Thoughts and Anxieties Concerning Girls, Media, and Fascism

September 22, 2025 Newsletter 

Girls Photo by Jessica Miglio

The day after Charlie Kirk got shot I started watching Girls. There was no correlation between these two things. However, it did set up an interesting frame of reference for me to start watching Lena Dunham’s acclaimed HBO show from 2012.  

Coming from a somewhat similar socio-economic background as the main characters, being twenty years old, and living in the same neighborhood where Girls is set, I expected to relate to the show, at least to some degree. I went into it with pretty extensive knowledge about the discourse surrounding the show’s white-centric cast, and its being tone deaf to the real-life  struggles of those who make up most of New York’s population (i.e. those who are not white, rich  and privileged). Girls has long been criticized – and rightfully so – for not being a relatable show.  

It was therefore to my surprise that, as someone who is white and privileged, I also felt somewhat alienated from the show. Watching Girls in 2025 feels like unearthing a time capsule from a distant and foreign land. Intelligible, but so far removed from your own every-day reality that you can’t help but experience some kind of awe.  

The show is rife with the confidence and liberalism of the Obama era. In the second episode of Season 2, the show’s main character, Hannah, displays this so-called “wokeness” of the early  2010’s while explaining to Marni and Elijah (her roommate and ex-boyfriend) how she broke up with her boyfriend Sandy for being a republican (and apparently the only Black person in New York). She says: “I can’t be with someone who’s not an ally to gays and women”. The fact that this is such a minor subplot to the show, and included in a way that pokes fun at Hannah’s unchecked privilege and racial biases, illustrates how embedded simple things like not being abhorrently antagonistic towards anyone who was not white, heterosexual and cisgender, felt in our culture.  

Everyone in Girls communicates through an iPhone 4s, and social media is only in the preliminary stages of creeping its way into our psyches. In episode 6 of Season 2, Shoshanna, one of the protagonists, even sets up a joke about Donald Trump. 

These episodes were aired just over a decade ago. Considering that now we are all in the throes of fascism where - along with a plethora of dehumanizing acts of injustice - people are  being fired from their jobs as television hosts and opinion writers for not “properly mourning” a neo-Nazi, a decade, indeed, feels like a long long time ago.  

I was ruminating over these thoughts the other day as I dragged myself across Manhattan to find a book that I was assigned to read for a class. The book is called “Radical Futurisms: ecologies of collapse, chrono politics and justice-to-come” by T.J Demos. It dissects Black and Indigenous artistic practices that engage with futurism as a form of resistance to racial capitalism’s control over the future, where the perpetuation of its power structures seem not only  probable but inevitable. Demos connects this re-claiming of the future by marginalized peoples, to the fight for climate justice, illustrating how de-escalating the climate crisis cannot be  adequately achieved without also dismantling the economic, social and racial inequalities that capitalism needs to sustain itself.  

I encourage everyone to read this book. I also wish you courage with your subsequent search should you decide to do so, because this book was not easy to find. Demos’ book is absent from the city’s public library system, and impossible to find in any of the thirty or so bookstores that are south of Central Park (including all four Barnes & Nobles). I had the joy of discovering  this first hand, as I ping ponged from book store to book store in the West Village, until I resorted to calling places on the phone to save me the trip. Although I don’t think there were any other explanations for this Demos desert other than my bad luck on Saturday (I did ultimately  just read the book at Pratt), the whole thing started to feel like an unsettling metaphor for the  current climate of censorship in this country. 

Not to say that up until now correct and unbiased information was widely available to everybody,  but with major news outlets like the Washington Post being bought by Jeff Bezos; AI making the Internet essentially unusable; and Trump’s burgeoning crusade against dissidents, it is a morose time for the free circulation of ideas.  

Therefore, although the struggle to find my book had nothing to do with censorship this time, it sounded off an internal alarm that this could become routine, that soon, access to leftist literature, or anything opposing the Trump machine, would become barred. 

For now I’ll continue to watch Girls and revel in the pre-authoritarian version of the US that now seems so far away, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t deeply afraid that, very soon, all new media – whether it be T.V shows or literature – will have to conform to Trump’s fascist parameters.  

In the meantime, we should get reading.

Ksenija Carleton

MFA in Art History