Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television

Concentrating on the series Girls (2012-2017), Fleabag (2016), and Insecure (2016-), this article examines the female-centered dramedy as a current genre of U.S.-American television culture with specific investments in gendered value hierarchies. The article explores the format's dominant narrative and aesthetic practices with specific focus on prestige dramedy's cringe aesthetics. Cringe is increasingly mobilized as a mode of political expression following the format's privileging of female subjectivities. As such, cringe is tasked with negotiating the tensions between drama and comedy on one hand and intersectional relations of identity politics on the other. Character complexity, embedded in ideological themes around identity, modifies the comedy in cringe and becomes associated with the more prestigious dramatic mode, this way governing the texts' appeal to cultural value. The article demonstrates the ways the female-centered cringe dramedy expresses its politicization and complexity via disturbing gendered expectations of mediated femininity, and specifically body and sexuality politics.