Abstract
Kissling examines how women’s sexual and reproductive health issues are represented in US television comedies by, for, and about young women – Girls, The Mindy Project, and 2 Broke Girls – in ways that fill in some of the gaps of abstinence-only sex education. These shows portray details of bad dates, good friends, boring jobs, and other minutiae of characters’ lives, including women’s reproductive and sexual health: pregnancy scares, PMS, clinic visits, abortion, STI tests, and more. These programmes simultaneously reproduce the postfeminist sensibility of the late 1990s television programming and interpellate viewers into the same neoliberal values.
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Notes
- 1.
In a recent screening of clips from this episode in my Gender and Media class, I discovered that this is true of students at my university. Many did not know what the cervix is, which led to an impromptu sex education lecture.
- 2.
Lampshade hanging refers to the common television, film, and theatre trope of making explicit reference to audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. It lets the viewer know that the author knows there is an unrealistic gap in plot development or that they’re in on the joke (Lampshade hanging, n.d.).
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Patty Chantrill, Imelda Whelehan, Meredith Nash, and Lyn Millett for valuable feedback on previous drafts of this chapter.
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Kissling, E.A. (2017). All Postfeminist Women Do: Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health in Television Comedy. In: Nash, M., Whelehan, I. (eds) Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52971-4_15
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