her obsessive behavior towards Adam (obsessive in a very different way than in season two, but nevertheless destructive) and instead see the acceptance letter from Iowa Writer’s Workshop as the chance she needs in order to advance her creative career, especially since she just quit her job at GQ, calling the advertorial section, as mentioned earlier, a “sweatshop factory for puns” ( Girls , 3.11, “I Saw You”). This moment at the end of season three represents the complete opposite of the season two finale and is, when we compare the two finales directly, a complete negation, or contradiction, of the show’s representation of the constantly negotiated and renegotiated dynamics of power relations between women and men.

3. Looking for the Female Gaze – Contradictory Voyeurism and Scopophilia in Girls

Girls does not exactly attempt to be counter-cinema; it is part of popular culture, social media discourse, and it runs on a renowned, well-known television network. When it comes to continuity editing, point-of-view construction and narrative unity, Girls utilizes these techniques and consequently, the viewer is presented with a comprehensive television program with a story line that is easy to follow. However, through its inclusion of graphic, awkward, and intentionally uncomfortable sex scenes, Girls displays a “bias against ease and satisfaction,” even if it does not achieve this by completely “annihilating the pleasure of identification” (cf. Gaines 81-82). The pleasure that viewers get from watching mainstream television that frequently includes sex scenes, for example, Game of Thrones , is usually bound to identification with the male character who gazes at or has intimate relations with a female character whose nude body is objectified. Television programs, then, have the power to shape viewers’ subjectivity, or, more precisely, to fix the viewer’s consciousness into a predetermined subject position. Sex and the City had previously succeeded in narrating from a female perspective, showing fictional events from a female subjective point of view. However, the representations of female bodies in Sex and the City were still written, it seems,

61 for a female audience that needs and wants to identify with idealized female bodies who are well-groomed, thin, and dressed to inspire men’s interest - in short, they are fabulous (a term that Carrie and her friends use quite often). Lena Dunham’s characters are, like her target audience, significantly younger, mostly college graduates whose parents are somewhat wealthy. The characters’ status as millennials who have not yet figured out exactly what it is that they want from, or can do with their lives is illustrated by the ways in which they dress. They dress consciously, but they are, of course, not able to afford expensive designer labels, and they live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, rather than the Upper East Side. Most of the characters, especially Marnie and Jessa, although in very different ways, dress to appeal to men. Marnie mostly wears relatively short, yet tasteful, business-like dresses. At the warehouse party the girls attended in Brooklyn, for example, Marnie wears a tight purple dress that is cut very low in the back, a dress that seems inappropriate when we take a look at what most other characters are wearing, and this inappropriateness is made explicit when Charlie’s new girlfriend, Audrey, is introduced. When Marnie asks Audrey if she has ever heard of her (Charlie and Marnie just broke up about two weeks earlier), Audrey asks her if she is “one of those Real Housewives ” ( Girls , 1.7, “Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident”). This reference is picked up again much later in the third season of Girls , when Ray, after having had sex with Marnie, comes by her apartment with the intention of showing her that he cares about her, and Marnie asks him which Real Housewives (Bravo’s expanding brand of reality series which started in 2006) locale seems most appealing to him (cf. Girls , 3.6, “Free Snacks”). What is interesting about Marnie’s and Ray’s awkward relationship is that Marnie makes clear over and over again that she does not care about Ray and that, therefore, she neither cares about the way she is dressed in front of him or what she looks like when she is eating pizza in front of Ray, something she claims she would not do if she cared about Ray’s gaze. According to E. Ann Kaplan, “the first wave of feminist critics adopted a broadly sociological approach, looking at sex roles women occupied in various imaginative works, from high art to mass entertainment” (Kaplan 23). Now, if we investigate the different roles the characters on Girls occupy, we have to take into regard that the creator and writer of the show is a woman. Likewise, whenever the viewer is able to gaze at a man who is objectified in a way that women usually are, it is important to look at the woman’s role in the same scene or scenario. Jane Gaines has tackled the problem of women’s role as spectators by referring to Mary Ann Doane, who has “theorized female spectatorship as a psychoanalytic and semiotic impossibility. For one thing, the female cannot assume a voyeuristic position in regard to the

62 cinema spectacle, because she is semiotically too close to that image which is ultimately her own” (Gaines 84). Concerning the reversal of the roles of spectator and spectacle, E. Ann Kaplan asserts, the consequence of the man being objectified is that the woman has to step into the “‘masculine’ role as bearer of the gaze and initiator of the action.” According to Kaplan, the woman’s “traditionally feminine characters are lost in this process, although she makes clear that she is not referring to physical attractiveness, but rather to “kindness, humanness, motherliness. She is now often cold, driving, ambitious, manipulating, just like the men whose position she has usurped” (Kaplan 29). Girls does not offer a complete subversion of the male gaze at all times, therefore not destructing male pleasure. Since it offers a different look on female bodies, namely from a female perspective, and since it also provides a look on bodies, or at least a body, that is imperfect, it challenges male pleasure as the viewer might be used to from watching television. Voyeurism, as E. Ann Kaplan explains, is “the erotic gratification of watching someone without being seen oneself, i.e. the activity of the Peeping Tom.” Exhibitionism, in contrast, “refers […] to the erotic gratification derived from showing one’s body – or part of it – to another person, as in the pleasure of being seen, or seeing oneself on the screen.” Kaplan goes on by saying that in terms of active and passive perversions, voyeurism is “an active perversion, practiced primarily by men with the female body as the object of the gaze, while exhibitionism is its passive counterpart” (Kaplan 14). With the three looks in the cinema, Kaplan provides a solid foundation for the analysis of the gaze in visual narratives. According to her, there is, firstly, the look within the narrative itself, when “men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze.” Secondly, there is the look of the spectator, “who is made to identify with the male gaze, and to objectify the women on the screen,” and thirdly, Kaplan argues, there is also the “camera’s original ‘gaze’,” which “comes into play in the very act of filming. Therefore, we can conclude that the objectification of women starts already within the act of filming, and it would appear logical that as a consequence, the director, who is, after all, in charge of the screen action, can actively direct all three looks by making certain choices when filming. Thus, female auteurs, as well as male auteurs, of course, are able to create a narrative that, when looked at through the lens of a cinematic analysis that “keeps in mind the construction and talks about distance of subject from camera, point of view, editing, place, function of a character in a narrative, etc.,” does not simply represent role characters (Kaplan here refers to examples such as “the image of the housewife, the macho male (hero), the homosexual, the villain (anti-hero),” and “the prostitute”). Rather, the auteur has the chance to

63 produce a narrative consisting of screen images that provide looks that diverge from the ones mentioned above, even inverting them completely. If, as Kaplan states, “scopophilia, or sexual pleasure in looking, is activated by the very situation of cinema,” which renders the spectator’s experience “closer to the dream state than is possible in the other arts” (Kaplan 14). Watching those same narratives at home, though on a smaller screen, in complete privacy, if one wishes, is as close or even closer to the dream state. And, most importantly, if the gaze is “built upon culturally defined notions of sexual difference (Kaplan 14-15), then it is necessary for filmmakers to keep changing the way the three looks Kaplan describes are challenged in terms of representing traditional sexual difference as “natural.”

3.1. Gazing at Males

After having discussed the female auteur’s control over her own to-be-looked-at-ness, we also have to look at the way the viewer, through the auteur and the diegetic world’s characters, experiences the corporeal and psychological portrayal of men. As a television show that portrays physical relationships between men and women from the perspective of women , Girls provides a chance for a reading of an inherent female gaze and a possible objectification of male characters. An important factor in the representation of male characters is that they are now, at least since shows like Sex and the City , consumed as a commodity by the characters, as well as the female audience. As Dunham points out, Networks and studios still seem to be almost pathologically incapable of understanding that women make up fifty-two percent of the planet, and therefore programming that has women at its center is not a ‘fad’ or a ‘trend.” It’s a necessary expression and it’s a necessary part of media. (Lena Dunham, The B.S. Report )

With this statement in mind, it is necessary to take a look at the way men are portrayed when they are part of a female-centered narrative. The concept of a male freak show on Sex and the City emerges in David Greven’s “The Museum of Unnatural History: Male Freaks and Sex and the City ,” and the title alludes to Sex and the City ’s premiere party for season five which took place at the Museum of Natural History in New York City – just like the premiere party of Girls ’ season four. Sex and the City mostly limits its portrayals of freakishness to the men that the women are sleeping with and, upon discovering the men’s freakishness, they dispose of them quickly. Girls , in contrast, makes an attempt to allow for more complex character developments for its male characters, providing background information about them in order for the viewer to relate to them. As Greven points out, Sex and the City portrays women as consumers (cf. Greven 39), and Girls does so as well when it comes to the portrayal of men.

64 However, when material goods are concerned, they are portrayed as consumers to a much lesser degree. Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna, and Jessa also “consume” fewer men than Carrie Bradshaw and her friends, but they nevertheless often treat their male counterparts as consumer goods, chasing them when their value seems high and disposing of them when said value seems to have decreased. Marnie represents a typical example of a female consumer when she loses interest in Charlie while he is the most focused on their relationship when she desperately wants Charlie back as soon as he has a new girlfriend and even more so once he is financially successful. Visually, the male characters on Girls sometimes become objects of the viewer’s desire as well as the female character’s, as their bodies serve as erotic spectacles in specific instances. However, since Girls uses elements of comedy and satire, portrayals of men’s bodies are rarely completely devoid of comedy. Therefore, a description of their bodies as sexually distinct objects of the female gaze, fulfilling their erotic desires, is problematic. Laura Mulvey has argued that “analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it” and this is precisely the intention of her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure” 8) and developed further in her later article “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’” I argue that a similar dynamic occurs in Girls quite often. Hannah is at all times analyzing, mostly in a comical way, her romantic relationships and the men she interacts with. The constant comments about the men’s actions and bodies, for example, when Hannah sees Adam at the warehouse party in the first season and exclaims, “I’ve never seen him with a shirt on!” ( Girls , 1.7), often destroy or subvert potentially erotic scopophilic bodily pleasures. Of course, this happens more frequently when it comes to the women’s bodies, especially Hannah’s. Nevertheless, the way men are looked at in Girls is interesting because of the numerous paradoxes that the viewer can detect. Sometimes, a certain amount of subversive scopophilia can be detected, when the female characters take men as objects, “subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure” 8), for example, when Hannah turns sexual pleasure around in “One Man’s Trash” ( Girls , 2.5). Joshua asks Hannah to “make [him] come,” closing his eyes and waiting for her to pleasure him, after which Hannah looks at Joshua and demands the same from him. Most importantly during this scene, Joshua’s eyes are closed, whereas Hannah is controlling the situation, making Joshua do what she wants and subjecting him to her controlling gaze. The female viewer is able to identify with Hannah at this point, but the situation is turned around soon after this scene. Hannah’s narcissism and her inability to enjoy erotic pleasure without analyzing and reflecting gets in the way of her blissful night with Joshua when she falls into a

65 monologue about her needs and wishes, alienating herself from Joshua and from the viewer. Her analysis of her own psyche is touching and narcissistic at the same time, creating yet another paradox for the viewer.

3.2. (Un-)Pleasurable Screen Images and the Female Auteur

There are a number of what can be called unpleasurable screen images in Girls, meaning that they contain visual details that simply depict body parts that we would normally not see in mainstream television. And it is not only the visual aspects that we would not normally expect, but frequently it is also the content, the story that a certain scene advances, that is unlikely to be presented on mainstream television. Aside from the fact that “it’s not TV, it’s HBO,” it is significant that a serial narrative depicts topics such as female desire from different angles. Sex and the City , in its position as Girls’ predecessor as a story told from a woman’s perspective, sometimes touched upon visually unpleasing images (for example, the episode where Carrie is photographed for a magazine’s photo series called “30 and Fabulous,” which later is revealed to have been “30 and Fabulous?” questioning the lifestyle of thirty- somethings and depicting Carrie with a cigarette, rundown after a night partying) and regularly showed characters that were flawed and three-dimensional. But how is their desire depicted? Is it still mostly depicted as if from a male perspective, objectifying the woman while ascribing power and control to the man, or is female desire portrayed from fully from the woman’s perspective, perhaps even inverting the power structure, giving power and control over the women, while portraying men as the objects? Or is it more complicated than this? Another question that arises here is if, with the perspective of a woman, especially an “imperfect” woman such as Hannah in Girls , there is room in the narrative for desire depicted in “unpleasurable” ways, unpleasurable at least, in contrast to what is usually deemed aesthetically pleasing. Female desire, Ramanathan argues, “whether authorial, diegetic or spectatorial, has been articulated either as fantasms of the male imaginary, or is underwritten by a male desire which conflates the image of women with desire itself” (Ramanathan 141). This conflation of womanhood and desire is part of a long tradition; one only has to think how frequently women have been depicted as desire in a biblical way, namely as Eve (for example, see Genesis, Chapter 2:16, “your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you”). This representation of women is in fact parodied in Saturday Night Live’s skit, “Biblical Movie,” where a fake trailer advertises a fictional movie in which some well-known elements of the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden are conflated with elements from

66 Girls . Lena Dunham stars as Eve, who is talked into eating the apple by a serpent whose head and voice resemble Shoshanna’s from Girls . She then is seen sitting on the ground, having eaten at least two dozens of apples and arguing with God that at least she deserves some credit for committing “ original sin,” and refusing to cover herself after her and Adam’s expulsion, not wanting to adhere to the rules of society (cf. Saturday Night Live , Season 39, 2014). Aside from pointing out some of the criticisms Girls has faced, this parody highlights the representation of women as sin and (uncontrollable) desire in Girls . The association of desire with femininity, where the man represented as the one that gazes and the woman becomes desire is frequently dealt with in Girls , and its problematic aspects are brought up. In the second episode of the series, “Vagina Panic,” the question of female desire and how it is expressed is dealt with graphically in the very first scene when Hannah and Adam are having sex. Their positioning is rather conventional, with Hannah lying on the bed and Adam on top of her. The first thing that is striking in contrast to other sex scenes is that no apparent attempts have been made to make it look pleasurable. When we think about various sex scenes from Sex and the City , what comes to mind are the sex scenes with Carrie that were only implied by strategic cuts from the very beginning of a romantic scene to the next morning. The more graphic sex scenes that depict Samantha having sex with one of the various different men she has intercourse with, for example, do reveal more of her body, but aside from her being slightly older than the other characters, the scenes can always be regarded as aesthetically pleasing, as there are no imperfect body parts and what we see is a perfectly shaped female body, slim, with nicely shaped breasts and perfect hair and make-up. What we can gaze at in the first scene of “Vagina Panic,” however, is a very different picture of a man and a woman having sex. Hannah’s imperfect body is presented in a way that lets us see the slight cellulite on her thighs, her round stomach, and her diminutive bust.

Fig. 9: Hannah’s features blend with the colors of Adam’s apartment as she tries to please him

67 Hannah’s face is cringing, wich lets the viewer assume that she does not seem to enjoy the experience much, and it is doubtless that Adam is in control. Hannah’s features are foregrounded, but the color of her skin blends in with the colors of Adam’s apartment, symbolically stating that Hannah is here merely another “thing” for Adam to use as he pleases. This is even more accentuated by the fact that Hannah keeps asking questions and generally acting submissively with Adam. He asks her aggressively where he should come to which Hannah replies, “you should come on my tits, ‘cause it seems like you wanna come on my tits” ( Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic”). Moreover, while having intercourse, Adam conjures up a fantasy scenario in which Hannah assumes the role of a schoolgirl with a “cabbage patch” backpack, in which Hannah, after being initially being confused, gladly participates. Instances like this, where the conflation of Hannah’s intentions and actions is paradoxical, thus creating unpleasurable screen action, are frequent during Hannah’s pursuit of Adam. The fact that Hannah is both pursuing Adam and behaving in a submissive way at the same time is another paradox in the development of their romantic relationship. Another of these examples is the warehouse party in episode 2.7, “Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a the Crackcident,” where Hannah spots Adam dancing with his lesbian girlfriends, which is the first time she sees him outside of his house and “with a shirt on.” Adam’s masculine power is accentuated in numerous ways, first by Jessa, who, after Hannah tells her that she just spotted Adam says that “he does sort of look like the original man” and then by Hannah’s inability to resist approaching Adam. “I am not going to talk to him,” Hannah tells her girlfriends, and promptly walks over to Adam. They dance, and a bit later Adam tells Hannah that he has to leave now to go on a “scrapping mission” in order to “sail down the Hudson on the Fourth of July” and “as it goes, it’ll break. In the last mile, it’s gonna sink” (Girls , 2.7, ““Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a the Crackcident”). In response to Adam’s story, Hannah tells him that she cannot come with him as she has come to the party with her girlfriends, after which there is a cut that then immediately shows the viewer Hannah, who is mounting Adam’s bike in order to leave with him, happily declaring that of course she will hold his backpack for him because she “would do anything” for him. What is significant is that there is always a contradiction between what Hannah says and what she ends up doing. As a feminist (and in some cases, postfeminist) woman, she always clearly sees what would be the better option for her as a woman in most situations where she has to make a decision for herself in relation to a man. But because she is always somehow a victim of her own desire and the wish to “feel it all” (Girls , 2.5, “One Man’s Trash), Hannah’s actions are often the exact opposite of what her intellect tells her to do. Thus, scenarios are created, where the screen action is made

68 unpleasurable for her on her own account. The paradoxical choices she makes are often paradoxical in the sense that her actions contradict her intentions. With respect to the pleasures of women’s sexuality, Lena Dunham describes her personal experience as follows: Everything I saw as a child, from 90210 to the Bridges of Madison County , had led me to believe that sex was a cringey, warmly lit event where two smooth-skinned, gooey-eyed losers achieved mutual orgasm by breathing on each other’s faces. […] Besides being gross, these images of sex can also be destructive. Between porn and studio romantic comedies, we get the message loud and clear that we are doing it all wrong. Our bedsheets aren’t right. Our moves aren’t right. Our bodies aren’t right. (Dunham 103) With Girls , Dunham finally has the chance to subvert all the images she has grown up with and that have taught her false conceptions about sex when she was in her teens. The question that the viewer has to ask is to what extent she is able to actually negate some of the traditional ways we see men and women on screen. Often, Hannah displays a feminist desire to subvert certain aspects of femininity, for example, when she receives a picture from Adam that depicts his penis, wrapped in a small piece of fur, immediately followed by a text message that reads, “SRY that wasn’t for you.”

Fig. 10a and 10b: Hannah undresses in order to send Adam an unwanted sext

Ramanathan further points out that, according to Mayne, auteurship should “be regarded in terms of the relationship between women, rather than that of male subject to female object,” and that that it is possible for a female auteur to inscribe herself in her work “without necessarily impressing [her] authority on celluloid” (Ramanathan 3). The question that arises from this is whether we still need the dominance-submission structure in cinema, as Kaplan points out. “The gaze,” she asserts, “is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the ‘masculine’ position” (Kaplan 30). Lena Dunham’s position as a female auteur at her young age comes

69 with a significant amount of control over what parts of her own body will be shown and how much of her body is visible on Girls , and how it is seen. Creative control over a television program is usually exclusively associated with male comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Currently, Girls is not the only show portraying a complex female lead and, in addition, having been created, produced, and written by a woman. The Comeback (HBO, 2005 and 2014) , for example, starring Lisa Kudrow, was created by Lisa Kudrow and produced and written by Kudrow and Michael Patrick King. Equally, 30 Rock (NBC, 2006- 2013) was created by its star, Tina Fey, and Broad City (Comedy Central, 2013-present) was created by its two twenty-something heroines, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, with multitalented Amy Poehler as the show’s producer. Other television shows such as 2 Broke Girls (CBS, 2011-present), New Girl (Fox, 2011-present), Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2009- 2015), and The Mindy Project (Fox, 2012-present) also have female characters at their center, providing a variety of perspectives for entertainment and analysis. Comedy television with female leads has progressed tremendously and is still progressing, hopefully with more chances for female auteurs in the future. None of the aforementioned shows, however, have triggered as much cultural debate about what viewers want to see on television and what they would rather not see, than Girls . The most important consequence of the choices that Dunham makes when she decides what to show on Girls , however, is that she “makes herself the object of satire,” thus providing exaggerated and contradictory portrayals of herself, or, rather, her character, that are thought-provoking for the viewer. “As calculated, self-reflexive, caricature, Hannah enacts a process of misrecognition, whereby there is a continual reinforcement of this character not only to ‘sustain the story,’ but to sustain her real, writerly self,” Bianco (82) asserts about the effect that Dunham’s role as auteur and actor in Girls has on the formation of Hannah as a character, and in extension, on the viewer’s perception of her. Furthermore, this “process of misrecognition” is a factor that is illustrated by the frequent contradictions in Hannah’s behavior and her changing conception of herself that often fluctuates between narcissistic self-hatred (which is itself oxymoronic) and sometimes delusional self- affirmation.

70 Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to gain some insight into contemporary feminism and postfeminism through Girls ’ contradictory portrayals of these concepts. The reasons and motivations for the aforementioned contradictions concerning female and male power structures in Girls have been explored in this paper in order to conclude whether Girls should be considered an example of feminism or postfeminism. Defining feminism as a specific set of characteristics, such as an increasing equality of men and women and female empowerment, as well as a subversion of heteronormativity and normative body images it is demonstrated in Girls in some respects, but not entirely. Postfeminism, which can be seen either as an extension of feminism, a countermovement to feminism, or a backlash to feminism, then, seems also to be demonstrated in Girls . The problematic reality that makes a specific answer impossible is that Lena Dunham incorporates both broad and seemingly competing concepts in her show through contradictory portrayals of characters and ideologies. Girls portrays, as Kaklamaidou and Tally assert, the “larger cultural confusions that are very much in play as a result of having lived after a social movement whose outcome is still in question, even as many gains have undeniably occurred” (Kaklamanidou and Tally 4). Therefore, I would argue that the contradictions in Girls are an outcome of the elusiveness of the concept of postfeminism and its complex relationship with feminism. Still, different approaches to feminism occur in social media, as a substantial number of women assert themselves as feminist. Often, they feel the need to make it clear that they are not “man-haters,” thusly attempting to refute preconceived notions of feminism. As a result from these aforementioned contradictions and competing concepts, this paper has shown that Dunham’s portrayal of feminist and postfeminist aspects in Girls is often paradoxical, and that these paradoxes arise from both the complex definition of postfeminism, as well as Dunham’s portrayal of feminism and postfeminism, which is accordingly complex. Having analyzed key aspects of feminism, the representation of the female body in contemporary television, and complex and problematic power relations within in the diegetic world of Girls , I am ready some of the questions I posed in the introduction to this paper. Dunham’s ability to provoke discussions with her complex portrayal of female representatives of the millennial generation are firstly due to a subversion of gender roles in film and television. Secondly, Dunham’s role as auteur, and both subject and object of the narrative she has created, provides a basis for new analyses of women in television. Thirdly, the range of different problems and obstacles the millennials in Girls are facing, often remain unresolved and are portrayed as contradictory in terms of the narrative’s sometimes active, sometimes

71 passive heroines. Overall, Girls provides a multifaceted portrayal of a whole generation that viewers are able to relate to, partly because of its verbal and visual bluntness, and partly because there is often no clear distinction between feminism and postfeminism. This blurry line between feminism and postfeminism is frequently due to the characters’ need to establish themselves as self-empowered women and their simultaneous need to define themselves through the men in their lives. This paper has shown that Girls is, in fact, a perfect example of postfeminism, as it very often takes the established feminist empowerment of its female characters as already granted. At the same time, Girls often questions some of the power structures feminism has supposedly established, sometimes attempting to carry them further, but sometimes also dismissing them. It is this constant questioning of feminism, both in constructive and destructive ways, that makes Girls appear as a perfect representative of postfeminism. In summation, Girls attempts to, and often succeeds in opening up new horizons for television shows with respect to the depiction of women’s bodies and the shifting power relations between women and men. This is achieved by ultimately prioritizing the exploration of complex female friendships over romance, as well as presenting visual depictions of female characters that are not often, or not at all, seen in other contemporary television shows. Gender roles and relationships are sometimes contested in Girls , but these deviations from heteronormativity and normative bodies are often negated by a regression back to a portrayal of traditional power dynamics between men and women. Thus, the power-relations between men and women in Girls , both on the visual and on the narrative level of the show, are always fluctuating, often contradictory, and never certain. The answer to Kaklamanidou’s and Tally’s question I referred to in the introduction, namely whether Girls is a positive example of the gains of feminism, or rather takes a step backwards in feminist history, is that it does both. Dunham takes many steps forward in terms of body image and self-empowerment while often simultaneously going backwards when it comes to portraying men as central to a woman’s self-fulfillment. With these alternations between feminism and postefminism, Dunham creates paradoxes and contradictions that make it impossible to deem Girls either just feminist or just radically postfeminist in a negative way. The elusiveness mirrors the difficulty in defining postfeminism as either a development in, or as a negation of feminism, and thus, Girls becomes the perfect contemporary example of postfeminism. Put succinctly, Girls paints an innovative picture of generation Y and women’s complex relationship to feminism, postfeminism, and postmodernity, it deliberately and paradoxically poses more questions about the millennial’s ability to move beyond the stalemate of their condition than it answers.

72 Thus, my answer to Kaklamanidou’s and Tally’s question about whether Girls is “positive, in terms of its portrayal of young women’s gains in society” or if it “somehow represent[s] a backlash, where young women are viewed as having lost something in the translation of the Women’s Movement in contemporary terms” (Kaklamanidou and Tally 4), is that it does both, and as a result, Girls represents a perfect example of the paradoxical definition of postfeminism.

73 Filmography

21st Century Feminism . Perf. Catherine Lindsay. TEDxCoconutGrove. Youtube, 2012.

2 Broke Girls . Created by Michael Patrick King and Whitney Cummings. Perf. Kat Dennings, Beth Behrs, Garrett Morris and Jonathan Kite. CBS, 2011-present.

30 Rock . Created by Tina Fey. Perf. Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan, Alec Baldwin and Jane Krakowski. NBC, 2006-2013.

Beginners . Dir. Mike Mills. Perf. Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent and Goran Višnji ć. Focus Features, 2010.

Broad City . Created by Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson. Perf. Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, John Gemberling and Hannibal Buress. Comedy Central, 2014-present.

Comeback ., The . Created by Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow. Perf. Lisa Kudrow, Lance Barber, Robert Michael Morris and Laura Silverman. HBO, 2005 and 2014.

Feminism isn't dead, it's gone viral ! Perf. Kat Lazo. TEDxNavesink. Youtube, 2013.

Game of Thrones . Created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Perf. Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage, Maisie Williams and Emilia Clarke. HBO, 2011-present.

Girls . Created by Lena Dunham. Perf. Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet. HBO, 2012-present.

How I Met Your Mother . Created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. Perf. Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Alyson Hannigan. CBS, 2005-2014.

Lena Dunham on the 'Girls' Backlash, Lack of Female Showrunners, and Getting Fired . Perf. Bill Simmons and Lena Dunham. The B.S. Report . Youtube, 2014.

Mary Tyler Moor Show, The . Created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. Perf. Mary Tyler Moore, Edward Asner and Betty White. CBS, 1970-1977.

Mindy Project, The. Created by Mindy Kaling. Perf. Mindy Kaling, Chris Messina, Ike Barinholtz and Ed Weeks. Fox, 2012-present.

New Girl . Created by Elizabeth Meriwether. Perf. Zooey Deschanel, Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield and Lamorne Morris. Fox, 2011-present.

74 New York, New York . Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Liza Minelli and Robert DeNiro. United Artists, 1977.

Parks and Recreation. Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur. Perf. Amy Poehler, Rashida Jones, Nick Offerman and Aubrey Plaza. NBC, 2009-2015.

Psycho . Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, John Gavin and Vera Miles. Paramount Pictures, 1960.

Real Housewives, The . Bravo, 2006-present.

Saturday Night Live . Created by Lorne Michaels. Perf. rotating cast. NBC, 1975-present.

Sex and the City . Created by Darren Star. Perf. Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon. HBO, 1998-2004.

Suburgatory . Created by Emily Kapnek. Perf. Jeremy Sisto, Jane Levy and Cheryl Hines. ABC, 2011-2014.

Tiny Furniture . Screenplay by Lena Dunham. Dir. Lena Dunham. Perf. Lena Dunham, Laurie Simmons, Grace Dunham and Alex Karpovsky. IFC Films, 2010.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt . Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. Perf. Ellie Kemper, Tituss Burgess and Jane Krakowsky. Netflix, 2015-present.

We Should All be Feminists . Perf. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. TEDxEUSTON. Youtube, 2013.

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List of Figures

Fig. 1: Jessa’s post-Sex and the City sexual liberation becomes transparent (Girls , 1.3, “All Adventurous Women Do,” HBO, 2012) ...... 12

Fig. 2: Hannah’s stomach as comical object (Girls , 1.2., “Vagina Panic,” HBO, 2012) ...... 21

Fig. 3a and 3b: Hannah’s imperfect body as spectacle and subject of body-shaming (Girls , 3.7, “Beach House,” HBO, 2014) ...... 22

Fig. 4a and 4b: Joshua and Hannah playing table tennis divided by a column, illustrating their different emotional and social backgrounds (Girls , 2.5, “One Man’s Trash,” HBO, 2013) .... 26

Fig. 4c: Hannah’s naked body is cornered in the midst of a mosaic (Girls , 2.5, “One Man’s Trash,” HBO, 2013) ...... 26

Fig. 5: Caroline as the embodiment of feminine liberation and depression (Girls , 3.3, “She Said OK,” HBO, 2014) ...... 38

Fig. 6a and 6b: Sexual harassment in a New York office (Girls , 1.4, “Hannah’s Diary,” HBO, 2012) ...... 44

Fig. 7: Jessa’s sexual liberation has unforeseen effects on men (Girls , 3.1, “Females Only,” HBO, 2014) ...... 54

79 Fig. 8a and 8b (top left and bottom left): Hannah and Adam are reunited through Hannah’s mental crisis (Girls , 2.10, “Together,” HBO, 2013) ...... 58

Fig. 8c and 8d (top right and bottom right): Hannah and Adam have become Distant, and Hannah walks away in order to pursue her own creative career ( Girls , 3.12, “Two Plane Rides,” HBO, 2014) ...... 58

Fig. 9: Hannah’s features blend with the colors of Adam’s apartment as she tries to please him (Girls , 1.2, “Vagina Panic,” HBO, 2012) ...... 67

Fig. 10a and 10b: Hannah undresses in order to send Adam an unwanted sext ( Girls , 1.4, “Hannah’s Diary,” HBO, 2012) ...... 69

80