Delusional Girl: Genre and the Representation of Feminized and Feminist Subjectivity
This essay compares the feminized subjectivity and agency that is represented in Lena Dunham’s 2014 coming-of-age memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’, to the more complex depictions found in the dramatic comedy of her fictional show, Girls. In its production of a self who progresses towards self-knowledge, the memoir is inextricably shaped by the fantasies of neoliberal feminist individualism. In Girls, on the other hand, Dunham represents the contradictions of this kind of subject formation, thus exposing the frictions of contemporary liberal feminism.