Voices of a Generation: HBO's Postfeminist Anti-Heroines

55 pages. A thesis presented to the Department of Media Studies and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Arts, June 2018.My research focuses on Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004) and Hannah Horvath from Girls (HBO, 2012-2017). Both series elicited a range of responses from viewers and critics who called into question the "likeability" of the protagonists. Out of this extra-textual discourse, Carrie and Hannah were conceived of as anti-heroines. Television anti-heroes like Tony Soprano (The Sopranos, HBO, 1999-2007), Walter White (Breaking Bad, AMC, 2008-2013), or Dexter Morgan (Dexter, Showtime, 2006-2013) are characters who skirt the boundaries between regular life and outlaw culture. They uphold hegemonic masculinity by reasserting their power through the form of vigilante justice. Carrie and Hannah are complete departures from the anti-hero trope. They are unabashedly feminine, and oftentimes, remarkable passive and ambivalent characters. In the past, female characters existed as complacent counterparts to a male lead. SATC and Girls construct a new space for complex and dynamic women on television. There is a wide breadth of scholarship on the postfeminist nature of SATC and Girls. My research intervenes to explicitly link the characterization of Carrie and Hannah as anti-heroines to the "postfeminist sensibility" (a concept defined by the scholar Rosalind Gill). I argue that Carrie and Hannah's unpalatable performance of femininity is due to the distinctly postfeminist ethos of both series. Essentially, Carrie and Hannah are too traditional for feminists, and too progressive for misogynists. My thesis ultimately suggests a strategy for reading Girls as an extension of Sex and the City. Together, the texts provide insight into shifting feminist relations and the politics of representation