Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls

Meredith Nash is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is the author of Making Postmodern Mothers (2012) and editor of Reframing Reproduction (2014).Imelda Whelehan is Dean of Higher Degree Research at the Australian National University. Her books include Overloaded (2000), Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (2002), The Feminist Bestseller (2005), and she is co-author of Key Concepts in Gender Studies with Jane Pilcher (2017).

• 1) Why Girls? Why now? MEREDITH NASH AND IMELDA WHELEHAN.- 2. Part I: Postfeminism(s) 2) ‘I have work… I am busy… trying to become who I am’: Neoliberal Girls and recessionary postfeminism STEPHANIE GENZ.- 3) Hating Hannah: Or learning to love postfeminist entitlement IMELDA WHELEHAN.- 4) Genres of impasse: Postfeminism as a relation of cruel optimism in Girls CAT MCDERMOTT.- 5) Twenty-something Girls v. thirty-something Sex and the City women: Paving the way for ‘post? feminism’ RUBY GRANT AND MEREDITH NASH.- 6) Bad sex and the city? Feminist (re)awakenings in HBO’s Girls MELANIE WATERS.- 7. Part II: Performing and representing millennial identities 7) ‘A voice of a generation’: Girls and the problem of representation HANNAH KY MCCANN.- 8) Educating girls: Girls and twenty-first century education for women LAURA WITHERINGTON.- 9) Reading the boys of Girls FREDERIK DHAENENS.- 10) All adventurous women sing: Articulating the feminine through the music of GirlsALEXANDER SERGEANT.- 11) ‘Doing her best with what she’s got’: Authorship, irony and mediating feminist identities in GirlsWALLIS SEATON.- Part III: Sex, sexuality, and bodies 12) ‘Art porn provocauteurs’: Feminist performances of embodiment in the work of Catherine Breillat and Lena Dunham MARIA SAN FILIPPO.- 13) ‘You shouldn’t be doing that because you haven’t got the body for it’: Comment on nudity in Girls DEBORAH THOMAS.- 14) Sexual perversity in New York? CHRISTOPHER LLOYD.- 15) All postfeminist women do: Women’s sexual and reproductive health in Girls ELIZABETH ARVEDA KISSLING.- 16) Afterword: Girls: Notes on authenticity, ambivalence and imperfection ROSALIND GILL.