‘So you want to be a #GIRLBOSS?’ Millennial femininity and entrepreneurial selfhood in Girlboss and The Girlfriend Experience

Abstract

The cultural politics of The Girlfriend Experience (2016–present) and Girlboss (2017) are symptomatic of intersecting discourses surrounding millennial femininity and neo-liberal enterprise culture. Featuring aggressively individualistic, White, twenty-something female protagonists, both shows interrogate the slender ideological crevice that separates economic libertarianism from social pathology. Girlboss and The Girlfriend Experience critically explore the ontological dissonance experienced by a millennial cohort schooled exclusively in the mythologies of a stubbornly resilient neo-liberal culture. As such, these young women are best understood as ideological avatars that expose the entropic conjunction of gendered individualism and entrepreneurial selfhood in a ‘post’-recessionary United States.