ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the circulation of millennial class narratives in a new-media landscape that makes normative the hierarchical systems that result in gender inequality. Broadly, it interrogates the representation of female millennial leads in three television programs as they are presented through sexual, social, and economic susceptibility. First, the chapter works to identify how the highly performative female body is engineered for mass-consumption through an erotic capital coded as entrepreneurial potential. It then argues that televised representations of millennial class identity rely on the valuation and judgement of the female body, a process that offers sexual precarity as a manifestation of economic embodiment. It concludes by connecting these largely heteronormative pressures to ideologies of containment, a process that foregrounds self-consciousness of-and-in the female body to preclude class consciousness. The resulting phenomenon are millennial narratives that celebrate female empowerment, resilience, and upward mobility, but at the expense of the systematic subordination and marginalization of working women by 21st-century audiences.
