Abstract
Lena Dunham’s highly acclaimed primetime cable TV production Girls centers on the precarious state of US-America’s young urban middle-class. With its portraits of struggling twenty-something female urbanites in New York, the series not only updates the glamorous Sex and the City, but more importantly illustrates the neoliberalization of everyday life in a creative economy driven by the mandate of (self-)exploitation. Eric C. Erbacher deconstructs the conventional social stratification model by showing how Girls’ socially privileged protagonists are torn between their aspirational claims to the creative class and their lower-class position as exploited members of the creative precariat. To the critical beholder, Girls offers more than light entertainment with a postfeminist twist, it reveals the emotional costs members of the creative class face in recessionary USA.
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Erbacher, E.C. (2016). Lifestyle Precarity and Creative Class Affirmation in Girls . In: Lemke, S., Schniedermann, W. (eds) Class Divisions in Serial Television. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59449-5_6
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